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Grantaire wakes up one morning, and realizes that possibly he fell asleep in Enjolras’ house. It becomes less of a possibility when he realizes that the book he has been using as a pillow is a textbook, not a phone book like he’d have used in his own apartment. That, and also Enjolras’ left ankle is resting just in his field of vision.
Grantaire swallows, suddenly wide awake, and rolls over to find Enjolras sleeping on the couch in front of him, chest rising and falling and a stack of papers settled onto his chest. He’s holding a pen in one hand while he sleeps, and Grantaire seriously debates taking a photo of him. Instead, he reaches up a hand to rub at his hair, and stops.
There is something in his hair.
When he pulls his hand back down, it’s to find that there is a post-it-note, blank and unassuming, that’s been stuck to the crown of his head. He frowns at it, somewhat confused, before crumpling it and throwing it towards the trash. He misses.
“Goddammit,” says Grantaire, and pokes Enjolras’ leg on his way to pick up the ball of paper. “Wake up.”
Enjolras groans, pen still not leaving his fingers, and his eyes flutter open. “Grantaire?”
“I have no idea why I’m still in your house but I am hungry what do you want for breakfast?” says Grantaire.
“That was three sentences in one. Hold on,” says Enjolras. He drags his free hand up to rub at his eyes and when he does so, his shirt pulls up to expose a stretch of pale skin and hipbones.
“I’m going to make you some coffee,” decides Grantaire, and heads for the kitchen before he ends up doing something stupid like licking Enjolras’ abdomen.
Grantaire is in the middle of actually listening to Enjolras rant about the latest horrific violation of human rights when Enjolras stops mid-speech and turns on his heel. To be fair, Grantaire had been chewing on the tip of his pencil, but he wasn’t arguing. He could have been arguing, but he wasn’t, so when Enjolras returns a few moments later with a pad of post-it-notes, Grantaire ends up going somewhat cross-eyed as the other slaps a post-it-note to his mouth.
“Um,” he says, and Enjolras just looks at him.
Then he starts speaking again.
“What did you do?” says Courfeyrac in a whisper, not looking away from Enjolras.
“I have no idea,” whispers Grantaire back. He peels the post-it-note off of his lips and gives it a look. “Do you think he poisoned it?”
“I don’t know,” says Courfeyrac. “Can you even poison post-it-notes?”
Grantaire looks at him, and then at Enjolras, and shrugs.
The next time it happens he figures it’s just something Enjolras does to shut him up. He’s in the middle of something a tirade, because Enjolras had said something that probably wasn’t worth a tirade but Courfeyrac had been eating starbursts and diligently throwing the wrappers at Grantaire, who really needed to be doing something that was not strangling him. So he’s standing up, possibly on a table, and ranting when it happens.
It being Enjolras blinking, pulling out the post-it-notes, and pressing one to the center of his chest.
Grantaire has no idea what to do with that. “What?” he says finally, tirade lost to the scrap of yellow paper sticking to the front of his shirt.
“You’re wrong,” says Enjolras simply, not addressing the post-it-note, and settles back into his seat. “Also, I think Musichetta is going to kill you unless you get off her table now.”
Grantaire looks over at the girl in question, and balks at the expression on her face. “Oh God,” he says, and gets off the table.
It becomes so commonplace that Grantaire stops noticing it. Enjolras covers most of his face on one terrible rainy day spent playing an intense game of BS. He gets his eyes somewhere around the third round, at which point Courfeyrac declares the game over as Grantaire is basically covered in yellow pieces of paper on every inch of his face.
“No, fuck you,” says Grantaire, frowning in what he hopes is Courfeyrac’s general direction. He has no idea if the fact that he is frowning even translate what with all the paper, but he does it anyway.
“How are you still talking?” says Courfeyrac.
“You’re just jealous that I’m winning,” says Grantaire.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to carry points over between rounds,” says Enjolras. “Also, since when are there points.”
“Shut up, you’re the reason we’re stopping!” says Courfeyrac, and Enjolras goes silent. Grantaire peels some post-it-notes away from his eyes so that he can see the absolutely fabulous expression on Enjolras’ face. It makes Courfeyrac swallow and play his cards.
“Bullshit,” says Enjolras.
“Dammit,” says Courfeyrac.
“I told you he was all knowing,” says Combeferre.
“You didn’t say he was a card shark,” says Grantaire. He licks his lips and puts down his own cards. “Three threes,” he says.
“Courfeyrac is just a bad liar,” Enjolras tells them, and gets up to put a post-it-note on Grantaire’s tongue. “Bullshit.”
Grantaire gets hired by Musichetta to paint a mural along one of the Musain’s walls, and he spends the better half of a day panicking about it. He ends up walking in circles around his living room muttering himself, then muttering to Éponine over the phone, and changes his clothes three times over the course of the hour.
Enjolras shows up at his house before he can do anything drastic, and hauls him out the door and into his car with little comment. “I drew the short straw,” he says.
“Ah,” says Grantaire, and dips his head when Enjolras reaches out to press a post-it-note to his left shoulder.
The mural goes well until Enjolras interrupts it to put a post-it-note on Grantaire’s dominant hand. It’s the first thing that has any writing on it, so as soon as he is out of the door, all of their friends are crowding around him to read it.
