Miscommunication (boyxboy)

Chapter Ten

~ Adam ~

Adam's feet felt heavy like concrete as he dragged them down the stairs. His alarm had gone off at quarter to six and staying awake was a greater challenge that morning than usual.

Adam's dipshit of a neighbour had been back to his usual antics, music so loud Adam's bedhead vibrated against the wall. Dubstep thundered between the two houses for three hours before finally cutting off at four o'clock in the morning. Adam had barely gotten two hours sleep and it reflected in the mirror when he took his morning shower.

Thick, dark bags swelled beneath his bloodshot eyes. His hair was a tangled mess that stuck up at all angles after having tossed and turned all night. The shirt Adam wore was too big for his lanky build so it slipped off his shoulder, illuminating pale skin under the harsh fluorescent light in the bathroom. The distal edges of his nails were rough and clipped after biting them bloody in a nervous wreck for hours.

Today had already started on a bad note and Adam's exhaustion only fuelled his foul mood. He reached the bottom of the staircase before tromping into the kitchen. The light switched on with a vicious snap of his wrist.

Adam's anger began to liven his movements and he stomped around the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors and aggressively twisting the cap off a bottle of day-old milk. The coffee machine on the counter - a conjoined Christmas gift from Piper and Leo last year that Adam had only accepted after countless hours of begging, six Proseccos and eventual blackmail - hummed as it brewed.

The fridge was mostly vacant save for a jar of mayonnaise and an old banana. Adam was familiar with the pathetic sight and grabbed the banana without a second thought. It would have to do until his next pay check came in and he could get to the store for groceries.

Adam didn't have class until eleven but that didn't mean he had the morning to slack off. Both his gas and water bill had to be paid today, the house had to be vacuumed and there was a pile of laundry to be done. Having been too exhausted to study last night, Adam also had three classes worth of work to catch up on before his seminars that afternoon.

Truthfully, his professors wouldn't care if Adam missed a weekly reading here and there or hadn't completed the set worksheet by next class because his academic record was stellar. They didn't know the specifics but Adam had been forced to declare his home situation on the fee application forms when he'd first enrolled.

The basic story was that Adam worked nights to support himself and crammed university classes into the spaces between survival and barely hanging on. His teachers were sympathetic but Adam didn't need them to be. He just needed them not to pry further than necessary.

Adam polished off two cups of coffee in the time spent sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop paying bills. Vacuuming a two-storey house took a little over an hour and the laundry was washed and hung in time for the morning sun to bare its frown across the east side of the house. Adam was sitting down with his textbooks by nine o'clock.

An alarm went off on his phone at quarter past ten. Shovelling his completed work and textbooks into his messenger bag, Adam slung it over his shoulder and booked it out the door. He was careful to make sure the lock caught before collecting his bike from the garage and beginning the fifteen minute ride to campus.

Morning traffic usually died down by ten o'clock but there were still a number of cars on the main road headed to drop off students for class. Adam weaved through them with grace before coming to a stop at the university gates. From there, he wheeled the bike in on foot and locked it up in the shed.

Adam's first class of the day was Advanced Bioprinting and only ran for an hour. Neuroengineering was next before finishing with Human Structure and Function, a class he shared with Leo.