Lick My Lips. Kiss My Fist. {Invite}

[Meredith Beckendorf]

For Your Consideration
.I've seen you watchin'
Pawns: Meredith Beckendorf, Carmen Liddell, & Elliot Wright
.I've been watchin' you all night
Status: Private, Active
.Oo, where you goin'?
Current Count: 3,552
.Baby, won't you stay, stay with me, alright?
Time: Present
.I know you need me
Place: Frankie's Cafe
.Well, I need you
Style: Tight ponytail up high & Down
.Tonight

Meredith was in a bad mood before she had wrote Carmen, but had happily closed her laptop. Christian was an ass, but he was well-intentioned, and Carmen was right: Jack wasn't going to change how he acted around her just because of some stupid gossip blog. She sat up from her bed and moved around the room, fluttering around to pick up her outfit as she tried not to bother her roommate with the earbuds in her ears on her laptop. She pulled on a pair of her pants, did away with the slip she had been sleeping in and tucked in her undershirt. A lace corset, and her zipped up jacket finished the clothes. She grasped a brush, pulled it violently through her hair and twisted it at the top, sticking a very expensive comb in to hold the ponytail there. A five minute assembly of what she was wearing was followed with a thirty minute application of her make-up, leaving the goth girl in her stereotypical vanilla lipstick and thick black eyeliner. She gave a brief excuse as to why she was going out so late and zipped out the door and out.

Across to the younger girl's dorm, she tromped carefully through the soft grass so as not to catch her heels in the loose dirt beneath it. They managed to get out without waking her roommate, though the daring escape from the window was a little unnecessary, but so very Carmen. The streets were lit with night lamps, flickering in and out in the soft English wind. Two women out in the night might have beckoned some bad crowds, but Meredith was a .. big girl.

The cafe door swung open to an almost empty 24-7 eatery. They had their choice of booths or tables, and Meredith was content to allow Carmen to choose the area they would be eating at. The tile floor soaked up the red and blue glows from the hooded lamps, giving a soft ambiance to the place. It was a dating spot, with a bar, that was quite a bit different than the usual haunt for drinkers, but still attracted some of the more.. odd crowds. Like the undoubtedly homeless group in the corner seeing how long they could stick around on one cup of coffee.

[Carmen Liddell]

outfiiiit

Carmen would be lying if she said that she didn't secretly enjoy the adventure of sneaking through a window instead of a door. Unfortunately, it wasn't really the same thrill when her window sneaking buddy was her best friend instead of an attractive badboy, but she tried to keep on the bright side of things. It also might have been better to have the attractive badboy whilst walking through the dark streets of England, but Carmen wasn't too worried. Not getting attacked was all about walking with confidence and, as she pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it, she was pretty sure that no one was going to attack her and Meredith.

They made it to the restaurant with no problems and Carmen hastily led them to a semi-secluded booth. This was obviously not the time for her to sit all up in the atmosphere and get them conversations with everyone around them; this was the time to eat. With each other. GIRL POWER.

She figured that it might be nice to not smoke while they ate so, as soon as they were seated, she stubbed her cigarette out and dropped it in the ashtray before grinning up at Meredith.

"Soooo, this is fun," she said, glancing around appreciatively. "We snuck off campus, made it to a sketchy restaurant. We're positively criminal!" She could only hope that their possible criminal status did not entice anyone, especially the group of homeless people, over to their table for a chat about their obvious criminal tendencies. Carmen would not really be too terribly opposed to breaking a few hearts tonight. It was, after all, Meredith's night. And she deserved to not have her friend get hit on.

...Not that it was written in stone that she would get hit on, but it wasn't like it would be weird. Carmen was clearly awesome.

[Meredith Beckendorf]

The bigger girl wandered behind Carmen until they took a seat at a booth in a slightly secluded area. The diner's lights made it so Meredith wasn't doing her normal squinting--it was an appreciated minor detail in her life, that the lights were soft lit and Meredith didn't feel uncomfortable underneath them. She rested her arms on the table, laughing a bit at her own stupidity earlier, and then finally came to a comfortable position with her cheek against the heel of her palm.

"I keep wondering who the heck knows me and Jack well enough to want us to be together; you know, that.. person arguing with Christian." She glanced over to behind the bar, watching the waitress scurry around for her things to inevitably come serve them. It was pretty late, so she was obviously doing a bit of resting from her game plan. Meredith could appreciate that--perhaps she should apply for a part-time job here.. Nah. Her foster parents provided her with plenty of money to get what she needed--clothes and food and some extra crap like going out to eat once in a while; like now.

