Toxic - Luke Hemmings

Chapter 48

Izzy's POV

I spent the weekend starting to study for finals. We only hand one week left of classes, so Luke and I cooped ourselves up in his room and cranked out notes. Every time we took a break he would go right on his phone, and when I finally asked him what the hell was so important, he showed me pictures of some apartments he flagged. He wasn't just looking at minimal one-bedroom places, he was looking at two bedrooms with updated everything.

I tried to convince him that we didn't need that much, but he said he wanted a guest room in case we wanted people to stay over. And he was dead set on stainless steel appliances and two bathrooms. He was like every wife on House Hunters, super picky and expecting more than he could get with his budget. He was willing to spend up to two thousand a month just on rent alone, but I was planning on finding a place cheaper than that with most of what he wanted so he could see how much we could actually save.

When Tuesday came around, we had exhausted a good portion of what we needed to study. I went to my 9:30 lecture and met everyone in the dining hall for lunch after. Luke and Mike didn't get out of class until noon, so I sat with Sophie, Ash, and Calum until they joined. Luke brought up having them all over at Brett's the weekend after finals, and he made it sound like this whole grand thing.

"We're ordering a fuck ton of pizza and playing board games, and I don't want to hear a thing about it." Luke said sternly, looking around at all of us to make sure we didn't object. He was acting like a child, but it was cute. We were going to have a middle school slumber party again, like the night we played truth or dare. Only good things came out of that night, so I had high hopes for this plan of his.

"What board games you got?" Ashton asked seriously.

"Monopoly, Game of Thrones themed." Luke pointed at Ash to put emphasis on the fact that it was Game of Thrones. "Risk, Scattergories, Cards Against Humanity... and Candy Land."

"Brett has Candy Land?" I asked, laughing at the idea of a 25-year old man having such a game.

"I bought it for him for his birthday as a joke a couple years ago." Luke chuckled. I rolled my eyes at him and continued to eat my sushi.

"Scattergories goes hard." Mike said through a mouthful of food. I couldn't disagree, though. Calum just pointed at Mike as he chewed on his own food, agreeing with him silently.

Once that monstrosity of a conversation was over, the whole night was planned out. Everyone went back to their classes and I went back to my room to study more. That's just how the rest of the week went. I met up for lunch, and dinner on Thursday, but stayed confined to either my room or the library. On Friday night Sophie and I booked a study room in the library so we could prepare for physics. Luke and Ashton tagged along since they had taken that final already, and they pretty much summed up all the things we actually needed to know.

I was happy that we could take school so seriously, even if we still maintained a very active social life. Since the study room worked out pretty well on Friday, I booked another one for Sunday and sent a text to the group chat telling everyone to come. We couldn't all study together since we didn't all have the same classes, but if someone had a question there was always someone who could answer it.

Luke and I both had Mondays off, so he took the opportunity to set up a showing for an apartment close to campus. He didn't even show me pictures, he just told me when to be ready to go and knocked on my door at that exact time. He seemed pretty sure about this one, even though it was the first one we were looking at. Odds were that we wouldn't take it without seeing any others, but I let him have his day of excitement.

When we pulled up to a large house with two doors, he checked his phone to make sure it was the right address. It was actually a really well kept up house, with fresh yellow paint and a big drive way. I wasn't expecting us to be able to find a single family for rent in our budget, but this was honestly as nice as it got for a multi-family.