om_main | Irvine and Alice - End of the Halloween party

After months of flirting (how terrible), Alice finally gets a lovely making-out session with Irvine, who is a gentleman all the way.

Alice had gotten a few dances out of Irvine in the course of the evening, but as the party came to a close, whoever was currently improvising themselves as the night's DJ switched to a playlist of slow songs. And obviously, she needed that kind of dance with him, too.

She finished her drink in one go, not one to waste the vodka she'd added to the coke, and tracked him down in the small crowd, hooking her hand in the crook of his elbow. "Take a girl for a spin?"

"A real slow one?" Irvine asked with a lazy, drowsy-looking grin. As the night had worn on, he'd lost a few of his cowboy layers until he was down to just vest and jeans, but the hat stayed on no matter what. You could always tell a cowboy by his hat, after all.

He led her out to the dance floor amid the other slow-dancing couples, but as soon as he slid an arm around her waist, Irvine didn't seem to have eyes for anyone else. "You been misbehavin' yourself tonight?" he teased easily.

"I don't know any other way to be," Alice confirmed just as easily, smirking as she said so. She really liked the feel of him, her fingers curled along the curve of his shoulder, silver eyes twinkling warmly. "How about you? Been breaking many hearts tonight, or just mine?"

"Tch," Irvine clucked, settling into a languid side-to-side sway, only shuffling a couple of steps in any direction. "What have I ever done to break your heart? Here I thought I was looking out for it."

"Honey, we've been flirting for, what, two months now," Alice pointed out, easily following his lead, especially with the dancing being so simple, "and you haven't even given me a single kiss. I would say that's call for heartbreak."

While flirting came naturally, as easy as breathing, there were a few things that Irvine took seriously. His grin softened to a barely-rakish smile, and he reached up to tuck back one of Alice's ringlets behind her ear. "Well, now I'm in a bind. It's not gentlemanly to lead a lady along, but it's worse to pressure her." Irvine was totally earnest about his words; choosing for oneself was one of the most important things in his world view.

"What I'm sayin' is," he finished with a quirk to his smile, "you haven't asked."

Alice couldn't help the soft, amused chuckle that escaped her lips when he talked about pressuring her. She'd brought it up; she didn't think pressuring people worked that way. Besides, she was pretty sure that if she wasn't careful, she was the one that would end up pressuring him. "Consider this me asking, then," she assured him with a smile, fingers curling on his shoulder in emphasis.

Irvine firmly believed that consent was sexy-- especially consenting to him. It wasn't gentlemanly to keep a lady waiting, either. He barely even had time to grin before he curled a finger beneath Alice's chin and leaned in to kiss her, nice and slow and taking his time about it.

Alice didn't stop swaying with him as they - finally! - kissed, and was fortunately too committed to the kiss in question to smile about it. Her hand on his shoulder slid a little closer to his neck, so she could rest manicured fingertips against skin rather than fabric, and she opened up to the kiss, drawing his tongue in with hers. She didn't know if it was the fact that they had been flirting for a couple of months and that anticipation made everything sweeter, but there was a special quality to the kiss that made her heart beat a little faster than it normally would for a first kiss with someone.

There was no such thing as a kiss that wasn't worth making it special, and Irvine invested himself in it fully. He gave Alice whatever her tongue seemed to ask for, cupping a palm against her cheek while keeping his other arm firm around her waist. Even still, he managed to sway just enough to the music that you could, sort of, still call it dancing.

When they both finally needed to breathe, Irvine didn't draw back but a few fingers' breadth. "'M I still in trouble for taking too long?" he drawled.

"I think you took precisely the right amount of time," Alice answered with a smile. Because another kiss at another moment might not have been quite like this one, and that would have been a damn shame. Her time with Tessa earlier meant that she was much more settled than she otherwise would have been, and that she didn't mind drawing things out a little, instead of offering to get out of there then and there. They were still sort of dancing, after all, and she slid her arm closer around his shoulder to tangle her fingers in his hair and draw him into another kiss as they kept swaying on the spot.

