Garrison and Adrienne - date night #2

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Garrison charms some tourists when he arrives for his date with Adrienne. Unfortunately his date is less charmed and more terrified by the idea.


The doorman stepped back from the door as Adrienne walked through, motioning whether or not to call her a cab, and getting a shake of her head in response. Garrison's message had been simple enough. Dinner, this evening; almost the stereotypical second date. The Canadian had a knack for making their tenative meetings casual, but still different than their regular hanging out. After all, they were friends first, and if their dating experiment turned out not to work, it was important that they didn't end up hating each other at the end of it. Still, it was seven o'clock, and there was no sign of Kane, or his ugly Crown Victoria.


The clopping of the hooves broke Adrienne's musing gaze on the street, as a New York City mounted division horse stepped up on the sidewalk near her fashion business' building. In the saddle, wearing the brilliant red serge and brown stetson of the RCMP sat Garrison Kane, holding the reins with a practiced hand. A couple of tourists snapped photos of the Mountie as he nudged the horse a little closer to Adrienne


"Cabs are always so expensive here."


Adrienne let out a noise that was half squeal and half scream and darted behind the tourists, quite prepared to use them as human shields should she need to. "You're on a horse! Why are you on a horse? Ohmygodit'slookingatmelikeI'mdinnermakeitstop!"


"Relax. Sudden Painful Castration is a sweet horse, aren't you girl?" Kane said, affectionately patting the horse's neck. She whinney slightly, tossing her head. "If you folks can excuse me, the lady has a date with the law. Canadian law. It's all very complicated. Possibly even illegal in this state." Kane held out his hand.


After several moments Adrienne realized that the sidewalk wasn't swallowing her up and getting her out of this and that she would have to move or speak or at least convert oxygen into carbon dioxide or something. Breathing, check. Her limbs didn't seem to be moving, though. "If anyone else wants to date the law right now, be my guest, because I can't seem to move," she said finally. "Hey! Back off! I was joking!" she barked when one of the tourists took a step towards Kane and the horse. A spark of jealousy had her taking Kane's hand without a further thought about the horse's teeth and feet.


Kane swung her easily up in front of him, sitting her sideways between himself and the horse's neck. His saddle was a basic bellyband, and it let her balance easily with his broad chest and arms there to serve as a sort of protective encirclement. He tipped his hat to the small crowd, and nudged the horse out on to the street, setting a comfortable pace as they trotted down Central Park East, moving north with the traffic.


"So, I see you dressed appropriately." Garrison grinned, looking at her clinging on in her dress and heels.


Adrienne screamed as Kane pulled her up onto the horse and tried to jump back down. "Myfeetarebyitsteethmyfeetarebyitsteethohmygodit'sgoingtobiteme!" She squealed again when they started moving.


"You know, the only way to get over a fear is to face it, Ms. Frost. Also, I already fed her a couple of kids down by Times Square. She's... well, less likely to bite your foot off at the ankle." Kane said, straight faced.



"I don't wanna face it! That's where the teeth are!" she cried out. She was clinging to him as tightly as possible, trying to keep herself away from the horse's head, but something in his tone penetrated the blind fear and had her frowning up at him. "Wait- are you mocking me?" Since it was Kane, the question was rather rhetorical. "You're mocking my discomfort and terror?! I can't believe you!" Except feeling indignant meant she wasn't so afraid, so maybe there was something in his theory. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.


"Most people don't believe me. Or the outfit, actually. I occasionally wear it to the office because people forget to charge me for meals or coffee along the way. They see the coat and get this gaped mouth look like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, me, public health care, and all the other things that Americans believe are fictional just stepped into the shop." Kane clucked his tongue, and the horse sped up a bit, her gait smooth despite the concrete and asphalt.


"It's probably your blinding good looks in the outfit, stunning everyone into forgetting to charge you for things," she pointed out, letting out a squeak and clutching tighter around Kane's waist as the horse started to go faster. After a moment she forced her eyes open and tried to focus on the conversation to keep her mind off her fear. "Although personally, I've always liked the winter outfit with the bearskin hat better. Or is that more of a third date look? Ah! My shoe!"


"Whoops." Kane sawed the reins and drove the horse into a tight circle. "Hang on to the mane." He said, and suddenly disappeared. The Mountie was leaning down, holding on to the saddle with one hand, and the rest of his body almost brushing the street as the horse loped along. He scooped up the shoe with his free hand and hauled himself back up on to the saddle, once again providing Adrienne with some sense of protection. "Next time, some kind of strappy, less fall-off brand for these events, eh?"


Before she could squeal about being left alone with only a mane to hold her onto the horse, Kane was back and her latest irrational freakout died in her throat. "Well if you'd told me you were going to make me ride a horse I would have worn appropriate footwear, or, you know, killed you," she retorted while her brain was still trying to process what he'd just done. "Did I see you do some sort of circus rodeo trick on that horse?" Her brain was torn between 'my hero' and 'are you fucking nuts?'


