District Attorney Dan McDaniel

She was so in trouble, wasn’t she?

Eventually though, he figured out how to make his mouth shut and he stood there for a long moment, gazing down at her. He cleared his throat and very calmly said, "I was... Trying to be a gentleman and not go straight to sex." His voice cracked a little just on the word. Goddammit it was sunk for this blonde. "But you make an excellent point that I won't be much of a conversationalist while focused on..." He cleared his throat again and wondered what in the hell she saw in him.

"Uh," Dan cleared his throat, and subsequently choked on his own spit a little. "Claire, yeah. Claire. She - Claire - broke into my house because she - Claire - was trying to be romantic in her own... Clairey way." His face contorted as he realized he'd already deteriorated into a senseless idiot within two seconds of her name being mentioned. "Yeah, you know, I mentioned the door thing and it's just not her thing and that's okay because we may or may not have ended up making out on the floor where she fell into my house after breaking in through the window..."

There was a long pause before Dan did his best to divert the topic off of Claire and her incredible figure and face and hair and eyes. "But I asked you first, and last time we talked, you were kind of making headway with Brett, but I saw her and Toby together the other day, so I'm guessing that didn't work out." He knew Sam had been glad to see his uncle squirm a little, so two could play at that game.

His head tilted as she kissed him and then gripped his arm and then promptly dragged him through his own house. This normally would have been the part where he wondered how a girl twelve years younger than him was able to make him act like he was younger than her, but all he could hear was her saying sex over and over again. Seriously, it was on loop in his brain. He heard her speaking animatedly as they moved down the hall, but she sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher. 

"Claire," he said, his wrists turning up to grab hold of her arms. When her feet stopped, he gazed down at her. She stared expectantly up at him and suddenly he was nervous. "What?" he asked, blinking a few times before shaking his head a little, "Oh, right, I was going to say something..." He cleared his throat and raised one hand to run through his hair.

"So I realize that you just said a whole sentence to me, but I didn't hear anything after you said sex, honestly," he said, his brown eyes a lil wide as he gazed down at her. "I feel bad, I should have been listening, but it's been... a lot of years since you and I have been in the same room and even longer since sex was mentioned, so I'm just a little..."

A nervous laugh bubbled up from his throat and he shook his head. God, he sounded like a complete idiot. "And you're here, and like... one foot away from me and you smell fantastic and your eyes are sparkly and your hair is perfect and blonde and..." 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now he had a tent in his pants. Greaaat.

He cleared his throat and shuffled his feet a little in an attempt to hide the fact that he was hard as hell. The nostalgia for the year after they'd had sex the first time and he refused to do it again because she was underage was strong. He'd spent pretty much that entire year with blue balls, and it looked like he was well on his way to the first one since she'd been back.

"Please continue dragging me downstairs and I will do my very best to pay attention and not stare at your ass and if it takes me a minute to respond, please just understand that I am giving this my all to not... You know... Uh... I don't know," he dropped his head in shame, staring at the floor. "Just please continue dragging me downstairs now."

"Trust me, Claire," he started, "I tried really hard to be mad at you." His hands moved soothingly over her back. "I succeeded for about two months... But then I just went back to being really mopey and missing you." He smiled a bit, but it was the truth. He'd been pretty pathetic while she was away. Dan let out a breath and tilted his head a bit so he could kind of look down at her. "It's hard to be mad at someone that you've known for eleven years... And been pretty much addicted to for about half that time..."

Addicted was a good word to describe how he'd been when she was younger. He'd been an addict doing his best to fight temptation to his drug of his choice. He'd failed ultimately, but it was only once... that was something to be proud of, right? He could have continued having sex with her while she was still underage. But he hadn't. He'd pretty much had blue balls for an entire year, but it had been worth it to know that he hadn't taken advantage of her.

"I tried to tell myself that I wouldn't just cave in and do... this whenever you came back," he told her, a laugh in his words, "Obviously I've got strong conviction when it comes to you. But I guess we already knew that from when I broke into your room drunk as hell and told you I wanted to fuck the shit out of you." He chuckled for a moment before raising a hand to her shoulders and pushing her back just a bit so he could see her face.

His hands gripped her waist a little tighter with each kiss she pressed to his lips and he let out a small huff every time her lips left his. "Claire," he whispered, as if her name were water to a dehydrated man. His eyes hadn't opened, because he was afraid that if he did, she would be gone, and so would her touch and he'd be heartbroken again.

