#let's just say. i'm glad. no one was recording me. askdlfjlksdjf HA!!!

[queenofbaws]

Hello fellow chilly queen!! I’m sorry I’ve been MIA, have been recovering from surgery (wisdom teeth). Doooo you think I could get some jossam, anything of your choice 👀👀👀? I hope you’re doing well and this week was better for you than it was me lol <3

catch me catching up on some prompts! ;)c

She could still hear the party going on. Doors closed, windows shut, the breeze in her ears, and...yeah. Yup. Mhm. That was definitely the bassline of Mike's (questionable) music choices making the hum under her butt. The whole point of slipping out for a little fresh air had been to, well, get away, but even so, Sam had to smile. Shake her head.

As long as everyone was having fun, what was the harm, right?

It was always cold up on the mountain - freezing, more often than not - but tonight, bundled up as she was, the chill barely bothered her. In fact, she shut her eyes, tipped her head back, and took in the deepest, deepest breath she could, filling her lungs with the crisp scent of pine. Not the artificial stuff either, the real deal, baby, roots and all. In her mind's eye, she saw her exhale plume out in front of her, a cloud of her worries pushed out of her and carried up, up, and away to join the ones in the sky, and when she opened her eyes for real, she...

Actually screamed.

"Wow," Josh snorted, deftly rocking to one side to avoid any punches she might've considered throwing. "A 'hello' would've sufficed."

When her fight-or-flight registered he was not, in fact, some crazed mountain man come to chop her into a billion little pieces, Sam fell flat onto her back, pressing her hands to her heart in an attempt to calm it down. "That...was incredibly mean, what you just did."

Because he'd sat himself beside her, she had the perfect vantage point to watch his face contort. No regret, she noted, not even a teeny-tiny sliver. Plenty of self-satisfaction, though. Lots of pretending like he wasn't laughing his ass off, inside his head. "Sitting on my own deck, huh? Punishable offense now, I guess."

"The sneaking, Josh."

"Who said I was sneaking, Sam?"

"Me. I do. The one whose eyes were closed."

"Have you ever considered...not dropping your guard while in a big, scary cabin in the middle of the dark, spooky woods?" He glanced down to meet her eyes, then raised his beer in a silent toast before taking a drink. "The killer always goes for the ones who split off from the rest of the group, Giddings. C'mon, you know this."

"The killer," she began, pushing herself up with her elbows, waving his hand away when he offered to help, "can try. I might not look like it, but I can take care of myself."

"Yeah, I've caught on to that," he nodded. For a second she thought he might say something else...but then he simply looked out towards the woods and nodded, taking another drink. "I've caught on."

Her pulse dropped back to its usual resting beat, and so she resumed her earlier position, legs crisscrossed and hands at her sides, her mittened palms flush against the deck itself. She tried not to look at him directly (not right away), instead rolling her eyes at the faint snow-angel she'd left in her panic. Snow-amoeba, really. There hadn't been a lot of snowfall since she'd gone out, only enough to barely dust the deck, but if the clouds on the horizon were any sign, they'd be getting more any minute now.

The song inside the lodge ended. A new one began. Beneath them, a different bassline began to thump. One of the windows rattled in its frame.

"You're not being a very good host," she said after a while, shooting him a sidelong look. Despite the scare he'd given her, she couldn't help smirking when their eyes met. He was good at that, Josh - making her forget things like that, smoothing them over without doing anything at all. It was a dangerous skill to have.

"Or I'm the best host," he argued, "rushing out into the night to make sure all my guests are having a good time."

She heard the unspoken question in it, figured maybe that was what she was good at - cutting through his crap. Another dangerous skill, that, just...in a different direction. "I'm having a good time."

"Mmm. Glad to hear it."

"Yup."

It was funny, really, how well she knew him. Maybe not funny in the laugh-out-loud kind of way, maybe funny more in the whacking-your-elbow kind of way, but funny all the same. In her head, Sam counted one, two, three...and then he turned to her again, keeping his bottle close to his mouth the way he did when he was trying to seem unbothered.

"Let's say, hypothetically of course, that you weren't having a good time. You'd tell me, right?"

She turned to him. Nodded. "I would tell you."

"And if, still entirely hypothetically, someone had said or done something to piss you off to such a degree that you had to flee the party..."

Her eyes rolled so hard that they brought the rest of her body with them. "Josh," she said, scooting so she was fully facing him, "I'm fine. Seriously. Things just got a little loud in there, that's all. A little crazy. I know you don't get this, but sometimes I like to just sit out in nature - " she spread her arms wide, gesturing to the mountain and its snowy trees, the stars above, the shimmering ribbon of aurora in the sky, " - so I can think my thoughts to myself. My quiet thoughts. Just so happens that I've...got a few of those, tonight. That's all."

After another drink, he set his beer down on the deck, copying her so they were facing each other, their postures mirrored. He wasn't wearing mittens, though, so she had to figure his hands were freezing. If they were, he didn't seem to care.

"Anything you want to share with the class?" he asked, and again the word appeared in her head: dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

What she needed to say was no, that there wasn't anything in particular on her mind, that she'd simply wanted a moment to herself. That would've been the smart thing to do, the safe thing to do, but...well. Those warning sirens in her head, they weren't just for his actions, now, were they?

She sniffed from the cold, giving her nose a numb little wiggle, then did something significantly more dangerous than splitting off from the rest of the group, something more dangerous than sitting with her eyes shut and her guard down in the middle of nowhere, something that, as Josh had pointed out himself, she knew better than to do.

She told him the truth.

"Just thinking about how absolutely furious Hannah and Beth would be if I told them I think I have a crush on their brother," she said, measuring her words carefully, watching his face more carefully still. "Between you and me? I kinda feel like they might eat me alive."