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“So, uh, this is it,” Enjolras said, hovering somewhat awkwardly as Grantaire set his duffel bag down on the floor.
Grantaire looked like he was trying not to laugh. “I have been to your place before,” he said mildly.
Enjolras scowled. “I know that,” he said. “I just meant, y’know…” He waved a dismissive hand. “Make yourself comfortable. Mi casa es tu casa.”
“Glad to see the Duolingo lessons are paying off,” Grantaire said, and Enjolras’s scowl deepened.
“Seeing as how I’m letting you stay here for the foreseeable future—”
“What, I’m supposed to not make fun of you for the next week or two?” Grantaire asked, sitting down on the couch. “That’s a little unrealistic, don’t you think?”
Enjolras sighed. “Fine,” he said. “But how about you not make me regret letting you stay with me until your landlord finishes fixing the ceiling of your apartment?”
Grantaire pretended to consider it for a moment. “Fine,” he conceded. “But only because you helped me out with that tenant bill of rights stuff.”
“And not because I’m letting you sleep on my couch so that you’re not temporarily homeless?” Enjolras said dryly.
Grantaire winked. “That remains to be seen.”
Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Well, you know where everything is. I have to go meet Combeferre and Courfeyrac, so try not to break anything while I’m gone.”
“I can make no guarantees,” Grantaire called after him, grinning when Enjolras closed the front door behind himself with more force than was remotely necessary.
Then he stood up, his grin widening.
If only Enjolras had thought to ask him not to snoop while he was gone.
“Grantaire?” Enjolras called, evidently having returned a few hours later and not successfully finding Grantaire on first glance through his apartment.
“Yeah, I’m in here,” Grantaire called. He was too busy sorting through Enjolras’s towels to hear him approach and so jumped a little when Enjolras asked, sounding torn between amusement and exasperation, “What are you doing in the linen closet?”
“Snooping, mostly,” Grantaire said without turning around, “though honestly your place may be the most boring of all time. No porn, no kinky sex toys, just enough anarchist paraphenalia that the cops would have a field day—”
He finally glanced over his shoulder at Enjolras and immediately lost the ability to speak, staring at him with wide eyes.
Enjolras raised an eyebrow. “Problem?”
“Uh…” Grantaire swallowed, hard, before managing to squeak in a pitch normally only heard by dogs, “Shirt?”
Enjolras glanced down at his bare chest and flushed, which was not remotely helpful to Grantaire’s current predicament, as he could clearly watch the flush spread down Enjolras’s neck and across his gorgeous, gleaming, carved by the gods chest. “Oh,” Enjolras said, sounding almost surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed that he was walking around like an Adonis among mortals. “Um, sorry about that. I just tend to run hot, so it’s more comfortable for me to just take my shirt off and I didn’t even think about it—”
“No, um, no need to apologize,” Grantaire hurried to tell him, his voice still about an octave higher than usual. “It’s your place after all, I’m just crashing here. You…” He made a slightly helpless gesture, trying very, very hard not to stare at the perfect V of Enjolras’s waist. “You do you.”
“Are you sure?” Enjolras asked, his brow furrowing. “Because I can grab a tank top or something…”
Grantaire shook his head so hard he almost gave himself whiplash. “Not necessary,” he said firmly, like he was a normal human not all affected by the sight of his friend without a shirt on. “Not on my behalf.”
Enjolras didn’t look nearly as convinced. “Are you ok?” he asked, with just a hint of amusement. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
In a showing of superhuman strength, Grantaire managed to tear his eyes away long enough to grab the first thing he saw. “Um, yeah, the ghost of beach towels past,” he said, holding up the towel in question. “Is this a Michael Jordan beach towel released to promote Space Jam in the year of our Lord 1996?”
“I know this will shock you,” Enjolras said dryly, “but I have put exactly zero thought into the towels that I hold onto other than making sure they aren’t completely ratty and gross.”
“1996, Enjolras,” Grantaire repeated. “This towel is almost as old as you are.”
Enjolras just rolled his eyes and wandered back toward his bedroom, calling over his shoulder, “Make sure to clean up after yourself when you’re done snooping.” Grantaire watched him go, breathing a sigh of something like relief when his bedroom door closed.
