helloeverybunny | OPEN POST • ALL-PURPOSE TEXTING MEME

fine

[ At least he legit likes her? Or so she hopes. He’s flirting with her and invited her over for breakfast despite her bad jokes, hasn’t he?

Wait, what the hell? Where are these thoughts coming from? She doesn’t like like him. Nope. ]

eta 10 minutes
15 really but i’m breaking speed limits and all so
you better be ready husband

[Cade is fairly certain that simply being addressed as husband should not inspire dread in a man. He's also fairly certain that it shouldn't inspire anything other than dread in himself. Yet here we are.

Rather than expose his lack of comfort in this situation, however, he opts to play commitment chicken.

I never said he was smart.]

i'm always ready
wife

It took Jane even less than ten minutes to arrive, and she’d traded her customary blacks for something more low-key. Though why she’d hurried or actually bothered to look more presentable, she didn’t really know. Or at least, she wouldn’t admit it to herself, nope.

She ended up hesitating outside the door, though. It wasn’t the thought of things potentially happening in Cade’s company; it’s not as if they’d not slept with each other before. But perhaps that was it. She normally didn’t go for seconds. She preferred drunken anonymous hookups without her giving out her name and number at all — as sad as that may seem.

Yet here she was.

She stood there for a good two minutes before she finally decided to knock.

Cade lived a fairly nomadic life, given his trade. As such, he was not often in one place for very long. That didn't mean that all of the places he laid his head were temporary, however. In fact, his comrades had several safe houses they used while running cargo, and Cade was currently occupying one such safe house. The structure was nothing special to look at, and certainly out of the way, and far from personal, but it had all the necessities.

Like security feeds, which meant that Cade had seen her coming, and waited for her to knock regardless. Par for the course for Cade, really.

The door swung inward, and a shirtless Cade leaned lazily against it, completely blocking her way in. He took the deathstick out of his mouth long enough to blow out a line of smoke neatly away from Jane, and turn a lopsided grin on her.

"You planning to stay out there all morning, Janeybird?" He flashed a smile that was all teeth, before dropping back to clear the doorway for her to step through.

The inside was about as impressive as the outside. His pack was there, his shirt tossed over the same chair that held his jacket, but beyond those things there was nothing that even remotely hinted that Cade was living here. Well, that and the skillet of meat and eggs on the stove.

Speaking of which, he retreated to stir the meal about a little bit.

The corners of Jane's mouth turned up into an approving smirk when Cade appeared, not bothering to hide the way her eyes trailed down his torso. Hey, she liked attractive men, and it wasn't as if he didn't enjoy the attention, anyway. Besides, it was a great distraction from the weird thoughts that somehow decided to occupy her head that morning. (She'll just blame it on the alcohol, as she blamed most things on nowadays.)

"Depends. Are you leaving me out here like you did last night?" she quipped, but she was grinning, so she couldn't have been serious. (Or was she?) Following him inside, she took a cursory glance around, noting how the place was so much like her own quarters in the First Order, sparse but functional. Then she saw the security feeds and she couldn't keep herself from rolling her eyes, but she didn't further comment on it. Though he better not ask what she'd been standing around there for.

She set her bag down on the chair, then went to watch him work, leaning back against the wall near the stove and folding her arms. Truth be told, she was impressed, but she wasn't about to over-inflate his ego. Maybe later.

The ring was no longer on her finger, but she wore it in a chain around her neck, alongside what was clearly a pendant made from a tiny shard of kyber.

Honestly, his ego could have probably done without the ego boost she so graciously supplied by just giving him a once over. It certainly put a little extra curl in his grin, though he somehow managed to refrain from giving her a similar look. Or, say, pulling her into him and kissing her breathless. All in all, his restraint had more to do with their breakfast than her current state of dress.

He wasn't about to grill her about her hesitation, though, more focused on stirring the flood as it sizzles in the pan. After a moment he reached over and tipped a little splash blueish milk in with the eggs, before going back to scraping the contents together.

"I'm fairly certain I left you a long way from here, and while we're on the subject," he turned to face her then, gesturing to her with his cooking implement. "What is it that makes you so sure it was me doing the leaving, eh? Might've been you that left me somewhere, don't you think."

The corner of his mouth actually twitched when he spotted the ring hanging from the chain around her neck. Perhaps nervously, his gaze returned to the food. After a moment and a roll of his own eyes at himself, he looked back toward Jane however. Reaching out, he glanced up at her eyes to ask permission, before he delicately plucked up the ring and turned it so he could look at the thing.

He whistled.

"The fool I pinched that off must have been loaded."

"I don't know, you look like a runner," Jane teased. "Guess we'll never really know for sure, but maybe after breakfast we can try to shed some light on last night's mysteries."

As mundane an activity as cooking was, she found herself incredibly fascinated, and she watched him go about the task with rapt attention. For one, she'd not seen someone actually cook in a long time. And, well, Cade really didn't seem like the sort of guy who'd be house-trained, most especially with how overtly averse he was to the idea of domesticity and commitment.

In fact, it wasn't until he'd reached out to take a better look at the ring that she averted her gaze back to him instead of what he was doing.

"What makes you so sure I didn't pinch off this baby?" she retorted, smirking. Oh yeah, it did look expensive. With some sweet-talking and perhaps a little persuasion, she could probably fetch a very good price for it. But that wasn't the real reason she wanted to keep the ring, no; it was as simple as wanting to hold on to something she could call her own, something that made her her, because the First Order had blurred so many lines and erased so many facets of herself that some days she really wasn't sure who she was anymore.

And if beneath her TIE pilot helmet Jane was a lonely, broken thing who drank herself blind and slept with a different stranger every night to drown out her sorrow and rage and regret, then so be it. It was better than being TN-3154, better than being the faceless monster the First Order had bred to fight Kylo Ren.

Honestly, he was about as house trained as he was self sufficient, but the variable and often lonely life of a smuggler necessitated a few basic skills. Some could tolerate ration packs day in and day out and only developed enough skill with a heating coil to make vegmeat marginally edible. Cade, on the other hand, could barely stand the stuff most of the time. He had them in case of emergencies of for the days when it was all he could do to drag his body to his bunk. But he had made it his calling to find better alternatives, and often had remarkably fresh food on hand.

At the end of the day, he never cooked anything terribly complicated, but he worked pretty well with the handful of spices and the simple fare he kept on hand.

"Well, one of us did," he offered by way of a compromise, shrugging and letting go of the ring. He turned back to the eggs and meat, making quick work of scraping the lot of it around the pan and finally dishing it out into two shallow bowls when the lot of it seemed to have congealed into a fluffy mess.

"Either way, it'd fetch a pretty penny if you decided to fence it." Simple fact. Cade probably knew someone who could do the fencing, even, for a modest finders fee. But he didn't feel the need to spell that part out. Instead he plunked her plate down near her on the table, and his own at the next space. Then he withdrew to go on a fork hunt that covered most of the drawers in the little kitchen space.

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