The salted caramel gelato is gone – now that they've polished it off. They'd uncovered a couple frost-bitten fudgsicles in an icy corner of the freezer as well, and the last of Laura's bargain brand cookies never stood a chance.
So dinner's been taken care of, and, as unconventional as it had been, there's something satisfying and – well – normal about rinsing out the dishes and shoving limp cardboard cartons into the garbage and falling into fits of sugar-high giggles when J.P. uses words like "commode."
And Su–LaFontaine, for what it's worth, seems just as happy to be yucking it up in the kitchen as sh–they do creating slides of zombied tissue samples. And maybe Perry doesn't have any right to be surprised by this, maybe she was the one imagining shadows into monsters all along.
In any case, it's nice. Nice. Not bloody, not spooky, and no one breathes a word about any hocus-pocus apocalyptical doom. (Well, J.P. politely declines a mug of chamomile, instead retiring to the foyer for a brief space of time with a "tonic" of his own that Perry tries not to think too hard about. It's okay. Everything is fine.)
Now they're down to night shirts and flannels and silk pajamas and for some reason J.P. and LaF have followed her into her room and she finds she's comforted by this turn of events. Maybe, somewhere in the back of her mind, she had decided that no one even wanted normalcy anymore; maybe they'd been putting up with it for her sake.
Quietly, as she discusses the vagaries of the room's interior decoration with J.P. (a few of the tapestries are overrun with leering swaddled cherubs and who ever thought that was a sensible subject matter Perry would like a word with them), LaF cuddles up in between the two.
And, well. Perhaps, in the strictest sense, having her best friend and a vampire in her bed isn't exactly what you might call normal. But, tonight, it works.