If This Feelin' Flows Both Ways | ShubIsh

VIII

Ishan wakes up to a hammer pounding fat metal screws in his skull over and over and over. He's quite sure that brain is probably bleeding. The inside of his ears are hot, and he's absolutely certain that they're oozing out blood right at that moment.

He is dead hungover, and it sucks because he knows why.

He forces himself to sit up, and lazily rubbing at his eyes as he tries to remember what happened last night. It's absolutely blank after the encounter with that girl whose name he forgot.

With the faint ache in his muscles, he guesses that he danced, maybe with Shubman or God knows who, and despite how much he tries to remember anything after that, he can't.

He just sighs and closes his eyes. His head is spinning but he tries to fall back asleep, forcing his mind to think of yawning puppies in the process so he can dream of them instead.

It isn't until a strong warm hand snakes up his waist, that he realises there's someone else in the bed with him.

Fuck, no wonder it was so cosy.

With a yelp, he quickly pushes off the other person who falls down with a thud and groans dramatically.

He desperately hopes that he didn't end up having a one night stand with a random stranger from the party to cope with his one sided love angst.

Ishan moves back, bunching up the blanket around him till his back touches the headboard. He takes a peek at the perfectly chiseled back muscles of the man flexing and of course he recognises that back. It belongs to none other than the man he's been pining for since months.

And as Shubman stands up, things come back to his mind, the drinking, the dancing, the kissing, the more drinking and everything's pitch black again after that.

But what matters right now is that they–

Holy shit, they kissed.

As a joke..

And for a second some stupid part of Ishan wonders about what else they did other than kissing.

Nevermind, maybe it's better to fall asleep and wake up again to prove this is all just a dream.

It's barely a second that Shubman makes  eye contact with him when Ishan throws the nearest thing he can find at him, which turns out to be his nearly empty wallet.

And Shubman, who was just roughly woken up, doesn't see it coming until it lands right onto the face making him stumble and fall back onto his ass again.

“Ouch, why would you do that?"

Shubman wines as he gets back up from the floor, rubbing at his nose which was still sore from the previous night’s injury it had sustained.

For a second, Ishan almost felt bad for him because the guy looked like he'd been through quite a rough night, until he looked down at his changed clothes and immediately looked back up to find Shubman's amazingly hot and also bare torso, and bare meant shirtless.

“What are you doing in my bed?” He asks pointedly.

They're best friends. They've been close enough to share a bed multiple times that he can't even count on his fingers, but they had stopped doing it casually since a few weeks, when Ishan decided that it would be better to put some boundaries to their friendship that wouldn't lead his feelings for Shubman further on. So he only stuck beside Shubman whenever he panicked about an upcoming match or poor performance in practice, not abandoning his duties of being Shubman's best friend.

He still believes that what happened last night– or at least what he remembers is stupid, stupid, stupid – utterly, and unbelievably stupid.