Klaus was slowly trailing his fingers down Suzanne's bare skin, watching as the sleeping woman's back lifted and fell slowly with deep, even breaths. She had a few tattoos on her back – innocuous simple images as well as quotations he was unfamiliar with. There was an instinctive curiosity as to what they meant, but for now his fingertips only barely brushed their edges.
He was currently trying to decide if the wisest decision would be to kill her before she woke.
It had been clear within the first few minutes after they had met in a bar for a drink that the two of them would be ending up on a bed. Or any decently comfortable and horizontal surface, he supposed. Klaus wasn't very picky when it came to where he shagged girls. Though the large, soft bed in the apartment he rented was a fairly ideal choice now that he was sprawled across this morning.
Her opening line after seeing him last night had been "I sent you that text when I was drunk and lonely. Heads up."
From then on it had been a fun evening, relaxed enough that he had been able to let his guard down a bit. There was little pressure to being 'Nick', and Suzanne was certainly sharp enough to hold his attention. There hadn't been much pretense to the night. Klaus certainly wasn't looking for any sort of long-term relationship, and the woman who now slept next to him made it clear she felt the same.
There was a script of sorts, when you were trying to woo someone into bed – predictable and reliable lines that made it clear to the other person what your intent was. And it had been Suzanne that charged through it.
She had been different in bed than Klaus had been expecting. With her brashness and harsh sarcasm only occasionally tempered with lighter humor, he'd predicted that she would be the loud sort who made sex into a performance. Instead, Suzanne had been nearly the opposite.
Quiet, breathy, accidental moans and suppressed whimpers had been the majority of sounds she'd made. Only after particularly well timed moves of his did he manage to get a few cries of his name. Well, his less-common nickname at least.
It had been good, maybe even great. But when she had begun drifting off as he rubbed her back, the edge of his palm had glanced on one of the tattoos decorating her upper ribs.
The burn of vervain where normal ink should have been had been unexpected, and it was only because of the pain he had endured throughout the years that he had not flinched or done anything to betray that he had been harmed.
He had been less worried about a burn that healed in half a second than he had been about the fact that the woman he had been talking to and then slept with had a tattoo that somehow encompassed vervain. Objectively, it was a brilliant move – to have vervain somewhere on a mortal body where it could not simply be removed like in the case of jewelry or some other adornment. But now Klaus was wracking his brain for everything he had ever told Suzanne, and if anything could have betrayed his plans or any of his secrets. He didn't know very much about her, and even as he picked apart everything he had said to her Klaus realized that the details of his life he had shared would have been impossible to connect to his real identity.
It was made obvious by her tattoo that Suzanne knew about the supernatural, but it would have been foolish to sleep with a vampire without any sort of safety. So she had not made the connection that he was a vampire.
Before Klaus could reach any conclusion regarding whether or not he should simply snap Suzanne's neck before she woke up, she began to stir.
Maybe it was because of his heightened sense of importance regarding the current situation, but Klaus could honestly say he was let down a bit somehow by what followed.
Suzanne eyes opened but immediately narrowed to a squint while she stretched out her spine, still sprawled on her stomach. When she finally focused on Klaus, she gave a small, strangely shy smile before she glanced behind him at the sun which was now only just rising over the Boston sky line. Seeing the sky and drawing her own conclusions regarding the time, Suzanne spoke.
"What the fuck, too early, Nick."
And after sleepily slurring her few words, she threw herself onto the other side of the bed and shoved her face into a pillow, immediately falling back asleep. So, it seemed like Klaus had a while longer to ponder what to do.
An hour or so passed before once again she stirred.
The second time Suzanne woke up, Klaus let her believe he was still sleeping. The best way to gather information from her would be if she did not realize he was doing so. Killing her could wait – if there was an ulterior motive to her having met with him last night, he wanted to know what it was.
The first thing she did was crack her back, which was a bit repulsive. But when he assumed she realized that he was in bed beside her, she froze. A second later she began moving, and he could hear her grabbing at her clothing. The swishing sound of a shirt being thrown on was followed by the quiet zip of her skirt, and a second after he heard her bare feet padding into the adjoining kitchen of the apartment.
Surprisingly, the first thing she did once she was in a separate room was make a phone call to another man while he heard her moving a few things on the counter around.
"I told you three times I was going out to drink and possibly get laid. Why the fuck did you think I'd want eight texts about your little brother's high school friends?"
"Such hostility, Suze! Just wanted to keep you updated, seeing as you gave me the silent treatment last time I didn't fill you in on the all the drama."
