2019-06-03 - What Men Want (Picnic Cont'd)

Finally coming back from Harper's car, Nicholas trudges, head down, over the rocky beach to get back to the small sheltered picnic area. Lifting his head as he steps into the sandbar, he slows to find only Harper there. A glance see the retreating form of Izzy, causing a questioning look back at the librarian, "Did... what happened?" Of course, he believes that Harper either said something or Izzy flaked out, "Did you know that she Knows?"

Harper is eating the rest of her small roll-sandwich and gazing thoughtfully at the surf. She begins relaying what Izzy said with a faraway gaze and tone to her voice until she gets to the end and looks up and to Nicholas. "And so I gave her my number." An almost smile touches at the corners of her lips. "Way to miss the girl, Granholm." (Outfit, not PB: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/493073859203729209/ )

That stops him in the sand and he looks at her strangely, "That... you were setting me up with her?" It is less incredulous than it is completely misunderstanding, given that he just shakes his head, looking after Isolde who is halfway up the beach by now. "Like that'd work," he mutters.

Harper shakes her head slowly, not to deny that simple fact, but to mourn Nick's cluelessness. "She was quite lovely. And I can imagine the two of you fitting together well," Harper muses, gesturing to the blanket and the spread of food, thermos included. "But now you're stuck with me. So sit down and eat or drink something." Those sparkling brown eyes regard the EMT warmly, invitingly even.

"Yeah?" Nicholas says with a snort, "You see her eyes, how distant and vacant she seemed to be? No. No, you didn't, because you're a girl and all girls think that guys look at are tits and ass and makeup." Moving over and lowering to his knees in the sand, he puts the bags down that he went back to fetch. His blue eyes look at her for a long moment, fighting back a very inappropriate response before he just sighs and sits down fully.

Harper frowns an endearing little frown that wrinkles between her brows and purses her lips. No. No. That is how guys think, she argues wordlessly, though not through any mental link. "I thought her eyes were pretty. You just don't like women who aren't --" She reaches for an apple and a knife and slices a piece from it, then points the piece at Nicholas, not quite accusingly. But certain. "-- normal." Like Harper. NOT normal like Harper. "You probably want some ... doctor or secretary or --" She pops the piece of apple into her lips and chews it, the column of her throat moving as she swallows. Mm. The girl can eat an apple. "-- something like that. Who watches 'The Bachelor' and volunteers at the Food Bank and likes living /outside/." Because Nicholas has peculiarly hermitish house rules.

He actually tilts his head at her, "You think I'm a soccer-dad type of guy, Harper?" The question is leveled at her like a jousting lance, low and dangerous, as if challenging her playful little revelation of how she views him. "So... you think that if Izzy is 'not normal', that I'll be attracted to her? Like, that's a checkbox on my mental dating menu?" he asks, his smile growing.

Nick's mind is accosted with an image of his legs in soccer shorts, cleats on his feet. It's gone before he can take a breath. "You -could- be." More softly. "If you wanted." She slices another bite-sized piece of apple with the knife and leans forward, stretching to her knees and the knife-wielding fist on the blanket to offer him a piece. 'Here. Eat something nutritious." Keep those muscles fueled, Nick. Beneath the jacket, Harper’s Led Zeppelin tshirt stretches across her chest just so.

He blinks, shakes his head, "...that's you, isn't it?" It is not an accusatory growl, it is a tentative test, to see if he's crazy thinking someone else's thoughts. But it still comes across as a growl of other means. Staring at her for a moment more, letting her words sink into his ears like honey, "Nutritious? You brought Twinkies?" One of his shift staples, and as much as Harper has tried to nudge him toward nutritious foods, he has cling to his junk food in a combination of a lack of self-care and a lack of time. She might get a sense of empty cupboards in an empty, dusty kitchen.

"No... I /said/ you apparently /don't/ like girls who are /not/ normal. Think about what you said about her eyes." Harper puffs a breath to try, with futility, to blow her hair out of her eyes while she leans. "Tell me about your menu." Because that's not at all selfishly motivated. She pauses, waiting just a few more moments to see if he'll take the bite of apple from her outstretched fingers. If he doesn't she'll roll back to her hip. Harper laughs one of those delicious little laughs in response to the Twinkies query, as if she had no clue how inviting it sounds. While she hovers over the blanket toward Nick, she frowns a little. "What's me?" There's genuine lack of realization in her eyes. A mutter, roused from the subconscious that's receiving fluidly, "I'll bet your cupboards are empty at home."

"Take out the double negatives, Librarian, and you get that I 'like girls who are normal'. And while her eyes are -pretty-, Harper, they are very unfocused and distracted. She seemed /very/ uncomfortable with me in my truck, and thank you for /that/ little bit of fun," Nicholas says in a sigh, somehow strung as tightly as the 'bridge' of fabric of that LedZep shirt. As for the apple, he plucks it from the knife, pops it into his mouth before he shifts his position, to lay his legs out before him and he leans back onto his elbows as he chews. "You never mind about my cupboards," he whispers.

"She was shy, Nicholas. And understandably spooked if even half of what she said had happened to her. Don't /you/ get distracted when you think about our experience in the fire?" Because in her dreams, Harper does. She makes all sorts of different decisions in her dreams. His sarcasm finally sets in and she gives him an exasperated look before pushing back then up on her knees to knee-scoot around the blanket far enough to re-hip-settle leaning slightly against /his/ knees. If they're against her, then maybe she'll stop looking at them so much. She goes about slicing herself another bite, chewing, swallowing, licking the sweetness off her lips before preparing him another piece of The Healthy. Another juicy, Honeycrisp apple chunk between Harper's fingers heads toward his mouth. "Wipe that grumpy look off your face and tell me your list. Friends should know these things." Her fingers stop about three inches from his mouth as he whispers and she looks ... well, not /quite/ as distracted as she does when she seems to hear voices. But distracted she is. And this time consciously she tries to push herself /into/ Nicholas, mentally, though there's a physical sensation of the intimacy of it just the same. She's looking for those cupboards, and they both know she's in his head for the present moment.

