Vanessa & Wade | Thursday Afternoon

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Vanessa and Wade made their way back to their hotel after their ice climbing lesson. They relax int he room's jacuzzi and shower respectively and give one another a tour of their respective scars.

The instructor was a very nice, very patient man. Wade and Vanessa had obviously been trying his patience with their enthusiasm. It wasn't that they didn't listen, exactly, it was just that they were so gung ho they made small mistakes that resulted in one or the other of them slipping down the ice or falling down to the packed snow below completely. Vanessa had even managed to slip with one one of her ice axes buried in the ice and the other in her hand. The fact that she didn't end up stabbing herself was slightly amazing. After six hours of instruction they both had a working knowledge of what they were doing, but they had also both taken a number of falls and gotten all too familiar with the packed snow and ice they were working in. Wade had ended up swinging wildly once and smacked into the frozen waterfall multiple times.

All in all, though, it had been sort of a brilliant day. But Vanessa sort of ached as they walked back to the hotel over a well-traveled path. "Mm...heat. So much heat needed or I might not be that effective tomorrow." She twisted, stretching her back out.

Wade was going to be one huge bruise in the morning, but he'd had an awesome time so he wasn't really all that worried about it. And the healing factor, gimpy though it was, kept him from horribly injuring his internal organs, which he appreciated. "Mm... there's a jacuzzi in the suite, honey." He looped an arm across Vanessa's shoulders and tucked her in against his side. "And a shower with like ten shower heads and a million settings - I am definitely looking forward to that. We are going to use up the whole hotel's hot water and it will be awesome."

Vanessa went a little bit limp as she leaned in against Wade. Hey, if he wanted to tuck her in she wasn't going to fight it. She wrapped an arm around his waist and wormed her hand into his pocket for added warmth. "Mm...jacuzzi. I really didn't pack for a jacuzzi." She shrugged a shoulder slightly. "On the other hand, this is why God made underwear. Because a jacuzzi doesn't require standing or attention or anything but laying there and letting the jets work all the tension out of your muscles." Thinking about it made her moan contentedly. "Oh, I am so going in for that."

"Mmhm," Wade agreed, reaching for the door and holding it as they walked through, squishing a little closer so he didn't have to let go of Vanessa. "Me, too. And if there's really anything that's horribly bruised, you can borrow my healing factor for a bit." He was pretty sure, from the way she'd described it, that the cancer shouldn't have any impact on her taking solely the mutation. "Same goes for tomorrow, if we fall and you break a leg or something." He figured he should put that out there, considering the amount of slipping and sliding they'd done today.

"My hero." She even gave him a kiss on the cheek for the offer and grinned over at him. "Bruising I can deal with. Anything that inhibits actual movement and action I'll take you up on that for. Fractured ribs are a bitch to heal, so yeah, don't wanna wait around on desk duty for eight weeks potentially while they heal. But bruises and nicks and scrapes? Nah. Chicks dig scars, y'know. And I healed most of mine away when I borrowed Laura's healing factor last time I got torn up." Literally. She'd nearly been gutted and the only thing that kept her wounds for allowing her entrails to spill out was her dropping the mimic she had been using to get by unnoticed. "But I left scars from that since it made me lose the rest of them."

"Chicks do dig scars," Wade agreed, grinning. "I'm just not really sure how I feel about sharing a bed with another me... I don't think the world can handle two of me." Into the elevator they went and then up eight stories, down a hall, and through a mini foyer into the honeymoon suite. "Is there any cake left?"

"I dunno, you're the one who's been eating it all." She didn't care, Vanessa's sweet tooth was minimal at best. "You know, I had plans for being you. It involved telling people we were twins and trying to pick up chicks together," she told him with a laugh. Her muscles were warming up, but somehow that just had her walking more stiffly. Maybe the increased blood flow was allowing something to be released which was causing her aching, like lactic acid. Stupid lactic acid. Her jacket was quickly stripped off after Vanessa had slipped out from under Wade's arm and she went straight to the jacuzzi to turn it on. Stripping would be imminent.

Wade unzipped his jacket and tossed it on the bed. His beanie followed a moment later and then his shirt. By the time he walked into the bathroom, he was fast on his way toward naked.

Unbuttoning his jeans, he turned on the water in the shower and checked to make sure it was as hot as he could get it, then turned and quirked an eyebrow at Vanessa. "If we're gonna get free cake, we might as well eat it, dear."

