#goldcaught

This is written for the request from @goldcaught. Remember that Black Eyed Kid/Adult AU I mentioned to you?  This song is perfect for that, so this takes place in that, as of yet, undeveloped AU. 

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If you wanna take a bite

Wanna see the dark side

C’mon, turn off the light

 No one else seemed to notice her.

Klaus walked into the Grill and looked around, and for a second even he must have overlooked her. Then, suddenly, it were as if she appeared out of nowhere, sitting at a table tucked into the back of the bar. She watched him, drinking something purple through a straw.

Klaus ignored the quarterback who was glaring at him from the bar and made his way over to sit across from her.

Caroline.  That was her name.

30. Post a snippet from your current WIP without context - no more than 300 words.

Just for you Melissa, from interludes:

Sioux Falls gets one final enormous—freak, Bobby calls it—snowstorm at the end of March; the winds howl outside as Caroline spreads her acceptance letters out on the floor of her tiny room. She chews her lip and stares at them, each of them holding an entire future in between the black and white of the printed font. 

She clicks her pen and leans forward, writing cheapest in neat cursive at the top of the VCU letter. After a moment’s hesitation, she adds close to home to both VCU and UVA’s letters. 

“What’re you doing?” Dean wants to know from the doorway. 

Without looking up, she says, “Figuring out where to go to college.” 

“Need help?”

The sigh she lets out is heavy enough to rustle the paper in front of her. “Got a spare fifty thousand?” 

“In my other pants, maybe,” he quips, then she hears heavy footsteps make their way over to her before Dean settles in across from the semi-circle in front of her. 

"We should probably get back to the game," Caroline breathed, moaning softly when Klaus nipped at the base of her throat, soothing the bite with his tongue, his hands on her hips, pushing her back against the tree. "Don't you think?"

"Do you want to?" he murmured between kisses up her neck to her cheeks, his breath hot on her ear.

"I mean, no," she admitted, her hand tangling in his curls to make sure that he stayed exactly where she wanted him. It just felt so good.

"Then let's not."

"Making out against the base tree is probably cheating, though," she pointed out between soft moans as one of his hands slid below the waistband of her dark jeans to tug gently at the cotton of her panties, creating a delicious friction against her pussy.

"Not if we switch who's pressed against it at least once a minute," he teased. "We can dethrone Katerina from her place as the reigning champion once I've made you come around my fingers."

"Do it fast, then," Caroline demanded, more for her own benefit than the game. God, he was good at this.

Promotions

“You did well today.”

Caroline nearly spit out her beer at the unexpected compliment. Judging by the dimples in his smirk, her surprise did not go unnoticed. By sheer force of will, she met his gaze without hesitation. “That hurt you to say, didn’t it?”

The smirk deepened in amusement. “I never doubted your skills, love,” Klaus answered quietly. Their group had dwindled over the last hour, and the hotel bar only held a very few late-night owls left. It had become something of a habit throughout the campaign for senior staffers to debrief the day’s events. For the deputy campaign manager to offer her unprompted praise, though, that was an outlier - the fond look he gave her, less so. “Despite the suddenness of your promotion, I think you’ll more than rise to the occasion.”

It could have easily been a fiasco when their press secretary had to quit with no notice, after a blistering argument with the candidate that left him unable to do the job required. As one of his deputies, Caroline had already been on camera when the news broke, a reporter quickly asking for a comment she was hardly prepared to give. But she handled the moment with a grace that shocked even her, and the interview played well on every outlet. So well, in fact, that the campaign manager and the candidate herself offered her the job on a trial basis. She was young and still new to national politics, and it all felt like a dream come true.

Klaus granting her a respectful not without even the hint of a grudge? Somehow, that felt just as good. “Thank you,” she finally said, a mischievous grin pulling at her lips. “But you doubted my skills a bit.”

“I thought your initial hiring was a bad play for demographics,” he defended.

“Because I’m too hot for the male audience to actually listen to me, yeah, I remember.”

His chagrin was marred by the smile he tried to hide. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

She shrugged, tapping her bottle to his with a clink. “You made it pretty easy to read between the lines. I, after all, don’t have a problem actually listening, even if the person speaking is hot.”

“You think I’m hot?”

Her cheeks warmed with what must have been a fierce blush. “I didn’t say that.”

Klaus’s teeth shone white as he smiled, almost predatory. Or maybe Caroline just felt like prey. “You don’t usually make it so easy to read between the lines,” he teased, his voice low and inviting.

Swallowing, she drained the last of her beer and slowly lifted herself from the couch they’d been sharing. “I think I’m going to go to bed,” she said without looking away from him.

He gave a solemn nod, but didn’t move. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Caroline. Congratulations again.”

She wet her lips and glanced down to the table before turning away. Her feet felt like lead as she walked to the elevators, anticipation and dread itching at her spine. When the doors opened, she resigned herself to the classical music playing inside and leaned back against the rail - but a hand stopped the doors from sliding shut. 

They opened again, revealing Klaus just outside, her card key in his hand. “Forgetting something, sweetheart?”

I know that intellectually; I just still feel guilty about it. I stayed up all of Tuesday night thinking our house was gone because I knew it was burning really badly in this area, finally passed out maybe an hour before my alarm went off, then Wednesday got up, felt physically awful because I hadn’t slept, and jumped on my laptop to work a bit to at least have something to do with my brain. Got the news that our house was intact and felt a bit better, so I went into the office for a couple of hours for some training related to this project. Then the fire blew back up at my parents’ place, where they had gone back for a couple of hours to check on things, so we were calling one another back and forth as they were evacuating. Then they told me they were going to head out into a nearby canyon and park, and shortly after that I read that the fire was heading into that area, so then I tried calling them to warn them that they needed to turn back, and they were outside cell reception and I just had to hope they’d run into road blocks and turn back and call me when they could. That was immensely fun. 

18. do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them

not aus! but def versions and storylines that were dropped witch novel is both a rewrite and then a combination of several prn ideas i had when i was much younger, and the a lot of book 1 of the wolves of braxton hall were buried from a historical romance a wrote yeeeeeeears ago that i never shared with anyone

22. do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?