"It's not a rodeo trick. You have to be able to pull something off the ground while still on horseback in training." The horse negotiated a crosswalk, earning a curious but respectful path by the other pedestrians. "You know, the name is Royal Canadian Mounted Police, after all." Kane stressed the 'mounted' part, something that even his friends in the Bureau forgot about from time to time.



"I think you were a rodeo clown in another life," Adrienne muttered under her breath, proving that she didn't actually know what a rodeo clown was. She just liked the 'clown' part. "So did you learn how to ride for the job, or did you already have the skill before you became a Mountie?" She giggled to herself, finally beginning to relax a little as she realized that the protective posture wasn't letting anything happen to her. "I can just see you begging your mother for riding lessons, skinny little ten year-old boy who already knows he wants to be in the RCMP when he grows up and wants a head start on all the other guys."



"Hell no. I grew up in West Toronto. The only thing I begged my mother for at ten was a Super Nintendo, Skydome tickets, and those foam WWII planes that you could buy in packets in the variety store." They crossed the sidewalk and the horse's hooves sunk into the grass a bit as he urged her through the tree cover into Central Park. "First year at the academy, everyone learns how to ride. It does make sense, too. Discounting the colour rides and the parades and crap, there's still a lot of policing that is done on horseback, especially in more remote areas."


"Well, I have to admit I like you a bit more now than I might if you'd told me you've been a lifelong horse nut," Adrienne smirked. "Nintendo, awesome. Jays tickets, well, no one's perfect but you've got the right game at least. Foam planes, I can deal with. I liked the fact that until you put the plastic nose on them they were completely useless, then you add this one piece of plastic and suddenly it flies thirty feet in this perfect flightpath, right at someone's head. Brilliant."


Feeling especially brave, she leaned forward a little to grab her other shoe, feeling it coming loose. "So when did you decide you wanted to be a Mountie?"



"I was about fifteen. The Gamma Flight program had just been established to test for mutation, and thanks to my family's somewhat unique position as part of national security, I was one of the first tested. It was around the time that I first met Mac Hudson. And Heather, although it was Heather McNeil then." Kane ducked his head, as a branch brushed his hat. "I was told then that I'd be part of the first wave of this new program they were working on, and what Hudson and Colcord saw as eventually being Alpha Flight. The military seemed a little bit too, I don't know, ethically dubious for me. I mean, a soldier is supposed to shut up and follow orders, and with a team of mutants... it just didn't sit right. The other option, working with CSIS was just way too much like my old man, and especially then, I wanted nothing in my life to be like his. So, there was the RCMP. Cool uniform, sounded like an honest career without any shady black-ops ideas; unlike the other two, it was a life I wouldn't have to hide."


Garrison paused and chuckled. "Yes, I also figured it was most likely to get me laid."


"Funny, I said the same thing about becoming a model." Remembering her most recent encounter with Lexington, Adrienne shifted an arm around Kane's back in a half-hug. "Yeah, the whole 'shut up and follow orders' thing isn't very you, which I must say after getting some of what soldier-boy Lexington saw and did on the battlefield stuck in my head, is a good thing. A very good thing."


"Well, I've seen plenty of things as part of both forces that I'd rather unsee, but yeah, I like to be able to say 'this isn't right' when I need to." Kane pulled back on the reins, and the horse turned and started a brief trot up the side of a swelling hill. "So, did it work?"


"Did what work?" She had an idea, but decided to play stupid. Or coy. Coy, definitely. It sounded much better than stupid.


"Becoming a model to get laid? I mean, my own obvious and slightly adolescent glee in naughty gossip aside, I've seen those awful reality 'The Hills' shows that the kids at the school put on. Makes me believe that injesting too much bottled water in clubs directly leads to Romanesque orgies and debauchery. Or rebauchery? Does that make a moral, upstanding person simply 'bauched'?"


"Maybe in Europe?" she joked in response to 'bauched.' "Of course it worked. It's just like it is in the movies and pornos and on those shows. Become a model, get the orgies, the drugs, the clothes, the money. Which isn't true for everyone, of course. Most models I know work very hard and stay away from the debauchery completely. But I made the career choice for the other reasons." She frowned at the horse's mane, lost in thought. "And just like in the movies, you eventually wise up and realize that it's all empty pleasure that will never make you truly happy, and all you really have to show for it is a substance abuse problem that lands you in rehab. Well, and the clothes."



"Huh. Sounds like the shows are actually pretty accurate in this case. Whoa." Kane firmly pulled back, and the horse came to a standstill near a tree at the top of the hill. He lowered Adrienne down on to the cool grass, before easily slipping off himself and tying the horse's reins around the tree. Kane patted her flanks for a moment before pulling off one of the nylon faux-saddle bags and dropping it on the ground. Inside, there were a couple of wrapped sandwiches, a bag of apples and a plastic container of fruit juice.



