So! Finally another update. My non-relevant words of wisdom for this chapter ... Avoid year 10 at all costs.

Anyway, thank you so much for all your lovely, lovely reviews! I'm totally in love with writing and planning this story and all of your reviews make me feel so much happier. I hope this chapter lives up to all of your standards too.

Would love to know what you thought of this chapter too... now sit back and enjoy! xxooxx

Chapter 4 – Putting the House in Order

Zane's POV

I was scanning the Foxtel guide when my bubble of silence popped from the sound of the front door opening, before slamming shut again seconds later.

Momentarily turning around sub-consciously, I witnessed Will stomp in, looking seriously unhappy. As he flopped down onto the lounge next to the one I was occupying, I looked up from the guide.

"How'd it go?"

"Fine."

"What's up with the Kyle-Sandilands-in-a-grump attitude then?"

"Shut up" Will said, shooting me an only semi-deserved glare.

"Okay, being serious now. What's up?"

"I bumped into Bella" he said with a swowl.

I furrowed my eyebrows. "Hang on... do you mean Bella-from-the-party-last-week, Bella or Bella-your-ex, Bella?"

"Second one."

"Oh... gotcha now... How was it?"

"Awkward" Will frowned. "Really awkward."

"How was she?"

"Fine, I think. It just felt like I couldn't read her nowhere near as well as I could before."

"What do you mean?" I asked not understanding which way he meant that. When Will was with Bella, we still hated each others guts, so I never had much to do with either of them and my entire understanding I'd had of their relationship was only from the snippets that Will had told me.

"I don't know, but all I got the gist of was that she was hiding something and that she was cutting corners in some of our conversations. It was all very weird- and awkward."

I nodded silently, really not knowing what to do or say next. I'm not wired to be emotionally intuitive like that. Most guys aren't. However, I guess us guys do have one man-to-man default setting...

"Want a beer?"

Will nodded his head slightly and I got off the couch to cater our needs, grabbing 2 beers from the fridge.

I tossed the bottle to Will, who opened the bottle swiftly as he caught it.

"So what'd you get up to while I was gone?" he asked me just after he swallowed his first mouthful

"What happened in those hours, stays in those hours" I smirked jokingly, un-admittedly attempting to pump up the intrigue and make my spare time sound better than what it really was.

Will read me like a book. His eye roll was evidence of that, but his dissection of my statement that had followed concretely proved it.

"What you really mean is that you had another couple of beers –enough that you were over the limit and couldn't go out anywhere- so you stayed home and played Gran Tourismo which I'm sure you only just turned off."

I opened my mouth, which appeared fish-like, moving open and shut soundlessly as I considered my excuses to explain to Will, but rationalizing the extreme stupidity of each before it had escaped.

"Zane you look like an idiot" Will said with a slither of amusement before proceeding with another mouthful of beer.

"Shut up" I said gruffly, before I changed my tune. "Now for some good news, grumpy, the agent emailed and said someone's interested in checking the place out to rent that extra bedroom. They're coming tomorrow at 2."

"That's great. Even better since we only had the ad in for a week, right?"

I pretended to cough as I 'swallowed' my currently non-existant mouthful of beer. "Uh yep... well something like that anyway. Thing is, it might've been a bit more like 3 days..."

My housemate let out an annoyed groan. "You only put it in on Monday? Zane!"

"Hey! At least we've got a potential housemate, don't we?" I said, in my successful attempt to save myself from a lecture.

Taking a moment to consider my point, Will succumbed and let his opportunity pass. "Alright. You're off the hook – this time. So two tomorrow, yeah?"

"Yeah. Leaves plenty of time to still have a sleep-in before then" I grinned.

"No way. What are you talking about?"

"Well if they get here at two, we can get up at one and-" I started explaining before being cut off.

"No mate. A sleep-in is out of the question for tomorrow. We need to impress, and in case you haven't looked around recently, I'll remind you that even a mentally retarded monkey would be put off by the sight of the place."

"It's not that bad Will..."

