A/N: A song that I've had on repeat as I was writing this: "Jackie Big Tits - Acoustic/Live at Abbey Road, 2005." Check it out if you need something to set the mood!

Eren

It's the morning after. And I'm jolted awake when Mikasa's elbow rams into my ribs.

"What gives?!" I yell at her, curling up into a ball. Wrenching the blanket away to cover herself, she scrambles out of bed, leaving me ass-naked on my mattress. In her sleep, she had hogged the covers, and every time I fought for an equal share, she kicked me in the shin.

"We're dumbasses!" Mikasa groans. Purposely trying to not look at me, she's pacing back and forth, a weird habit of hers. I've only seen cartoon characters pace like that, never an actual person. "This is bad, Eren. Not good at all."

"That's not what you thought last night," I retort, rubbing my aching side. For her sake, I cover my crotch with a pillow before swinging my legs over the edge of my bed to sit up. "Let me refresh your memory: you started making out with me. It was like, bam! Talk about out-of-the-blue—"

"You were baiting me!" she shoots back. She tries to jab an accusatory finger at me, but the blanket slips, almost revealing one of her breasts, and I snort with laughter, watching her fumble to fix the wardrobe malfunction. "This is all your fault! You were parading around without a shirt on—"

"Bull. Fucking. Shit," I argue back. "In case you forgot, A) you live with a dude now, Mikasa. It's customary for dudes to go shirtless at home. And B) it's ninety-fucking-degrees out, and that crappy, little AC unit in the living room does jack shit in cooling this place down. I'm perfectly fine not getting heatstroke, thank you very much."

"You know what, Eren?" Mikasa does this peculiar thing when she thinks she has a devastatingly good comeback: she crosses her arms and tips her head forward. She doesn't even realize she has this tic because yesterday, when we were figuring out the Jar, I tried to get a ruse out of her by mimicking it, but my playacting went over her head. "In case you forgot," she says. "A) you don't live with your fraternity brothers anymore, B) you could, I dunno, get the AC fixed, maybe? And C) you're really not helping the situation!"

"Correction: I wasn't in a frat, by the way—well, I kinda was, but only for a semester. I had to drop it to study for the MCAT."

"My point still stands," Mikasa sniffs.

"But you were really turned on, though. Weren't you?" I press, smirking at her. When she turns bright red, I laugh, and she glares daggers at me.

"Don't flatter yourself."

"But it's true."

"I regret everything."

"At least I took mercy on you, so now you don't have to scrape together $66 for initiating everything."

"You were just trying to get out of paying your end of the bargain."

"Okay, I'll give you that, but at the end of the day, you wanted to fuck me," I point out.

"Your brother's right," she says, unimpressed. She reaches down to gather my blanket into a huge, cushy wad, taking extra care to make sure her tits and bikini area are properly covered up.

"He was right about what?"

Mikasa walks forward until she's looming over me. "You're an absolute douchebag," she mutters, dumping the load over my head. I catch a glimpse of her long legs and tight ass before she storms out of my room.

I fly by the seat of my pants. That's been my style since I was born. Life's more fun when you roll with the punches, as opposed to scheduling out every last detail twenty years into the future. There's less decision fatigue, and there's more room for error. So as someone who prefers winging it, I can't fucking understand Mikasa's obsession with updating our House Rules, which we now keep on the coffee table, right next to the Jar. As of noon, here's how it reads so far:

HOUSE RULES

1. No hooking up, ever again.*
2. In public spaces (i.e. living room, kitchen, and balcony), residents must be fully-clothed at all times.
3. Dishes are to be washed immediately after use.
4. Leftovers belong in the trash if they have not been eaten within 72 hours.
5. Each resident is to honor the weekly chore schedule (see Appendix A).
6. The television volume shall not exceed a value of "20."

*Refer to the other side of this document for the finalized Sexual Tension Jar (STJ) policy.

"These are all directed at me," I complain, squinting at her handwriting.

"That's because you make these rules necessary." Mikasa sits criss-cross applesauce in the armchair and points the remote control at the TV, enforcing Rule #6. And then, she's laser-focused on her laptop again, scrolling through Facebook Marketplace for a lamp.

