steal me with a kiss [c]

Joze wasn't sure why she was here. At the mall. She was a teenager girl, and for her, the stereotype wasn't far off - she liked shopping. She liked it a lot. But rarely did she get the opportunity to spend money. She had gotten paid fairly recently, but most of the time she preferred to save up the money she earned for something more practical, which was to help her family. Technically she was doing that just now - looking for some household appliances for the good of the family. At the mall of all things. She was just here, for goodness sake, yesterday on that disastrous trip to the mall with Fae. Not looking for a repeat performance.

As she looked through the shops, Joze couldn't help but glare enviously towards her fellow shoppers. They paid her little mind, but she couldn't help but be jealous that they could buy all the clothes and accessories that they wanted and she had... well, a fair amount of money on her too. But she couldn't spend it, not yet, not until she bought everything that her family could possibly need.

And as much as Joze liked to window shop, she knew with money in her pocket that she wouldn't just be window shopping. So she did her best to ignore all the cute clothes and convinced herself it was for the greater good that she didn't spend money on clothes and instead on something that would benefit her financially. She was a little thirsty too, and she hadn't brought water with her. Well, the food court was close enough, so what was a little money spent on a smoothie? She was sure she'd still have enough for those household appliances, anyways.

Cue one smoothie in her possession. As tempted as Joze was to drink it immediately, she held off. After all, she didn't want to have it gone too soon. Maybe, maybe in a little bit. She looked at her surrounding, hopefully locating a shop that could conceivably sell her maybe a but no avail. Maybe she should have looked somewhere else besides the mall because there were just so many outfits and not enough money for her to spend. Bad decision on her part.

"Hey Kittim!" Wait, hey Kittim? Perhaps Joze's mouth had gotten ahead of her because she hadn't even realized that it was indeed a Kittim carrying shopping bags, being the girl that he spiritually was. She wished she could buy things like he was. But what surprised her a little more was how... not rude and angry she sounded. And as much as she tried to ignore him, a couple of steps forward and she was already pretty much in his presence. And... she felt weird. Not weird like sick but... she wasn't angry at him like she always was? What was up with that?

"I h-- How are you?" Why couldn't she say it?! It was true, she hated him, but why couldn't she say it?! She tried forcing it out, even if it was out of the blue like this, but... she was being nice? Why was she blushing? And why was her heart pounding so hard like this?

---

sorry, edited for overlook on my part from dates.

tagged: kittim, joze, canis. time: 5th may, 1PM. speech: paris. notes: four months late with starbucks.

Ah the mall. His second home, his kingdom. A bustling mecca of shameless consumerism. Paris just wanted to sink his fingers into that materialism like a physical thing and let it pulse through his veins like a drug. There was seldom a time he felt more powerful than with the roar of the crowd in his ears and credit card in hand and this time Rhiannon couldn’t even jump down his throat about it. He’d been damnably good about his spending lately. Objectively. The online shopping thing had been getting a little out of hand, but no one had to know about that. This was his treat to himself for being sort-of-mostly-good.

He didn’t have to meet up with anyone until five, so he could do this at a leisurely pace (at least for him). Friends knew him well enough to steer clear of situations that involved him and serious shopping of any kind. He became a miniature tour de force, and they had all laughingly declined to be dragged around for four hours on a fashion feeding frenzy, as funny as they seemed to think it was. So he was flying solo until the evening movies started playing, in which event he was going to meet up with his wayward deserters and drown himself in a little sea of popcorn and shopping bags and bask in the afterglow of a day well spent. In the meantime he was just enjoying the weight of fresh purchases on his arm and the satisfaction of all the heads he was turning.

Wandering off to the side to set down his few bags and fire off some texts, Paris startled at a cry of hey Kittim!, and he was pretty sure he felt his heart slide right down into his stomach. No way. Whoever had yelled had to have been calling someone else. A Kristin or a Kim maybe. Even if he’d heard right, there was no reason for it to be the same Kittim from last week, right? Why was he looking around anyway when he could just keep walking and go on pretending that the shockingly spoiled, insolent, insufferably cocky blonde he was thinking of didn’t exist outside the realm of one photoshoot?

Zeroing in on a commotion just down the hall, Paris found both good news and bad news awaiting him. Bad news: behold Kittim Curtis in all his prissy, effeminate glory. Good news: the blonde was apparently trying to rock a Styrofoam smoothie cup nestled in his hair, pink slush dripping down his face. And it was priceless. Paris couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. “Well look who it is,” he called cheekily. “Come to mingle with us mere mortals, Kit-kat darling? I’m loving the look.” Stalking over with bags in tow, all pretty petite grace and barely-stifled schadenfreude, Paris smiled a little Cheshire-cat smile up at Kittim. “How come you never call? Apparently you can’t keep yourself together without me, so I don’t see why you’d put yourself through the trouble.”

He picked at a soaking strand of Kittim’s blonde hair, limp with slush. Huh, that was weird. Kittim was almost… cuter than the last time Paris had seen him. At the photoshoot. The one time they had ki-… no. Why the hell was he thinking about that? He’d had way better kisses with way hotter, way less annoying guys that had not been for work. There was nothing worth remembering. Paris dragged his eyes away from Kittim’s lips, reddening. He rummaged around in his bag for a moment instead, producing a travel pack of makeup wipes that he shoved against Kittim’s chest. “Thank god I’m around to save the day, right? At least you can make the walk of shame to the bathroom without totally embarrassing yourself,” he covered airily.

Joze got a little startled. A lot startled. That blush soon turned into embarrassment and then flushed to anger. "Hey, watch it!" Some kid (who actually wasn't more than a couple of years younger than her) had tripped over her, knocking her over some. At least from that she knew she was still capable of being mad at someone. Which was odd, seeing as she didn't feel the familiar annoyance and anger she usually felt over Kittim. What the hell was wrong with her today? And she was nervous, for some reason, as though she were confronting someone she liked. But of this little group that had gathered, she only knew Kittim, and she didn't like Kittim in that way - or at all.

Under normal circumstances, Joze would have laughed at Kittim, with the smoothie all over him, but today all she could feel was sympathy. But for some reason a foreign feeling was welling up in her chest as some other guy came up to Kittim (just as feminine, it seemed) and started... unspeakable things. They weren't really unspeakable, but what she was thinking was near unspeakable. Why did she have the feeling of wanting to rip that pink-haired boy away from Kittim and then drag him away for herself? No kidding, this was really weird.

"Hey! I, that.. Don't say that!" Joze was blushing before, but she was flushing much harder from embarrassment. Why did Kittim have to say that? She didn't want other people to know, and she turned away for a moment trying to compose her fluttering heart. "H-here, take it." She held out her smoothie. "You wanted another one, right? My apology for throwing ice cream at you." Joze was feeling kind of... shy, was that the word? Why was she being so nice to Kittim, he was a horrible person!