Torrie Reed (hardbitten) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2016-09-12 10:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2019 [09] september, nick choi, victoria reed |
Who: Torrie Reed and Nick Choi
Where: Torrie and Lita's home
What: Torrie meets Nick, and is her usual sunny self.
When: [slightly backdated] 9/4/19, morning
Six-thirty in the morning was too early, in Torrie’s opinion, to be required to be out of bed. As a habitual night owl, her new position as a music teacher had stretched her old habits until they were nearly non-existent and had her clinging to her first cup of coffee in the morning. It was possible that eventually she’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but not likely. Padding down to the kitchen, she was still in the t-shirt she’d slept in. An oversized thing, with most of the graphic on the front worn away with age. It was pretty clear that Lita must have gotten up before her and started the coffee pot, since the smell was drifting down the hallway before Torrie had even made it there. Except she came up short when it wasn’t her roommate seated at one of the barstools, but some guy with crutches and a bum leg. If she’d seen him before, she didn’t remember him. “Who the hell are you?” Nick was not naturally a morning person, but years upon years of early mornings had rewired his brain and now he found he struggled to sleep past six-thirty. Which was in fact why he could be found in an unfamiliar (though becoming more familiar by the day) kitchen, making coffee and survey what sort of ingredients there might be in the house to make breakfast with. He knew he didn’t really need to do the latter (or former), but it was just in his nature and truth be told he liked the little smile that would appear on Lita’s face whenever he made her breakfast. Of course he had been warned about her roommate, but even after a couple of weeks he had yet to actually cross paths with her. That was until now. “Hey,” Nick turned on the bar stool slightly, offering the woman an easy smile. “I’m Nick, Lita’s friend. So I’m not a robber or anything, I mean, if I was would I have made coffee?” he began, holding up his coffee cup to prove his point. “You must be Torrie?” “Who else would I be?” Torrie retorted, crossing her arms over her chest. She kept her distance for a few more moments; he seemed harmless enough, but the ability to make coffee wasn’t going to win her over. Even if it smelled strong and perfect. Taking a sip of his coffee, Nick weighed how best to reply to that and finally decided to go with agreeing with her. “Good point, or I mean, you could have been a friend of Torrie’s for all I knew.” “I don’t have friends who stay over.” Eventually after a few more uncomfortable moments of standing and staring, Torrie moved and opened up the cupboard (with attitude) that they kept their mugs in and brought one down for herself. She pulled the pot out, filled her mug, and restrained herself from inhaling deeply, like usual. “Lita didn’t mention that she’d given anyone a spare key.” Taking a few swallows of the black coffee, she kept her attention on Nick, then asked, “Don’t you have a fucking kitchen of your own?” Nick shrugged one shoulder, unfazed by Torrie’s prickly demeanor. “She hasn’t,” he answered simply, unsure of just how much Lita had said about him and their whole arrangement. “And I do, but I generally prefer not slinking out of a woman’s place before sunrise after spending the night with her,” Nick flashed a bit of a smile, hoping it might help Torrie warm up to him. “Guess I was just raised that that was rude.” Torrie snorted. “So you’re fucking.” Not a question. She scrutinized him just a little more, like she was trying to see what Lita might see in him. He was cute, but wouldn’t have been the first guy in a lineup that Torrie would have pegged as a bedmate for her roommate. “Well, ah, that’s not how I’d have put it, but yeah.” Nick saw no point in denying it. “It’s really more like a friends with benefits thing,” he added, not sure why he felt the need to emphasize the fact that he was also a friend of Lita’s and not just some dude she was sleeping with. “I was just about to make breakfast, would you like some?” he added before he took another drink from his coffee mug. Mr. Cheerful Morning Person seemed worried about the distinction Torrie was going to make, but whatever. She didn’t really care. Just fucking, or fucking with friendship, it wasn’t her love life. An offer of breakfast in the morning was pretty smooth though, so maybe that was why Lita liked him. “What are you making?” she responded suspiciously. God help him, if he said fucking cereal he’d lose any possible goodwill the offer might have fostered. “Pancakes,” Nick answered while he located the ingredients he would need for said pancakes, gathering it all on the counter near the stove, along with a big mixing bowl. “And bacon if I won’t be crucified for using up what’s left in the refrigerator.” He eyed her out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge what sort of reaction he might receive from Lita’s roommate. They had bacon in the refrigerator? Fuck, Torrie needed to pay better attention. It was fucking weird that Mr. Cheerful Breakfast Making Morning Person knew that and she hadn’t. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll take a plate.” There was always toast as a Plan B if he couldn’t actually cook. After finishing half her mug of coffee, she was still barely willing to concede he could make that. She was still a little annoyed that she’d walked into her own kitchen to find a stranger. “But only if you make mine in dinosaur shapes,” she added with a serious face. Nick glanced sideways at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if this was some kind of test. It probably was. Without even missing a beat in the process of making the pancake mix, Nick chuckled as he replied. “What sort of dinosaurs are we talking about here?” The noise of the whisk in the batter was the only sound that could be heard in the kitchen for a moment. “Because I have to be honest here, my dinosaurs aren’t nearly as good as my Mickey Mouse pancakes are.” He wasn’t about to tell her he had never once in his entire life made dinosaur pancakes. Nick felt like he was maybe gaining some ground with Ms. Attitude, he wasn’t about to give it up by admitting his dinosaur pancakes would turn out looking like horrifying blobs. Torrie opened a cabinet and reached inside for the griddle, passing it over to the stovetop. “Velociraptors. Scary ones. If you can’t fucking do it, then I want scary Mickey Mouse. None of that cutesy bullshit.” Her one act of helpfulness done, she moved around the island and