Kitty and Pete's Grand Night Out

[tingrin]

Timestamp: Later that same evening, following on from thread Milkshakes and Mutterings

By the time Peter and Kitty got out of the cab that dropped them in the front of the mansion, the rain had just started to fall. The big Russian looked up at the skies thoughtfully and not without a little disappointment. The humidity of the day had gone into the chill of the April evening and he had hoped for a thunderstorm.

He liked thunderstorms.

They had enjoyed an excellent - and amazingly cheap - meal in the Russian quarter and the more comfortable Peter became, the more animated his conversation, until he was nothing at all like the stoic Russian that she thought she had known. Big Pete, it seemed, did in fact know how to have a good time.

She could have sworn she'd even heard him say 'I'll pay the bill' instead of his very precise 'I will pay the bill' - but it could have been her imagination.

On top of everything, he was still holding her hand, almost protectively as they crunched up the gravel to the steps and into the main entrance of the mansion.

"I had a lovely time," he said, after a pause during which neither of them quite knew what to say.

[Shadowcat]

Rain was just beginning to fall as the taxi pulled up to the Institute, and Kitty glanced up into the sky with slight worry - she didn't much like thunderstorms; she'd always been frightened of lightning as a child. Plus, bad weather around the mansion sometimes meant more than the movement of cold fronts; she wondered if Ms. Munroe was at the root of this storm, and whether it would get much worse.

The Russian quarter had certainly been an experience; everyone seemed to know Peter, and Kitty wondered how much time he spent there, and whether it helped his homesickness or made it worse - seeing familiar things always helped while they were happening, for Kitty at least, but then once she got back to her room it always seemed like the longing for home had increased tenfold. But he'd seemed to enjoy himself and even begun to open up more, hardly the withdrawn Peter she'd known. He might even have used a contraction.

It was good, she thought, that one of them was a talker, because Kitty wasn't usually - unless she'd had a lot of sugar or caffeine, which didn't happen much.

They made their way back up towards the mansion and the rain began to pick up a little, Kitty ducking with relief under the portico when they got to the mansion itself.

"I had a lovely time."

Kitty smiled, shy again. "So did I," she said. What were you supposed to do at the end of a first date? The only other one she'd ever had was with John, and that had ended with her storming out a restaurant with singed hair - somehow, she doubted the same behavior would be appropriate.

Impulsively, she reached up as far as she could and pecked Peter on the cheek - almost his jaw, since she couldn't really reach - and darted for the stairs, blushing furiously.

"Thank you!" she called down, thanking G-d she'd worn her flats instead of heels - she'd have fallen over the stairs for sure in her haste in anything else.