Boys Will Be Boys (v.2)

chapter ten - bread

chapter ten — bread

I NEVER LIKED THE NIGHT-TIME. Sleeping wasn't exactly one of my many talents, and I spent most nights contemplating useless theories and imagining pointless scenarios. It wasn't that I wasn't tired; it was that my mind never could shut off the way it was supposed to. I could only say I slept well whenever we had a basketball game since I usually collapsed from exhaustion afterward. Every other day was just as bad as being in class: I couldn't make loud noises, I couldn't get up, and I couldn't move. I was stuck.

When it was night time I was resigned to sitting in bed and wondering why I couldn't fall asleep like everyone else.

Sleeping over at Lukas' made it a mite better. He had an unholy amount of people under his roof: his grandparents lived in the renovated basement, his eight siblings, parents and him on the first and second landing. His house was never quiet.

Whenever my Mum and I stayed over, she'd take the one guest room they had and I'd borrow Lukas' sleeping bag and make camp at the base of his bed. We'd tried swapping before, but his sleeping bag was old and barely covered him completely. It suited me just fine though, and it had that strange warm-bread scent Lukas carried around with him everywhere. It was more like a smell a Grandma should have than a teenage boy, but I didn't mind that much. My Mum's cooking was not exactly the greatest thing in the world, so I was more than fine with Lukas' Grandma-scent as long as it was accompanied by that good Grandma-food too.

I'd slept over at Lukas' house a grand total of three times the past week alone, my Mum eventually giving up on bringing me home and staying the night to hang out with Mrs. Schmitt. They'd gone to bed around 1 am, a feat for my mother since her bedtime was around 9 o'clock every night. It'd been quiet since then, the only sound in the room Lukas' steady breathing. It was relaxing in the strangest way possible. Though I still couldn't sleep the way he could, the odd depth to his snores helped me slow down a little: helped me stop thinking so much and just lay there without driving myself crazy.

It was around five in the morning when the house started waking up. It wasn't that I'd stayed awake the whole night, but the little sleep I'd gotten was restless and near worthless. Lukas' littlest brother Asher was only one year old and he loved waking up bright and early — and waking everyone else up bright and early too.

Lukas called him Rooster.

I yawned, sliding out of my sleeping bag as Asher's steady wail thrummed through the walls. I sloppily rolled the sleeping bag into a ball, tossing it into the corner before getting up and stretching. Lukas hadn't bothered to shut his blinds yesterday, so the early sun peeked through slicing ribbons on his waking form. He rolled around tired, hair wild and sticking to his pillow. Mine probably looked worse.

"Rooster up?" He grumbled, his voice gravelly from a night of sleep.

"Bright and early," I sighed, rolling my shoulders back and grabbing my toothbrush from my bag.

"You getting ready Keke?" He sat up straight in bed, sheets pooling around his waist as he lazily stood up.

"Yeah, I thought we could hit the gym" I shrugged, looking over at him. Sleep was still clouding his eyes and he rubbed them lethargically, looking at me with a weird smile.

"At five am?"

"Yeah?" I grabbed the towel Lukas had set aside for me yesterday.

"You're so fucking weird" He muttered and I caught it, turning around with a grin.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, your highness"

I chuckled at his response, grin spreading a little wider across my face. He mirrored me, a stupid smile on his face as he grabbed his phone from the nightstand. It'd been going off constantly in the night, the ringer muted but the screen glaring at the ceiling with all the Snapchat notifications Lukas got. I'd rummaged through his phone before, with the rest of the guys, and we'd discovered that Lukas got a shit ton of nudes — way more than any of the rest of us. All of them were unopened and they'd built up, the girls usually sending him a questioning chat afterward. We couldn't fathom why he wouldn't at least open them, or tell us about them, but that was the little mystery to him.