If Lucas had to guess how long he and Jamari had been texting last night, he'd have guessed two hours.

Which was very, very far from correct.

Last night, he had checked, they had texted for something close to six hours, from one hour after Jamari got home from practice, to one in the morning.

It was a thing between them now.

They'd talk about anything, from whale morphology, to nature documentaries (Jamari loved them), to musicals (Lucas had only watched Hamilton, but Jamari swore by Dreamgirls), to music in general (Jamari thought Carti was just fun noise, and Lucas loved his lyricism), to food, to movies, to superheroes, and everything in between.

Jamari was way easier to talk to than Lucas had first anticipated, which meant that he would find himself double, triple, and quadruple texting in his excitement. 

Ever since Jamari’s football game, they'd been texting almost every night, and now, he was at the point where the lack of sleep was starting to show.

“Gukkie,” Auntie Geum-hee began in Korean, concern in her voice, “You look like a zombie.”

“Thanks, Auntie.” Hearing his own voice made him cringe. He sounded like he ate cigarettes for breakfast, fuck smoking them.

“Please sleep, Gukkie-yah.”

He looked at the table in front of him, the swirl of the wood grain under his bowl of Lucky Charms cereal (only the marshmallows), and blinked at it like that would make it stop moving in his vision.

“Yes, Auntie,” he replied, promising both himself and her.

Geum-hee was his mom’s sister, and they looked nothing alike. Where his mom was tall and thin, Geum-hee was small and round, and the only similarity that could identify the two as sisters was the shape of their eyes and nose, both features that Lucas had inherited.

When Lucas was born, his baby pictures had been eerily similar to his auntie’s and even though he now looked more like his grandpa than either his mom or her, she still called him her little twin.

He even had a couple of memories of her being his favorite of his parents siblings, so it wasn't like Lucas disliked Auntie Geum-hee. However, she was clearly the more extraverted one out of her and his mom, even though she was the older one, and with her kitschy, technicolor sensibilities, Lucas did find her… overwhelming.

“Lucas?” Uncle Kwesi dwarfed Auntie Geum-hee, and even Lucas himself, but he was much more laid back than his wife, and sometimes Lucas just had to wonder how he ended up living in a house that was decorated like a kid-friendly antique store. “You look like death, nephew.”

“Thanks, Uncle,” Lucas let his shoulders sag, accepting his stupid cigarette voice and his apparent similarities to a fucking cadaver.

“You want me to drive you to school today?”

Uncle Kwesi worked nights, so it wasn't often that Lucas saw him in the mornings. Auntie Geum-hee couldn't drive (he didn't know if she was even safe to be in the front seat, let alone on the fucking roads,) so Lucas usually walked to school, the only time he got to be more like Sophmore Lucas, and not Straight Guy Junior Year Lucas.

If Uncle Kwesi dropped him to school, he wouldn't be able to get his daily fix of K-Pop girl groups and PinkPanthress, but on the other hand, Lucas felt like his legs might give out five minutes into it.

“Please.”

“Alright, nephew.” Uncle Kwesi stuck out his hand to ruffle Lucas’s hair, and in his dog-tiredness, Lucas didn’t even bother to budge. He just let it happen, only complaining through a sulky side-eye as he fixed his hair back into its intentional messiness. “I’ll get some shoes on. You finish your breakfast, and we’ll regroup in five, alright?”

Lucas’s uncle and aunt were probably the most well-off out of all of his mom’s side of the family, even though you wouldn’t be able tell by the way they lived. Auntie Geum-hee bought the same ingredients for the same four meals Lucas was pretty sure she’d been eating in college, and Uncle Kwesi had had his car since — and Lucas was making an educated guess here — 1998.

The story apparently was that his Land Rover SUV was the first big purchase he’d made since moving from Ghana, and the man loved that car like it was his own child.

Lucas sighed, staring into the endless depths of his now mushy Lucky Charms and ultimately decided to cut his losses, shovelling as much of the multicolored mulch into his mouth as he could in thirty seconds. He pulled on his shoes as he chewed his last mouthful, pressing his stuffed cheek against his auntie’s in lieu of a kiss, and then practically running out of the door to get to the car before his uncle did.

“Good job on the speed, Lucas!” his uncle chuckled, checking his watch, “That has to have been an new record!”

