Vanessa & Warren | Monday night

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Vanessa finally gets around to calling Warren and they make plans for dinner at his place and him whisking her away to his bed for hours after.

Work was a terrible thing. It cropped up, got in your way and stuck its tongue out at any and all plans you may have decided to have. Then again, it was all Vanessa's own fault. If she hadn't run off with the very pretty man with promises of new challenges then she wouldn't have had to work on the weekend but she had so she did. The cases were small things, easy, some of which could have been done exclusively from the office. But they'd certainly delayed her giving her favorite feathered friend a call once she'd gotten back to town. He'd been non-specific as to when he wanted her to call him anyhow and Vanessa would use that as part of her excuse if need be. When she finally cleared everything that she could, Vanessa flopped over on her couch and fished her phone out of her pocket. Warren's name got looked up and she hit the little green call button while humming to herself.

Warren honestly hadn't expected Vanessa to call the second she got into town - she was, after all, a busy lady, and he knew what happened at work when you disappeared unexpectedly for a few days. It meant you had to play catch up. Warren was at home when she called, wandering around and trying to avoid his work email. It was becoming more and more of a habit recently, Warren avoiding work and finding other things for himself to do. He picked up his phone off his kitchen bench when it started to ring, checking the caller ID before he answered.

"Hey beautiful," he said with a grin.

"Lover boy," she greeted with a purring tone, then promptly had to stifle some terribly girlish giggling. "How are you? I'm hoping you're up to no good so I can live through you vicariously. I've been horribly well behaved today."

"Sadly, I've been pretty well behaved myself." Warren sighed a little melodramatically. "I'm not sure I like this state of events. Just think what people would say if they found out we'd become such model citizens."

"There would be panic in the streets," Vanessa said, smiling to herself. "People would run about with signs about the end being near. We'd lose our reputations as the rebels that we are. The poles would shift. It would suddenly become summer. Birds would fall dead out of the sky. We can't let this continue, can we? We have to think about the others!"

"It would be terribly selfish of us to continue in this manner. I just don't think I could live with myself." Warren pushed himself up onto his kitchen bench, sitting on the edge as he continued to speak. "Which means, of course, we'll have to remedy this situation as soon as possible. Right now I'm thinking take-out, a bottle of wine and locking you in my bedroom for hours until we've thoroughly returned our reputations to their former ruined state."

"Mm...I like this plan of yours. It's a good strategy, there's just a couple of things about it. One, I hate white wine. Two, what kind of take out. And most importantly, three, I find myself in need of your address." Clearly, Vanessa had no qualms with this plan of his. Part of her felt like she should. She hadn't ever been one for casual sex. She sort of felt like she should feel bad about it now. But she didn't. Vanessa just felt very playful about it. And more importantly, she felt like she wasn't in danger of hurting his feelings, which was important after Lex.

"Well, hrmm. How do you feel about red, pick a restaurant and I'll bribe them to deliver if they don't already, and three, I can text you that once we're off the phone." Warren wasn't thinking too hard about how things were falling out with Vanessa - he'd bounced from a six year relationship into an intense but brief fling to being celibate for longer than he'd even thought possible, and now? He was just having fun. It wasn't something he often got to do, and he had no desire to change anything or make it complicated.

"Red is good. Merlot is my favorite. And how about you name me a cuisine and I'll pick it up on my way over," she offered. There was no reason for Warren to bribe people when Vanessa could just stop along the way, after all. "Or you can pick somewhere, order and I'll grab it."

"This deal is acceptable. I'll dig through my wine collection and see what turns up. How do you feel about Italian?" There was an Italian place near Warren's apartment that he adored - they technically didn't do take-out, but they did when Warren asked very nicely.

Vanessa tried to remember the last time she'd had Italian food and came up short. She couldn't remember the last time at all. "Italian sounds great. Italian, wine and my very own lover boy, what else could a girl want?" She laughed quietly and got up off her couch. Vanessa was considering doing something fairly uncharacteristic and showing up in a skirt just to see what effect it caused. "Did you have somewhere specific in mind?"