Her tongue slid across her lower lip, glossing the black lipstick there as she tasted the hint of vanilla, "You know; I'd like just once to be kissing someone that wasn't an accident or a hoax. I'm sure I'm cute enough to merit some sort of boyfriend; Jack's way too popular to like me--I should.. broaden my options, don't you think?" Meredith actually didn't like anyone on a first glance, which was both a blessing and a curse. It meant that the only people she could deign to sleep with were her friends, which was awkward, to say the least. It also meant that she didn't get any over-the-hill crushes on people who would treat her like trash.. which was a benefit she could live with in lieu of not dating for a while.

"Maybe I should try internet hook-ups. Personality up front first makes for an easy sell of my body structure." Meredith liked how she looked, despite all her ragging on herself. She just realized that, unfortunately, other people didn't, which made it hard to earn lovers. She knew there were people out there that did like girls who were her size, but she didn't know any of them. She'd thought, initially, that Christian might have when they first met, but the idea had flitted away after a few more meetings. He was just dense and an egomaniac, if not a little cute when you talked to him a lot.

[Carmen Liddell]

"Do you even have a lot of friends?" Carmen asked, lifting an eyebrow. It wasn't like she was trying to be mean or anything--it was a legitimate question that would provide her the background for when she carried on to say, "Because it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. We could make a list. Ooorrr we could go through your phone. OOH OOH!" She rapped the table with a few of her fingers in the excitement of a new idea. "OR WE COULD FIGURE OUT WHOSE SCREENNAMES WE KNOW!!" She smirked, since this was obviously brilliant, and leaned back in her chair.

As Meredith spoke again, Carmen frowned at her. She loved her friend dearly, but that didn't mean that there weren't some things she had to say [no one was perfect, after all], and now seemed to be the time to say them. Of course, they weren't bad--Carmen did hang out with Meredith for a reason, after all--, but she wasn't sure she wanted to hear them.

"You're adorable," she said honestly. "You just don't play up the cute factor very much." Meredith would probably pummel someone for telling her this, but Carmen was [almost] positive that, since it was her that was saying these things, the violence would be foregone. "You could wear a color instead of...you know...death. All the time." She shrugged, reaching for her cigarettes as more of a defense mechanism, since she wasn't intending to actually smoke one. "I could help you. We could go shopping. Thrift stores are beautiful things." Carmen, unlike her friend, did not have very good funding for casual shopping.

At the suggestion of interet dating, she wrinkled her nose. She may not have been computer illiterate, but that didn't mean she wanted to spend any more of her life on technology than was strictly necessary.

"That would be so sketchy," she pointed out. "What if the guy turned out to be like...fifty? With a pedophile record? Or an undercover cop? And," she continued, pointing her carton of cigarettes at her sternly, "there is nothing wrong with your body structure. Just the things you structure around your body. Which are also not that bad...in small doses." Pleased that she had gotten that out, she set her carton back down and gave Meredith a challenging [but loving?] look.

[Meredith Beckendorf]

Meredith found Carmen's excitement both exhausting and addictive. She held some cathartic aura that made everyone around her want to hop up and down and squeak happily. When she asked if Meredith had a lot of friends, the fact that it might have been an insult didn't even occur to the older girl, "Nope. I don't have a lot of friends--and we could go through my phone, but it would have a bunch of acquaintances from god-knows-where. I've got someone named Stevie on here--and I don't know who it is, but I don't want to delete it in case I ever remember 'cause I wanted his number at that moment." Meredith sat up straight as the waitress began toward their table, brushing her bangs back for a moment only to have them fall back into place again after she was done with the arbitrary motion.

At the mention of a 'cute factor', Meredith tried not to choke on the glass of ice water she had just picked up to take a sip of that the waitress had just run up and dashed off after. The girl was obviously a little tired after a long shift, since she forgot to ask for what they wanted for their drinks on the initial go-'round. She coughed a few times to clear her throat and padded at the corner of her watering eyes until she could squeak out around the burning sensation in her throat, "Help me? Carmen, black isn't death--and I adore you. You really are cute, but I'm not--I'm a lot of things, sexy, dominating, altogether hot, but cute isn't one of them. False advertisement is a crime on the TV stations and it's a recipe for disaster in relationships."

The rest of the conversation had been absorbed, but not really pertinently conceived. After all, she wasn't really considering online dating, and if she was, Carmen being against it wouldn't have stopped her from doing so. The waitress came back around and Meredith paused to put up her order and handed the waitress the menu that had been on the table since the beginning of this conversation. She reached over and pulled the ice water back to her mouth and sipped some of it down, imagining in slight horror the idea of her in any of Carmen's very cute, but very colorful, outfits.

