sleep

the duvet wars

[ It's our paradise, and it's our warzone. - Pillowtalk ]

Just because you love someone doesn't mean you're gonna go easy on them in the bedroom.

pairing: zigi
rating: pg
word count: 675
an: i wrote this for horusporus on tumblr bc she's a cutiepie who always answers my dumb zayn prompts (no, really, they're super dumb "what if zigi get drunk-married by an elvis impersonator in vegas?" "what if they adopt an orphaned hedgehog?" i'm so sorry) lmao

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In the course of his year-long relationship with Gigi, Zayn has discovered through thorough experimentation that there are basically only two reliable methods of keeping warm in their bed.

The first route he can choose is to generate extra body-heat through pure volcanic sexual passion, the sort only a young, beautiful couple consisting of a supermodel and a pop-star pin-up can create. This works well enough for all of twenty minutes – thirty on a good day! – but then he's still got the rest of the night to shiver through.

It's also a pretty dangerous option, he reckons, as his mum always warned him that getting very hot and then getting very cold in quick succession would leave him with a nasty chill.

The second – and far more efficient – route is wearing some old-fashioned brushed cotton pyjamas like his granddad used to always wear, the material thick enough to stop a bullet. Gigi loves his traditional snuggly pyjamas, so much so that when he gets ready for bed he generally finds her already inside them.

It turns out the pretty silky nighties Gigi usually wears might look stunning, but are no good whatsoever for keeping warm. The silky material offers little in the way of insulation; it's like sleeping in a tent with no groundsheet. Nighties also carry the additional hazard that she only has to turn over twice in bed while wearing one for them both to end up twisted tighter than a Bavarian milkmaid's plaits.

The reason why their bed gets so cold in the first place is that Gigi puts her feet in it. He's pretty sure he saw a bad Channel 5 documentary once that taught him women's feet generate more cold than the average domestic fridge-freezer. They're a bit like the reverse of a hot-water bottle: warm as toast and lovely all day long, but rubbery and unappealing during the night. And, unfortunately for him, permanently attached to the woman he loves.

To combat this deadly flaw of evolution, Gigi has also mastered two separate techniques for keeping their bed warm at night.

The first is that – much like a heat-seeking missile – her feet can accurately pinpoint and migrate towards the nearest source of warmth, which, for obvious reasons, tends to be Zayn himself on the other side of the bed. He's found that, if Gigi is anything to go by, the standard woman's foot can drain the entire body heat from a sleeping adult male in approximately three minutes.

It starts with just a toe or two, pressing into the flesh of his calf, and before he has a chance to brush her off, she's got her entire lower legs pushed against him, absorbing every ounce of warmth until she's sighing happily and relaxed, like a gecko basking in the sunlight.

The second technique Gigi uses to great effect is duvet-winching, by which she turns over, pulling the duvet with her, then keeps rolling over in place until she's cocooned five layers deep in blankets and toasty warm.

In a desperate attempt to keep himself from dying of hypothermia, Zayn has developed a range of bedroom callisthenics to generate artificial warmth: flapping the duvet, tugging the duvet, straightening the duvet, pulling the duvet down to cover up his feet, pulling the duvet up to cover his shoulders, and, finally, going to sleep in the spare room with the electric blanket.

The most important thing he's learnt though, is to be aware of any night-time request Gigi makes to 'spoon, please, honey'. On the surface it may seem like an innocent invitation for some cuddling, but without fail turns into a deadly combination of foot-sapping and duvet-winching which inevitably leaves him completely exposed to the elements within seconds.

This is when he decides to go put on his thick snuggly pyjamas – unfortunately for him, of course, Gigi is already wearing them. And the only way to get them off her is to go back to route one: the twenty minutes of volcanic sexual passion.