Dan wanted to be mad at her. She was twelve years younger than him and yet he always felt like she was the one in charge of them. She was the one that had kissed him on the very second she'd turned eighteen. And then she'd been the one that had decided that whatever they'd had was over when she left. He'd always been so wrapped up in her, he felt like he'd never had much of a say.

Sadly, he couldn't bring himself to be mad. His hands released her waist as his eyes opened, and his arms snaked their way around her, pulling her body in close to his as they sat on his floor, "I missed you, too." One of his hands rested on the back of her neck, and his thumb stroked her soft skin. He gazed at her for a long time before leaning in and burying his face into the curve of her neck. "Don't do that again," he muttered into her skin. His lips pressed to her throat then and then trailed up to her jaw and then brushed his nose past hers. "Don't run off again," he whispered, resting his forehead against hers.

Claire had been doing ok, she liked to think. Then again, “ok” for Claire Belfront meant something entirely different than it meant to others.

She didn’t kill her boyfriend. Or her ex-boyfriend. Or whatever it was that people called it when the person you had been dating kicked the bucket while the both of you were doing illegal substances and it looked very very suspiciously like you had done it. Ex-dead-boyfriend?? The problem was, despite the fact that she claimed she hadn’t done it, there was a very real possibility that she had. After all, she didn’t like him very much.

It didn’t help that the very next week she was back in jail for something minor that she did, in fact, do and was back out on the streets the next night with her new vampire best friend who was kind of a psycho and claimed he was an ex-mob boss despite the fact that he looked 12. Then again, Claire and age didn’t always go hand in hand.

It was one of the reasons she left in the first place, right?

She had herself convinced that she was doing it for him. She didn’t know what love was but she knew the gist of it was keeping the person that she had slept with out of jail in case anyone ever found out what they had done. He had worked too hard to have it all come undone at the hands of a blonde beauty queen with the last name Belfront. She knew very well that she could ruin the lives of men with the snap of her fingers but it didn’t mean that she wanted to ruin his. It was probably best to bow out before the town caught on to past demeanors like cutting his ex-girlfriends brakes out of her stupid little car.

She was so messed up. She had hit 18 and lost all semblance of control. In fact, she probably had her head on straighter at 16 than she did at 23.

Claire couldn’t pinpoint why she came back in the first place. Claire and her parents could go rounds about Claire’s level of interest in Belfront Construction or dealing front desk with her idiot male counterparts whom she loved very dearly but hated all the same. It didn’t help that she had chosen to go off and travel instead of persue a career or head off to college. Not that any of it mattered anyway when Claire had been looking at possible jail time only to have her name cleared after her daddy had hired the best district attorney in the state of Mississippi all for his little Claire Bear.

How thoughtful.

Said best district attorney hadn’t even let Claire properly thank him before he rushed off again leaving Claire to her own devices. She deserved that. He deserved it, too; she still firmly believed he deserved much better and if Claire were a better person she probably would have hoped that he had found much better. But Claire was basically the worst and so she just found herself at his front door, instead. Or rather — she found herself climbing up his neighbor’s tree, her boots kicking bark and dead branches as she climbed up and up and up and over onto a limb before reaching out to grab the window to pull open so she could slide inside.

So when he got home that evening, he was more than ready to pop open a beer and watch some tv. Maybe NCIS marathon if he was lucky enough for it to still be on. He was an addict for marathons. Of any show. Will & Grace, Reba, NCIS, Law & Order. He didn't care what it was, but if there were going to be twenty episodes on back to back, he was in.

He was about three beers in and beginning to feel nice when he heard a clamor from upstairs, and then a crash and something breaking. Jumping up from the couch, Dan ran over and grabbed the baseball bat he kept for home invasions and then grabbed his phone, stuffing it into the pocket of his lounge pants. He crept up the stairs and checked each room until he found the source of the noise.

"Claire?!" he breathed out loudly. He tossed the bat onto the bed in the room and walked over quickly, kneeling down beside her and doing his best to peel her off the floor. "Claire, I know you're a little different than most people, but there's this thing... Called a door? It's down on ground level, and when you knock on it, you get into the house," he told her with a grin. They'd only managed to roll her over so she was laid on her back on the floor. He reached up and brushed her golden hair back from her face.

Even now, he felt like that thirty year old who'd just been kissed by eighteen year old Claire. That had been the best day of his life. "You okay?" he asked her, his voice barely above a whisper. His brown eyes gazed down into hers, and he'd been listening to her answer, but he wasn't really... processing anything she'd said.