She had taken a taxi into work that morning. Though her heart nearly refused to allow her to leave her apartment for so many different reasons, she knew that money never grew on trees and she had two little mouths that needed to be fed. She had not found her shoes on the side of the street from the back of the car, though she had never expected to find those shoes again, in New York you drop something and someone is bound to pick them up within seconds. She tried to not look at the man that was driving her to Stark Industries Headquarters as he kept starring at the large gash that was in her face. Hell, everyone took a second glance at her when they saw the swelling line down her face.
Robin tried to look to the ground as she tapped her ID off of the entry pad and pushed the doors open, starring at her feet as she moved to the elevator. She knew that she must have looked like hell with the way that her hair was pulled into a bun with her bands hanging as close to her cheek as it could. Her normal bright heels that made her a couple inches taller were no where to be found, she honestly didn't dare wear them with what happened the night before. She just wanted to get up to her office and get her work done without having to see another person the whole day. She planned on eating lunch at her desk and hoped that Pepper had not planned anything too hard for her to do today, she doubted that she would have been able to make it through the day of being around people. As she entered the elevator though, there was a friendly face waiting for her within it.
" Damn girl, you look like hell. I told you not to get frisky with that dom a couple floors down from you, he is no good to a girl with your sharp cheekbones." Jordan, one of her only friends at work, said as he lightly touched the girls face without any form of permission.
" What can I say, he was kinky as hell and I didn't call him master enough times so I got it to the face." Robin smiled, knowing that the man could see through all of her lies.
" So what really happened, little bird?" Jordan asked as he lightly touched around the wound, making sure that it was not getting infected or whatever his pre-med classes had taught him to do.
" Rough night last night. What can I say, I should have just paid for a cab when it was offered to me." She sighed as she leaned her body against the railing of the elevator that was going to the top floor.
" Well I see that someone helped you out though, this was cleaned up pretty well and I know that you do not have the guts to be able to do this without a fifth of tequila in you. Who was he?" Jordan asked with a smile as he started to work on her hair, fixing it so that it would fall across her cheek.
" His name is James." She smiled as Jordan gave her a look, she knew that look so well, he was mixed with shock and happiness with a little bit of jealously.
" James is a regal name and he saved your ass? He seems hot." Jordan smiled as he was finally happy with the way that he had done her hair.
" He's. . . he's cute. He saved my ass last night, I will agree with that, he took a knife for me. But there is something so. . . different about him than all of the other guys that I have ever even seen." Robin sighed as she started to remember last night.
" So you mean that he is not a complete and utter asshole who is only planning on having sex with you and then leaving your hot ass? Girl please tell me that you are meeting up with this man again?" Jordan asked as his hand on the button that did not allow the elevator doors to open.
" Yes, well I mean I hope that I am going to meet up with him again. I asked him to come back to my house tonight for some dinner and I hope that he does show up." Robin smiles as her best friend gasped.
" So you mean that he knows where you live already? Little bird you must really have something with this guy, I could not get you to tell me where the hell you lived until I came out of the closet!" Jordan said with his hands over his mouth, stunned with the way that his friend was acting.
" Listen, I knew that you were gay within the first five minutes that I knew you. It is not something that you can hide when you stare at Tony Stark's ass. Secondly, he's at my house right now recovering from a night of drinking with me." Robin hissed as she slide the mans hand off of the button, allowing the doors to open to a lavish office.
" Girl! Did you do that nasty with a man that you barely know! You know how I feel about a crappy romance novel ending!" Jordan nearly screamed as he chased after his best friend down past the first level of security and into the office that was in front of Pepper Potts office.
" No Jordan, I did not have sex with a man that saved my life last night, we had a couple of drinks while I stitched him up and then slept for like three hours, he was still pretty messed up when I was getting ready to leave so I told him to sleep it off in my apartment." Robin sighed as she sat down in her chair, trying not to flip her hair out of her face, as she booted up her computer.
" You didn't make the boy do the walk of shame? Man I would have done it in a heartbeat." Jordan sighed as he looked over his friend one more time. " He must be one fine piece of ass then."
" Jordan, what the hell are you even doing here today? Pepper doesn't have any appointments today, she doesn't have anywhere that she needs to be, she's not even leaving the office today, why is her make-up artist here?" Robin sighed as she was still not awake enough to deal with her friend.