He’d managed to cover, at least for now.
Though if Enjolras kept walking around without a shirt on, Grantaire wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to make it.
Evidently, Grantaire was made of stronger convictions than he gave himself credit for. Either that, or he’d died and gone to his personal hell which involved having to see Enjolras shirtless every single day.
It wasn’t that he minded the view, not by any stretch of the imagination.
It was more that Grantaire could only come up with so many excuses for why he was staring.
His only saving grace was that Enjolras seemed truly oblivious to what he looked like without a shirt on, though that probably shouldn’t have surprised Grantaire as much as it did, seeing that Enjolras also seemed to have no idea what he looked like when fully clothed.
“Just…ungodly hot,” he told Joly and Bossuet one night at the Musain, after they made the mistake of asking how things were going.
Enjolras, who happened to be passing by because Grantaire’s luck could truly rival Bossuet’s on occasion, paused. “What’s ungodly hot?”
“Your sauna of an apartment,” Grantaire said, a little too quickly.
“See, this is what I’m saying!” Enjolras said, shaking his head as he went to go rejoin Combeferre and Courfeyrac.
Grantaire looked back at Joly and Bossuet, who were both trying, and failing, not to laugh. “I am so unbelievably fucked.”
“It’s only for a few more days,” Bossuet said bracingly.
“And besides, the temperature’s supposed to crash tomorrow,” Joly pointed out. “So he’ll probably need to put a shirt on regardless.”
But Enjolras, it seemed, was immune to the rapid fall in temperature from 65 degrees one day to 35 degrees the next. Grantaire, however, was not so lucky. He’d only grabbed basics from his apartment when he packed for Enjolras’s, and as such had not packed anything to wear to bed besides a couple old tshirts and some boxers.
As such, when the wind howled outside the window like it was mid-January instead of mid-October, he curled up under the thing blanket Enjolras had given him and shivered violently, his teeth chattering.
When his attempts to will himself to sleep proved fruitless, he stood, still cocooned in the blanket, and hobbled his way to Enjolras’s bedroom, extricating his arm only far enough to knock on the door. “Come in,” Enjolras called, and Grantaire poked his head into the room.
“Are you decent?” he asked, which at this point, after seeing Enjolras half-undressed for the better part of the week, meant very little.
As it was, Enjolras was sitting in his bed, his laptop in his lap, still without any shirt and seemingly any care that the thermostat put the apartment at a frigid 60 degrees. “Depends on your definition of decent,” he said, his easy smile fading when he saw Grantaire. “I’ll take it you’re cold?”
Grantaire jerked a nod. “Yeah, I wanted to see if you had an extra blanket.”
“How about I do you one better,” Enjolras said, setting his laptop down.
“Turning the heat on?” Grantaire asked hopefully.
Enjolras rolled his eyes. “In October?” he scoffed. “No.” Instead, he scooted over to one side of the bed, patting the vacated space next to him. “Come sit down next to me for a while. You’ll be toasty in no time, no heat needed.”
Grantaire hesitated. As respectful as he’d tried to be over the past week, he wasn’t sure proximity to Enjolras’s bare chest was going to keep his streak going for very long. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Positive,” Enjolras said firmly.
Grantaire hesitated only a moment more before all but collapsing onto Enjolras’s bed. His attempt at keeping a slight distance between them failed instantly when Enjolras huffed a sigh and said, “Come closer, I’m not going to bite.”
“Not even if I ask nicely?” Grantaire murmured out of habit alone, shifting closer to Enjolras until their shoulders were just touching. Almost immediately he could feel a difference in temperature, and to his acute mortification, he let out a quiet moan that sounded far too pornographic for the moment. “Oh my God, you’re like a space heater.”
Enjolras just laughed. “So I’ve been told,” he said, picking his laptop up again. “Courfeyrac used to come home from class and stick his toes under my thigh to warm them up. Thank God I don’t have a foot fetish, right?”
Grantaire managed a weak laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Thank God.”
