newroutines | Party!, Purposefully Creepy Mansion, Thursday Evening

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Party!, Purposefully Creepy Mansion, Thursday Evening

It was once more Halloween, and the island had finally calmed the fuck down again.

Well, mostly. The Jack O'Lanterns outside in the yard lighting the way to the house occasionally laughed in a PG-rated creepy fashion, and bat cut-outs flew around the ceiling above the partygoers' heads, and the black cats printed on the sides of balloons flicked their tails back and forth and sometimes hissed at people when they went by.

And because it was tradition, there was a bloody goblin in the fridge, complete with a name tag identifying it as April. Only this time, whenever you opened the door to get something, it'd tell you whatever you were grabbing was actually poison...ously delicious!

(Shut up, it was made of plastic, its punning game wasn't the greatest.)

There were also once more lots of snacks, lots of drinks, and way too many kinds of jello shots. But fewer renditions of Monster Mash on the Spotify playlist for this party, this year! So far, anyway. Mike had a sign up againwith instructions on how to find the playlist and add songs to it, so that may not last all through the evening.

[ooc: OCD up, have at! OPEN TO ALL! If you're an adult, you got an invitation! Students are welcome to try and sneak in should they so wish, but may be politely removed from the premises.]

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Annnd so much for the serious, because Karolina immediately broke into happy giggles.

Also blushed a little bit.

"... hi, you're really pretty," Beau blurted out, like she was thirteen and didn't know how to flirt, instead of twenty-three and still terrible at flirting.

With someone she'd been dating all year, yes, but she had to do something to cope with how cute the giggles and the blushing were.

The giggling turned more into snickering.

"Did you... just notice that?" Karolina teased.

"No, I've always known that," Beau shot back in some pitiful attempt to reclaim her dignity. "Just worth pointing out every now and then. I thought you were super hot the first time I saw you, remember?"

In costume though. Because that had also been Halloween. But details.

"I think almost anyone would've thought that, though," Karolina retorted, even if she wasn't generally inclined to think of herself as a Hot Person, such. Because: "It was the cinched waist and the cleavage."

Push-up bras weren't really her thing but she knew it had looked good, because the whole costume had been designed to do that.

"…yeah, okay, that is what I noticed," Beau admitted, because that would have been obvious to anyone. "You were hot then. I mean, I still think you're hot. But I like you a lot more as yourself."

She gave Karolina a quick grin. "I totally would've banged you the way you were dressed that night." No one was shocked by this. "Dating long enough that we're practically living together? Nah, that's all you, babe."

… oh wow, they really were practically living together, weren't they. Somehow that hadn't occurred to Beau until she said it.

Yeah, it didn't seem to have done so with Karolina, either. Judging by the sudden bounce of her eyebrows.

"... Wow, we -- we really are basically living together, aren't we?"

They were super observant about these things, clearly.

Well, they still had to be disasters somehow. It was kind of like they just had one really big apartment with a hallway running through it, and neither of them had noticed.

"We …" Beau looked at her, a little wide-eyed, but only in surprise, because now that she thought about it she was pretty sure almost half her stuff was at Karolina's place, and she'd already set aside half of her own dresser drawers so Karolina could use them. "Holy shit, we kind of are."

She might have freaked out about that a while ago. She was actually freaking out a little bit now, but not in a way that made her want to run.

"I'm kinda into it."

"Are you?"

Because, no lie, for a second there Karolina had been maybe a tiny bit worried she might freak out? Because while they weren't actually living together in a single-address kind of way, it still seemed like a pretty big thing. Even if they'd failed to notice it over the past months, apparently.

"Because, so am I."

Beau leaned into her for a moment in a one-armed sort of half hug, but she had to lean back so she could actually make eye contact. She'd spent most of her life being a compulsive liar, and she'd actually been very honest since she'd gotten here, but it felt like she had to make it clear that she was telling the truth right now. It felt like that was important, somehow.

"Yeah," she said in the steadiest voice she was capable of. "I wasn't expecting that, but yeah. I'm totally okay with it. I mean, you're not the only one who likes waking up and knowing I'm right there."

Wait, that didn't quite sound right.

"I mean -- you know what I mean, right?"

Did she really have to even ask that, with the amount of 'awwww' already on Karolina's face? Because there was a lot of it.

"Babe," she said, pulling Beau just that little bit closer, as if she wasn't already. "I know exactly what you mean."

