Jo sits ramrod-stiff at the kitchen table, with her fingers laced around a mug of coffee that went cold hours ago, and at 3:47AM the back door finally rattles. She stares fixedly at the tiles over the sink.
"Oh, that was a good one," Roo says, leaning on the doorframe. She's bright-eyed, and sounds slightly breathless, hand pressed to the left of her chest. "Good call to come inside, it's cold out there. Pretty cold in here, too, actually; you should have turned the heating on."
Jo says nothing, and Roo pauses in her slightly awkward walk across the kitchen, brows slowly pinching together. "Everything okay?" she says, keeping her voice light.
"Fine," Jo says, unlatches her white-knuckled hands, picks up a pen, and makes a note in the notebook on the table in front of her. She lays the pen back down on top of it precisely, and pushes them toward Roo, still without looking at her. "Ran rather late on this one. I should probably go."
"The spare room—"
"I should probably go."
"Oh."
Jo gets up and grabs her jacket off the back of the chair and she's still not looking at her.
"Are you angry at me?" Roo says, in a way that sounds almost perfectly convincingly diffident.
"No," Jo says stonily.
"Did I do something?"
"No."
"All right," Roo says. "I mean, I'd rather you weren't on your bike at this time of the morning, you know what people are like on country roads. And you look angry. But all right."
"I'm not angry at you," Jo says, and visibly clenches her jaw.
"All right." Roo eases herself into a chair, and reaches out to skim a hand over Jo's forearm. "Hey," she adds.
"What?"
"You've got a really good swing with a sledgehammer," Roo says and smiles honest appreciation at her, and Jo's expression slips a little.
"It's nearly four," she spits, and Roo raises her eyebrows and checks the clock and her mouth forms a little oh, because the longest anything else has put her down for, by far, has been from sundown to midnight.
Roo's not a vampire or a werewolf or a whatever. So far as anyone knows, Roo's a one-off. She can't quite remember why it sounded like a good idea to ask Jo for assistance — "for science" — cataloguing how long her recovery is from attempts to kill her.
Well, no, that's not quite true: they'd met at a party. The senior local vampire, Étienne, throws an office-xmas-party-from-hell each year for the local supernaturals, but the werewolf pack from over the river do a nice afterparty with less tense posturing.
"Hello," Roo had said, smiling. "I don't think I've seen you before."
"I've been warned about you," was the first thing Jo said back, also smiling, extending a hand.
"Oh, I don't eat people," Roo assured her.
"Funny you should say that," Jo had said. "That's what I asked, and Layla said, only the kind where she wakes you up in the morning to say she's calling you a cab and kicking you out without breakfast."
Roo coughed awkwardly and sipped her mulled wine and said, "That's not fair. Some people get breakfast," which has probably been true often enough that it isn't a lie, and shook Jo's hand and asked how she knew Layla, and Jo said something politely evasive, and then Roo waited a week and then casually asked Layla a couple of questions.
"Fuck off, Cruithne," the werewolf told her sweetly. "I'm not your wingman."
"Just wondering what a human's doing in such a rough crowd," Roo protested unconvincingly.
"Our Jo's tough as nails," Layla said. "Fuck off, Roo."
So, no, not quite true: it had been a challenge to Jo's tough-as-nails, dressed up in a supernatural one-off's innocuous self-exploratory curiosity, all wrapped around the other challenge, the one posed by I've been warned about you. "Hey, could you help me—" and Jo could.
Tonight, Roo had laid back, grinning, on the floor of her old woodshed, holding the point of a stake over her heart. And Jo had obligingly hefted a sledgehammer — girl's done that before, where has she swung a sledgehammer before? — and knocked it in hard.
"I was awake for a bit," Roo says cautiously. "Just had a slow start. Nailed to the floor."
Jo makes a noise through her teeth. "Two-thirds of the local supernaturals are convinced you'll come around any day now, whether they got the famous morning-after brush-off or you never gave them a first look," she says sharply. "I've been sitting here making a list of all the people who were going to line up to kill me. Étienne, to start with."
"Étienne's got no chance," Roo says instantly.
"Oh, that'd help." Jo yanks her arm out from under Roo's light touch and folds her arms, clutching at her sleeves. "Even if nobody murdered me, I'd have to move again. How was I going to explain that I accidentally killed you because this was the best excuse you could come up with to try to get in my pants?"
Roo reaches after her, but leaves her hand hovering, not quite touching. "Well," she says, falsely bright, "just like that? Nobody would think twice," and she chews on her lip. "This was...not not trying to get in your pants," she adds reluctantly. "But I haven't hung out this much with anyone since — since I dunno. I'm sorry for freaking you out. We won't do killing-me science any more, okay? It was — it wasn't a good idea." She grimaces and pulls her hand back. "I don't— hell, Jo, I don't know how to ask you if you'll come and hang out with me for something else."
"Oh, for goodness' sake," Jo raps out. "Just say hey Jo, come over and watch TV or whatever you do with your other friends."
Roo lets it lie for long seconds of increasingly self-deprecating silence, then underlines it with an embarrassed cough.
"Explains so much," Jo says under her breath. "Hey, wanna come over and kill me repeatedly? For science? Why not just pull a girl's hair because you like her—"
"Well, depending on the girl..." Roo says, half-defensively.
"Oh god, shut up," and Jo abruptly unfolds her arms and drags Roo out of her chair into them, tucking her nose into the join of Roo's neck and shoulder. "Thought I'd killed you—"
"Sorry, Jo." She halting wraps her own arms around her, strokes her back. "I didn't mean to— I'm sorry."
"Shut up," Jo says, and her breath on Roo's neck does something terrifyingly electric to Roo's spine.
"Sorry," Roo squeaks.