Sighing softly, Umi tapped her pen roughly against her desk in frustration. She loved to write, but lately the drive to do so had left her, leaving her frustrated and strangely empty. For the fourth straight night she sat at her desk and stared at a mostly-empty sheet of notebook paper, a few unconnected words written haphazardly on the page. No matter how hard she tried, nothing would appear in her brain to transfer down to the paper. Letting out a groan of pure aggravation, she let her head fall against the desk.
"Umi-chan?" Her head jerked up as she whipped around, focusing on the sight of a confused-looking ginger standing in her doorway. "Are you okay?"
"Honoka? How did you get in here?"
"Well, I was going to knock, but your mom was leaving the house and she just let me in." Umi raised an eyebrow suspiciously at that, getting a sheepish grin from Honoka. "Hey, it's the truth, Umi-chan!" Another groan escaped her lips as she slumped back against the desk.
"Fine, just try to be quiet. I'm working." Her voice was muffled by the piece of paper she was laying on, a severe lack of work done on it.
"It looks like you're napping." Umi couldn't even find the energy to get up and yell at Honoka for believing that she was slacking off, even if it was admittedly true. She just didn't need the acknowledgement from the queen of slackers herself. At the very least, Honoka did quiet down, leaving Umi's gentle, even breathing and a rhythmic dripping as the only sounds to reach her ears.
"Honoka, do you hear a dripping- Honoka! What the hell, you're soaked!" That dripping sound had been strange and out-of-place, but when Umi lifted her head up to question it, she found the culprit was none other than Honoka and her sopping-wet clothing. The ginger gave Umi another sheepish grin and rubbed the back of her neck.
"Ehehe, well, Rin-chan dared me to run through all the neighborhood sprinklers."
"... And you ran through all the sprinklers."
"Yes, yes I did." All Umi could do was shake her head slowly in sad disbelief, though it wasn't actually that hard to imagine Honoka doing something stupid like that. It was so very Honoka.
"Just... Just go to the bathroom and change before you catch a cold. You're getting the carpet wet." Trying to ignore the steady dripping sound so she could get back to not having any writing inspiration, Umi pointedly turned back to the mostly-blank sheet of paper, grabbing her pen to try and write anything down.
"But Umi-chan, I don't have any other clothes!"
"Then you can borrow mine. Just make sure you wash them before you bring them back." Not that she thought Honoka was inherently dirty, but she wouldn't put it past her friend to get dared into something involving mud while wearing her clothes. She needed to learn responsibility with others' property.
Two words later - 'annoyance' and 'soaked' - Umi threw her pen against the desk, angrily crumpling up the poor, defenseless piece of paper in her hands. Her mind was an absolute blank. Had she lost the touch? One day had been concerning, but easily dismissed as an anomaly. Four days? Now this was a problem.
"Umi-chan sounds really frustrated." Honoka was still in the room? She could have sworn that the ginger had already left to go get changed. Was she being lazy and still standing there, making a mess of her floor, or had she already finished changing? Maybe she'd been concentrating so hard on her work that she'd blocked out all the noise.
Turning to figure out which of the two options was correct, she quickly found that there was a third, more unexpected option that Honoka had chosen to go with. Umi's mouth fell open as her eyes fell upon her friend, noticing that her wet shirt and jeans were pooled together on the floor. Clad in nothing but her undergarments now, Honoka's arm had reached behind her back to undo her bra before being caught by Umi.