"Nothing, obviously. It's why I'm New York's most eligible bachelor." There probably was a list out there like that with his name on it, but Warren didn't have a tendency to care about things like that. And he ignored his assistant when she tried to tell him about them. "There's a place not far from mine that is pretty amazing. I'll text you the address for them as well. This may be very boring of me, but I basically can't go past their bolognese. I don't know if they serve anything else, but it's amazing."

"Very adventurous of you," she teased with a laugh. "I'll defer to you, though. Text me addresses and I'll see you soon, yeah?" Now to decide if she wanted to see Warren's jaw potentially drop from the sight of her in a dress. Vanessa was very obviously a tomboy. She looked like the kind of girl who lived in combat boots because she was. Most people assumed she didn't know what a dress was, never mind how to put one on.

"I can be adventurous," he said with a laugh. "How about you choose what we have? I'll call ahead and let them know you can put it on my account." Vanessa paid for their drinks last time, it was his turn to pay. At least as far as he was concerned.

It was almost an hour later before Vanessa showed up at Warren's door. The wait was in large part thanks to waiting for their dinner, but Vanessa had a lovely time charming Italians, learning a bit of the language and getting her Calabrian accent refined. When she pressed down on Warren's doorbell the bag with their food in it dangled from a few fingers and her trenchcoat hung open. Vanessa was wearing a dress that looked like she was wearing nothing more than black lace and tulle, the colored fabric lying under the lace having been changed out for fabric that almost matched the color of Vanessa's skin. It was low cut enough to be distracting, but not enough to be distasteful. It didn't even show a terribly great amount of leg. But she looked like a woman rather than a tomboy for once and the effect was striking.

It really was. It certainly wasn't what Warren was expecting, so when he answered, his jaw did literally drop for a moment. It wasn't that he wasn't used to seeing beautiful women in beautiful dresses, but it definitely was not something he expected to see Vanessa in. He suddenly felt underdressed, currently wearing nothing more than a pair of jeans. Granted, they were designer and fit him like a glove, but it still was put to shame by Vanessa's dress.

"You look amazing," he said honestly, stepping back so she could enter the apartment.

She greeted him with a smile that plainly said she knew how good she looked. "Ciao, caro." The guy at the restaurant had made sure she could say that in what, to her own ears, sounded very much like a bedroom voice.

Vanessa's gait was different in heels. Typically her hips didn't move much from side to side as she walked, but as she entered Warren's place her hips clearly had a mind of their own. There was something about the heels and the dress that made her movements slinky feeling, like she was rubbing silk over bare skin. "I've been buried under work since getting back," she started to explain. "And I thought I'd give you the very rare experience of me in a dress. I thought it fit the Italian and the wine." A playfully affectionate smirk graced her lips. "And the winged lover boy."

It took Warren a moment or two before he, well, actually closed the door and followed her, far too interested in watching her walk. Truth be told, he didn't often spend so much time staring at women in dresses, but it was certainly worth it for Vanessa. He flashed her a smirk in return, picking up her free hand and bringing it up to his lips so he could kiss the back of it. "Well, I will endeavor to be worthy of such effort." He steered them towards the dining area, where the wine and dishes awaited them.

"Non c'è necessario. You had to be worthy in order for me to put forth the effort in the first place." Generally Vanessa had to be coerced into dressing up like a girl. She owned at least a half dozen dresses and another half dozen skirts, but the only skirts people usually saw her in involved dancing. This was an entirely different classification of dress tonight. For his reaction, though, it was entirely worth it.

At the table Vanessa set down the bag and started to pull out the containers inside. "There's bruschetta," she said after opening the first container. "Angel hair with shrimp, asparagus, tomatoes and peppers. Some sort of grilled chicken I was promised would be heaven. And panna cotta." With the containers all set out and opened aside from the panna cotta - which she needed to get whisked away to the fridge - Vanessa looked over at Warren. "Do you regret me ordering yet?"

"Not at all," he said with a smile, having busied himself with pouring them both a glass of wine while she fussed with the containers. "It all smells amazing." He handed her one of the glasses, before waving for her to take a seat. "Make yourself comfortable, I'll get this to the fridge." He scooped up the dessert, not letting her do any more of the work when it came to their meal. Except for the eating of it.