Shaking her head, Vanessa pulled off her gloves and her hat. "Well, honey, how about if we're going to get free cake you may as well eat it. You wouldn't want your wife to let herself go so soon after getting married, would you?" Once her boots were off Vanessa pulled her shirt off and started on her jeans. Underwear covered just as much as a bikini, and even then she wasn't entirely sure she would bother with any. Hey, there were towels next to the jacuzzi and he could always divert his eyes if he her nudity made him uncomfortable.

"Sweetheart," Wade called, grinning as he toed off his shoes and socks, "You can go any which way you want and I'm pretty sure I have no say in the matter." He shucked his jeans a moment later and then his boxers, walking into the jets from the multiple shower heads, then moaned.

With the jacuzzi in the nook just off the living room, he didn't feel bad about getting naked. He'd be decent before he walked out of the bathroom again. "Besides," he called, "I think it'd take more than some cake to get you out of fighting form."

"But I wouldn't want to deprive you, darling," she called back. "I know how cake sets your heart aflutter." With the jets in the jacuzzi going, Vanessa gave some thought to what she had on. Underwear and a bra. How comfortable would a wet bra be, though? She shrugged to herself, reached around and unhooked the clasp. A moment later her bra had joined the small pile of clothes on the tile step.

Climbing into the heated water of the jacuzzi was heaven, but it was heaven with a small lash of pain with it. After the cold of outside the heat of the water stung and burned just a little bit on the side of being uncomfortable. Vanessa settled into the water anyhow, forcing herself to sit put so she could adjust to the heat. Staying put was pretty easy when she had the water from the jets beating against her skin. Definitely heaven.

Wade's nose stung, but the rest of him was now comfortably hot and even his nose warmed up eventually. "Something of mine's been set aflutter," he said, not projecting enough to be sure Vanessa would hear him in the other room.

He stayed under the spray for longer than necessary, his fingertips pruney by the time he finally turned the water off. Pulling his boxers back on after toweling dry, Wade made his way into the main room again. "I think I'm gonna watch some tv."

Vanessa had sort of dropped off into a very light doze. She wasn't sleeping, but she wasn't exactly paying attention either. Her aches had all slipped off and she was happily lounging in the hot water with her head pillowed on a rolled up towel. The jets created enough disturbance and foam on the surface of the water that her level of undress wasn't readily apparent unless someone looked for it, but she was hardly concerned with that. Wade's voice was dully registered and she didn't answer him for nearly twenty seconds. When she did reply it was only with a, "Hm?"

"Television," Wade said, already having grabbed the remote. He laid down on the couch, then sort of frowned over at the jacuzzi. "Are you going to sleep? I think that's a bad idea when you're in water."

"I'm not sleeping," She didn't sound very convincing, though. Vanessa rolled over and folded her arms along the edge of the jacuzzi so she could lay her head on it and look at Wade through cracked open eyes. "You're a TV junkie, aren't you? It'll rot your brain, kid. You should watch out for that."

"I'm a fan of educational television," Wade said, keeping one eye on Vanessa even as he flipped through the channels. "Mostly I like the Golden Girls, though." He couldn't find that, so he settled for a documentary on WWII. "You look like you're made of jelly. Do I need to pull you out of there?"

Vanessa whimpered at him and gave him her most pathetic pouting look, which really wasn't hard in her current state. "But, but...it's cold out there. In here I'm all warm and comfy and not sore and mostly naked. It's a good way to be. You could see my scars!" She sounded a little too excited about that last bit. The last time they had spoken of scars it had been much more intimate and flirtatious than it was now.

"Okay," Wade said, pushing himself off the couch so he could wander over to the jacuzzi. "You first."

"I told you, I only have the last ones," she reminded him before rolling back over in the water. She considered if she would need to stand up or if she could maybe float in here. Floating probably wouldn't work so Vanessa instead got up on her knees in the jacuzzi on the bench she'd been sitting on. It exposed her enough to traced the scars that slashed across her abdomen at a bit of a slant. The scars were raised and thick enough that even if they healed further over time there would always be a tactile scar there. "Some guy trying to gut you with your claw hands sort of sucks."

"Fair enough," Wade said, grinning even as he trained his eyes on the scars rather than the rest of Vanessa. "Weren't you supposed to be wearing a bra or something?" He pulled his eyes back to himself, then looked down at his side. "Uh... that one's from a poll that a guy stuck through me in Zaire." He gestured to his thigh. "That one's from falling out of a window in Georgia. And the these," he held his forearms up, "are from a nasty little bitch in Columbia who thought trying to knife my client would be an awesome idea."