“‘Not just them, but what they do,’” reads Courfeyrac. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Grantaire shrugs. “I don’t know?” he says.
They both watch Enjolras make his way over to his car and get into it. “I worry for him,” says Courfeyrac.
“I’m just glad it wasn’t my tongue this time,” says Grantaire.
He gets one on his ass the day he wears The Pants. Grantaire decides he is never going to wear The Pants again.
“They’re not really The Pants,” points out Éponine, when Grantaire tells her. “I mean, they make your ass look good but that’s not hard.”
Grantaire pauses. “Thank you?” he says finally.
“You’re welcome,” says Éponine. She passes him the bottle of juice they’ve been finishing for Courfeyrac, who hasn’t moved from his place lying despondently on the couch.
Grantaire takes a sip. “How’s it going on the ice cream front?” he asks Bahorel and Feuilly. The two of him give him a thumbs up and grin around their spoonfuls.
“I hate all of you,” says Courfeyrac.
“You’re the one who broke the freezer,” says Jehan, on his way back from the bathroom. He grabs himself a spoon and settles down next to Bahorel.
“Ugh,” says Courfeyrac. “Don’t remind me.”
Combeferre and Enjolras don’t look up from their place in the living room bent over the phone book trying to convince someone to come out and look at the fridge on a Sunday, but Combeferre says, “Is Courfeyrac talking?”
“No,” choruses the group.
Éponine takes the bottle from Grantaire. “Your ass would look good in most pants, though.”
Grantaire is really glad he’s not the one sipping.
“He could have said hello, though,” he says quietly. “Instead of doing whatever the hell it is he is doing with these things.”
Éponine snorts. “Well aren’t you picky,” she says, but she pats him on the back anyway on her way towards Cosette and Marius. The two of them are curled up on the couch eating a tub of chocolate ice cream and watching B Horror movies on TV.
Enjolras puts one on his lips three times in one day.
The first for laughing, Grantaire assumes, but he’s not quite sure how that would be seen as disruptive to the meeting. He’s not quite sure the post-it-notes are even because he’s being distracting, but that would make sense.
The second is for making a face at Cosette. She’s wearing a pair of origami crane earrings that Grantaire knows Marius bought for her, and he’s trying incredibly hard not to make a pair on the spot just to watch her face. She ends up scowling at him, somewhat playfully, when he fails, and so he sticks his tongue out at her. He’s not even talking. But still, post-it-note; Enjolras is baffling.
The third one is when Grantaire is giving Enjolras a ride home. They’re in the car, and they’re not talking, because Enjolras is tired and Grantaire isn’t sure how to form words that aren’t, “Why are you covering me in post-it-notes.”
But the radio is on in the background so that Grantaire’s mind had something to focus on, and when one of his favorite songs comes on and Grantaire can’t help singing along.
So of course Enjolras sticks a post-it-note on his lips mid-lyric.
“Um,” says Grantaire.
“Keep singing,” says Enjolras, and adds a note to his throat for good measure.
It occurs to him that possibly there is a reason for the post-it-notes only a day later, when Enjolras pulls out a battered paperback filled with them.
Grantaire blinks and stares. He looks between the book, and his upper body, most of which is covered in post-it-notes at this point, and blinks again. Something is dawning on him, and his stomach isn’t quite sure if what it wants to do is burst into a million butterflies or empty its contents.
“What are those?” says Courfeyrac, somewhat desperately.
Grantaire raises his glass in agreement, and sits down somewhat heavily in his chair.
“Post-it-notes?” says Enjolras. He fingers the book gently, before tucking it under his arm. He’s still in the doorway, somewhat awkwardly, and shifting his weight between feet.
“Yes, but why are they there?” says Courfeyrac, still desperately
“To mark the spots I like?”
Grantaire had been attempting to take a sip from his drink, but he ends up dropping it rather suddenly onto the table.
“Woops,” says someone—Éponine?
“Oh my God,” says Grantaire somewhat breathlessly, because that makes sense and yet also it doesn’t make any sense at all.
“Are you okay?” says Enjolras. He looks somewhat concerned, and so Grantaire gets up and walks over to him to assure him that he can.
“Peachy,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What?” says Courfeyrac.
“I thought I did,” says Enjolras hesitantly, but he’s smiling.
Grantaire smiles back at him. Grantaire is pretty sure his face couldn’t handle more complicated emotions anyway, which is stupid because Grantaire’s chest is a mess of complicated emotions. “You couldn’t have been more obvious?”
Enjolras frowns. “Well, you understood eventually,” he points out.
“What?” says Courfeyrac, again. The rest of the room hushes him loudly.
“True,” says Grantaire. He takes one of the post-it-notes, the one right across his heart that he got when he—and he’s laughing about it, now—commented on the beauty of Joly and Bossuet and Musichetta’s relationship, and sticks it to Enjolras’ cheekbone.
Enjolras grins at him, head dipping.
Grantaire tugs the post-it on his neck off and presses it to Enjolras lips, reverent, before replacing it with his own.
“Oh my God what?” says Courfeyrac loudly, and frantically, in the background, but Grantaire is too busy discovering just how much he loves the way Enjolras tastes, and the little sighs he makes when his eyes go closed.
“I like this part,” he says when they pull back, and pulls Enjolras in for another.