"Not that bad? The bottles from last month's party are still sitting on the bench like they're ornaments and I found ranga hairs in the shower this morning! When was the last time a red–head used our shower? Sophie's never stayed here before!"

"So your point is..."

"That we need to impress, so we need to clean!"

"Ouch! That 'c' word is killing my ears here!" I said, acting out a wince of pain for my charade.

"Toughen up. Besides, if we clean this one time and impress them enough, then if it's a chick, we'll never have to cook or clean again and if it's another bloke then we can con him into cleaning since he'd be the newest and would have the lowest place in the household! It'll be worth it Zane!"

I caught on with what Will was implying, nodding visibly. "Good point... Alright, so what do we need to do?"

"Clean."

I rolled my eyes, already feeling irritable from the prospect of having to clean. "No kidding, but what & how?"

"Mostly focus on doing downstairs. They probably won't take more than a glance at our rooms."

"Okay. What've we gotta do down here then?"

"You can start by taking our "ornaments" out to the recycle."

I nodded and grabbed a garbage bag, tossing the dozens of varying brand beer bottles into it. Within seconds I felt like my work was paying off.

"Well, well, well! Who knew we had a kitchen bench under here! I was tempted to call the builders and complain that they'd forgotten ours" I joked, throwing the swollen garbage bag over my shoulder and walking outside to ditch it.

Walking back inside, I walked over to Will who was flicking through his wallet and grabbing his car keys off the entry table.

"Bailing on me already?"

"Yeah totally. I'm just gonna head out and get a few cleaning bits."

"Don't we have sponges and sprays or whatever?"

"Sort of... the sponges were mouldy and I swear the bottle of Metho wasn't Metho..."

"Charming."

"I know, so I'm gonna go get new everything. I really don't trust our household's supply of cleaning products."

I nodded and Will left.

Feeling a surge of unexpected enthusiasm, I decided to wash the benches... using one of Will's clean shirts. I mean, it's kind of pointless cleaning with a mouldy & useless sponge, right? That's how I was justifying my actions anyway.

#

An hour later, I gave myself a double surprise when I saw the time on my iPhone, but the bigger part of surprise came when I realized that I'd actually spent the last hour cleaning! How I'd done it with no cleaning products was probably best kept a secret from Will.

Speak of the devil. I heard Will walk in and looked up to see him walk in, carrying three stuffed-full, green environmental shopping bags.

"Did you take out shares in Pine-O-Clean or something?" I joked as I scanned through the bags filled with more bottles, sprays, polishes and sealed sponge packets than I'd known to be possible.

Pulling out a window spray bottle, I questioned Will. "Since when did you care whether our windows were see-through or not?"

Will rolled his eyes. "Impress, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get the picture."

"Alright. We should hit the bathroom next."

"Dibs you do it."

"No way! Half the bathroom gross-ness is your fault Zane!"

"Oh yeah? What exactly?"

"I really don't wanna go there... "

"Well you can do it then!"

Will scrunched his face up in disgust. "No!"

"Fine, I'll race you on it."

"Fine" Will agreed and we both made our way over to the PlayStation 3 from the kitchen to decide who the bathroom's cleaner fate would lie in the hands of.

#

We played our game of Gran Tourismo, determining that Will had drawn the short straw and lost, consequently being forced to take the dirty job, much to my joy and relief. However, after the deciding game had been played and ended, we didn't stop. We didn't stop till there was two empty stomachs that got in the way of our game-playing at 9pm.

"If I get off the couch, I honestly feel like I could snap from malnutrition."

Will rolled his eyes, muttering something to himself as he stood up, walking over to his mobile. "Supreme or Meat Lovers?"

"Meat lovers. Need meat." I groaned, trying not to move a single, lazy muscle.

Will didn't reply and the next thing I heard was him calling in our delivery order.

"Forty minutes" Will said, stating the wait simply. "Suppose we should start cleaning again..."

"Forget it. I can't move without food."