Vanessa folded her arms over the side of the jacuzzi again and leaned over onto them to watch as Wade's scars were pointed out. "Bras are really uncomfortable to wear soaking wet most of the time and that one," she pointed at the ground where hers laid. "That one is too thick and constricting to be wearable soaking wet. And then I'd need help to peel out of it anyone so one way or another you end up with a topless smurf." She reached out with one hand and traced the knife scars. "Is it bad that I like knife-induced scars? Aesthetically, I mean."

"Nah, I like 'em better than the pokes and gashes," Wade said, holding his forearms out a bit more so she could see the scars better. "There's a few spots on my back where I got shot one time, but they didn't leave scars so much as like. Little spots. So I don't really count them."

"Spots are no fun," she stated, running wet fingertips over the ridges of fine lines of scar tissue. "Scars don't count unless you can feel them. Sure, if it's just a pigmentation thing you notice them but there's something about the way scars feel, you know?"

"Uh huh," Wade said, eyes following the movement of her fingertips because if he looked anywhere else, he'd be looking at her chest and that was just all bad. All. Bad. That would lead to things Wade shouldn't be doing. Or even thinking about. He needed to think less.

Something blew up on the television and Wade didn't even flinch. "Definitely something about the way they feel."

A smile began to spread over Vanessa's mouth, slow and lazy and wide. "Mm...I knew a girl once who was into scarification. You know, cutting as a body mod? She had these beautiful, intricate designs cut into her back and arms. Some places entire patches of skin had been removed so it all scarred over. It was so weird to run your hands over." Vanessa told him all this with eyes slightly unfocused but directed toward the pink scar tissue on his arms and the blue fingertips running over it.

"You, Miss Carlylse," Wade said, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, "are trouble." He was smiling, though, as he said it. He needed to step away, go back to the couch, watch the WWII documentary, learn about how soldiers got eaten by sharks. Wade needed to do those things. But he just sort of stood there instead.

It was his hand tucking the hair behind her ear that drew her gaze upward to his face again. Wade got a little half-smile from her that was part flirt and part contented laziness. "Mm...that I am, Mister Wilson. Does that mean you'll be running away now? Because if you're not going to run away you should come in here with me. It's lovely." Her fingers shifted from his scar up to his shoulder where a bruise was starting to form. "You're turning purple, sweetie."

"That's generally what happens when you smack yourself into a wall of solid ice," Wade said, tone shifting into something almost contemplative before he leaned down a little and tipped his head to the side, the end of his nose very nearly touching hers. "Do you want me to come in, Miss Carlylse?"

He was very close. And very pretty. Vanessa was feeling a lot more awake now than when he'd first come back out, but she was also a bit distracted by staring at his eyes, which were a very warm, light brown. Only a woman with pure red eyes could find brown eyes so fascinating. "I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't." With her vision taken up by Wade's face her fingertips skirted down the length of his arm so she could have a touch-based path for which she could find and hook a finger around his pinkie. She tugged on his finger gently, as if trying to coax him in there with her from it. "If you're worried about me falling asleep and drowning it'd be easier for you to make sure I didn't if you were in here with me."

Wade could see neither pupil nor iris in Vanessa's eyes, but he'd always liked red as a color, generally speaking. Dipping his head a little, he kissed the very corner of her lips and then pulled back a little so he could lift her hand, still attached to his pinkie, to his lips. He brushed her knuckles with another very light kiss, then gave her a smile. "Why don't you finish relaxing and then come join me on the couch? I've been told I make a good pillow."

A faint pout crossed onto her face, but he was also being incredibly cute. Vanessa wasn't sure what to do with Wade being cute. Silly, rambunctious and flirtatious she had a good place to work from. But sweet? Not so much. So her reply wasn't cute or sweet or even flirtatious in return. "Didn't you spend a half hour this morning complaining that the couch is uncomfortable?"

"Only because I was sleeping on it. It's very comfortable when you just want to sit. Besides, I'd be cushioning you so you wouldn't have to deal with the couch itself," Wade said, sliding his hand away from hers and straightening so he could head back over to the couch.