I wonder what Mikasa looks like when she smiles. I mean, all the pieces of the puzzle are there—cute nose, cupid's bow, pretty eyes—but ever since she's moved in, I've only seen grimaces and frowns. And the faces she makes in bed, of course. But no smiles yet. It's like worrying is her emotional baseline. (Well, worrying and being horny, if we're splitting hairs.) Although to be fair, two nights ago, when we were talking at the bar, she did flash me a ton of flirty looks, but those don't count. I'm talking smiles, and I have a feeling that Mikasa's got a great—

"One dollar," she says all of a sudden, not even looking up from her computer.

"What?"

"You're staring at me."

"No, I'm not."

"One dollar," she repeats.

The Jar policy has begun. But first, a confession.

Not to throw her under the bus or anything, but Mikasa wanted to keep having sex past midnight. Last night, around 11:55PM, I tried calling it quits before our first day as normal roommates. Mikasa, however, decided that the Jar would run on Pacific Standard Time instead of Eastern Standard Time, scoring us another three hours. Before I knew it, she was on top of me again, and we kept at it until she dozed off.

I fish a dollar bill out of my wallet and stuff it into the Jar. Being a stickler for technicalities, she had reclaimed her four quarters from yesterday, arguing that the policy hadn't taken effect just yet. I sneak another glance at her. She's looking at the single dollar, smug and satisfied, like she's rubbing in the fact that I paid the first official penalty. Crossing her arms and tipping her head forward. But I shrug, turning my attention back to a reading I'm supposed to do before clinical rotations. This petty first fine doesn't bother me all that much. Based on last night, I'm more than convinced that she's going to be racking up the lion's share of the Jar.

Mom always jokes about missing the boat on empty nest syndrome. For starters, college was only a forty-five minute subway ride away from our townhouse in Brooklyn, and I came home whenever I got sick of dining hall food (which was often). But more importantly, not long after I moved into my dorm, Mom went from picking after my shit to picking up after Dad's.

There were a ton of missed warning signs. I started beating Dad in poker—something that used to be an impossible feat. He constantly asked where the car keys went. For the past twenty years, they've always been on the mail counter in a clay bowl Mom got from a craft fair. He mixed up the Mets with the Yankees. And when it got really bad, the Mets with the Giants. But we didn't see a neurologist until one day, when he was standing over the operating table, he asked a nurse where he was and what he was doing with a scalpel.

Alzheimer's disease usually lays low until a person hits their mid-sixties. But for some unlucky people, it can take on an early-onset form and ambush forty-seven-year-olds.

Dad loved being a doctor. His patients adored him. Some still text him and send him Christmas cards. He never complained about getting paged at 3AM for an emergency surgery. He once missed a flight to check up on a sick lady in the airport. And years back, he showed up an hour late to a date because on his way to the restaurant, he had pulled over to help two car accident victims (Mom didn't believe this excuse at first, though).

But by the time I was a sophomore in college, we needed a caretaker to keep Dad company during his days of early retirement. A really friendly guy named Colt Grice comes by in the mornings, and he fixes Dad lunch and gives him his meds. And around 7PM, Mom comes home from working in the ER and takes over the night shift. Colt has it easy because Dad's tantrums don't hit until just before bedtime. I go home once every two weeks, and I've noticed that Mom's hair has gotten grayer and grayer.

Zeke, my half-brother who's ten years older than me, thinks nursing homes are the solution. "Listen, Carla," he says, whenever we get together for dinner. "I heard about this place the other day. Top-rate services." I think it's weird that he's on a first-name basis with my mom, but she doesn't seem to care. Mom tries hard to make him feel included, especially after his own mom (a.k.a. Dad's ex-wife) died recently. She's just warm that way.

I can't tell what's motivating Zeke to push this agenda so hard. He always asks to get drinks, trying to win me over on his nursing home plan. He has a complicated relationship with Dad. Zeke's mom, Dina, got pregnant during college, and she ended up having to drop out to take care of him. Busy with med school and residency, Dad was absent for basically all of Zeke's childhood. He was out of the picture entirely after he met my mom. Despite all this, Zeke's on relatively good terms with Mom and me. He always points out how tired Mom looks from having to "babysit" Dad all the time.

"Are you calling me old?" Mom teases, grinning. She insists she's got everything under control, but she cries after I call her on the phone every few days. I know this because her voice cracks at the last syllable when she says "I love you, Eren" before hanging up.

Mikasa triple-checks the bookkeeping. She keeps a piece of lined notebook paper next to the Jar that logs the time, date, category, and penalty amount of each offense. It's only been a week since we kickstarted the policy, but somehow, we've racked up more than $300 in fines.

