The taxi dropped Arthur and Ford outside the little gate leading to Arthur's garden path, and thence, ultimately, to Arthur's front door. Arthur stood by his gate, unable to go in until Ford started to walk away.

It became clear fairly swiftly that Ford was not going to walk away.

'This your house?' he asked with an appraising sort of look at it.

'Yes,' said Arthur, because it was.

'Hm,' said Ford, 'So, how far away is this pub?'

'You carry on down this road. It's only what? Five minutes? It's the first building you come to. You can't miss it. I'm sure they'll be delighted to see you,' he added, relieved that the problem was about to go away. He put his hand on his gate to push it open. Ford didn't go. 'Anything else?' asked Arthur, his natural politeness being eroded steadily away by his hangover, his lack of sleep, his general disgruntlement with the wedding and the fact that parts of him were screaming 'Danger, Danger!' in Ford's direction.

'No,' said Ford, 'But that was fun, wasn't it? Mind if I pop round sometime?'

'Um...' said Arthur, 'No, of course not, please do...' he heard himself say.

'Great!' Ford flashed him a grin that made him come out in goosebumps all over, and headed off down the road at a healthy pace, his satchel swinging wildly from his shoulder.

Arthur stared after him, his hand limp on the gate for the moment. He suddenly found that he didn't want Ford to go. Not that a bit of peace and quiet wasn't just what he needed right now, but it had been sort of friendly having Ford there. For a moment he was tempted to go inside, change out of his sadly crumpled best suit, brush his hair, feed the dog and head off to the pub as well for a belated hair of the dog. Common sense, however, told him that that was a very slippery slope and advised him to follow through with his original plan for today which, while it included the three above mentioned activities, also included routine but fairly urgent things like vacuuming the hall, mowing the lawn and restocking his unpleasantly depleted store cupboards.

Ford's back disappeared round a corner and Arthur let himself into his garden, up the path to his front door. On the doorstep were six bottles of milk. He picked them up in their little basket and carried them inside.

There was a small pile of post on the mat. He picked it up as well and took it with the milk into the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of tea.

The dog was insanely happy to see him. He assumed that Mrs. Penrose had popped by as he had asked her to if his car was not in the drive first thing. She must have let it into the garden to do its business, since it seemed in no hurry when he opened the door. He sat down and drank his tea.

An hour later, showered, changed, refreshed and drugged up on aspirin, he left the house and made his leisurely way to the village shop It was really a supermarket-scale stores-deficiency, but without a car, that was out of the question; he would just have to live a little frugally for a day or two. He was starting to feel much more cheerful. Yes, his car was in the garage; yes, yesterday had been poor; and yes, he was still feeling a little delicate; but he was home, he had had tea, he was no longer worried that his head might fall off or his stomach eject its contents at an embarrassing moment, and he had made a new friend. A slightly peculiar new friend, but a friend nonetheless, and one who did not work in advertising, which Arthur regarded as something of a bonus.

He shuffled round the little shop murmuring the shopper's mantra to himself,

'Eggs, bread, sugar, carrots, tea; eggs, bread, sugar, carrots, tea; eggs, bread...'

He paid for his groceries, left the shop, and had made it to the bend in the road before he stopped, turned around and returned to the shop to get the sugar.

At the bend he hesitated. Continuing back along the road would take him the shortest way home. However, if he cut across the field through the gate on his right, it would take him to a point half-way along the other road out of the village proper, which also led to his house, past the pub. It would be a friendly sort of thing to do if he just checked that Ford had found it all right. Wouldn't it?

His head gave an experimental throb, just to test the efficacy of the aspirin. He decided against his friendly impulse and returned home.

The vacuuming did not really help. Nor did the lawn mowing. He was troubled by a strange feeling of discontentment, which continued throughout the day.

The discontentment had not abated by the following morning. In fact, it lasted through the week, a week he was forced to take off work in the continued absence of his car, until the following Saturday, when Ford Prefect turned up at the door at the beginning of the evening, explained that he had 'lost' Arthur's house for a while due to a spot of something to drink at the pub that first night and had only just found it again, and suggested they go to the pub together.

