To say Luke had been fretting about this was a bit of an understatement. In true King fashion, he'd not worried too much about it until about six am on Sunday morning when he woke up out of a dead sleep dreaming about expletive-laden cushions being thrown at his face which exploded like powdery glitter bombs while falling down a great height, bursting brightly coloured bubbles as he went. Shit, he thought, this was a terrible idea. He'd texted Roman about a dozen messages in the space of thirty seconds all varying degrees of why am I like this, are prophetic dreams even a thing, help me I'm about to make a stupid mistake until Roman replied with a definitely grumpy you're supposed to feed me before you pester me in the morning.
So he moved to Cece, who was a little more receptive (if not significantly more sarcastic) in telling him that he was an idiot and to just shower, get dressed and go. He hadn't dropped the guy's name into the messages: they were kind of a repeat of what he'd sent to Roman but worse because he'd had his first coffee of the day before seven am now and honestly that was probably not the best start to what was meant to be a good day.
Two coffees and a shower later, Luke caught himself about to chew on his thumbnail when he caught sight of the dark blue polish that Ness had done and he could almost hear her pre-emptively chastising him for even thinking about ruining her beautiful work.
He huffed out a breath, looked at the clock and faceplanted onto his couch, willing his body to just stop vibrating oh dear God because Percy had given Luke the guy's number to talk to him, for them to be friends. So what if - retrospectively - it was possible that their text conversation was borderline flirtatious. It didn't mean anything, some people - not Luke, Luke was a disaster human, witch, whatever - were like that.
By the time ten am rolled around, he'd had four more coffees, which took him to seven for the day and he needed to move otherwise nervous energy would literally destroy him from the inside out. And a messy, caffeine-related death would prove Claire 1000% right (in that he couldn't adult to save his life and should be given a 24/7 carer) and that absolutely wouldn't do. So.
Off he went.
Of course, he got halfway down the street from his house and realised that he hadn't pocketed his spare battery and he really didn't want to have the same kind of problem as he had the other day since he was probably already going to fuck this up, so he hurried back and picked up both his spare battery and the one he'd used yesterday which probably had a bit of charge in it just in case.
Catching his reflection before he left; jeans, black t-shirt with Deadpool and Pikachu dressed up as each other and one of his favourite zip-up hoodies, he eyed himself critically for longer than he needed to before stepping out of the house again. Before he shut the door, he did a mental rundown of his shit; wallet, keys, batteries, cell phone. Check on all four. Good. At the last minute, he grabbed his coat, too, because there was a chill in the air and he didn't want to arrive at La Luna Verde as a Lukesicle.
Whilst he wasn't proud of it, he did meander a bit on his way there, partly to get rid of some of the coffee-induced nervous energy and partly because he was just plain nervous. He hadn't really met new people in a long time. Percy had been an exception; all his friends here he'd known for years and when he was working with Max it had just been a job, something to get his mind off what had happened and why he'd needed a break from Summerview and that stupid bridge.