Midnight Rain | EVERLARK

Peeta's (not) imagining his BFF naked.

PEETA

"Never in all my years! Tomorrow is my wedding day. Oh is nothing sacred anymore?" Effie lectures. The dramatics of Effie Trinket truly need to be studied in schools. This had been going on for almost an hour, and Peeta was starting to get a headache as he was forced to look at Effie, her bright yellow dress rehearsal dress lighting her up like a toxic highlighter.

Peeta stole a look at Katniss, who wouldn't meet his eyes. With her gaze fixated on her dirty skirt, still covered with bits of wood and grass, she is attempting to pick some of the debris off. She looks guilty enough, and Peeta hopes it's directed towards the messed up venue, and not what happened moments before they got rained on by chunks of wood and fake ivy.

To say that he's embarrassed would be the understatement of the century. He curses himself again and again, he has been so good lately. And to his knowledge, before the incident, Katniss had never noticed any of his other accidental boners when around her.

He really thought that he was beginning to get over her.

Okay, no he didn't, but he hadn't gotten hard over her for almost a week, which was a very long time in his books.

Books!

He had forgotten about how he had stashed the last two pages of Katniss's book in his pockets; he had swiped them after he had bought her the book from a secondhand bookstore. The owner had told him that the last two pages had fallen out, which led to a very decent discount, and to Peeta's master plan to torment Katniss further, he was going to give them to her before she dropped the sodding book on his head.

Peeta was snapped out of his daydream by Effie once again as she snapped, "Get out of my sight! The pair of you, there's only an hour left before the dinner and I want all that mud off of you both, and a very good apology from your lips my dear niece!"

Peeta clocked Katniss' fake smile, knowing that she would rather have Effie murder her in cold blood than ever sincerely apologise to her aunt.

The two shuffled out of the room after some mumbles of 'sorry' and 'never again'. Peeta felt spectacularly awkward as the two dragged themselves upstairs and into the room they were destined to share for the remainder of the wedding celebrations.

The wedding was held at Effie's fiancé's ridiculously fancy mansion just outside of their hometown, District 12. However, even though the mansion was huge, as was Effie's family, resulting in all of the rooms were doubled up, with the best friends obviously being chosen to share a room, something they had done since they were five.

Peeta wouldn't normally bat an eyelid at rooming together, however, due to his stupidly and majorly inconvenient recent... feelings towards Katniss the rooming arrangement had made him even more on edge around Katniss than usual.

As they entered the room, Peeta was very concerned over Katniss's radio silence. He could just imagine her pushing him away, closing the door and claiming that she didn't want anything to do with her pig of a best friend who just popped boners whenever he was around her.

He wouldn't ever let this stupid infatuation ruin them, Katniss meant pretty much everything to him, and he couldn't imagine a life without her.

Peeta was once again brought out of his daydream, with this time it being Katniss, who cleared her throat to catch his attention. He looked over to Katniss who was on the other side of the room, her back towards him and her hair gathered up in one hand as she tried and failed to grab the zipper on her dress.

"Unzip me?" She asked, looking over expectantly at Peeta, whose brain short-circuited for a moment before he moved over, willing his shaking hands to still as he used both of them to grip the zip and pull it down.