jianhuo | (no subject)

Most nights, Saffron likes to go out. Oftentimes it'll just be to a friend's, armed with a home cooked meal. Sometimes she'll go out on the town, to the various night spots, to drink and dance the night away. She hasn't been trying her little trick to seek out information as often, where she'd go to a bar and wait for the inevitable complimentary drink from an admiring self-described Darrow local. It doesn't interest her as much anymore, now that she's reasonably certain she's not going to get anything useful from any of those men in varying states of drunkenness who really just want to get into her panties - not that she's ever let any of them. It makes her skirt far too close to being a tease for her liking.

Every once in a while, though, usually after a long stretch of consecutive nights out, she stays home for the evening. Tonight she's already delivered a couple of meals, and now she's curled up comfortably on her couch in yoga pants and a lightweight, loose-fitting sweatshirt, sipping on a cup of tea and reading a book. It looks like it's going to be a quiet night.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Robin's knock comes well into the evening, followed by the thump of his resting his shoulder against the frame of the apartment door. He is drunk - well past 'has been drinking' - and he is frustrated. And he does not want to wait at home until Ishiah is done with work to discuss his reason for being so with the peri.

He's found himself somewhere he does not expect to. The place of an interesting young woman with beautiful sunset hair. He'd thought it best to avoid thinking of her often, after Ishiah's arrival. They had slept together. Selfish as he is, he raps again on her door with his knuckles.

She hasn't had any late night visitors - 'booty call' is the more crass term she's heard - in a long while, so Saffron's startled by the knock, tea sloshing a bit out of her mug as she starts. It's just warm now, thankfully, and she wipes her hand on the paper towel she'd had the mug sitting on before standing to answer it. There's another knock as she's heading to the door, and Saffron rolls her eyes. "All right, all right, I'm coming," she calls, wondering if it's some emergency as she answers it.

At the sight of Robin, her eyes widen in surprise before she relaxes into a wry grin, one hand on her hip. "You look like you were rode hard and put away wet," she says dryly, before opening the door wider and stepping aside to let him in. "Come on in, honey."

"More or less," he admits, in self-deprecative humor. Robin slips into the apartment, searching for the couch that he knows is there, to sit heavily upon. After scrubbing his face for a second, and straightening his green tie, he looks up at Helen with a lopsided, begging smile.

"Have you got any tipple? I am not ready for what I have to wear off just yet."

Saffron shuts the door behind him, watching him as he sits on her couch. It's becoming more and more clear to her this isn't exactly a light-hearted visit.

"I have red wine and beer," she replies. "What's your preference?"

"Wine over beer every time," he says, with a smile that manages to be mostly in earnest. He's glad that she hasn't kicked him out, and more glad that she has something to drink to keep total sobriety at bay.

"I'm starting to think that I might be better off becoming a hermit. Me, of all people. But this place makes me think it might be the better for me."

"Coming right up," she says, and flits into the kitchen for a minute to pour him a glass, getting herself one while she's at it.

"You, a hermit?" Coming back out with the two glasses, she hands one to Robin and sits beside him with the other, turned to face him with her legs curled up beneath her. She gives him an incredulous look. "Somehow, I don't see that working out too well."

Robin accepts the drink a little too happily, draining half of it at once before speaking. "Neither do I," he admits. "Which is why I am crawling to every doorstep I can think of in order to avoid trying it out for real." Helen's door had been the first though, perhaps for a reason. She seemed to know how to reason with an unreasonable puck.

"I give too much of a shit," he finally admits to the problem at hand. "I never used to give any shits. Now all I do is give them away like they don't cost me anything. But they do."

Her glass halfway to her lips, Saffron pauses to give a wry smile and a knowing laugh. "Oh, honey, do I know something about that," she says, before taking a healthy swallow. Does she ever know. "Once you let yourself go there, it's pretty damn near impossible to stop, even if you want to."

She'd tried to stop caring, on more than one occasion. It had never worked, not since she'd started letting folks in. It was like somewhere along the line she'd reached the point of no return and now, she can't protect her heart the way she used to be able to.

"I don't think that I do want to," he dmits, turning his glass in his hands quietly. "But I can only make so many stupid decisions for the sake of someone else, before I stop making my own mistakes. And it kills me that there is a choice. Sacrifice one or the other. I am not sure there is a third option available anymore. Except the hermit thing."

"The joys of being a person who actually cares, and has something to lose." Saffron sighs, thinking of all the mistakes she's made in the past few years thanks to allowing herself to get attached. She chose to allow herself to fall in love, only to have it be for nothing. And then she did it again, somehow thinking it would be different the second time around.

But she can't think about that anymore, not ever again, and it's not all that difficult for her to push all that aside and to focus on Robin instead. "But that's not really a third option, is it?" she asks, though she already knows the answer.