"And, besides, I don't want a guy who doesn't like me for who I am, anyway, and I like black. A lot." She gave Carmen a pointed stare, knowing her friend really liked the idea of dressing her up. After all, girls did that kind of thing.

Meredith wasn't at all perturbed by the idea of Carmen disagreeing with her outfit choice--what perturbed her was that Carmen usually could convince Mere to do anything once just by trying hard, which would result in the older girl feeling highly awkward for a day or two, she imagined.

[Elliot Wright]

The red-brown liquid tasted like petrol in Elliot's mouth, and it burnt like hot coals as he forced a gulp of it down his throat. Spluttering and wincing through tearing red eyes, the young man stared in horror at the ornate metal hip flask from whence the terrible substance had arisen. How many times had he seen his step father take swig after swig from that blasted container? It never seemed to phase the old man either; no wincing, no spluttering, no exclamations of "sweet baby Jesus that tastes bloody awful!". If that poncey twat could drink the stuff then it couldn't be that difficult. After all people said whisky was an acquired taste. Perhaps all Elliot had to do was acquire it mentally and not just physically (à la stealing it from his step father's liquor cabinet before arriving at the Academy).

He brought the hip flask to his lips once again, though this time he made sure to only take a sip from it. He winced, though this time not too severely, and his spluttering had decreased to almost inaudible. This whisky stuff wasn't too bad, especially if you pretended you were drinking something that tasted way better, like Coke or Fanta or something. After taking a few more sips from the flask of yummy Coca Cola, Elliot screwed the lid back on it and placed it in the inner pocket of his jacket. Then, making his way to his open dormitory window, he clambered his way out of the building in what he hoped was a very manly manner.

He had overheard a bunch of the older years chatting about sneaking out that night to a club in town. It seemed that sneaking out was a regular occurrence for the cooler students, and Elliot hoped to become one of them. That was why he was currently wiping the mud from his jeans from his fall out his dormitory window and walking, rather wobbly, away from the Academy building. It was also why he had the whisky sloshing away in the flask in his pocket. Elliot Wright was going to mingle!

The town wasn't too far away, Elliot could see the lights glistening in the darkness. He walked briskly towards them, his hopes high. He was definitely going to be cool now! Sneaking out of school: check. Drinking alcohol: check. Drinking alcohol underage: check check check.

His hopes however had lowered slightly when, after fifteen minutes or so of walking, he reached the town. It wasn't really the thriving party place he was expecting. The streets weren't full of the young and hip ready for a night out, in fact it was mainly full of old wheezing men standing around in the shadows. Elliot quickly hastened his pace.

It was then that he saw them: two girls walking into the restaurant just ahead. He could only really see the backs of them but he could tell they were only a few years older than himself, definitely school age. And since the only school around the area was Somnium, it was safe to assume they were fellow schoolmates. Elliot quickly followed them in and sat at a booth a few metres away from them. The redhead was all right looking, but the other one was a bit too big for his taste. But what the hey, beggars can't be choosers, and at least they were upper years. Elliot took a swig from his hip flask (holding in the splutters this time) and tried to look as cool as a person possibly can look whilst reading a menu and holding in tears from drinking excessively strong whisky.

[Carmen Liddell]

Carmen nodded her understanding of this--it wasn't like she hadn't been there before as well, although she also tended to go on arbitrary deleting sprees. Power trip, she supposed. "Well, we can probably safely assume that it's not Stevie," she pointed out, glancing over at the waitress as she brought water. She was going to point out to said waitress that she was going to order a soda and, thus, by just deciding they wanted water, she had lost money, but could not be bothered and so shook her head slightly and turned back to Meredith.

She waited patiently while she coughed, smirking a bit at the fact that she had so startled and alarmed her, but prepared to offer help...eventually. Fortunately, she didn't need it, so Carmen did not feel guilty when she rolled her eyes at all of the nonsense that Meredith was spouting now. "While you are quite right about how cute I am, you are so wrong about everything else." It may have sounded insulting, but Carmen was honest. And besides, she wasn't done talking. "Suuure, you're sexy and dominating and all of that crap, but I don't think many people find all black makeup that...enchanting." She pursed her lips in the general direction of Meredith's black lipstick. "And no one said that you couldn't wear black. You can totally wear black. It's elegant and sexy." She winked. "But you can also wear a bit of color. Maybe red. Red is also sexy. And you can wear things that don't make you look like a dominatrix. Because not everyone wants to be whipped in bed." She wiggled her eyebrows, still smirking and totally not going to let the issue go.