"How do you find time to watch that crap?" Adrienne asked with a roll of her eyes. By this point, it shouldn't have surprised her that Kane didn't seem bothered by what she'd told him, but it still caught her off guard. Pleasantly. Of course, he'd read her file so he would have known about her month in Sierra Tuscon back when she'd been a teenager already.



She kept the maximum distance possible between herself and the horse and eyed the tree suspiciously. "Are you sure that tree will keep it from being able to reach us?"


"The kids leave it on. I don't sleep more than a couple of hours a night. Something to do with my mutation. So, I sometimes randomly surf the TiVo. I'm just curious who keeps recording Coronation Street religiously. My money is on Xavier." Kane pulled one of the apples out, and patted the horse as she gratefully noshed it from his hand. He tend went over to where Adrienne was and settled himself comfortable on the ground with his sandwich.


"You hungry or what?"


Adrienne cringed involuntarily as the horse crunched the apple and kept her eyes on it nervously. "I could eat, yeah. I'm on horse watch right now though. Maybe when I know it's full I'll take my eyes off it and eat," she murmured, just barely kidding. "I didn't know you don't sleep. So, you don't sleep, but you spend your nights... watching television? What, the uniform isn't working to get you laid, Slick?" she joked with a laugh.


"Christ, between you, Lil and my sister, my lack of sex life seems to be the most hilarious thing in the world." He handed over the other sandwich and unwrapped his own. "I work. I'm an X-Man. There is baseball to watch. Put all that together and it doesn't exactly leave a lot of time for cruising for chicks. Strike that. I think the use of the term 'cruising for chicks' may also be a factor."


Still keeping an eye on the horse, Adrienne bit into the egg salad sandwich eagerly. Fear worked up an appetite, it seemed. "It must be your vocabulary, because it definitely isn't the rest of the package, although for the record the Mountie uniform doesn't work on every girl, such as those of us who spent many years hiding the fact we were accomplices to murder. I never thought I'd be sharing a meal with a cop," she said through a mouthful of sandwich. "Especially one who rides a horse." Swallowing, she raised an eyebrow at him. "You've never had sex while watching baseball? But that's like, the best multitasking experience ever!"


"Considering the fact the world tells virtually every Red Sox' fan to go fuck themselves at all times, I'm amazed that Fenway isn't running ankle deep by now." Kane said sourly, not needing to elabourate on his own Blue Jays broken season. "The fact is, and don't get me wrong, but sex isn't the most important thing for me. I mean, I like it quite a lot. I especially like it with pretty and adventurous women, but, you know, even kinda cute and good enough women are alright too. But, well, I don't need to get laid regularly to prove anything to myself, and I don't want to fool someone into thinking it's something more if all it happens to be is sex."


"We've had this conversation before," Adrienne reminded him gently, smiling. "I haven't forgotten your feelings on sex. And although I'm not sure how I feel about the 'kinda cute and good enough' statement, you don't have to defend yourself to me. You're not getting wine thrown in your face tonight. Not that I have any wine anyway, but no metaphorical wine either." Her eyes left the horse and focused on Garrison, wicked grin on her face. "You never answered my question, you know."


"Nope. I always assumed one of the ushers would kick us out before we got very far, or I'd end up on the Jumbotron with twenty-two thousand fans making disparging comments about my 'slider'."



Adrienne choked on her sandwich as she barked out a laugh and ended up coughing and sputtering for several moments before regaining her composure. "You know I wasn't talking about having sex while at the games, right? Also, twenty-two thousand? At the Skydome or whatever it's called? Were you even old enough to have sex back when they would have actually had that many fans at a game?"


"What, last Friday? Yeah, I was old enough to have sex by last Friday. Although, like all healthy young men, I spent it on the internet looking for faked photos of Jessica Biel nude. I think we have a connection. Seriously." Kane wolfed down another bite of his sandwich.


Rolling her eyes, Adrienne set her sandwich down in favour of an apple. "Last Friday doesn't count. It was the last weekend at home. Of course it would be busier than normal. It's like, having six relatives over for a christening but having two hundred people at a funeral. Which is a simile I'm liking a lot, actually," she grinned. "But don't feel too bad. Even though you didn't make the playoffs this year, you did just sweep us."
"I believe the technical term is beat the everlovin' shit out of you, actually. Also, I'm looking for a pretext to arrest Papelbon on. As much as I've searched, I can't find a legal framework to charge him with extreme douchbaggery and make it stick yet."

"Everloving shit? Really?" She raised an eyebrow patronizingly, stretching out onto the grass on her elbows. "A rain-out, a one-run victory, and a twelve-nothing win against a team of triple-A call-ups? Okay, Slick, I'll let you have your delusion."