" No, but we are all going out to lunch today and- what happened to your face Robin?!" Pepper said as she ran from her office door to the girls side, nearly ripping the all of the tissues out of the box that had been on Robin's desk as she did so.
" She got into some type of a fight last night. Seeing as she didn't get out until way late into the night last night and was too stubborn to go out and get a taxi, you can only imagine what the hell she went through last night." Jordan said with his arms crossed, unhappy with the way that their boss worked his friend.
" I am so sorry Robin! I know that you have to go home and take care of your siblings after leaving here and do you know how sorry I felt after leaving you here to do all that work all on your own? I should have never left you to do all of that." Pepper was nearly on the verge of begging for forgiveness.
" I'm fine, don't worry about it and Jordan stop being such a prude about it, this is work and you should really stop guilt-tripping our boss before she fires you since we both know that this is the only good job that you will ever get." Robin hissed as Pepper started to put pressure onto the wound. " It's already been cleaned out and Doctor Jordan has already gave me the okay to work. Now what is this about lunch?" Robin asked with a smile.
Pepper had basically paid Jordan and Robin to go out shopping and eating with her. This was something that they only had done twice before, it seemed like once a quarter Tony Stark with hand Pepper a platinum credit card and tell her to have fun with it. Pepper would take out her two favorite people, one of them was always Robin and the other was usually Jordan, and they would have a day full of eating and shopping. Pepper was a nice person and if she even saw Robin looking at something, she as charge it to Tony's credit card and that would be that, Robin could have a whole new wardrobe by the end of the night. So when it slipped that Robin had her first date in over a year and a half, it became a day of shopping for a sexy dress, a new pair of heels, and finding a good bottle of wine for the night in.
Robin had not put much planning into what she was going to wear, how she was going to look, or what she was going to do for drinks for that night. All she really cared about was getting back in time for the dinner date. So when she, and Jordan, spilled back into her house with bags filled with clothing and wine, they were shocked to what they saw. The house was spotless, there was not a sign that there was three people living in this house or that there had been blood going from one end of the kitchen to the other the night before. She was shocked to find that the man not only left everything in her house, but that he also cleaned in on the way out. As she placed her bags on the ground she could hear the little feet of both her siblings running down the hall to look at her, the shocked looks on their faces as well.
" This so was not me." Robin said as she looked around the house one last time.
" He is such a keeper! Can we hook up a camera so that I can see what this guy looks like?" Jordan whispered into the girls eat as she pasted by and placed some of the bags onto their small dinning table.
" We were just heading out actually." Simon sighed, he was in one of his moods where he hated everyone and everything. " I see Miss Potts took you out today, end of the quarter?"
" Yep and okay. Give me a call when you get to Brendan house and make sure that Cecilia actually gets into her house before you ride off on your skateboard this time, okay?" Robin asked as she gave her little sister a kiss and fist bumped her brother.
" That was one time and she got into the house fine!" Simon sighed.
" She waited for over an hour before the doorman figured out she was outside and let her in! It was the middle of winter!" Robin sighed to her siblings. " Celie you give me a call if you need anything, okay? If you still wanna call me before you go to bed you do it okay?"
" Okay Robin, have a good eek-end." Her sister said with a wave as Simon lead them out of the house.
" Bye you guys! I love you!" She cried out, knowing that it would comfort her sister and annoy her brother.
" You've done really good with them, you know that?" Jordan said with a smile. " Now do we even know if they guy is going to show up?" Robin snorted at this, she had been putting the whole thing behind her because of the pit that would just appear in her stomach at the thought of it.
" Nope. Hell, I don't even know if he would show up again!" She sighed as she started to pull different things out of the cupboards. " Do you think that he likes his sauce with garlic?" To this it was Jordan who started to chuckle.
" How the hell do I know how a straight man, your knight, likes his spaghetti sauce?" Jordan chuckled as they started to work on everything together.
Jordan had done her hair and make up in a way that made it look so good but also as if Robin had done it herself. She was wearing a simple black dress with the skirt going to her knees. She could feel her heart in her chest as she light a candle hear the kitchen, a scented candle that smelt like rain hitting grass, something simple that smelt so good to her. She didn't know why she was so nervous, it was not like she had never been on a date before, but this one, this guy, he was different on so many levels. Hell, she didn't even know if – that is if he showed up – he considered this a date or a quick meal with a girl that was semi-pretty. It was fifteen minutes past seven when Robin started to feel down about everything, chuckling to herself and wondering why she even thought that the man would come back anyway. She shook her head as she started to put away the nice wine glasses that she had gotten on her day out and that's when there was a faint knock at the door, something that made her heart skip a few beats as she heard it once again.