...Maybe she'd let it go a little bit. But not for long and only because she was sure that the kid in the booth over was spying on them. Well, perhaps spying was a bit too harsh, but he was definitely looking. Had he been older, Carmen probably would have given him the finger for interrupting their girltalk eating session [in which they had yet to eat...where the hell was the waitress?], but since he did look fairly boyish, she had to give him a little credit for having the nerve to even approach as close as he had.

Glancing back at Meredith, she grinned. "Don't turn and look, but look at that guy over there." She glanced at the boy again and gave him a little wink before turning back...again. "Poor boy doesn't know what he's gotten into, going out at night alone. He looks about ten." Giving a little chuckle, she took a sip from her water. "Anyway, you could be cute if you tried just a little."

[Meredith Beckendorf]

Meredith slid her tongue tauntingly over her lower lip as Carmen made reference to it, tasting the sweet vanilla while still being slightly arrogant if not a bit obnoxious to her friend, but as usual, the smaller girl was convincing Meredith. She was just so positively forthright and confident, it was hard for Meredith to not give her the benefit of the doubt. "It is probably not going to change anything, you know. People don't look at me and see, 'goth chick'--" She left the rest to be finished off. People looked at her and assessed her weight category, and that was all. She shrugged her shoulders and made a whip cracking sound at Carmen, winking and giggling to herself as she listened to the girl explain her side of the argument, which was compelling.

"I do wear red. I have red corsets... and some acid green accessories and highlights, too." She suspected the accessory part wasn't really going to cut it, as some color that brought out the black of her outfit wasn't really an appropriate response. Her brown eyes slipped to the side to observe the boy Carmen had noticed--she was much more aware of the lookers-on than Meredith ever would be. Mere had a good bit of sense for danger, but not for just... annoyance. "He does look ten." She giggled at Carmen and leaned her cheek against her hand, "Go figure, the homeless and the very young are out on the town tonight!" Her voice was kept low--she didn't really want to insult the boy nearby. After all, it wasn't really fair to be insulting him when she knew nothing about him, no matter how bad a day it had been.

Her phone buzzed and she flipped it out of her sidebag, opening it up and rolling her eyes, ".. Message from Christian. Dumbass." She flipped it closed before even reading it, opting instead to avoid irritating herself instead. "He can suffer a bit--little brat." She stuck her tongue out playfully as she slipped it back inside the folds of her bag and waited patiently for the orders to come up.

She slipped the water back to her lips and focused back on Carmen, raising her eyebrows, "So, if I let you dress me up.. how long until you're satisfied I've adequately tried out your idea?" She licked her lips for another reason this time, clearing the droplets of water that had gathered on the surface of the waterproof lipstick, "And we can hit somewhere not-thrift-store.. Not that there's anything wrong with thrift stores, but I find them difficult to locate objects in my size, so we could save time hitting a store made for girls like me."

[Elliot Wright]

Elliot continued to peer over at the two girls, though in a way that he hoped was incredibly inconspicuous. It wasn't like he was being a stalker or anything. The restaurant he had ventured into was not the most exciting of places to spend an evening, and the majority of the customers were of the old and greying kind. There wasn't really very many things for him to look at, and even when he tried his line of gaze always ended up wandering back towards the girls. After all they were pretty difficult not to notice; one wearing gothic black clothes and make-up, and the other sporting bright red hair and accessorrised with colourful jewellery. They were an obvious pair.

Elliot took another swig from his hip flask, hoping that the action appeared as more like that of a sophisticated young adult and not of a teenage boy who stole alcohol from his step-father's cabinet. He was getting pretty good at this drinking business by now anyway, his eyes had barely begun to tear during that last attempt. He felt manly pride well up inside of him. Unfortunately, before his manly pride had a chance to grow to its fullest extent, Elliot heard someone clear their throat to his left. Quickly shoving the flask back into his jacket pocket, he looked up to see a waitress staring down at him, her finely-plucked eyebrow raised up in a questioning manner.

"Is that alcohol you got there?" she asked, disdain evident in her croaky voice.

"N-no Ma'am," Elliot replied with a curt shake of the head.

"How old are you?" the waitress asked, her eyebrow rising even further up her forehead that Elliot thought it would disappear entirely in her hairline.

"Eighteen," Elliot lied, cringing as he did so. She obviously wasn't going to believe him. Elliot was a good liar but not that good. Luckily for him, however, the waitress was a disgruntled enough employee to not question him any further on his blatant string of fabrications, instead she simply took his order (a hot chocolate and a blueberry muffin, very adult) and went on her way. He assumed it was nearing the end of her shift and she didn't want to get caught up in a case of under-age drinking.

Breathing a sign of relief Elliot slunk back in his seat, noticing that he had caused a bit of a stir in the restaurant. Sucking in his cheeks a little and straightening out his hair, he attempted to look the age he had lied himself into being.