As long as no teachers came by to tell them to break it up, Irvine was very much present in the here and now, his arms around a gorgeous girl who was managing some really sincerely interesting things with her tongue. Irvine kissed Alice slowly, neither too light nor too deep, but there was no concealing the curve of a smile that kept trying to tug up the corners of his lips and interrupt them. He couldn't help himself; how could he not grin?

That repeated hint of a smile was perhaps, oddly, the hottest thing about this kiss, Alice decided as Irvine managed to hold it back once more. Of course, his reaction kept triggering the same in her, and before long she had to break the kiss to smile fully against his lips, the hand not in his sliding to the top of his chest and resting there. "You wanna get out of here?"

Said the saloon wench to the cowboy. She'd picked the right costume, if you asked her.

Irvine let himself grin fully when they finally broke apart, and took a moment to twirl one of Alice's saloon-girl ringlets around one of his fingers, careful not to tug. It didn't take more than a glance to notice that the party was winding down, and they wouldn't be the only couple slipping out for some privacy. "Mm. You got someplace in mind?"

"Lots of unused rooms around this place," Alice replied, still smiling, and turned her face towards his hand to press a kiss to whichever part of it was closest. There was elation in her breast, and what more could a girl want? Apart from everything needed to keep that feeling going - something that would be greatly helped by privacy.

For Irvine, there was a certain way to go about things, and that meant respect and deference to any young lady who wanted to take things private. As the music ended, he shifted from wrapping an arm around Alice's waist to tuck her hand under his arm, the better to escort her off the floor and out of the party. "Somewhere with a comfy couch and not a whole lot of lights, I hope," he drawled lazily.

Alice smiled at the way her hand ended up in the crook of Irvine's elbow, and under his. She really had picked the right costume, given how he was treating her. "I'm sure we can pull that off. A couch or a bed." The words were emphasized by a squeeze of her hand on his arm, and a smile thrown his way, silver eyes twinkling.

"My roommate ain't exactly the understandin' type," Irvine answered, with a touch of something just beyond tolerance but not quite as far as fondness. Manuel was a messed-up dude, but he deserved his privacy as much as Irvine might like some of his own. "I don't know about you, but there is somethin' about a little leather, and there's a sittin' room up by the front doors that's got a leather sofa I been keepin' an eye on. What do you say?"

"I say lead the way," Alice replied with a smile. There were unused bedrooms in the mansion, but if he wanted his leather sofa, who was she to refuse him. It wasn't like she had anything against leather - on the contrary. "Who's your roommate?" she asked curiously, realizing that she had no idea.

"Manuel Alfonso Rodrigo de la Rocha." Irvine's Spanish accent left something to be desired, but he recalled it exactly as Manuel had pronounced it. "He's from Spain, he's got culture, and if I may say, he's damn good-lookin' for a guy. So maybe," he drawled, finding the room he'd been heading for and turning around so he was backing into the room, drawing Alice along with him with a twitching grin, "there's more than one reason I ain't keen on retiring to my room. Don't want nobody to distract ya."

Alice laughed at his admission - whether it was meant as a joke or not - and was glad to let herself be pulled into that room, closing the door with her foot. Of course, that plunged them in darkness, but their eyes would acclimate in no time - enough for them to find the light. "Trust me, honey," she assured him, resting her hands on his chest for now. "There's no amount of handsome that could distract me from you right now." It was true, too; it had been over two months, and she'd liked him from the very first moment. "Still, I'm glad we don't have an audience." There was no need to see much of anything to pull him into another kiss, and so she did, only just managing to hold back her smile to do so.

He loved that she was still grinning, and that he could tell just from kissing her in the dark. For Irvine, this was play, it was fun, and it should be fun to stumble around until his knees hit the leather sofa and he dropped back onto it, gingerly tugging Alice down with him. He didn't take anything too seriously -- how could anybody, when you were half-blind, missing buttons and snaps, when you couldn't be sure where your hands might end up -- and Irvine would rather laugh and tease and have a good time, one on one, up close and personal. "No ma'am," he chuckled, low in his throat. "Just you 'n me 'n the leather."