send a strawberry 🍓 if we've written together and i'll compliment you.

"Oh, relax. I'm here for business, not pleasure. See?"

He lifts his laptop bag and indicates it with a tip of his head and a grimace. Woe is he, bound by an immovable, fast-approaching deadline, and too picky by half for the coffeeshop chains that populate his city of residence. If he's going to get anything done, he needs only the best, handcrafted with love. That's where she comes in.

Now for the order: "I'll do a large blonde roast. Give me three ristretto shots pulled separately. I don't like when they sit."

Julie scowls, opens her mouth to say something. Holland interrupts by shoving his index finger in her face and begins unloading the entire contents of his laptop bag onto her counter.

Scripts, headshots, contracts, takeaway menus, receipts, sticky notes, every flavor of refuse under the sun wallpapers the space like it's a landfill. He's got a punch card somewhere in here, he knows it. Not the one he's almost finished with — the new one that he opened just because he loves to watch her boulder roll back down the mountainside, the twitch in her eye when she realizes she has to start pushing again.

Krou'Ahz stills as Julie's patience frays. Outside, the wind howling against glass windowpanes dries up in a gasp. The clock stops ticking. The roil of his tea kettle peters back into a simmer.

Something he's said has connected with her, touched some exposed psychic nerve that she's not ready to discuss. Her defense mechanisms blaze like pale fire. Even so, her rebuke connects with him like a pert little slap he doesn't see coming.

He pins her in place with his gaze, a still-twitching butterfly to cork board, and lets the silence grow between them. They sit like that for five, ten minutes, him studying her, her studying and picking at a loose thread in the chaise. Julie makes no effort to fill the emptiness. She doesn't rely on the comfort of constant sound and chatter the way others do.

He's always liked that about her.

Another five minutes. She's not giving him an inch. Krou'Ahz sighs, shoulders dropping, and folds his hands over his knee.

Mildly, "I'm not trying to shrink you. I'm trying to understand you."

Gradually, sound and movement resume. The wind picks back up. The clock's hands accelerate to account for lost time. In the kitchen, the tea kettle begins to sing. Julie will not be having tea. Julie never accepts anything he offers.

she drops the box in her hands rather unceremoniously on the table in front of what is almost certainly the book julie was trying to read before she was interrupted, and rests a hand on top of it, fingers splayed out across the bakery's logo printed onto the cardboard. the grin she fixes julie with is near - diabolical.

❛ made a whole bunch of new shit at work that needs taste - testing. ❜ yes, she's this excited about getting to bring her friend some sweet treats. sam winks, and taps her fingers against the top of the box. ❛ figured it'd be easier with a second set of taste buds. ❜

her hands drop to her knees. suddenly she hops off the kitchen stool. "oh. oh! don't go anywhere."

she has to dig to find what she wants in the unsorted books stacked in precarious towers around her bedroom. not everything can be high priority; books she got from the little free library in the park, because she kind of remembered loving the rejected proposal scenes in high school, definitely fall lower on the shelf.

"sorry in advance, i'm not doing any accents." as she's walking back into the kitchen, where julie has been crashing out about the prospect of making dinner with no podcast or show to listen to in the background.

until now, julie has defied all her wannabe-librarian attempts to figure out what she likes to read. fanfiction, mostly? and like, what is alice supposed to do with that? she doesn't know shit about video games and musical theater post-2008.

back to basics, then.

"Nefoedd wen! Arghhhhh," Not expecting a punch in his hung-over state, Mathias widens his stance to balance himself and steps into a puddle that engulfs his entire left shoe.

The cotton canvas of his vintage Chuck Taylors does nothing to keep his foot dry, making a pathetic slosh when he steps on the sidewalk again. He can't do much more than mutter and mumble— cythraul uffernol!— as he tries to shake the water out as best he can.

@glacierfront

"Oh my God," she warbles, and laughs, and turns away in a futile attempt to stop the waterworks. "You're apologizing too? What the fuck? Shut--" Swiping at her eyes doesn't stop the fucking rivers threatening the riverbanks. The fuck is going on! "Who the fuck are you? Shut the fuck up and start being mean or I'm." Another laugh. Everything is unraveling! "I'm gonna lose it, man--"

Tony stands there, helplessly. Uselessly. Clearly, he keeps saying the wrong thing, so he kinda thinks his best idea is to shut up and maybe just leave; but how is he supposed to just leave when she's crying her eyes out?

Well, if she wants him to be an asshole...