He looks down when the fire is mentioned, finding a piece of driftwood and drawing in the sand, rolling to his hip facing Harper as he focuses on a scrawl. Anything to not look at her lips. "I don't have a list, Harps. That's the whole point. You go and meet a pretty girl in a store, a stranger and an Outsider to town, and you just throw her in my lap like a kitten," he says slowly, glancing up once and seeing those lips glisten. There is a flash, just momentary, of the heat that washes through a person's body with the rush of endorphins. The quiver of the heart, the tightening of the groin. The pushing is felt and for a moment, accepted... only for a flash of her panties as she fell backward on the porch days ago to be thrust into her mental face... then she’s pushed away. Like a stolen kiss.

Harper's gaze is relentless. She's not used to having her gaze avoided by Nick. The one positive bit is the way he shifts and moves just a little closer, and her gaze falls to the play of his chest as he does. It's a benefit of being a notoriously distracted person. People don't realize it when they are the cause of the distraction so much. Especially when they hit-and-run mentally rather than lingering awhile. "Well," she begins pragmatically. "Let's start one for you. Along with some rules. You don't resent the company of nice girls." She adds, quietly, "I know you handle people with care every day, Nicholas. I knew she was in good hands. Even if she wasn't your /type/." He knows she is thinking about him being a good man. That evolves to 'strong' which evolves to the way his body moves, the muscles in his arms, when she is shaking her head a bit, her voice growing just this side of husky, hushed. "Think of three top-list items," she cajoles in that voice he's never heard like that. And then abruptly she's flushing, a blush warming her cheeks and wandering down the skin of her throat. Her /underwear/? Certainly she hadn't been that immodest when she fell. Had she? Oh, mortification! And just plain, dark blue hip huggers at that. Nothing fancy. She utters a quiet grunt, as if the mental shove out of his mind had tossed her to the ground.

It only takes a few breaths for him to arrive at his top-three, "Soft," and if she is still receiving, a flash of her skin, her lips. Gods, her lips. "Eyes," he adds on, giving a tiniest of smiles, "but not just pretty eyes. They have to be smart," he looks right at her, "intelligent." But, the third, well, that confession takes a few minutes as he watches her differently, curiously, "This is silly. Why do you want to know?"

Harper is gratefully pulled from the depths of mortification by Nick's response, her flush more slow to fade away. She finally remembers to offer him that bit of apple that she's holding in the air in her fingers near his mouth. "Well, that's a good start. But all soft really means is not-a-boy, not-a-body-builder, and-not-model-skinny." Girl translation of boy-speak. If her fingers didn't hold an apple and knife in one hand and a piece up ot Nick's mouth in the other hand, fingers would be flying to her lips as images touch at her and she begins to recognize them as /from/ Nick rather than just her imagination. Or at least the possibility of that. And that confuses the /hell/ out of the girl who misread his slapped-faced reaction on the swing a few nights before while discussing the strange events in Gray Harbor. She searches his gaze in silence while the waves crash against the shore. "One more --" And this time there's a full-out assault to his mind as she pushes with intention, parrying his mouth back at him, her point-of-view. It's a strange game-investigation, the connection and it's potential. How does it work? Is it always on? Is he impervious to her today somehow differently than he was when he closed his eyes and focused that previous afternoon. "What kind of girl you like," she repeats patiently. "Soft. Intelligent eyes. And ..." she invites, curious and strangely warm, the tingle of sudden body heat flickering after the intention retributory image of his own lips. There is ... a knife in her hands, an ignored piece of apple, and the remainder of the apple. She can't quite figure out to do with any of it.

Nicholas leans forward, brushing his hand off on his pants as he reaches for the remainder of the apple. Placing it to her lips, he answers slowly, "Soft means gentle, Covers. (Not Sheets). Soft means careful, respectful, indulgent. Soft means quiet and introverted, watchful," he lists and lists and lists, all in a whisper coated in the tentative carefulness of withdrawing if she misunderstands. "One more?" is his query, "Needy."

Harper's lips part with the sharp intake of her breath and she readily accepts the apple piece, forgetting to chide him about healthy eating. But the sweetness just sits on her tongue as she forgets to chew at the much more descriptive answer he now gives: and she couldn't look more astonished. That receding flush slowly rises once more. A little sound rolls in Harper's throat and she doesn't even realize it. She swims in the words, each one. He can somehow /feel/ it. She's certain she didn't understand 'covers'. She doesn't even remember wearing those socks that day they were burned in a fire that didn’t happen. Words like 'indulgent' and 'watchful' tangle in her mind like sheets around legs. She abruptly swallows the piece of apple without chewing, choking for a long moment before it dislodges, drifting to Nicholas as a brief sense of oxygen loss, then she echoes, the words bare and broken, "Needy?" She clears her throat, boldly meets his gaze with hers. "You mean, like--" She might as well be telling Nick how she touches herself using /that/ tone of voice. "-- high maintenance?"

Nicholas just smiles that smile, looking down as he pops into his mouth the fingers that held her sweet apple slice in them. A small shake of his head, for that left turn in the conversation. It is just his luck. On the precipice of him seeing how she feels about him, if she reciprocates, and those perfectly-fated words jerked to the left by the cruelness that is his reality. Shaking his head, he lays back into the sand, "Sure. High maintenance. Let's go with that."