rain ✧ lrh

2. don't make it so obvious

Ashton assumed that if his mother could somehow sense what he was doing from thousands of miles away, he'd be dead by now.

He said a silent blessing that his family was on the other side of the world, cooped up in their Australian home, and they were virtually unable to see the boy- better yet, see the wheels in his head turning as he laid in his bed, one arm bent beneath his head and the other covering his eyes from the absolute monstrosity of papers surrounding him.

He wanted to get drunk. So drunk, in fact, that maybe he could pass out and sleep through his class, forget he was ever assigned a huge project that his brain just ultimately decided to not remind him of for the last month of his life.

But he couldn't get drunk, because he knew he'd see people he had no interest in seeing. It was a Sunday, after all, and the bar was unofficially off limits for him, and he didn't want the confrontation of speaking to people he'd made it years without saying a word to.

He just physically could not get out of bed.

However, while he was grateful that his mother couldn't see him, Ashton forgot that his two best friends were coming over to his almost-too-small one bedroom apartment, and they would ultimately not be happy to see the way that there were only three and a half words on his damn laptop.

That's why, when he heard his door opening, he cursed himself for giving them a key and let out a quiet groan of distaste.

"Ashton?" Ruth called out, stepping into the empty living room. The television was off and the couch was empty.

"He's not home," Ashton groaned from the darkness of his room, prompting Nova to walk over to the closed door.

"Ashton Fletcher, I know you aren't sitting in your room with the lights out when you have a paper due," he could already hear the reprimanding tone in her voice. He hated it, and he found himself questioning how he allowed himself to associate himself with the two sophomores that were about to enter his room.

Ashton was a senior, but when he had had his shirt ruined by the one and only Nova Montgomery, he was a lowlife junior who could not, for the life of him, figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He probably should've taken it as a sign when he spent his first day of class covered in a searing hot liquid that smelled faintly of mint (another red flag he should've noted earlier; who the hell drinks mint hot chocolate?), but he actually enjoyed marketing. And, surprisingly, he actually really enjoyed hanging out with Nova and Ruth.

He became protective over them pretty quickly, but he also just thoroughly enjoyed their company. They were funny and horrifyingly bad at drinking, but the only other alternative he had was down the street at the bar, and he knew better than to involve himself with that crowd again.

So there he was. And there Nova and Ruth were, staring at him with a mixture of pity and something that seemed close to disappointment in their eyes, and Ashton had to look away in guilt.

He knew they weren't going to be leaving until his project was finished.

Nova had her own homework to finish, so she sat against the couch in the living room while her two friends bickered over Ashton's procrastination and apparently, his really shitty deductible reasoning skills.

"I literally got into Notre Dame. I'm not fucking stupid," was Ashton's usual argument, to which Ruth always replied with, "Yeah, but you aren't going to graduate from here if you don't get your shit together, dude."

Nova tended to stay out of this recurring argument. It would be hypocritical for her to scold her older friend for procrastination when she was just as bad as he was.