He returned within moments, a hand momentarily brushing over one of her shoulders before he took a seat at the table with her. His seat had been modified so it had a very low back, making it easier for him to sit at it without having to rearrange his wings around it.

"What shall we drink to?" He picked up his glass of wine as he spoke, looking at her with the hint of a grin.

With her coat folded over the back of a chair, Vanessa felt slightly more exposed. It was amazing how pretending to be a lady could become muscle memory. Despite rarely dressing up as herself Vanessa instinctively crossed her ankles and tucked them slightly under the chair after she had seated herself. A faint upturn at a corner of her mouth hinted at a playfulness, though that was nothing new when she was with Warren apparently. She raised her glass to him. "To not behaving too often."

"To not behaving," he agreed with a playful smile of his own, his glass meeting hers with a clink. He hadn't echoed her toast completely on purpose - he knew both of them were too dedicated to their work to honestly misbehave too often, but he was in too much of a playful mood to think too much about what was sensible.

"And never together," she added with a laugh before sipping her wine. As she set her glass down, Vanessa gave Warren a smile. "I hope you know, should our special friendship get out to people I am going to start claiming I single-handedly brought you back to the dark side." Though she wasn't sure if sex with women constituted the light or dark side. She had trouble thinking of herself as being part of any light side so dark it was.

"Well, I was planning on blaming it all on you," Warren said with a grin. "So obviously that works for both of us." Warren wasn't entirely sure what it was about Vanessa that had broken his drought, so to speak, but he certainly didn't mind it at all. He also didn't mind if it came out, though he knew it would surprise more than a few people. He reached for the bruschetta, offering it to her before taking some for himself.

She took two slices of bruschetta and set them on an outside edge of her plate. "We could always say I drugged you," she suggested with another small laugh. "Technically I did. There was a lot of alcohol involved on your end in particular. And you never know, that could have been lust-inducing chap stick I had on." Vanessa had always assumed Warren was gay. She assumed a lot of other people made the same assumption. Claiming things only happened because she had drugged him would at least amuse her while people picked their jaws up off the floor.

Warren shook his head at that, putting down the piece he'd just taken a bite out of and swallowing the mouthful. "And take away from your obvious charms? I don't know if I could do it." Sure, he'd been drunk, but no amount of alcohol could have gotten him in bed with her if he didn't find her attractive, and it hadn't been her somewhat tomboyish ways that had attracted him either.

"My charms are obvious?" she asked, voice full of faux surprise. "I really must work on my subtlety, shouldn't I?" Vanessa picked up one of her slices of bruschetta and carefully wrapped her lips around it as she took a bite. She was wearing lipstick but that was hardly the reason for the care she took when she bit down.

"I think your charms are fine just the way they are," Warren replied with a twinkle in his eyes. "But then I've never been one for subtlety." His gaze lingered a moment on her lips, and he stopped to take a long sip of his wine. That was... more than a little distracting.

She chewed slowly, answering Warren only after she'd swallowed. "Subtlety is underrated. Especially if one appreciates tension. Some sorts of tension are absolutely delicious despite the metallic edge of all that wanting that goes along with it." Vanessa knew lots of people who enjoyed being teased. They loved having what they wanted dangled in front of them just out of reach. Some people only found it infuriating. For Vanessa it all depended on who was being dangled in front of her.

Warren was the sort of person who, when he wanted something (or someone), he pursued it (or them) until he got it. Teasing was just another obstacle to be overcome, and it was fairly rare for Warren to not get what he wanted.

"See," he said with a gleam in his eyes. "I prefer a more direct method. When I want someone, I go after them. If it takes time, it takes time. But I always get what I want." Both Piotr and Jay had had to be coaxed into the relationship, so various reasons, but Warren could be a patient guy.

"You're quite cocky, aren't you?" She was smirking and clearly amused. "I like that in a man, but one day you're going to say that to someone and they will refuse to give you what you want out of pure spite. And because everyone loves to see a cocky man get knocked down a peg or two. They always have the most lovely expressions of surprise when it happens." Vanessa took another bite of her bruschetta, then reached for the container of pasta so she could serve herself and then pass it on to Warren.