Ford toppled back into the sofa, which sighed dustily and allowed him to sink down almost to the floor.

'You're on the odd bit there,' Arthur explained, steadying himself on the back of it.

'Ah,' said Ford, trying, unsuccessfully to find some leverage to haul himself back out. Arthur put his hands out and Ford took them, pulling himself to the edge and perching there uncomfortably. He let Arthur's hands slip out of his own and Arthur lost the balance he had been clinging to on Ford, took a large step to regain that balance, overcorrected, and ended up sprawled, half behind Ford on the sofa.

Ford looked round at him and laughed,

''S'nice to have you *hic* down here,' he said, his whole body jerking with the force of the unexpected hiccup. He twisted round to help Arthur up and in so doing, lost his purchase on the edge of the seat. He slid back into the void next to Arthur and hiccuped apologetically at him.

'Should've brought some gi-- *hic* girls back with's.'

'You've got hiccups,' Arthur pointed out, helpfully.

'Yes, but if we had girls...' he paused to waggle his finger dramatically at Arthur, 'We could've got 'em to help us *hic* up. As it *hic* is, we're shtuck.' He patted Arthur's leg. Arthur stared at the fireplace as if it might be able to give him some idea of what to do.

'Your behaviour at the pub wasn' ex...exsackerly cond...' he frowned, 'What's that word? Condi something...'

'Condiment?' offered Ford.

'No. No. Like that though...' he trailed off, then shook himself, 'It's not that, anyway, to getting those two nice women to do anything mush other than run 'way.'

Ford hiccuped again, then harrumphed noisily,

'Don' need'em anyway. 'Sprobably time for bed.' He rested his head on Arthur's shoulder, nestled his way into it and scrunched around until he found a suitable position for going to sleep.

Arthur looked at the clock. He wasn't sure, but he thought the hands were pointing to something very like the middle of the night. The sky had a sort of pre-dawn-ish look about it and that made sense. Since returning from the pub, they had decided to make something to eat to soak up the quite reasonable amount of alcohol they had consumed, only to find that the lack of supermarket-visiting transport really had left Arthur's cupboards in a parlous state.

The dilemma had led them to the conclusion that they best thing to do would be to open a bottle of wine to help their thought processes. The first glass had not produced any real results. Neither had the second. By the time they started on the second bottle, however, they were definitely starting to make progress.

Ford had suggested that they take out all the possibly edible items and line them up on the table so that they could see what they were working with. They did so, and half an hour later, Arthur was expounding the virtues of a slice of bread, a couple of sheets of stale lasagne, some Branston pickle and the sticky tape from a packet of oats, for use as an emergency Carbon Dioxide scrubber; an idea that had made him and Ford giggle indecently and confirmed his suspicions that they were pretty drunk now.

In the end, they had eaten pickle-on-toast, which Ford had declared 'Almost as good as a Hagra Burger,' a sentiment with which Arthur had happily concurred, although he had no idea what Ford was talking about.

Then they had decided to see who could make the tallest tower out of the various jars and boxes laid out on the table. It had looked as if Ford was going to win hands-down, until a spark of offended sobriety alerted Arthur to the fact that the astounding disparity between the towers was largely caused by the fact that while Arthur had laid his foundations on the floor, Ford had started his build on the table. A row had ensued over what constituted allowable building materials, and Ford had gone into a sulk over his tower being disallowed, gone to the cupboard and opened another bottle of wine, which he refused to share until Arthur apologised. The end of that bottle had left Ford disoriented and vague, which was how he had ended up pretty much inside the sofa.

Arthur looked at the head on his shoulder. He considered getting out from under Ford; fuzzy memories told him that his breath in the morning would not be a pleasant thing to wake up to. However, getting up was now somewhat beyond his capabilities and although he was not altogether comfortable with having this man's softly drooling lips pressed to his neck, he was drunk enough to bat such worries aside. He yawned, stretched, and fell asleep, leaving the arm that had just been stretched above his head to descend, and come to rest snugly around Ford's shoulders.

Will Arthur cope well with waking up with his arm around Ford? Will Ford cope well with the delicacies of being in Arthur's house? Will the kitchen ever be tidy again? Hungry plotbunnies feast on reviews XD