“I’m kinda, I don’t know, used to you?” Beau leaned into her again, and maybe a hint of a blush was showing just below her mask. “Like, my place feels super empty when you’re not there. And it’s a little weird. Having that matter to me so much. But it does.”

She chewed on her lower lip for a moment.

“Did you really have to go and make yourself that super important to me that I maybe have a hard time sleeping sometimes when you’re not there?” Sure, she could have just stated that as a fact instead of a playfully whiny question, but this was easier somehow.

If anyone thought Karolina didn't notice the blush, they were clearly not paying attention to how closely she was paying attention to Beau. Somehow, she kept herself from actually squeeing out loud over it, though.

And also everything else.

But she was still kind of beaming down at Beau all the same. Even when she chuckled a bit at the whine. "You know what?" she teased. "I'm pretty sure I did, yeah. You were sleeping too well by yourself."

“I mean, I don’t want it to sound like we’re all codependent or anything like that,” Beau said, fiddling with the hilt of her costume rapier. “I don’t want us to be. But it’s just like, I don’t know. It’s not like I can’t function without you or anything; just want you to be there.”

A warm little smile crept across her face, and she added in a near whisper, “Everything’s better when you’re there with me, Kar.”

If Karolina hadn't already confessed the extent of her feelings before, she would've definitely done it right now. It was the tiny smile and the almost-whisper that put a weird flutter right in the middle of her chest.

But instead, she ducked down for a soft kiss.

Beau, meanwhile, was doing everything she could think of to admit to the extent of her own feelings without doing it directly; that was part of her reason for curling one hand lightly around the back of Karolina’s neck as she kissed her back just as softly.

She hadn’t quite pulled away when she mumbled, on impulse, “So I’m not saying we should like actually officially live together yet, but maybe we should think about it? Just putting that out there.”

Which was to say that she wanted to, but was still convinced Karolina wouldn’t be on board with that.

Karolina pulled back a little further, just on instinct, just because she wanted to see Beau a little better. "Wait, really?" she asked, her eyes a little wide. But not in a bad way? She was just surprised.

See, also: "We should definitely think about that."

“Wait, really?”

It was Beau’s turn to ask that, also a little bit wide-eyed with surprise, partly because she’d caught herself by surprise asking, and partly because of the answer. “You’d really want to?”

Someday she might actually stop being surprised at these things, but not today.

"I mean... unless you don't want to?"

Maybe kind of a dumb thing to ask, considering Beau was the one who'd brought it up. But this was kind of a big, surprising thing to be talking about at a Halloween party, so cut her some slack! Big things could make a girl a little nervous.

Just a little? Because Beau was super nervous now that this conversation was happening for real and not just in her head. And yeah, this was a weird place to discuss a Big Thing Like this, but, well. It was them.

“No, no, I do want to,” she blurted out. “I mean, I’m pretty sure my favorite shirt is still under your bed somewhere, and this would totally solve that kind of problem, right?”

Could you blame her for going for a dumb and not even very logical joke right now?

Not really. Especially considering how Karolina, for her part, was still stuck kind of going 'uhh is this for real?' in her brain, badly enough that the joke didn't even fully register.

"Oh, wow," she said. "Wow."

Super helpful, Kar!

“That’s a good wow, right?” This wasn’t making Beau any less nervous, no. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight, or, you know, there’s no pressure. Just … something to think about.”

She already knew her answer, she was pretty sure, but she’d die before she ever tried to pressure Karolina into anything.

It took Karolina exactly until that to realize that yes, what she'd said had been really, really unclear. "Oh, no, it's definitely a good wow!" she said quickly. "But, yeah, we -- we should probably not decide anything right here and now. 'Cause, we should probably put some thought into figuring out which one of our apartments we want to actually move into."

That had probably not been the part Beau didn't think they needed to decide tonight, no.

Edited 2019-11-05 21:42 (UTC)

Not really, no.

Still.

Beau reached up to run her fingers through her hair, or at least try to until she remembered it was covered at the moment, and let out a little, kind of stunned sounding laugh.

“Is this really happening, Kar?”

She meant it more as “are we really doing this” than as “is this for real,” because Karolina had made it sound like she was just as into this prospect as Beau herself was, but both questions were applicable.

She was honestly pretty surprised at herself too.

If only someone had asked them at last year's party what they thought might happen at this one...

Finally, a smile broke through the half-stunned expression on Karolina's face. Small, but spreading rapidly. "Yeah," she breathed. "I think this is really happening."

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