Here is my second contribution to @csjanuaryjoy! I put together the picset for this wintery au concept a few weeks ago, and planned to share a one shot with it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to put the time I wanted to into this, resulting in a 600ish word drabble. But I’m hoping this will serve as a sneak peek to a longer story that I’d like to share soon if time and life permit! Until then, I hope you enjoy this glimpse at a little friends to lovers bedsharing story. Thank you to the CSJJ admins for hosting the event again this year, and to @thisonesatellite for inspiring me to write again and overall being wonderful 💙
Emma wasn’t sure just how she’d gotten into this.
Well, actually, she was. It was because her soon to be sister in law was too good and too pure for this world, which made it impossible for Emma to say no to her regarding most things. This trip was no exception.
Emma didn’t even like to ski, and yet she found herself at a ski resort in Vermont, where she’d be spending the next seventy-two hours with the rest of David and Mary Margaret’s wedding party.
A wedding party that included Killian Jones. Who she was also forced to not only share a hotel room with, but also a bed, because luck was not at all on her side thanks to a mistake in the resort’s booking.
(If Emma hadn’t made the reservations herself, she would have sworn Mary Margaret had deliberately booked the wrong number of rooms to see what would happen.)
Sharing a bed with the man she was just a bit in love with wouldn’t be such a problem...if said man was aware of this fact and felt the same way. But Killian wasn’t and didn’t. Emma was certain of it without having to ask. Or, at the very least, certain enough that asking felt like too big a risk to take if she could lose her best friend as a result.
She knew from the moment they met at David and Mary Margaret’s Christmas party two years earlier that something about him was different. They’d spent most of the night alone together on the couple’s back porch, not caring about the dropping temperatures or the party they were missing as they drank hot chocolate (spiked with rum from the flask tucked away in Killian’s jacket) and talked about everything from the best and worst limited-edition Oreo flavors to their high school graduations.
It didn’t hit Emma until days later when she found herself unable to think of anything besides him. The concept of someone getting under her skin so quickly was terrifying, and a risk she couldn’t afford to take. So the result was skipping invites for plans with David and Mary Margaret, and avoiding all of Killian’s efforts to contact her. And it worked. Until the circumstances bbehind one of her skips hit a bit too close to home, mentally and physically. She’d stumbled into the Jones brothers’ bar with blood and tear tracks on her face, desperate for a drink. Instead, Killian had taken one look at Emma and led her to his office in the back, where he’d used a first aid kit to treat her injuries and sent one of his employees out for chicken noodle soup.
He’d sat on the couch beside her while she ate, not prying with questions about why she’d avoided him, simply asking what he could do for her, and then driving her home later that night. The two of them had been close ever since; movie nights once a week at one of their apartments, texting each other memes with no context at any given moment in the day, and being thrown into wedding plans when David proposed to Mary Margaret. Over time, an unspoken shift had taken place in their relationship. Killian had become her best friend, her closest confidant, and the person she longed to see the most after a hard day. And Emma had no doubts that his feelings mirrored her own.
That is, until she fell in love with him.
So, yes. Sharing a bed was going to be an interesting experience to say the least.
Emma only hoped she would come out of it with her dignity and their friendship till intact.