"Outscored 31 to 12. While I am aware that Papeldouche is illiterate and Ortiz can only count up to the number of pills in his regular steroid shipments, a 19 point run differential is actually the definition of 'everlovin' shit'. Don't worry though. The silver lining is that Detroit will likely save you from having to get your heads handed to you by the Yankees... again."


"You can't count the runs they scored off the second-stringers, which means it was only a seven point run differential and you're still forgetting that the first game ended in the seventh, when the Sox were making a comeback," Adrienne pointed out sagely, reaching for a juice box. Plus, you can quote run differentials all you want- we're still in the playoffs and you're not. Neener neener." She even stuck her tongue out at him.

"So is the horse something you use quite often at work while you're investigating big bad crimes, or do you only get to use it for special occasions?"


"Borrowed her off the NYPD's mounted division. We have an understanding." Kane leaned back, watching the lights of the city over the tree cover. "Besides, I figured that you've already done car rides and carriage trips through the city before, and doubling you on the handbars of a bicycle seemed a little bit too fifth grade. So I took a shot."


"I've actually never done a carriage ride before," she mused, following his gaze skyward. "Due to the whole horror-of-horses thing, I guess. And I think a lot of men in this city like to pretend they're so highbrow and that carriages are camp or tacky."


"To be fair, they are kind of camp and tacky, pulled by horses so old that they were retired from the Civil War." Garrison said, with the inbreed snobbery of a professional mounted officer. The Canadian's attitude towards horses were similar to his view towards cars; there were pretty, fussy or deceptively pleasant ones meant for people who were impressed by such things, and there were real ones, that had power and pride and did the job, pretty or not.


"I don't mind camp in very small doses," she replied with a shrug, glancing over at him to grin mischeviously. "Like when it involves a Mountie uniform. Although I suppose if one actually is a Mountie then dressing in one's uniform doesn't really constitute as camp. Do you feel sad for the carriage horses?"


"Are you kidding? Most of them would be catfood without the carriage job. They're usually old horses that have been acquired cheap because they can't continue either at a ranch or track. In a couple of years, when my broken and useless carcass gets put out to pasture, I'm planning for that kind of job; something simple."



She didn't bring up the fact that horse meat was sold at any butcher or grocery shop in Switzerland and that apparently most of it came from Canada's Woodbine racetrack. Cat food seemed bad enough. "Don't you think pulling carriages after a lifetime of policing and saving the world might be a little... boring for you? Wouldn't you much rather come be a security guard at my office?" she grinned. "You'd get to spend your days watching pretty girls coming and going."


"Watching neurotic women paw through expensive clothing and chasing down celebrities with klepto urges doesn't seem as alluring as you might think, eh? I was thinking something more... basic; farming beets, making clay mugs in the likeness of Lester B Pearson to sell at craft festivals, a service for watering potted plants. That kind of thing."


"Damn, I thought 'pretty girls' was more than alluring enough for you," she teased. "But that's right, 'kinda cute' is good enough for you, I forgot!" A playful shove followed. "Maybe we should stop going on dates then, because I am in no way in the 'kinda cute and good enough' category, and you didn't include 'smokin' hot' at all. I guess it's a good thing you don't need sex" she deadpanned, "because even if we ever were to put sex on the table at these date things we could just never have it unless you change your standards to include 'smokin' hot'."


"Wow, someone is kind of insecure. Would you be terribly offended if I pointed out that 'smoking hot' was quite far down on my list of reasons to pursue a second date with you?"



Adrienne made an over-the-top 'mulling it over' face. "Not if you followed it up with 'I would pursue a second date with you not because you are smoking hot but because of-' and then listed a multitude of other positive attributes about me. And yes, I am insecure when I am with you," she agreed with a smirk, not about to debate something that was true. "I spend my days making everyone believe I'm awesome and store up all my insecurity just for you, Slick."


"That would explain the footwear choices, I guess." Kane said with a grin. "You know, I really pursued the second date because I like you. I know in this age of vastly self-aware men who essentially need to scrutinize and list every facet of their emotional spectrum like a resume or a tax return, I seem like a throwback, but, well, I don't mind. I like you. I like spending time with you. One day there might even be kissing involved. I'll worry about the details later, eh?"


"Sounds like a plan. I like you too, Kane," she admitted with her own grin. "And I've never said that to anyone before." She picked up one of her shoes, lying on the grass nearby since it had seemed pointless to put them back on after getting off the horse, and showed it to Garrison, still smirking. "Since I can't carry a gun anymore, the footwear with these pointy little heel thingies called stilettos are the only weapon I have; you wouldn't begrudge me the need to feel secure, would you?"


"If I believed that for a moment, no, I wouldn't begrudge you. But I know you wear them because it shows off your legs and makes you feel tall. Lying to me so early, really... tsk tsk."