Nick placed a hand over his heart, a quiet mockery of a sweet pout ghosting his lips, closing his eyes briefly to show how truly humbled he was by her compliment. The man had always done fairly well with women, for reasons unbeknown to himself. Perhaps it helped that a large majority of his friendship group consisted of women. Beautiful, strong-minded women he admired fiercely, forcing him to treat them well. Maybe it was Caroline, whom he would never want to see treated badly, and so Nick outwardly reflected the way he wanted men to treat his little sister. Nick’s friends had always been the best part of him, and despite the fact they seemed to be scattered from country to country right now, they still remained the best part of him. He was pleased to include Tessa alongside those friends, now.
Absently, he followed the dark-haired woman into the kitchen, his hands still in his back pockets as his head turned this way and that, drinking the apartment in. He pressed the flat of his palm to the edge of Tessa’s work surface, bench-pressing the counter once before straightening up, finding extraneous things to do with himself for no apparent reason. Perhaps the unfamiliar territory was doting on him more than he first thought, although he trusted and loved Tessa wholeheartedly.
Her workspace wasn’t what Nick would refer to as messy, although Tessa must have thought so, given the way she began rearranging the place, pushing trays and spoons and the sort aside and finding new homes for things. He watched her almost silently, knowing his bed at home was much more messy. His bed - Gabe’s bed, it had belonged to Gabe before him - had become his workplace, although for what he wasn’t sure. Books were piled at the side of the bed, both fiction and non, pieces of paper scattered amongst the bedsheets, laundry he’d been too lazy to fold falling down the crevice. Mostly he’d been desperately filling in the blanks on his CV, wondering how to account for the huge, glaring space of time where he’d been in rehab, and the time he hadn’t finished law school.
“I’ve seen worse.” he insisted, leaning over her shoulder to mutter so against her ear, his breath making the hair tucked behind her ear flutter just so.
“There’s a first time for everything.” he teased, putting his hand into the bowl where she’d measured out flour. Between his thumb and forefinger, he pinched at the white substance, flicking it at Tessa and chuckling to himself as it patterned her nose, a splash of white freckles.
“How do you fancy just taking our clothes off and having a food fight? We’re less likely to call the fire department out that way. Unless you’d like to, of course. How good looking are New York’s fire department? Do they have a calendar?” he rambled, a light smile on his face to show he was merely teasing.
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