"I could sleep on the couch tonight," she offered, sliding more fully back into the jacuzzi's water and away from Wade. Vanessa actually moved to the far wall where she couldn't be seen easily from outside of the jacuzzi's area. Because, really, she had no idea what to do with this strange, sort of sweet thing Wade had just pulled and that left her sort of conflicted about how to interact with him. She'd definitely found a hard limit to what he could endure in terms of flirting, she just wasn't entirely sure what she'd done to hit it. Maybe it was the toplessness, but that was just stupid because it was only a body. Now she had to think about that boundary she'd just found and figure out how to proceed.

It wasn't fair when guys complicated things that should have been simple. Especially when she wasn't dating them.

"Or I could sleep on top of the covers," Wade returned, grabbing a t-shirt from his backpack and pulling it on before he went back to the couch. There were some pillows, but no blankets, and he briefly considered grabbing one of the spares from the closet but discarded the idea a moment later because soldiers were getting eaten by sharks on the television. "I feel like that might be the best option here, so neither of us freeze, neither of us are uncomfortable, and we might be in some sort of shape for the climb tomorrow."

She couldn't see Wade anymore, but she gave the wall a look suggesting it was utterly daft. "That's stupid, why would you sleep on top of the covers? The bed is huge. I can promise to not get handsy with you and if you don't believe me it's big enough that you won't have to worry about touching me at all." Seriously, who offered to sleep on top of the covers? It had been Wade's insistence the night before, not Vanessa's, that he sleep on the couch. She had offered him the bed with her from the beginning and had sworn she did not flail or steal covers in her sleep. Obviously he hadn't believed her because he had opted for the couch anyway. Then he'd woken up sore.

Wade flirted a lot. And in most cases, he definitely followed through on that flirting. This was a respect thing, he supposed. Either that, or all those small town morals his mother had instilled in him back when he was ten were finally starting to show up in unexpected places. Inconvenient places, really. He wanted to have the same reaction with Vanessa that he had with everyone else, but he couldn't seem to work up to that level of careless flirtation. "It's not you getting handsy that I'm worried about," Wade called back, eyes still resolutely trained on the television.

Maybe it was the shared background that kept throwing him. Vanessa wasn't his responsibility - he didn't actually have to take care of her. After so many years in the private sector working protection, he'd gotten used to having a client and constantly needing to ensure that client's safety. But Vanessa could handle herself and maybe that was what was throwing him off.

"So you're worried about you getting handsy?" Honestly, she wasn't entirely sure she would mind that. He had decent hands. Strong, rough, and wow now she was thinking about his hands. Vanessa groaned to herself and slid completely under the water. Nothing but the dull roar of the water jets punctured her suddenly enforced bubble of water silence until she could no longer hold her breath. Being trained as a mercenary by an array of marines and seamen meant she had also been trained to hold her breath for a very long time. When she came up she continued her end of the conversation without missing a beat. "If it makes you feel better I can offer to threaten you with weapons doing unpleasant things to various unpleasant areas for them to be doing those things if you let your hands wander."

Wade was standing beside the jacuzzi when Vanessa came back up, hands on his hips and a frown on his face. "Unpleasantness being done to my bits aside, could you not nearly make me have a heart attack, woman?"

Vanessa blinked water out of her eyes and tried to look at Wade through the veil of hair now plastered to her face. "Wait, what? What heart attack?"

"The one where I've warned you not to drown and then, while in the jacuzzi, you just go quiet for four freaking minutes."

She heaved a sigh and pushed her hair out of her face. "What? I needed a minute. Or, erm, four." Vanessa hadn't realized she'd been under for that long, honestly. With a petulant, sulking look on her face she held out her hand. "Hand me the towel. I'll get out before you have an actual heart attack over me possibly-but-not-really drowning." At least she was very relaxed now. And she was waiting for the towel in case the nudity was part of that hard limit she had hit. Vanessa could be thoughtful and polite when she wanted to be.

Wade reached over to the stack of towels and handed Vanessa one, then turned back around so he was facing the television. "Thanks," he said, still frowning a little. "I'm pretty sure there's people out there that'd kill me if I let you drown in a jacuzzi."

"I've got a friend who threatened to step on the spilled entrails of my last boyfriend if he broke my heart after everyone else had maimed, mutilated and killed him," Vanessa said as she stood and wrapped the towel around her. "So, aye, it's good odds there are people about who would kill you." She stepped out of the jacuzzi and swept up the bundle of discarded clothing on her way down the stairs. Wade got a pat on the shoulder as she walked past him on her way to the bathroom. "And the bloke who's basically my brother is in town for at least the next few months. He'd do worse than kill you if you let me drown." Then she was gone with her dirty clothes nestled in beside her and her backpack swooped up on the way.