Professor Keyes’ Office
A joke for a joke but he was the one who found the mirth in the situation. She had taken him seriously and by the sounds of it, she’d come close to saying that she hadn’t noticed his body growing soft when she’d been feeling him up in the lab. Of course she hadn’t noticed. For one thing, she didn’t have a point of comparison; Aurelie hadn’t known him before he’d started working with Keyes. For another, while he might not be shouldering the same workload as he had before going to work for the professor, he still did enough heavy lifting and the like to be in good shape.
Fionn couldn’t stop himself from cracking a grin, pleased by how flustered she’d grown in those few seconds, the response he’d elicited something that he lapped up gleefully. The youth had no doubts about his own attractiveness but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t nice to hear about it. It was all right to be a little vain, wasn’t it?
It didn’t make it any easier to tame his mood but he could do nothing to control the giddy delight that surged through him. His heart was trying to beat a tattoo on the underside of his sternum, probably something that Aura could feel too, even if she couldn’t hear it. She was still using his chest as a pillow and now his abdomen had become a table. The teenager was becoming a regular piece of furniture.
If he was sensible then the passive would keep his mouth shut instead of adding fuel to his own fires but the blond was hardly in a sensible mood. The only thing that saved him — albeit temporarily — was his stomach because he really was hungry and he was eager to make quick work of the sandwiches. In all honesty, he could probably have eaten the entire bundle of sandwiches that he’d brought with him but he had to pace himself, forcing himself to eat slowly and allow his companion to get her fair share. When they reached the end of the sandwiches, he could still feel his stomach growling within him even if the whistles, bangs and shrieks made the soft gurgles inaudible. At least there was cake and gingerbread to add to it. And the fizzy lemonade, of course, his own drink abandoned off to one side and the bottle it had come from left unstoppered so that its contents were slowly going flat.
Fionn made to shift the cake onto his belly but thought better of it, wriggling free of her hold so that he could sort the drinks situation but leaving the cake within her grasp this time; he had no intention of leaving her for long anyway.
“My body is fine, is it?” Fionn questioned, making no effort to hide the mischievous edge from his voice as he recovered his lemonade and gulped it down. When he moved the cup away from his lips, the first thing that issued out of him was a burp, the young man laughing juvenilely even as he excused himself as was proper manners. However, after that came hiccups, air jolting out of him in soft squeaks of sound as he continued to giggle and topped up his drink. Topping up the kitchen maid’s drink if she wanted it, the matter of sealing the bottle still remained as it wasn’t entirely empty yet. It was a sizeable enough bottle in fairness and in all honesty, the blond didn’t want to leave it open only for one or other of them to knock it over; what a waste that would be.
“Are you sure you’ve examined enough of my body to be certain about how fine it is, Aurelie Steerpike?” he teased, a wicked grin finding its way onto his face, tongue protruding only to be held in place by the press of his teeth, uncovered by the broad stretch of his lips. The light show outside provided good illumination for the cheeky expression, allowing her to see it in all its glory, as he grasped the glass drinks bottle.
Holding his thumb over the hole at the neck, he shook the lemonade vigorously and then upended it abruptly. The marble that had been held in its temporary glass prison shot down the neck and reunited with the washer at its top, re-establishing the airtight seal with a sucking sound. Only when that was done would he crawl back to the spot that he’d recently vacated. This time, he propped himself up on his elbow, stretching out beside her but facing towards her this time. The entire reason for this rendezvous seemed to be forgotten by both of them. Well… maybe the fireworks hadn’t been the entire reason.
“I… have no idea how they do it being honest. It could be science, it could be magic but either way, they do it with something that we can’t have,” he pointed out gently, his voice lacking its habitual bitterness when commenting on such things. He picked up another gingerbread cookie, snapping off a segment with his teeth before using the biscuit to gesture as he spoke, no doubt inadvertently showering some crumbs in her direction.
“I don’t have to know everything, Aura and I think… I think that that’s all right, sometimes. I think sometimes it’s okay to enjoy something simple. I mean, this…”
He pointed his makeshift baton at the window, purple and red streaking through the sky as he did so as if to punctuate his point.
“This is beautiful and I think that that’s enough for me tonight. It’s amazing but it’s also- I suppose that it doesn’t matter as much as I thought I would. It’s a nice backdrop but it isn’t… the most important thing here,” he confided, his voice dropping in volume, the gingerbread pointed in her direction. More than that, he all but waved it under her nose, eyebrows quirked and then waggled suggestively as he wafted the biscuit in front of her. There were other biscuits but it was clear that he wanted her to bite his one, his gaze fixed on her curiously.
“If you really want me to waffle on about what I think might or might not be going on outside the window when I don’t really know then I’ll do it but…”
He paused, the brown eyes dropping for a moment, teeth worrying briefly at his lip. He gazed up cautiously, hardly raising his head so that he was forced to look up at her from beneath his lashes.
“I don’t think that either of us wants to make guesses about how the gollies make the pretty lights. That out there isn’t really for us but… what we have in here…”