“Comfortable?” Finn asks Nik, who’s lying on the couch. “I know it isn’t much but… my bed’s always open.”

Finn’s gut twists at the way Nik cringes, but he plays it off to himself as having eaten too much. He hadn’t wanted all the food he had ordered to go to waste, after all. That was all.

“I’ll be fine, thank you,” Nik’s tone was polite, his hand waving in a dismissive manner. He looks down at his feet and Finn can’t help but think he’s uncomfortable. He’s sleeping on the couch, for Christ’s sake, after Finn offered to have him move in.

Stupid. Reckless. Dumb.

“Well… good night,” Finn spins on his heel and heads towards his bedroom, his quip dying on his tongue. They seemed to do that a lot around Nik. He finds himself wanting to hold back harsher comments and jokes, things he had never given a second thought to around anyone else he knew. It was almost baffling, but at the same time, Nik wasn’t like anyone he knew.

Finn shuts his bedroom door and leans up against it, his head hitting just a bit too hard. The pain ebbs in the back of his head but does good in clearing it. He opens his eyes, not even realizing he shut them in the first place. He takes a deep breath and makes his way over towards his dresser before pulling out a pair of boxers and a t-shirt.

Finn quickly changes and tosses back the covers on his bed before sliding in, leaning over to flick the lamp off. The only light entering the room is moonlight, filtering through his windows through the curtain.

“What the hell am I doing?” the question is rhetorical; no one is even around to answer. But his mind is screaming, working, chasing itself around in circles until suddenly he can’t bear it anymore.

He feels bad. He hates that Nik is sleeping on the couch only because Finn was so reckless as to invite him to stay and then not even buy him a damn bed.

Finn glances at the clock and winces. It reads 11:00 PM in bright red text, and he sighs, remembering how early he has to wake up in the morning.

Work. That’s a thing he does.

When sleep finally claims Finn, enough to make his thoughts turn to mud, it’s past midnight.

********

“Okay,” Nik whispers to himself, attempting to calm his over-excited nerves. “Okay, okay, okay.”

Nik quickly makes his way into the bathroom and into warm pajamas, attempting to block out the cold that had seemed to worm its way into his bones and hasn’t left since.

“You’re fine,” he whispers to himself in the mirror. “Everything is fine. Finn is not going to murder you.”

Nik knows he’s being overdramatic, but there was a wild buzzing in his head that he just can’t shake. His knees are weak and he feels like he might collapse, though from nerves or excitement he isn’t sure.

When he exits the bathroom, his hand automatically comes up to his hair, untangling his braid and slipping the hair tie around his wrist. It’s oddly calming as his hair brushes against his cheeks and shoulders; a constant through all the hectic events that have transpired.

Nik sits on the couch and begins worrying with his hair, glancing at the couch beside him. There rests a thick blanket, stuffed with down that Finn had handed Nik with an apologetic look in his eyes. Nik places one hand on the blanket and sighs.

Sleeping on the couch isn’t a big deal; Finn’s couch is more comfortable than Nik’s mattress had been, soft under his body, unlike the rigid structure he had slept on for so many months. He’s been given pillows and a blanket, and a promise he would be given a real room soon.

The couch wasn’t the problem.

The problem, Nik found, as he turns off the lights and shimmies his way under the covers, is that he finds himself regretting turning down Finn’s offer.

It was probably a joke, sure, but suddenly Nik can’t stop thinking about how well he slept the night he crashed at Finn’s place. How reassuring it had been to have someone there, next to him. He hadn’t realized just how much he missed being around other people until Finn came along and reminded him what it had been like at home.

Home. “Fuck,” Nik swears into the darkness. He had meant to call his mother, but now he knew she’d be at work by this point.

Tomorrow, he thinks as he drifts off. I’ll call home tomorrow.