"The purpose of this Jar isn't to fill it up ASAP, just so you know," she mumbles. She grits her teeth when she punches a wrong number into the calculator app on her phone, which forces her to restart all the math.

"You have equal fault in this," I reply.

It doesn't make sense. Starting at 6AM each day, Mondays through Fridays, I'm booked for twelve hours straight thanks to clinical rotations, which means I'm conked out by 10PM every night. Mikasa's schedule is no lighter. She's got to crank out her MFA work, be a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class, attend job interviews, and do her whole "freelance" writer thing.

Yet somehow, in the past week, we've fucked twice, made out five times, went to second base three times, and had dozens of "sexually tense" moments (I keep forgetting that going around shirtless is illegal now). Mikasa is petty with the $1 charges, so naturally, I'm petty right back.

I caught up with my buddy Armin over lunch yesterday, sheepishly telling him about this crazy coincidence and, well, the pricey consequences. Armin knows me inside-out. He always has an idea of what I'm thinking, and he's my go-to guy for life advice. After I filled him in, he gaped back at me.

"Eren, are you crazy?" he said incredulously. He didn't take a single bite of his salad the whole time I was talking. "So you're telling me that you're essentially friends-with-benefits with your roommate, who's a girl you met at a bar?!"

"Firstly, we're not friends-with-benefits," I said. "You see, that's what the Jar is for. It's so that we stop hooking up. And secondly, I didn't pick my roommate. Keith arranged that, which I know sounds weird, but I did tell him that I didn't really care who moves in."

"Eren, let me lay out the facts for you." Armin launched into lawyer mode. He's interning at the ACLU right now. "You guys have been regularly hooking up, despite all the fancy measures you've put into place. Evidently, these rules and this… what do you call it again?"

"The Sexual Tension Jar."

He cringed but went on, "Okay, so this Sexual Tension Jar clearly isn't working. Dare I say it? You guys have so much money in there already, and at this rate, it makes me wonder if you're paying for—never mind, you get my point, right?" He was turning red.

"Well, fuck," I replied. "We're paying to hook up is what you're trying to say, right?"

"Exactly." Armin nodded vigorously, even redder.

"Now that you put it that way, that sounds so really wack," I said, frowning. "Ugh, wow. Mikasa said it was supposed to be the opposite of a strip club—"

"What?!" Armin squeaked.

"Forget it, it's nothing."

"Did you guys decide what you're going to do with the money in this Jar thing?"

"We haven't settled on an answer, but I've floated the idea of using it to pay the electric and internet bills."

"That's a terrible idea," Armin said immediately. "You're gonna delude yourselves into thinking that hooking up ensures that the bills are paid, which only encourages it even more." He pushed a grape tomato around on his plate, thinking up a storm like he always does. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Go for it."

"Are you even trying?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're being so relaxed about all of this. Don't mean to be blunt, but you're not in a frat anymore, Eren."

"Jeez, why does everyone pin the 'frat boy' label on me? I dropped it for the MCAT, if that means anything."

"You were still in it for a semester. Hate to break it to you, Eren, but that was some major character regression."

"You're still pissed about that incident, huh."

"Which one? There's so many."

"The one where I had the sorority girl over and hooked up while you were still awake—"

"I remember very clearly! And yes, to address your point, I'm still pissed!"

"And for the millionth time, I'm sorry."

"Seriously, Eren." Armin stabbed the fork into his salad and pointed at me with an impaled tomato. "This is bad, and I wish you had some more urgency in solving the problem."

"I recognize that!" I protested. "Mikasa starts a lot of it, though. She's such a hypocrite, trying to be all mature and stuff with these rules, but holy fucking shit, that girl can get so horny, Armin. I can't even begin to explain—"

"Then don't," Armin interrupted me, twisting up his face in disgust. "Tell me, then. Why is it bad to hook up with your roommate? I need to make sure we're on the same page here."

"Isn't it obvious? It's weird."

"And?"

"If something bad happens, we can't escape each other for another ten months."

"And an example of 'something bad' would be?" Armin beckoned.

"If we fight?" I offered.

Armin sighed. "Yes and no, Eren. The answer I was going for was if someone catches feelings. That's going to be a living nightmare, and as someone who's known you for ages, I firmly believe that you're not good at untangling the physical stuff from the emotional stuff."

