sunburned

He wakes slowly; he's never been good in the mornings. It's become their habit to sleep all in the one bed, all together, within reach of each other's hands. He sleeps on one side of Julie, arm stretched across her and his fingers curleld against Laurence's ribs. It's warm and it feels safe, something to sink into and get lost in.

So it does take him a while to wake, despite the fact that she is insistently calling his name.
Which isn't unusual. He dreams about her often.

He stirs in his sleep, pushing closer to Julie as he does.

He often stays up later than Laurence and Julie; he sits on the porch sketching and then, when he's ready, he chooses one room or another. Most nights, he starts off with one and ends up with the other and, tonight, it's Julie's door (because it might still be the spare room, but he definitely thinks of it as Julie's) that he opens first.

And there comes a point where he simply can't stay away any longer; there's no force in the world that would make him. He slept at Julie's, and he's drawn by the time he reappears, hair damp from a quick shower.

"Laurence?" he calls. "Will, are you home?"

That Julie is here with him makes perfect sense. This is a conversation that they all need to be a part of, after all.

Suddenly, he's having a hard time sitting still. Concentration is impossible. He draws a lot. He doesn't finish anything. What he does do is draw Laurence a lot, lingering over the lines of his face. Some of the drawings are more successful than others. Sprawled on one of the chairs on the porch outside the hut they share, he all but growls at himself.

He tears the page out. He starts again.

It's been a miserable few days, as things go. He's given everyone but Laurence a wide berth and, even with Laurence, he's been an unbearable scrub. It's difficult to parse what he's actually feeling. It's not that he told her - that much he can live with. He meant it when he told Laurence that it wasn't anything to be ashamed of, and it wasn't something he wished that he could changed.

He was angry, more than anything, that she'd pried it out of him, as surely as if she'd used her nails.
And he's still angry. But he misses her.

He sighs, leaning his shoulder against the wall beside her curtain. No door to knock.

"Are you in there?" he asks, voice low. No reason to interrupt everyone's evening.