Nic & Lem
"The hippie lady," Nic said, wondering who that was. It could be a couple of different people, one a more accurate reader than the other, if he was thinking right. Or he could be totally wrong. The dark witch people had to be Reagan and Caius, since they were the only ones to also attend the gala. It sounded like she'd made the rounds. "What do you think of Zan's boyfriend?" he asked. It was a question people kept asking him and he just wasn't sure of the answer. Gabriel seemed cool so far, but he barely knew him.
Lem hadn’t formally introduced herself to most of those people, that wasn’t her style. She’d just stared at and recognized some of them. She’d been tempted to grab Carson and pull him off to the side to confirm plans for the next full moon that was baring down on them, but decided against it. It was a party. Lem shrugged at Nic’s question and turned to loosely wrap her arms around him, chin on his chest now. “He seems okay,” she said. “I didn’t talk to him much or anything. He smiles a lot. Doesn’t matter what I think anyway, though, as long as he’s like, being nice to her.”
"You sound like me," Nic grinned. "He seems good to her, and she hasn't talked about wanting to burn his house down, so I'm inclined to like him." She'd never been that happy when she'd been hanging out with Caius and the non-witches that she'd dated in college always seemed to bore her after a couple of weeks. Gabriel appeared to be holding her attention and, bonus, he wasn't a jerk, so Nic liked him without even knowing him. "You know, people have asked me if you're my girlfriend," he said, hands resting on the small of her back. "I'm not big on labels. They always seem to doom me. But... What do you think of that?"
Talking about the two of them was more interesting to Lem than talking about Zania and her boyfriend. Her brows raised at the first bit, then furrowed thoughtfully at the rest of it. She hadn’t been calling Nic her boyfriend out loud, but she’d never really called anybody that. Not that there had been many people who would even come close to qualifying. Some guys she’d messed around with before her life had fallen apart. She couldn’t tell by the way he asked how Nic felt about it, which made her question even more how she felt about it. “I think people are nosy fuckers,” Lem said, shrugging one shoulder and studying his face. “Like ... what would that mean to you? If I was your girlfriend? Just don’t fuck anybody else, or ...?”
"They are," Nic said with a little laugh. "I try not to fault 'em. I can be one too." He knew nobody meant anything by it, and probably thought it should be a simple yes or no question. Maybe for others it was, but a title always seemed to mean different things to different people and they'd never taken a moment to define anything about them. "It would mean whatever we want it to mean," he shrugged, a little smile playing on his lips. "I kind of assumed you weren't fucking anyone else, but... I don't really want to tell you what to do. I like what we have. I'm not looking to change it." He just didn't know what to call it. She was more than a friend. He didn't normally fuck his friends and, when he did, he didn't have feelings for them like he did for Lem.