She tired not to run to the door, to keep calm and to just walk to the door, but even so she probably had opened the door far too soon and caught the man in mid-knock. Robin smiled and felt herself blushing as she tried to play it off like she had not rushed to the door by leaning on it lightly. But then felt her mouth hang to the floor as James pulled a beautiful bunch of flowers out from behind his back that made her just stand there with her mouth open and her cheeks getting redder than before. She could hear James chuckling as she just started from him to the flowers then back up to his face.
" You. . . you got me flowers?" Robin finally asked with her hands going up to her mouth to hide the fact of her blushing. " They're beautiful!"
" Yeah, I thought that you would like them. They reminded me of your eyes which are even more beautiful." James smiled to the girl, it was a small smile, but it took her breath away anytime that he smiled to her.
" Stop." Robin could feel herself blushing harder as she lowered her head so that her hair was finally covering her red face. But she felt his fingers softly remove the hair from her face so that they were looking at one another again.
" No, you are a beautiful girl and you deserve to hear it." He whispered lightly as the woman from two doors down came out of her apartment and looked at the two of them.
" Do you wanna come in?" Robin smiled as she waved to her neighbor and pulled the door open, allowing the man to come in.
" I'd like that." James said as he entered her small apartment, this time it was light up and in its glory for him to see.
" How's your side doing? I was kind of worried that I was going to come home to find that you were bleeding out or that you bent the wrong way and was sent to the ER because they thought that I had stabbed you or something worse." Robin asked as she took the flowers from the man and placed them into the only vase that she had.
" I've been through worse." James said and that made her a little nervous, a man who had been stabbed the night before and allowed a girl with no medical knowledge to stitch him up had been through worse? That's when she looked down and remembered the fact that he had a metal arm.
" Afghanistan? Iraq? Or were you just fighting off some other girls worst nightmare?" Robin asked as she placed two wine glasses on the table once again.
" None of the above." James replied with and she could already tell that was a far as they were going to get with the whole arm situation. " So how is your face doing?" James nodded to the slice on her face.
" Well I think that it would be a lot better if people stopped starring at it as if I brunt off half of my face. I have had two people look at it and panic thinking that I sliced my face open and needed stitches and everyone else just looks at me like I am a victim." Robin sighed.
" Well you were. . ."
" Shut up. I'm fine. But I just feel like it could have been a lot worse, like I could have been stabbed in the side or something." They both chuckled at this, though Robin though that James was just chuckling at whatever she found was funny.
" So I made the sauce with a little extra garlic, with the siblings around I never get to put garlic in anything, Cecilia, my little sister, hates garlic anything with it in there she refuses to eat it." Robin said as she placed a pot with the sauce and another with the spaghetti in front of the man who looked at it as if it was something that he had not had in years.
" Garlic is good." James said with a nod as Robin started smiling widely as she pushed her hair out of her face and sat down across the table from the man.
" So a man who can kick ass, save a girl from monsters, brings her flowers, and like garlic? Where have you been all of my life?" Robin asked as she unscrewed the bottle of wine that Pepper had picked out.
" Here and there mostly." James said as she poured some into his wine glass and felt his hand move up and around hers. " So tell me, how old are you really?"
" I'm nineteen, but trust me, I feel old enough to be your grandmother at times." Robin smiled as this made James chuckle as if it was a joke that she could not understand. " So tell me all about yourself, my hero, I fell like I split my guts to you last night and all you did was listen. Tell me about you."
" There's not too much to say about me. . ." James lightly shook his head as he took a sip of his wine.
" Well there's gotta be something interesting about you. Something that makes you, you." Robin tried to pry out of the man as she gently placed some spaghetti onto both of their plates. " If you don't start talking we are going to have to play twenty questions and trust me, I am the queen of getting information out of people in that way." Robin smiled as James looked at her playfully.
" Is that so?" James questioned to the girl.
" Oh yeah." Robin smiled as she knew that the game was on.