outfit | set

A wispy arm reached for the drink, a first round during their coffee break from the dance floor. Only it was obviously not coffee in the glass she had just accepted-- they likely did not offer coffee, unless it was espresso poured over whiskey or mixed with a frothy, milky potion whose properties were slightly undecided. She offered a lazy smile of thanks, and bumped the glass against the air before her with equal idleness, a cheers to Darian Morgan. She moved over a bit on the dark leather loveseat so that he could sit beside her-- Laney had strewn over the middle while Darian had gone to get drinks, ensuring that no one mistook the extra bit of space as hospitality on her part.

With posture that would make someone’s grandmother scoff, she sank into the chair’s back. Her legs, crossed loosely, were slinked over the low-sitting table in front of them. Her thigh brushed his leg. “A drink for every month I haven’t seen you,” she suggested. She took a sip and turned her eyes on him, cheek barely tilted in his direction. In the dimness of the club, his hair was a brilliant thing.

It had been months. She had curbed certain habits when she’d landed in a relationship (having finally managed to convince the more bashful Frank Pratt to take off his... modesty), but she and Darian had still regularly gone out as friends. The winter had been busy, though, both for the tailor and the quidditch player. Now Laney and the book-loving (or magazine-loving) direwolf weren’t talking, and the young seeker was seeking thrills. There was no company quite like Darian Morgan.

She tipped her head back into the pliable leather, her drink still hovering in hand. This time she turned her face more properly toward him, and grinned widely. “I assume you’ve been behaving.”

Darian wove his way through the crowd with idle grace, wrists tucked in to keep the drinks he bore safe against his chest.  Reaching their couch he uncurled one arm and Laney extended hers, the touch of their fingers a Sistine-pretty spark of life to remind him what he'd been missing. He threw himself down next to her, threw his head dramatically back against the couch and his arm dramatically across the back of it - you wouldn't believe what I went through to get these - but a smile soon crept over his mouth to negate any feigning boy-pout. It felt good to be out and about again after too many weeks spent indoors. It felt right. As did his company.

"Couple it with something," he suggested instead, the smirk on his face suggesting that this was the least of tolls he'd extort from her before the evening was out. His hand against the sofa back gave a lazy twirl. "Make it a drink and a kiss." Commitment was such a terrible thing. No matter what anyone said, he could only see it as punishment. Oh, but had he been behaving. He shot her a glance and a smirk. It was perfectly ridiculous to hear the infamous Laney Irving asking such a thing. "You know what they say about assumptions," he replied, amused. "Not to mention you didn't finish your sentence. Behaving... shamelessly? Vivaciously? Ostentatiously? Why, certainly, forever and for always. And you collared in comparison, as if you could make me believe it."

She took the suggestion at face value, with the same ease he had voiced it. No rushing, no heaviness, just a press of her mouth-- presently a hint of a lazy smile-- that lingered for a moment. The crowd was easily ignorable, shadowy and anonymous, a pleasant buzzing backdrop, the opposite of claustrophobic. She settled back, their limbs still touching blithely.

Laney tilted her chin down, an almost half-nod that he had a point. Her smile was languid again, lids heavy with the kind of shrugging agreement that one yielded to a friend, not quite an eye roll. Asking whether he’d behaved was somewhat hilarious, but it had been a long while, longer than it could have been. A reminder of why they should hang out more often. “What’s the most shameless thing you’ve done recently?” She took a sip of her drink, listened.

Collared was a funny choice of word. Fitting, but not because Laney had felt collared. Frank had been the collared one, once at month, under a full moon. Laney was a young woman who liked to tug leashes. “It wasn’t exactly domesticated.” The relationship. She smirked, but then tried not to think about too hard. It had been weird, weirdly stable for Laney. It had become harder, not easier, to not miss Frank, to avoid appearing at his flat unannounced and demanding access, but Laney was as stubborn as she was untamed. Inhabiting the part of her that had been less attached was her present ambition (though she had never stopped being wild, taken or single).