sat on one of the barstools while she finished her coffee. As Nick began mixing all the ingredients together, he looked across the kitchen island at Torrie. “Now are we talking Jurassic Park Velociraptors, or like what they really looked like?” Because while Nick was not a dinosaur buff, even he knew that the movie didn’t portray them accurately. Torrie only pursed her lips in response to his question, like Nick should have already known the answer. “And I think it might be against the law to make Mickey Mouse scary, just saying.” He would do it though if it meant getting on Lita’s roommates good side. “And don’t make the bacon soggy,” she added, ignoring the comment about the legality of her Mickey Mouse request. Turning to start the oven, Nick laughed. “I’m planning on baking the bacon, it gets crispier that way,” he replied, glancing over his shoulder at his audience. “I mean unless you have a thing against baking bacon or something…” “Fuck you,” Torrie said with less heat than she would have if she’d really meant it. “I don’t give a damn how you make it, as long as it doesn’t come out of the oven looking like a limp dick.” She wasn’t a breakfast food expert. She also wanted a cigarette to chase her coffee with, but it was too early to go stand outside and smoke. And she was skeptical that oven-baked bacon wouldn’t just set the kitchen on fire. “Alright, I'm going to take that as a pro-baked bacon answer,” Nick replied, rolling with the way it seemed Lita’s roommate said just what was exactly on her mind. He could respect her for that. “Really, once you have it this way you won't ever want to go back.” Or at least that was his opinion, she might have another -- and she would probably have no problem sharing it with him. Torrie raised her eyebrows. “Guess we’ll see.” For awhile he busied himself with laying the bacon out on a cookie sheet and put that into the oven. Then he turned to the pancakes, screwing up his face as he concentrated on making scary velociraptors. “So these might look more like scary blobs…” Nick began, plating a couple and passing them over to Torrie. They did look like scary blobs… that had more of a dinosaur shape than Torrie had been expecting. Maybe that was why Lita liked the guy, because he delivered on requests, but she didn’t really know and she wasn’t going to go looking for the answer. Reaching for the syrup, she doused the plate with as much as she could stomach and glanced at Nick. “They could have been fucking worse,” she conceded. “It’s too damn bad I didn’t have a cookie cutter around here so you’d get the damn shape right for sure.” Nick might not have known Lita’s roommate well -- or at all, really -- but he had a feeling those words was the closest he was going to get to a compliment this morning. “Hey, I’ll take that,” he answered with a grin, oven mitt in hand as he moved over to the oven. “Cookie cutters would make the process easier, I have to agree with that.” Nick added while he opened up the oven and removed the baking sheet with the bacon on it. Near as he could tell the bacon wasn’t limp, though again he was going to wait to pass judgment until Torrie weighed in. Nick could admit he was trying on some level to impress Lita’s roommate, if only because he knew she valued the other woman’s opinion and thus was someone he definitely didn’t want to have against him. “Okay, so how many pieces do you want?” he questioned while he prepared to remove as many slices of bacon as Torrie desired. “Four,” Torrie replied after she finished a mouthful of pancake, and stared Nick down, daring him to make a comment. She didn’t want to hear some remark about her appetite, even if it was supposed to be cute and adorable. Then she leaned over the island and stretched her arm out to point at the pieces that she wanted. “Actually, make that five. I want that piece too,” she tacked on, pointing at one last piece of piggy goodness. Once he gave her the pieces that she had requested she sat back on her barstool and continued with her breakfast. “You want to get me another cup of coffee too?” There wasn’t even an ounce of judgment in Nick as Torrie pointed out the pieces of bacon she wanted and he kindly obliged her in placing said pieces on her plate. He just wasn’t the type and anyway he did want to impress her. When she asked for another cup of coffee, Nick glanced at the clock on the wall -- noting that he still had a couple of minutes probably before Lita would be awake. “Yeah, sure,” he began, reaching for the coffee pot as he came around the island to pour more into her mug. “Do you take anything in it?” Nick questioned, hoping it wouldn’t earn him some kind of distasteful look for the fact he hadn’t remembered just how she had fixed the first cup up. If Torrie had been Lita he would have known, a fact he probably should have been worried about since it meant he had spent more than his fair share of mornings with her -- enough to make this thing less of a casual deal. NIck wasn’t looking closely at that though, he enjoyed Lita’s company -- was that a bad thing? “No. Thanks,” Torrie replied, because she wasn’t raised without manners, and it might throw him off to hear her say it. But it wasn’t like she waited to see his face before she went back to her breakfast. She’d admit that the pancakes tasted okay, and the bacon too, but she felt weird now that Nick wasn’t occupied with making it. The only sign that Nick was surprised by her thanks was the way his eyebrows rose for a second before his expression slipped back into something more neutral as he poured her coffee and set the pot down on the counter. “You’re welcome,” he replied with a brief smile, pleased that it seemed despite her words he had maybe, just maybe made a good impression on her. “You can go bring Lita food,” she told him dismissively, assuming he’d made enough for her roommate and ignoring the smile on his face. He probably thought he’d won some boy scout points or something. “I don’t really need a fucking audience while I eat.” And she’d had about enough conversation. “Ah, yeah, okay,” Nick began as he moved about the kitchen preparing a tray of food for Lita. “She’s probably up now and thinking I left without a goodbye or something anyway.” The last part was more of a joke, mostly because he wasn’t that guy and if anyone knew that it was Lita. With tray in hand and food for both himself and Lita on it, Nick offered Torrie one last smile as he said, “Well, it was nice meeting you.” and he meant it. Even if the woman was a little -- or a lot -- prickly, Nick hadn’t hated the brief time they had shared the kitchen together. “Yeah, whatever,” Torrie responded barely sparing a look up from her breakfast as Nick left her in peace. |