twotwelfths | above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

1 PETER 4:8

The six-bedroom house in Hyde Park is owned by Oliver's father who uses the first floor as storage for his online electronics shop. The remaining bedrooms up the stairs have been distributed somewhat evenly between the three twenties-something-young men living there, what with Noah (26) and Oliver (29) sharing the master and James (24) paying minimum rent for the 70 square feet extra, the final bedroom having been set up as an office for Noah who's filled the space with books on nutrition and anatomy. Right now, he's studying to become a dietitian. It's his third attempt at a degree in two years. No one seems concerned, least of all him.

It's not a fancy house or anything, not by L.A. standards. Still, it's reasonably well-maintained on the inside, because Oliver's dad is the type to care for functionality over appearances which explains why the facade is crumbling, the grafitti paint on the far-end gable peeling off little by little. The large Hokusai wave someone painted on there a decade ago looks tattered and worn. Bleached from the sun, too. Whenever James turns the corner in the morning, back from a couple of hours surfing at Venice Beach, that piece of grafitti artwork signals home in all its disintegrating beauty.

After a turbulent first year out on his own, it's nice having a place he can actually call his. Again.

The master bedroom is almost triple the size of James' room, not that he's complaining. He gets to sleep in here often enough that it could as well be his own. Through the fluttery curtains that block the stark Californian sun at noon, he can glimpse the neighbor's open balcony doors, loud pop music (sounds like Beyoncé) playing as a kind of rude wake-up call. He stretches. Elbows someone in the face in the process, so he has to twist to avoid jamming limbs into soft spots anywhere. Noah groans, but ends up just turning over on his other side, his naked butt sticking out underneath the sheets, pale and firm. He's got spunk up his left arm, you can imagine how it got there.

Against James' other side, Oliver stirs, reaching out blindly with one, dark-skinned hand to push at James' shoulder. "Whoever's awake makes breakfast," he mumbles.

"It's not breakfast anymore, it's noon," James tells him after having reached over a loudly complaining Noah to check his phone for the time. He could make a scene about the fact that he's always whoever's awake and thus, it's always him making breakfast, but seeing as he pays a third of what a room would cost, if he weren't fucking his landlords? He can live with playing the kitchen elf once or twice a week, to be honest.

"Whatever it is, you're making it," Oliver tells him and snuggles closer to Noah as soon as James is crawling out of bed, the two of them a mess of legs and arms within seconds. Noah hmm's and only moves to grab Oliver's wrists, pulling the other man's arms around to his front. James thinks about Benjamin for all of two seconds, then he thinks about whether they've actually got any bread left that isn't moldy.

The house is quiet, peaceful, as he moves downstairs to the kitchen, naked and uncaring as the day he was born. If they don't, it probably won't kill them if he just scrapes it off this once.