“You should probably try and sleep,” Chris said to me absent mindedly as we sat on the floor together before the TV at two o’clock on Thursday morning. We were playing the ‘Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World’ video game now and I was enjoying every second of it.
“I bet you’re only saying that because you’re scared I’m going to take your last backup life,” I grumbled as I smashed my fingers on the buttons of my controller repeatedly in the hopes of creating some form of fighting combo.
“What, like the last time you did that?”
I scoffed and tried to whack one of the bad guys over the head with a baseball bat. “Why. Would. I. Ever. Do. That?” I spat with each strike of the bat as the pixelated enemy fizzed out of existence.
Earlier on, probably around half an hour ago, I’d accidentally gotten myself killed in the game, making Chris yell "GODDAMMIT HOW'D YOU DIE? IF YOU FUCKING TAKE MY LAST BACKUP LIFE I WILL END YOU!" at me in an authoritative and dynamic tone. I’d purposely killed my character just to see his reaction after that. He’d told me that he wanted to pour a cup of scolding tea over my head he was that angry, but he only restarted the game after giving me a lecture about not wasting his lives. Since then, I really felt like I’d improved in this game, nay, I’d improved with my gaming skill generally over the time I’d been living with Chris for. I kind of loved that.
“You’ve got work tomorrow,” he continued coolly as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
“So?”
“So, you’ve been working flat out for three days now and you look dead. I don’t think your boss or tutor person will appreciate you collapsing from sleep deprivation tomorrow.”
“I’m absolutely fine.”
“You’ve been yawning since you got in.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Take some sleeping tablets then.”
“I’m fine, I swear.”
“You work full time. You need to sleep.”
“…can we play Scott Pilgrim again soon?”
“You mean when you get home tonight or something? Yeah, okay. Want me to stop playing so you don’t miss anything?”
“Thanks. You should sleep too.”
“Alright.”
Why did such a mundane and boring conversation set my heart aflutter? Anything to do with Chris nowadays reduced me to a heart flailing, tongue tied, mess of a person who could scarcely knit a sentence together coherently around him. It was humiliating and I dreaded to think that anyone would ever find out about it.
Chris switched off the console and gathered up the two empty beer bottles that were resting against the sofa alongside an empty pack of peanut M&Ms that the two of us had shared whilst gaming. The two brown glass bottles clinked together as they swung between Chris’ fingers and he took them out to the small recycling boxes in the kitchen. Whilst he did that, I picked the cushion I’d been sat on up from the floor and briskly brushed off some of the dirt which was on it before setting it down neatly on the sofa. With a stretch of my sore muscles and the groan of a sleep deprived zombie, I stumbled from the lounge in the direction of the hallway to find Chris.
My body felt exhausted, ready to collapse on a feather soft mattress and just pass out until seven. My mind, however, was alert and attentive to any small details that arose in my surroundings, such as how Chris was making a small racket of noise in the bathroom as he got the sleeping pills out from the medicine cabinet.
YOU ARE READING
Procrastinators on Stage (Chris Kendall/crabstickz fanfic) *unedited*
Fanfiction(Book 3 of the Procrastinators Series, set in September 2014 -but can be read independently from the series-) "Relationships end. Relationships end in three ways: you split up, one of you dies, or you get married. There's a two out of three chance t...