Lucas slapped his waiting hand with gusto, before sliding into the passenger seat. 

Uncle Kwesi wasn’t nearly as talkative as his wife, and Lucas was too tired to think of things to say, making the ride to school quiet, with Lucas only opening his mouth to yawn mournfully.

The only words spoken after they’d gotten in the car was his uncle saying, “Have a good day! Take sleep when you can get it! Please!”

And from there, Lucas’s day just got worse.

First, before he could even get to his first class, he got compared to a dead body three more fucking times.

“Yooo, what happened, man?” Jazaiah’s voice rang clear across the hallway the monet Lucas walked in, drawing eyes in his direction. “I’d offer you a RedBull, but you look like you need a goddamn necromancer?”

One.

Then, in homeroom: “Oh, man you look like you just crawled out of a graveyard! You good?” from Vinnie.

And finally, from his fucking homeroom teacher, “Hey, Lucas, are you okay? You look… worryingly corpse-like.”

And then?

And fucking then?

He just had to run into the guy that he’s been talking to over text for this entire weekend whilst everybody apparently agreed that he literally looks like he participated in the skeleton war.

Lucas, in his exhausted stupor, was vaguely conscious of his own nervousness. His heart was pounding, and his stomach fluttered, but it was ignored in favor of his mind’s whirring. When he was tired, he was liable to be almost completely unfiltered, but usually, he could trust his impulse control to stop him from doing something ridiculous, but now? Faced with someone he knew could erode away at all the finely-tuned controls he’d placed on himself, he was all the more concerned about what could happen if they were to talk.

And, of course, he just had to prove himself right.

The moment Jamari approached him by his locker, he knew he was a fucking goner. He sighed, shutting his locker door, and leaning against it, ultimately relinquishing his control to the pull of sleep on his filters.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Lucas sighed, catching sight of the concern that marred Jamari’s beautiful features, “I look like an extra from the Walking Dead, or whatever.”

That, at least, got a chuckle out of Jamari. “I wasn’t gonna say that, but sure. Them late nights catching up to you too, huh?”

“Catching up?” Lucas laughed in response, the sound tinged with his exhaustion. “I think they’ve fucking caught me, I won’t lie.”

He slumped against his locker, letting his head hang back against the cool metal, hoping it could serve to wake him up just a little.

Blinking made his eyes droop, and yawning made the tiredness all too apparent — there didn’t seem to be anything Lucas could actually do to keep the need to sleep at bay. It was either nap here, his back against his locker, or nap in some lesson, and if the trend of day’s classes were to be believed, it probably wouldn’t be wise to risk falling asleep in one of them. “Ugh, I can’t lie to you, Jamari — I might just have to sleep in study hall later.”

“Or,” Jamari’s voice was a blessing on Lucas’s ears, the word singing with a conspiratorial lilt. “We could skip a lesson.”

“Lucas Choi doesn’t skip,” he breathed, despite how attractive the idea sounded. He ran a hand over his face to try and keep his mind awake, but sleep pulled at his mind all the same.

“You sure?” Jamari sing-songed, laughter in his tone, “Apollo’s got a key for the music rooms, and the kids there don’t bother nobody. They’ll leave you alone if you go in. Plus, we ain’t got no music teachers, so if there’s a lesson, there’s nobody around the music department.”

It sounded so, so fucking good at that moment that Lucas could’ve just melted right then and there. But there was one question on his mind. “....You do this a lot, huh?”

Lucas opened an eye to get his reaction, catching sight of Jamari’s shoulders falling out of a shrug. “I got a lotta stuff to do, and not a lot of time.”

All Lucas could do was nod in response, his decision made for him by the heaviness of his head. “Yeah. Let’s do it… Where are the music rooms?”

“Well… Apollo’s shit is in my locker, so we’re gonna have to head towards the science department first.” Jamari’s hand was on Lucas’s arm, and his touch was a mix between electricity and the soothing coolness of aloe vera gel if that was even possible. Lucas used Jamari’s firm grip to help him up, trying to commit the strength in his grip to memory. “Don’t fall asleep before we get there.”

Man, Lucas was too tired to think. His words slurred a little, the syllables running into each other in ways he usually would hate. “No fuckin’ promises.”

The music rooms weren’t as far away as Lucas would’ve thought they were, based on the fact that he’d never even seen them, and for somewhere that was entirely to do with sound, it was pretty much silent.

