GOLDEN, luke hemmings

XXV: KISS IT BETTER

"We're not up to anything. At least nothing that I know of. Are we up to anything, Luke?" Ava mused, winking at the boy in question, almost making him choke on his drink.

Luke shook his head and held in his laugh as he drank some juice, feeling Ava kick him lightly in the leg. They had began a game of footsie, going back and forth continuously as Ava kept trying to catch his foot with hers although her reflexes were always one-second too late. Temporarily distracted, he failed to hear his friends' voices, tuning them out, only caring about looking at Ava. The more he stared at her, the more beautiful each distinct feature became. The slight freckles she had around her nose, how red her cheeks got in the cold. He noticed that she was currently biting her out of concentration in the game of footsie she had provoked, and that she was really cute when she bit her lip. Her dark hair hung in her face, swaying whenever she moved, and Luke just wanted to kiss her again.

Okay, Luke. You need to get a grip on this whole kissing thing. Which, seriously, he did, but no one could really blame him. He had been wanting to kiss his best friend for so long that he had an entire supply of kisses that he had yet to give her. Now that he had done it, he just couldn't wait to do it some more. In the way he described it, it made him sound like he was addicted to Ava, but that wouldn't exactly be wrong either. In a metaphorical sense anyways.

"Hey," he heard Ava whisper and he snapped out of it, mumbling something incoherent. "Calum's been trying to ask you a question for the past minute and a half."

"Yeah, doofus!" Calum yelled with a mouthful of turkey bacon, "Anyways Bec, Ashton, and I are gonna go to the mall today, you two wanna come?"

He looked over at Ava who merely shrugged as she placed her empty glass into the sink, and nodded, "Okay, why not?"

"Cool," Becca said, kissing Calum on the cheek before she walked to the bathroom, "We leave in an hour. You can go back home and get your stuff if you want, my car keys are in my bag."

Upon hearing this news, Ava began to ponder over the thought as she grabbed the dishes from the kitchen and began to wash them, starting with the glasses seeing as they were the easiest. She did this chore without being asked and the other three boys in the room couldn't help but stop and slightly gape at her, neither one sure what she was doing. Not minding them, she read the scents of the variety of dish soaps that the boys rarely gave much thought to, picking a green bottle that had cucumber-melon scented soap and squirting it over all the dirty dishes and scrubbing it with a sponge, humming a tune to herself like washing someone else's dishes wasn't a big deal. (Which to her, it really wasn't.)

Luke didn't even think about dishes after eating breakfast, it usually an afterthought that him and one of the boys would have to fight over, playing a game of rock-paper-scissors to see who would get stuck with the job all week (it was usually Ashton, Calum and Luke had a pact that they would both constantly pick paper since Ashton only chose between rock or scissors but mainly chose rock). He watched as Ava changed the setting on the faucet so that the water came out quicker and in almost a hose-like fashion, in order to clean everything more efficiently. When she finished, she dried her hands on her shorts.

"Dude, I didn't even know that our sink-thing could do that. She's a keeper," Ashton told Luke, Calum nodding along. "All Calum's girlfriend does is eat my pudding."

"That's not true. Shut up, Ash," Calum scolded, hitting the older boy upside the head before the two of them walked off into their own bedrooms, leaving Luke alone in the kitchen with Ava.

Ava sat up on the counter by the microwave as she put away some dishes and since she was quite short, she regretted it immediately, seeing as her feet couldn't even reach the ground by two inches. She swung her legs back and forth, placing a few plates in cabinets. She knocked her head on one of them trying to open the door, and tried to hide the growing bruise from Luke, but he was already smiling. He walked to where she was, a sheepish look on her face as she looked up at him, an annoyed look on her face.