"Very much so," Warren replied with a cocky grin. "But then I don't usually admit it so blatantly, for that exact reason. People already tend to assume I always get everything I want because I'm a Worthington." He shrugged, accepting the container from Vanessa. "I don't mind proving them right, to a point. I don't like things being handed to me because of who my father is. I prefer to earn them on my own merits."

Amused, Vanessa asked, "So does 'pretty' qualify as a merit? Because I am sure you get a great many things on the merit of being very, very pretty. Which likely means there are a number of people who will never give you what you want because they don't like pretty." Vanessa wasn't very into pretty, personally. She preferred her girls cute and her men attractive in a distinctly masculine way. Warren was very pretty. She also wasn't keeping him but rather borrowing and playing with him. She liked the wings, though.

"It's a natural advantage I can't really get rid, so I suppose it counts as a merit." He grinned and shrugged. "And I've yet to come across anyone who has denied me on the basis of being too pretty, so I'm not sure such a person even exists." If it did happen, he'd have to re-evaluate then, but for now, he was quite confident in his ability to win over anyone.

"Do you really think anyone would tell you if that was why they were rejecting you?" Vanessa sipped her wine with a thoughtful expression. "I could deny you on the basis of you being too pretty," she told him after she'd put her glass down. "I don't usually do pretty anyway, so I bet it'd be pretty easy." You couldn't just say you could always get what you wanted without expecting to be challenged on it.

"But no one has ever rejected me before, so they've had no cause to." He smirked a little at Vanessa, leaning back in his chair. "Well you could, of course. But I'm not sure you get to claim your prize in that case. My foray into sleeping with women could have just been a drunken mistake." There was a teasing glint in his eyes as he took a sip of his wine, his gaze on her not wavering.

"It could have been. Of course, there will be other prizes and other nights." A somewhat arrogant smile crossed onto her lips. "You're hardly the only person who would enjoy my presence in their bed, after all. Why settle for this prize when there are others to be had?" Then she bit down on her lip. "It's too bad, though. If I had known this might happen I would have bothered to put on knickers."

Warren didn't let himself seem phased, or react too obviously to the comment about her knickers - or lack of them. "It would be a pity," he said mildly, setting down his glass of wine. "I had been intending on introducing you to my very large, very sturdy bed, but if I'm too pretty for you..." He sighed rather melodramatically. "I suppose I'll just have to enjoy it all by myself."

"By yourself? You just said yourself that you've never been rejected so surely you could find someone to bow to your unquestionable beauty and enjoy your bed with you. Or are you not so confident in your draw?" She raised an eyebrow, Vanessa's expression smug with her little challenge.

Warren just laughed at that. "I don't have a problem finding people who want to sleep with me," he said with a broad grin on his face. "But I'm afraid I'm a little more discerning with my tastes. I don't sleep with just anyone." Despite his bravado, the fact that he couldn't go out and sleep with most of New York if he wanted to did bother him, since it was just another stricture on his life dictated by his father. He couldn't risk his status as a mutant being made public, so he only slept with people he could trust in that regard.

"That's terribly inconvenient for you, isn't it?" Vanessa made a tsking sound and shook her head. "To let all that lovely go to waste. Just a shame. But I'm sure you will be busy admiring yourself in the mirror you no doubt have over your bed." She doubted he really had a mirror up there, but if she was going to poke fun of him and his cockiness then why not claim an assumption otherwise?

"Hey now," he said, a mock injured note in his voice. "I said I was cocky. I didn't say I was vain." Okay, so he could be a little vain, but he wasn't that bad. He surveyed the damage they'd done to the meal so far, then picked up the container of chicken they'd yet to attack, offering it to her. "Chicken?" He asked in an off-hand tone, changing the subject without a blink.

"It'd be a shame to let anything I brought along go to waste," she told him as she took the container. The double meaning was slid under and the smile she gave him was all flirtation. Vanessa hadn't bothered to consider whether or not all her playful teasing would see her through with not being bedded by him due to his cocky nature. She would decide that should it come down to it.

"It's true, it would," he said with a smile of his own, remaining non-committal. As far as he was concerned, the ball was in her court - she knew what she was missing out on if she did decide not to sleep with him, and he had enough pride not to push the matter too far. "But as you said, there are others who would enjoy your presence in their beds. So it wouldn't have to."