"You think I'm gonna catch feelings? Come on, dude. I was in a frat."

"Invite me over sometime. I wanna meet your roommate," Armin said. "You're picky about girls, Eren."

"I don't know what you're getting at."

"Look, you're attracted to her for a reason, and I think there's more to it than just physical attributes." He studied me for a long moment. "Yeah, invite me over soon. In the meantime, you guys need some more discipline. And you can't keep making the excuse that Mikasa started it because you absolutely, positively have the ability to stop things in their tracks." Suddenly, a light bulb glowed up over his head. "Have you guys talked about your turn-offs?" he asked.

And so here I am, trying to figure out the best way to pinball into this conversation topic with Mikasa. She's in deep concentration, redoing the arithmetic for the fourth time, cursing when the final answer ends up matching her first three attempts: $318. Over the course of my life, I've learned that the easiest, most efficient way to segue into awkward conversations is to just ask the tough question at point-blank, so I lean forward on the sofa and say, "Hey, Mikasa."

"I'm trying to focus."

"What turns you off?"

She blinks once. Twice. And looks at me slowly with an expression that's equal parts appalled and flustered. "What compelled you to ask that?"

"Just answer the question."

"Answer my question," she counters.

"God, why are you so difficult?" I grumble. "Okay, so we both suck at self-control. Like, a lot. So I thought maybe we could come up with really awful images that turn each other off before we hit the point-of-no-return. Here, I'll go first." I pause to think. Across from me, Mikasa is struggling to digest what I just said. "Sweet, I got it. If I ever make a move on you, you should say 'Connie's third nipple.'"

"Uh, what?"

"He has a third nipple, but he always says it's a mole. This stays between us, though. He's sensitive about it."

Mikasa pulls her knees up onto the armchair and buries her head between them. "I can't believe I'm doing this," she says, her voice muffled.

"The grosser the better. Oh, if that one doesn't work, you can also say, 'Zeke taking a dump over poison ivy.' Poor fella. One time, we were hiking in the Catskills, and he—"

"I can guess the outcome," Mikasa says quickly.

"What about you?" I ask, nodding at her. "I need something to say to you when you try to make out with me."

Her first couple of suggestions suck. She offers "rotten cheese," "gum on a park bench," and "earwax," but I push her to dig deeper. She's one of those guarded personalities, it seems, someone who'd turn up their nose at a Seth Rogen movie. At one point, she takes a breather from our discussion to answer a text message from her uncle—and then it hits her. Her eyes widen, and she straightens up.

"Levi scrubbing a toilet!" she exclaims, flinching a little as she says it.

I snort. "What? That's still kinda vanilla."

"No, you have to understand the painstaking detail he puts into cleaning a toilet," she says. "He's a complete neat freak, absolutely loathes filth, but I've always found it such a fascinating paradox, the way he gets so into the process. It's like, in a crusade for cleanliness, he's willing to wade so far into the muck until he's neck-deep in it, basically fully-submerged. It's almost… self-sacrificial."

It feels like her soul has left her body and went into some faraway universe only accessible to English majors. But as she goes on and on, her face lights up like a Christmas tree. She's beaming. She gets creases at the corners of her eyes when she smiles, and I can't help but grin too when I see it.

A/N: Holy fuck, guys. I'm honestly just having WAY too much fun with this fic. Like TOO much fun. I literally have a scrap of paper right next to me, trying to tally up all of Eren and Mikasa's Jar moments, making sure that the numbers add up properly—wait, did they? God, I hope I didn't fuck up the math, HAHAHA. UGH.

Thanks so much for the nice messages, you all! I'm trying hard to respond to each and every one of them, and wow, I'm really just touched to have such thoughtful readers. And the little ask box questions on Tumblr make me laugh so fucking much. You rock, Anons!

HTCE makes me so fucking nostalgic for the good, ol' days in the city. I think I was talking to one of you guys about this (I think it was couldntthinkofanythingbetterme), but I've come to the realization that I write this fic for a sense of escapism from our current world. Yet this escapism is a modern AU that reflects a former pre-COVID version of our world. Maybe that's why I haven't been afflicted by writer's block just yet. I remember when I was writing WUARD in 2017, it'd strike me like every other chapter, hence the sluggish updates—but recently, all I wanna do is dive into the HTCE AU.

Anyways, please be safe, you guys. Catch you guys in the next update!

Kar