They fell into a comfortable silence and Grantaire burrowed closer to Enjolras, closing his eyes in relief as he felt the warmth emanating from Enjolras slowly sink down to his bones. After a few minutes, he was able to actually push the blanket down, and he glanced over at Enjolras, who was absorbed in something on his computer. “Thanks,” he said, a little awkwardly.
“Don’t mention it,” Enjolras murmured, not looking up, and Grantaire lay back against the pillow.
Not even a minute later, he stifled a yawn, his eyelids beginning to droop dangerously. “I should go back to the couch,” he said, more to himself than Enjolras. “Or else I might very well pass out here.”
“You can, you know,” Enjolras said casually, still glued to his computer screen, and when Grantaire just frowned at him, he finally looked up. “Sleep here, I mean. I don’t mind.”
Grantaire had a million excuses lined up for why that was a terrible idea, but instead, the only word that popped out of his mouth were, “Ok.”
“Ok,” Enjolras echoed, giving him a small smile. “As long as my computer light won’t bother you. I’m going to be up for awhile yet.”
“I think I’ll manage,” Grantaire said through another yawn. “I can sleep through anything, and besides, your bed is really comfy.”
Enjolras laughed lightly, and it was the last sound Grantaire heard before he fell asleep.
“You know,” a slightly familiar voice said, and Grantaire cracked one eye open as he woke up, his surroundings as unfamiliar as the warm, comforting weight pressed against him, “when Enjolras said ‘make yourself comfortable’, I don’t think this is what he meant.”
“Courfeyrac, shut up,” Combeferre sighed, and Grantaire lifted his head to blink blearily at the pair of them, standing in Enjolras’s bedroom doorway wearing identical grins.
Next to him, and, to his horror, half-beneath him, Enjolras groaned, reaching out a hand automatically as if to smack an alarm clock into submission. “Five more minutes,” he mumbled, tightening his grip around Grantaire’s waist as he tried to pull him back down.
Courfeyrac let out what might charitably be considered a cackle, and the noise was enough to have Enjolras finally open his eyes. He looked tiredly from Combeferre and Courfeyrac to Grantaire, who was pretty certain he still had a somewhat horrified expression on his face. “Did we say we were meeting here today, or did you two just break into my apartment on a whim?” Enjolras asked, carefully extricating himself from under Grantaire and sitting up, jerking a hand through his blond curls that somehow had not turned into a frizzy mass overnight.
“More the former than the latter,” Combeferre said, his lips twitching. “We’ll, uh, we’ll be in the kitchen.”
He grabbed Courfeyrac’s arm and all but dragged him down the hall. Grantaire drew his knees up to his chest. “So, uh, sorry—” he started, but Enjolras waved a hand while yawning.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“No, I mean, I’m pretty sure I accidentally drooled on your chest, so.”
Grantaire’s attempt at a joke fell painfully flat, but Enjolras still managed a light laugh. “I’m sure I’ll somehow recover,” he said, giving him a somewhat tired version of his usual grin. “Besides, all things considered, it was actually…kind of nice.”
“Nice?” Grantaire repeated blankly. “I assume you’re not referring to my drool.”
Enjolras rolled his eyes. “No,” he said. “I meant, y’know.” He shrugged. “It was nice. Comfy.”
“Yeah,” Grantaire said, with a small smile. “It really was.”
For a moment, it looked like Enjolras was going to say something more, but then he shook his head and cleared his throat. “Well, I should, uh, go deal with them,” he said.
Grantaire nodded, his eyes already half-closed again. “Just hurry back before I miss you,” he murmured, and when Enjolras didn’t say anything, snapped both his eyes open to add, “I mean, before I miss your warmth.”
Enjolras laughed. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised.
Grantaire closed his eyes as Enjolras got out of bed, and there really was a noticeable change in the temperature. He reached automatically for the blanket still pooled around his waist, but to his surprise, someone else got there first, and he lay very still as Enjolras pulled the blanket up and gently draped it over his shoulders. “Be right back,” he murmured, so quietly that Grantaire almost didn’t hear him over the hammering of his heart, and then he was gone.
For a very long moment, Grantaire lay perfectly still, almost as if afraid Enjolras might come back and the moment might be ruined.
Then, he allowed himself a small, blissful smile.
The smile was still in place when he finally fell back asleep.