A/N: ? ? ?
One month, nearly. What the hell!
Requested by meet-me-onthe-equinox on tumblr! Thank you for everything, really. And to everyone else that bothers to care, you're all Grade-A Rad.
"What are you doing?"
Andy jolts up from his uncomfortable limb-angling meant to shield from precisely this, sweat already building when April's glaring him down. Normally he'd be fixated on the plastic bag with delicious smells wafting from it, but now is not the time.
"Uh, just… reading–" he tucks the notepad underneath his armpit. "Reading, uh, nothing."
"Nothing?" April deadpans, eyes fixed on the red header jutting out clearly from his shirt. "Dude!"
"What?"
"Didn't your mom ever tell you sneaking into people's things is super rude?" April sets the bag down on her desk, leans over, and pulls the pad away from Andy, now a little damp. She rubs minute creases away with her thumbs until the pages are relatively flat and sighs.
See, normally April and Andy share their lunch break and it's a blast between all the spitballs they fire at shoeshine stand passersby and sloppy makeouts at the same spot. It's great. Today, however, April unceremoniously left during lunch. So, instead of greeting her at her desk, Andy sat down and waited. And waited. And, oh man, does waiting in an office while everyone else eats lunch get super frustrating. That's when the pad of paper with a few doodles on it caught his eye.
April mumbles something about an invasion of privacy.
"Uh, hey… y'know, Mouse Rat could use a super cool cover for our album or… whatever." Andy shrugs, pretending to play it cool.
April's stare-back cuts his breath off for a moment. He coughs, she smirks.
"I mean–" he wrings the frankly dirty collar of his flannel. "Those are… awesome."
"How much did you see?" April's voice is suddenly very quiet.
"Oh… only some of it?" Andy scrunches his face up, wincing one eye closed. He peeks out, expecting her to be furious.
"It's lame…" April starts, instead of angry she peers through the paper and distantly elsewhere, "I dunno. It's cool that you didn't hate them, though."
"Well, you're really, really good and the uh… the one with Ben in a car crash is super funny," Andy admits. Most of the drawings were a little too surreal for him to get, and half of them were work-hour doodles stretching half of a small page.
April smiles the briefest, looking back down at the pad.
"So… I am, uh, sorry for invading your private stuff like that…"
"Ugh." April rolls her eyes. "Stop apologizing."
"But–"
"I bought takeout for lunch, and it's getting cold," she lifts the plastic bag and Andy rockets out of her chair.
"So you're not mad?"
"I guess a little bit, but now… uh, now we can, like, share stuff and personal stuff," April says with that confused sloth in her voice like she's coming to terms with the idea word by word. "That sounds gross."
"Ew." Andy fake-shivers all over and she chuckles. Worth it. "Except that sounds pretty cool. Like, I know you're an amazing artist and you know I'm an amazing singer."
April rolls her eyes in response. She takes his hand and guides him back to the shoeshine stand to enjoy their usual ritual, but something is a fair bit lighter in the atmosphere of it all, as if anything here was ever dour. Andy neglected to tell her that he did see those drawings that were more like formerly blank pages filled black like a dark canvas, marks erasing new negative space into impressions of wispy figures, vine-like threads, and a small heart in the distance.
He wasn't, like, any good at art or anything, but he's pretty sure he got that one. It's reflected in the way she tosses a french fry at him with a mischievous grin that's saying, "I bet you won't return fire."
She's always wrong, and her laughter is so worth it.