Mao’s laugh was softer at Vaughn’s promise to be ‘rougher than normal’, with no hint of his usual mocking. Why did that strike him as being weirdly sweet? “Alrighty. I’ll take your word for it, I won’t make you pinky swear.” Was this what people who were into each other actually did? Make awkward plans for when they eventually fucked? Mao didn’t think so, but he only had his mother’s M.O. when working and his own brief hookups to go by. And movies. But movies were full of lies, he knew, so in the end he was left feeling pretty clueless.
Wrestling sounded like a good time, and Mao might have been tempted to jump Vaughn right then if they weren’t eating. He didn’t want to piss him off by making a mess and staining his couch with soy sauce, but the demon boy most certainly tucked the idea of a wrestling match away for later.
“Hey c’mon, if Hannibal can do it, I can too. Haven’t you seen the show?” Mao distinctly remembered a man being treated to a piece of his own leg very fancily cooked up. Of course, Mao couldn’t cook worth a damn so if he attempted to copy it’d surely be a mess. “I dunno if I’d consider it romantic though… But if you light enough candles then anything can be made romantic.” Even serving someone their own leg. Not that he’d do that to Vaughn, he liked him just as he was, two legged and everything.
The movie was starting, and thus Mao grew quiet so Vaughn could appreciate it fully. The film was a mix of comedy and horror, rather off kilter, yet compelling, and in Mao’s opinion, very entertaining. There was no disguising the delight he got from the antics of the villian, who he clearly watched with something like admiration in his eyes. Mao grinned at his one liners and jovial way of dispatching his prey. Maybe it was a demon thing to root for the bad guy. Though… the movie did make it rather easy, as the hero was quite the coward.
Gore and violence, weird and funny, scary, but silly… These same descriptions could be used for Mao sometimes. He was a whole lot of contradictions in a pretty little package. Few people got to see the many sides of him. Vaughn had seen the most, more even than Mao’s mother, but even he hadn’t witnessed everything.