“Why isn’t there noise?” Lucas whispered. It was a thought that had somehow managed to escape, and Jamari hummed in response.

“Apollo and some of the other music guys soundproofed the whole thing back in sophomore year since people kept complaining about the volume and shit. Of course, they dragged me and Jazaiah in to help.” Jamari scoffed under his breath, pulling the key out of his pocket as he looked into the windows of the rooms to check which were empty. His eyebrows furrowed. “Weird. Tallulah the Bassoon Player’s usually in Room 1. I hope she’s okay.”

“Fuck, I think I used the wrong “their/there/they’re” in my essay in English today.”

Jamari snickered at Lucas’s statement, pushing open the door to Room 2. “Yeah, you’re pretty fucked up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucas yawned, his eyes blurring with the effort it took to keep them open.

“You just said ‘there’ three times.”

“No, I didn’t. I said three different words.” Jamari held open the door, letting Lucas walk in. The moment Lucas was in the room, the exhaustion caught up to him, his body dropping heavily to the floor like a discarded sack of potatoes. “I feel like a bag of groceries.”

Jamari looked even taller from where Lucas was on the floor. His smile was sympathetic, even with the weird angle. “Please go to sleep.”

“I’m gonna,” Lucas said petulantly. If he wasn’t so tired, the embarrassment would’ve colored his cheeks a deep red. He was sure that when he looked back at this when he was well-rested, he was going to regret this.

“Damn,” Jamari’s eyes flicked to the clock on the wall behind Lucas. “If I don’t go now, I’mma be so late.”

“Then stay.” His voice was quiet with sleep, an afterthought he would probably forget.

Either way, as he drifted into sleep, his head rested on a broad shoulder, a heart beating steadily in his ears.

The moment Lucas had opened his eyes, he’d felt immediately better, even when he jerked away from Jamari so hard he smacked his head on the wall. Even now that his tired antics were haunting his every thought.

But even with his newly awakened mind, the lingering feeling of Jamari’s chest under his head and the quiet comfort of Jamari’s stable presence was almost as all-consuming as his deep, deep embarrassment. An idea plagued him like a cartoon ghost from a Scooby-doo episode.

Fuck.

He would just have to steel himself and ask. 

It wouldn’t mean anything to Jamari, and it would likely help his understanding of the play…

He’d had the idea written down in Mildred since he’d realized that Jamari was a visual learner, but he hadn’t wanted to ask until he was sure that Jamari would be comfortable with him enough that asking him wouldn’t be weird.

But now, he was sure if he waited any longer, things would get complicated, and so he had to do it now.

Bite the bullet.

“Uh, they’re showing Leo DiCaprio’s Romeo and Juliet in the movie theater next week,” Lucas began, his voice carefully casual. He hoped it sounded more conversational than like a proposition. “I thought that since we’re getting really close to being half way through all the content, it might be a good change of pace to catch it next Thursday.”

Jamari flashed Lucas an appreciative grin, the exact kind of smile that would’ve made Lucas actually swoon if this was a shojo anime. “Yeah! I fuck with that. The movie theater off Main Street, right?”

“Yup,” Lucas’s nod in response was awkward, just a single bob of his head. In his embarrassment, he dropped eye contact, choosing to let his eyes drift around the hallway instead of having to meet Jamari’s brown-eyed, intense gaze.

There it was. His salvation.

It was in the form of an open classroom door, with his Spanish teacher sat at her desk inside. 

“Thank you for walking me to my lesson, man.” Lucas’s words came out faster than he can catch them, practically tumbling out of his mouth. “And for the music room, and stuff. Uh, I’ll text you more of the details about Thursday after basketball, if that’s cool with you.”

Jamari’s responding smile was so blinding that Lucas barely heard the ‘sure!’ that accompanied it, too caught in the tailspin of his own beating heart. He felt his cheeks warm and his hands shake and knew, knew-

And then Jamari was gone, and Lucas was alone with his bemused Spanish teacher, a knowing look in her eye.

“Aye, aye, aye,” she teased, her lips twisted in a smile that Lucas knew was supposed to be comforting. “Boys, am I right?”

Yeah, this was for sure, the worst day of the year so far.

At least, his mind whispered traitorously, you can look forward to Thursday.