newroutines | 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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Karolina managed an actual snicker, again. "Well, I'm already doing it for most of the week, every week, anyway."

And had been for a while now, hadn't she? Huh.

"It doesn't seem that bad to just go the whole way."

Well, they’d been dating for weeks before they even realized they were doing it, and Beau had gone and developed Feelings long before she knew she had, so really, this was consistent with their relationship so far.

“As long as it’s with you, I’m down to go pretty much anywhere,” Beau told her. “Literally and figuratively.”

At least their disastrousness was turning out to be of a pretty productive sort? They were stumbling and fumbling, but at least they were both doing it in the same direction.

"Aww," Karolina said, because, aww. "Me too, babe. You... You've become super important to me over this past year."

Maybe, as weird as it sounded, they were disasters in ways that complemented each other? It seemed to be working for them so far, anyway.

Beau just reached out to wrap both arms around Karolina's waist and just ... hug her tightly for a moment.

"Last year," she said when she eased up, "when you came over to say hi to me. Did you think we would turn out like this? I sure as fuck didn't."

Beau could probably tell from just from Karolina's incredulous laugh alone that no, she had not.

"Oh, I so didn't." See? "I mean, I definitely thought -- okay, I hoped we might go out once or twice, but I never expected this." Where that 'this' was a brief tighter squeeze around Beau's shoulders.

Beau laughed, too, though much more sheepish than incredulous.

"I just thought 'oh cool, I might get laid once,' but that was about all I expected," she admitted.

Karolina dropped a kiss against her forehead, like that could somehow hide her own sheepish smile. (It did not.)

"Which you did, way earlier on than I would've usually gone for," she murmured. Not that it had just been 'once'. "For the record. Guess you're just that irresistible."

"I mean, I was gonna say you're the irresistible one, because I kept coming back," Beau said with a chuckle. "Which I knew I wanted to do basically as soon as you kissed me, by the way. Though I wasn't planning on acting on that, until you said you wanted to see me again."

She leaned a little bit more into Karolina.

"I kind of expected you to just kick me out afterward, to be honest. In retrospect that was dumb of me. Sorry I ever thought that about you."

"It's not like you could've known," Karolina pointed out in a murmur. "You'd only talked to me lke twice before."

Although she hoped she didn't give off that kind of a vibe, but still.

It wasn’t that she gave off any kind of vibe even remotely like that, it was just what Beau had taught herself to expect.

“You’re not that type, though. It’s pretty obvious,” she said, tightening her arms around Karolina again for a moment. “It was just … safer for me to assume it. Managing my expectations, you know.”

"I know," Karolina assured her. Her hand was lightly rubbing a circle against Beau's upper back. "I've had about a year to try and learn to get you."

To figure out some things about why she was how she was.

“And you love me anyway,” Beau said, a bemused smile on her face. “But I’ve had a year to kind of figure you out too. And some of the shit you’ve been through? You took that, and you figured out how to be a better person. Whereas when I went through similar shit it just made me angry and cynical."

She hadn't exactly had a support network at the time, which probably made a lot of the difference. Still.

"But ... is it weird that I kinda feel like you get me more than most people do, because of that?”

Karolina shook her head. "It's not weird," she murmured, and no one as getting any points for correctly guessing she'd think that. "I think it's just... natural. I mean, maybe we had different reactions, and different circumstances --"

Because, yeah, having her fellow runaways had probably been a major factor in how she'd gotten through some stuff, and she knew it hadn't really been like that for Beau.

"-- but it was still similar stuff. I still know, you know?"

"Yeah," Beau said gruffly, then, with a nod, "yeah. Like I don't have to explain to you how some of that shit made me feel, but I know you get it."

Like what it had been like to get hauled off to the Cobalt Soul with no say in the matter, not that she'd be elaborating in the middle of a bunch of people. Among other things.

Some psychologist would probably think they were a fascinating study.

"You know, and I know you're not going to use that to hurt me, and it -- that means a whole fucking lot."

Party!, Purposefully Creepy Mansion, Thursday Evening

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