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THE REST OF THE MORNING went by in a slow haze, the dormitory thick with the sounds of the heater blaring, the faint clicking of Bree's fingers hitting her phone screen and Stuart reading out most of his stuff out loud, occasionally going quiet when he tried to comprehend it more thoroughly in his head.
Stuart and Bree hadn't exchanged another word since she grabbed her phone a couple hours ago, the two falling into a comfortable silence while they did their own thing in their respective corners of the room. Stuart had managed to shut out everything else while he skimmed through the material Lyle had lent him, and by the time he finished the last chapter of the cheap binding, he realized that Bree had gone uncharacteristically quiet.
With a groan, Stuart leaned back on his chair and stretched his arms over his head. His muscles had gone completely taut overtime and he took this as a relatively good sign: the sleep was going to be especially good that morning, he could tell. He paused when he turned around, eyes trailing over to the figure slumped against her headboard in a lazy heap, her phone loosely hanging between her fingers.
Bree was stiffly laid out over her sheets, the low rumble of her snores blowing past her lips in uneven breaths. Even with how dark the dorm was, Stuart could still see the small sliver of her stomach as her night shirt rode up, making him quickly avert his eyes back to his desk.
The sight of her like this, inelegant and almost childlike, seemed like an invasion of her privacy somehow, but he couldn't help but steal another quick glance anyway. Her hair looked ridiculous.
He busied himself with cleaning out his table and placing his books in a neat stack, the feeling of exhaustion from the day finally hitting him. Bree had barely moved when he slipped her phone out of her grasp and on to the bedside table, didn't even flinch when he tried shaking her awake so she could lay down more comfortably and had simply turned over into a more questionable position by the time he came back from the bathroom.
Before going to bed, Stuart shook her again, this time non too gently. This time, though, he finally got a reaction out of her through the angry flailing hand that came up to push him away by the face, an irritated gurgle of sentences muffled underneath the pillow thrown over her head.
"You're going to get a stiff neck overnight," he told her aloud like saying it any louder would get the words to her head faster, flicking her hand away from him with a scowl.
At this, Bree looked up at him through drooping eyelids and a scowl mirroring his own. Sighing through his teeth, Stuart walked over to the other side of the room to grab the spare blanket neatly folded at the foot of his bed, but was only met with more hostility when he threw it over her. Bree mumbled something under her breath in argument and half heartedly tried to push it off of her and Stuart shook his head.