"And I did get all dressed up, so someone is surely going to have to wind up in my bed tonight." She smiled at him even through the biting of her lower lip. This, like most things with Warren, was play. Thinking anything through too far was unnecessary as far as Vanessa was concerned. They flirted, they teased and once that had resulted in a fun time in her bed. But she could admit to having a bit of a thing for knocking a cocky guy down a peg or two. She wouldn't go out and find someone else to sleep with because she simply wasn't that careless where sex was concerned. Warren was the fluke in her recent sexual history. As much as she would like to say she was going to play the field and hook up and have casual sex with people deep down Vanessa knew she had more leopard spots than chameleon scales where sex was concerned.

"True, and you could certainly find someone far less prettier than I," he said with a smirk, taking a sip from his rapidly dwindling glass of wine. "But I'm quite sure you'd have a far better evening if you stayed in. I may be biased, but it may still be true." He shrugged, his wings flicking out slightly.

"But then how would you ever learn about rejection?" Vanessa looked incredibly amused. Her finger trailed around the edge of her own glass while she considered him. "But I suppose I could always help teach you that lesson another day, couldn't I?"

"If you think it's necessary." He finished off the last of his wine, before smirking again. "But I have to say, the prize for being the first person to say no to me is far less fun that the prize for being the woman to break my drought."

"But both have prizes, do they not?" Vanessa was generally not built for casual sex. Warren was her exception and she wondered how long it would be before she reverted back to more typical behavior. No doubt that prize for turning him down would be there when that time came. "But who am I to say no to the better prize when it's dangled in front of me."

"Who indeed?" He asked, an eyebrow raised. "I'm not entirely sure what the lesser prize would involve. Possibly just dinner, and then a lonely bed later this evening." Something he was, regrettably, far too used to, and something he didn't want to return to if he could help it. He honestly didn't expect anything more from... whatever this was, but he could feel it wasn't leading to something more serious. Which might bother him later on, but for now, he was finding he was quite okay with things not being serious.

Lonely beds. Vanessa had gotten rather used to her bed being empty of company in the past few months. Even before the break up Lex hadn't been around as much as he once had and he had been completely absent for months before that. Vanessa was intimately familiar with empty beds and she had a strong preference for company in bed, at least for actual sleeping. Company in bed for things not relating to sleeping was preferred as well, but that she could live without.

She took the last bite of chicken from her plate and nodded. "I think the dinner is the prize and the cold bed is not so much prize but punishment, hm? A sacrifice for being a teacher and refusing your charms."

"Possibly," he acceded with an incline of his head. "There are those that do say teaching is an ultimately unfulfilling path." Warren wasn't one of them - he'd been a teacher at the school once upon a time, and while he couldn't imagine returning to that role anytime soon, he had enjoyed it at the time.

"I don't know, I always enjoyed imparting knowledge." She gave him a self-satisfied smile. Vanessa had taught self-defense. Teaching kids to block and hip throw had been a world of fun. How could that not be fulfilling. "Though, one could argue that furthering your introduction of relations with the fairer sex is also quite an educational opportunity. And perhaps a rarer one."

"That's true. Anyone could bring me down a peg or two, but you are the only woman who has taken me to their bed in..." He paused, thinking about it. "Well, for longer than I'd like to think about. I'm sure I'm far more rusty in this area than I'd like to think."

Grinning a bit, Vanessa slid her chair back and stood up. Her movement over the small distance between herself and Warren was the slow, calculated motion of a predator. Vanessa wasn't feeling half as predator as she looked like. Warren was hardly prey. Prey was never so willing. A hand trailed along the upper edges of his wings until she was on the opposite side of him, then she held out a hand. "Then I've much ground to cover in tonight's lesson and shouldn't waste any time, should I?"

Warren shivered a little at the hand over his wings, his head turning to watch her move. There was something very sleek about her movements, a predatory edge that surprisingly reminded him a little of Jay. But it wasn't his ex he was thinking about when he took her hand, or when he stood up, or when he pulled her in for a kiss. No, that was all her, the restraint he'd managed to employ shattering now that he'd actually touched her. There was no alcohol to cloud his reactions this time - he wanted her, pure and simple, and he planned on letting her teach him plenty this evening.