The thing with Laney - the really delicious thing - was that she was sharp-sided and eager all at the same time. Whatever fiery little rebellious thoughts had filled her teenage mind had matured into adulthood, burning down to the embers of a more long-term kind. It resulted in the sort of hard-edged young woman who had little thought to other's opinions. Those were his favorites. They were always up for everything. And in light of that, when she bent in like he'd dared her (well, he practically had) he was amused by her instant willingness to comply. So she'd be sweetly tractable as long as what he suggested was something she already wanted to do. Typically Laney. He'd expected nothing else.

"The most shameless thing?" he asked, sounding shocked and distracted by the broadness of the question. Clearly he had a wide array of options before him. His head tipped back, helpless in thought. "Well, you know I don't kiss and tell," he said finally, modestly, which was an absolutely filthy obvious lie. "But I've had Draco Malfoy's cane hidden in the back of my closet for the past two days. I had to make a rather undignified sudden exit from his estate and felt I deserved the reward." He sighed. He'd probably replace it when next he returned, but it was a pity he couldn't stick around to see Malfoy get increasingly pink in the face and start punting house elves out the windows when he couldn't find it. The mental image was still lovely. He was such a peaky little tit.

Slowly Darian's lips turned up into a smirk, and he glanced over at Laney. "His wife's mad for a man with a full head of hair."

Laney wasn't the most forthcoming, but he wasn't terribly interested in the details of her relationship anyways. “It wasn’t exactly domesticated.” "I do believe that," he said, and laughed.

Darian’s story was the sort to catch even someone like Laney off guard. Draco Malfoy’s cane. The tailor was a legend: if he had penned Beadle the Bard, she might have paid more attention to the cautionary tales as a child. As it were, half of those were easily ignored, the other half easy enough to test. Residual ghost stories, remembered in a moment and then forgotten again. Nice in theory. Ridiculous when presented with real danger. Darian seemed to walk the finest of tightropes. Not clumsily. Laney smiled, a dimple making its appearance. “You took the only interesting thing about him,” she chastised, casually. She lifted her drink, paused before it got to her lips. “Now what is his wife going to play with in bed?” She raised her brows, let the question sink in before she took another sip. “Besides you."

He’d been cold and beautiful in young adulthood, Draco Malfoy. But Laney had been too young to appreciate it. Now that he had a receding hairline and a reclusive air, one that did not suit his ego or his money quite so well as prickly promises, glittery smirks, and the abundant name-dropping of the youth before the snake and skull brand, he was somewhat less appealing. A younger version of old family members of her own who had never held Laney’s interest. She had only seen him from a distance when she was younger, and now, sometimes at parties where purebloods rubbed elbows; more so now that she was a seeker to bet upon, a girl worth the silver and not because she was a bride. She could imagine why his pretty wife might be a prize, though. Laney remembered her back then, vaguely, a pale-and-dark-featured seventh year when she had been a first year. Alluring, a touch fragile. Resplendent now, in the way that society wives were, like someone’s polished china. And how fun it must be, to test their breaking points, to take them from their shelves, the shelves of those who had claimed them. For them, especially. But then it wasn’t as if Malfoy was not (probably) paying women to pretend he wasn’t boring and balding while his pretty wife cuckolded him free of charge. Maybe she wasn’t fragile after all.

Laney liked a man with hair, too. Beautiful curls, like her lavish friend's, or hair all over, like a certain direwolf's. Anyone who suited her in the moment was her type. Her smile grew. She could hardly blame Mrs. Malfoy. “Do you dress him?” She asked, musing over the possibility. She looked at her glass, the shifting light from the dance floor refracted through it. “Maybe you should offer him some party favors.” Her gaze moved to her ringed finger— a ring with a compartment, barely noticeable— then back to Darian. “Give him something to smile about.” As if a little pick-me-up could detract from the man’s love for his missing cane.