With my head slumped back against the lounge, in my peripheral vision I witnessed Will nod in response.

The two of us remained like that, for the 'forty minutes', which translates into an hour in Fast Food time. When it had finally arrived, our stomachs obviously didn't do the talking, while we had a 2 minute debate about who would get up and get the pizza, just managing to stop the delivery guy as he was getting in his car to leave.

The hour wait was close to pointless after the 2 ordered pizzas were obliterated and had vanished off the face of the earth within 7 minutes. The only evidence that there had even been any pizza's were our 2 full bellies and the pizza boxes, which under 6 hours ago would've just blended in with the pile of various other boxes that I'd cleared out, being identical to those two, just a lot less fresh.

Despite our best intentions of an early night in order to wake up bright & early to finish the cleaning we'd started, the time slipped through our fingers, reaching 2:30am before we remembered our intentions.

The second part of our good intentions was to wake up bright and early... way earlier than 11am.

"ZANE! GET UP! NOW!" Will yelled, unexpectedly awakening me, with the element of surprise enhanced by the noise from my door flinging opening and slamming shut in under 5 seconds.

I rolled over in bed, turning away from the noisy ruckus that my housemate was making, to face my alarm clock that projected the wicked combination of numbers. 11:19am.

I bolted up from my bed, pulling half of my quilt along with me that had straddled itself to my legs. Untangling myself from the linen, I ran downstairs to where Will was throwing the remains of our dinner and beers into yet another garbage bag.

"Can you mop the kitchen?" Will asked frantically, although, I knew if I wanted to keep my friendship with Will I didn't have much choice in the option and it was more of a statement.

Nearly jogging, I threw cupboard doors open and shut again, trying to find our mop... if we had one.

5 minutes later, I'd found something that resembled a mop, but was covered in cobwebs and mothballs, and I'm not even going to start about the bucket.

Yelling overtop of the vacuum cleaner that Will was sliding around unevenly, I tried to get his attention. "WILL! The mop's outta action!"

Turning it off momentarily, he sighed. "Okay. I'll vacuum it. Just make our beds then. I cleaned mine & the spare rooms yesterday."

Running upstairs, I obeyed Will, even though I couldn't remember the last time I'd made my own bed. That was the beauty of living on your own... until it came to the crunch in situations like today.

I raced back downstairs to get more orders from Will. I didn't care if he was being the leader for once. He at least acted as though he knew what he was doing and talking about, and it was working well so we continued like that for another hour until the ill-fated sound of the doorbell flooded the house.

Walking out to Will, we both walked towards the door, while he tried reassuring me, thinking on the same wavelength. "Don't worry. It's probably just Sophie dropping in or something."

But as we opened the door, we weren't met with Will's sister or my Dad which was a thought that had passed through my mind.

"I know, I know I'm late" said the blonde as she scurried through her bag for something, and by the time her head looked up again, I had realized who she was.

For about 10 seconds, Will, Rikki and I adjusted to the realization of who was standing in front of each other.

"I'm sorry; I think I've got the wrong address. I must've taken a wrong turn at Cheats Corner and ended up on Jerk Drive" Rikki spat out at us with a glare, before turning around and starting to walk off.

Immediately I bolted after her.

"Rikki! Rikki wait!"

I reached out to grab her wrist and anchor us to the spot, but she was already turning around to face me again.

"5 minutes ago you were out of my life and in another 5 minutes you will be out of it again. End of story. Bye."

My aim was for this chapter to be longer than what it was, but due to lack of time and desperation to update this, I decided to leave it there. Also, it's a good, slightly unusual, but good place to write Rikki's POV from in the next chapter. But until then, I'd love to know what you thought of Zane, Zane & Will's cavemen-ness and the bitter reunion with Rikki.

Next chapter, as I mentioned is Rikki's POV and it hints at her own hidden heartache. Also, she's in a tough situation and you'll find out what's happened in her life since season 3 ended. That chapter will have an oh-so lovely cliffhanger ;) Can't wait. Can you? Review and inspire yours truly!