Suzanne let out an annoyed snort but sounded genuinely fond when she responded to the man on the other end of the call. This must be the best friend she'd mentioned a few times.
"Point taken. But I just had sex and have little to no interest in plotting right now."
The man on the phone burst into laughter before saying, "So your gentleman caller put out? Did you –"
Suzanne hung up, and Klaus decided to stage his waking up. Her conversation wasn't a guarantee of course, but she seemed to be acting without a motive or plot. Truthfully, the more he had thought about it, the less likely it had seemed that Suzanne was working against him. Their meeting would have been difficult to stage, and keeping in contact over innocuous texts with largely useless information wouldn't have been a great tactic for any kind of spy.
With a loud, obvious yawn, he made sure to create a bit of sound as he pulled on his own pants and walked to the kitchen. Klaus tried to suppress his amusement at the startled squeak his appearance prompted from the young woman, and he watched as she practically juggled the coffee grounds she'd been holding in an attempt to keep them from hitting the floor. Though Klaus easily could have grabbed the bag from her, he had officially decided to play human for a bit. To his relief, she righted herself on her own and let out a self-congratulatory muttered "yes".
It seemed as though she actually assessed her current situation a second later and realized she was standing fully dressed – she hadn't found her underwear, however, Klaus had seen those on his walk out of the bedroom – in the kitchen while he looked at her impassively.
"Your coffee machine looked basic enough that I could brew some. Sorry for the overstepping, if you're protective of your caffeine stock or something."
Klaus snorted and let a small, hopefully harmless looking smile cover his face.
"No, I'm not particularly attached to my coffee machine. You look entirely too done-up, however."
Suzanne immediately looked a bit awkward, and while she didn't blush, her fidgeting and cracking of her knuckles – dear god, was it a habit of hers? – gave away her sudden influx of nerves.
"Yeah. I'm not usually around in the morning-after stage of one night stands. But we've already met and you know my favorite books and shit, so I figured it would be alright if I said 'bye'. If that's not the case, speak now."
By the end of her speech she looked entirely confident and careless to anyone who wasn't incredibly versed in reading people. However Klaus was one of those people, so he could see through the brashness she put on and was able to tell that she was genuinely uncomfortable.
"You won't hear any complaints from me about a pretty girl making coffee in my kitchen after a good night."
Now there was the blush he remembered so fondly from last night.
"There is a stupid fucking ghost-witch trying to ruin my afterlife."
… that was honestly not a sentence that Suzanne would have ever thought she would hear and then proceed to take seriously. But she was very fond of a certain dick who made enemies out of a ton of people. And apparently also ghost-witches.
It sort of seemed like things hadn't been going Damon's way lately, and as much as she wanted to be there for him, he'd kept her in the dark about parts of his plan, something she truthfully appreciated. After finding out he had turned a random girl and killed her in front of the sheriff she hadn't been able to look at herself in the mirror. Because honestly? Her first reaction had been relief that now her friend would be a little bit safer.
There was a window seat with her name on it on the way to hell.
"Well, what did you do to the ghost-witch?"
Suzanne saw two teenage boys walking by her outdoor table at the restaurant obviously overhear her and stare at her strangely, so she immediately gave them the finger and made a face back at them, making them hurry up their pace.
"That's the worst part, I didn't even do anything to her except keep up my end of a deal we made! And then she went and destroyed my crystal! She was a Bennett and protected Katherine as long as I protected her descendants."
Suzanne hummed along, partially to show him that she was listening, and partially because she had just taken a really fucking delicious bite of the avocado toast in front of her. Coming to this restaurant for her lunch break had been a very good call.
"Well, um. That sucks."
Damon let out an annoyed sound on the other end at her brief answer, so Suzanne continued talking.
"Hey, I can't really help out much with this. I don't know what the crystal you're talking about means to your plans or all that much about the schematics and intricacies of the Save-Katherine plan. You just told me that when it happens I've got to stay out of Mystic Falls so I don't get eaten by the group of vampires you're freeing by proxy. But I'm always here for you to rant to. Whatever I can do to make you feel better."
And so the remainder of her lunch break was split between near-orgasmic food and trying to understand the supernatural pubescent nonsense going on two towns over.
Sorry for the late update, work was kicking my ass. I'll be picking up the pace a bit in the next few weeks. We'll also be moving back more towards Suze and Damon's friendship - that's really what the story is about, after all. Cheers! xx