Chapter Text
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He was a nice guy.
Seriously, he was.
Charming, sweet, polite. Had a decent job. Broken up with his girlfriend of five years almost a year ago, and was ready to date again. Had a kitten that he had picked up from a rescue center. A regular volunteer at the local homeless shelter.
He was so. Very. Nice.
Maybe, this was why she found him so utterly, unforgivably boring.
Bulma sighed as she reached for her straw, absent-mindedly stirring her margarita as her blind date sipped his latte.
“So, Bulma,” her date, Kai, began. “What about you? What do you usually do over the weekends?”
Honestly? Sleep till noon, binge watch TV dramas, catch up on science articles, and sometimes drop by the city’s secret swingers’ club so she can try on her sluttier dresses and maybe find a cute guy to ‘dance’ with. But alas, it seemed that her standards were too high, that she had never quite managed to set her eyes on a good enough target.
She was painfully single, and her friends wanted to help “remedy” that. Hence, the set-up.
“Well,” she mulled, deciding to just make shit up. She was never gonna see this man – or the cat hair on his light gray suit jacket – ever again, anyway. “I enjoy going on wild hunts for magical artifacts.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” he said blandly, his tidy brown hair perfectly in place as he nodded. “What else?”
“Sometimes,” more like almost never, she thought as she spoke, her free hand unconsciously clutching at the dream catcher-shaped pendant that hung low on her chest. “I cook. I’m not very domestic.”
“Well, not everyone is a good cook,” he said as she bent down to take a sip of her drink. “But I am sure that with practice, you could learn. You would make a good wife, then.”
She almost choked. “Ex-excuse me?”
“Yeah, if you learn to cook, you’d be great.”
Her eyes rolled so far back into her head that she thought she could see her own brain matter. She thought about strangling him with the thin tie around his neck, but ultimately decided that he wasn’t even worth the effort. “I wasn’t aware that learning to cook was a standard for measuring my worth.”
Bulma turned her gaze away as he started speaking again, pushing her blue bangs back from where they were trying to poke out her eyes. She disinterestedly scanned the surroundings, scouting out the place as she contemplated on whether she could risk jumping out the nearest window of the upscale restaurant they were dining in.
It was only three floors up. It shouldn’t be too hard, right?
She had almost resigned herself to pretending to listen to Kai again, when she spotted something… interesting.
His eyes were the first things she noticed. Dark and brooding, narrowed into impatient slits as he watched over the crowd, a lion hunting for its elusive prey. Unfathomably deep, they flitted from one place to another, expertly taking stock of his surroundings, before again training with laser-like focus on a single point before him.
A square jaw bordered his sharply-angled features, contrasting with lips that seemed almost too pinkish to belong to a man. His nose was straight, belligerently turned up at whatever it was he had been watching. His brows were thick and dark, a complement to his black hair that was swept up into a wildly-controlled wave.
She quickly scanned down, taking note of the wide shoulders hidden beneath a sleek black suit jacket. He had on a deep blue button-down shirt, the first button undone, and she raised a brow as she made out the defined dips of his collarbones, a hint of his bronze chest teasing her view. His thick arms were very tightly encased in long sleeves that were possibly just a few seconds away from ripping apart, outright.
Her lips quirked up into a grin as she watched him scowl down at his watch, before he lifted his gaze to stare almost violently at the entrance door. His expression grew even stormier, and she quickly deduced that he was waiting for someone who was already rather late.
She turned back to her date again, absently nodding and smiling at his words, as she kept the hot stranger in her peripheral vision.
It seemed, something rare had just occurred: Bulma Briefs had found a potential target.
She would give him a few more moments alone, and then…
She would pounce.
He was going to murder Kakarot.
Vegeta glared heatedly at the door, willing it to open and let in a mystery woman dressed in a blue and white striped dress. The blind date had been set up by his meddling buffoon of a soon-to-be-dead cousin, who had gleefully asserted that he needed to “meet a girl” so he would “lighten up”.
It wasn’t that he was excited for the date, per se. He just didn’t want to admit that he had been foolishly wasting the past half hour or so, waiting for a date that was going to stand him up.
It was inconceivable, and frankly, rather humiliating.
He looked down at his left wrist to check the time again, before picking up his wine flute and knocking back another small gulp. He had half a mind to just order a whole bottle, get himself wasted and just get the hell out of the snooty restaurant.
He turned his glare away from the door again, looking around and half-hoping that there would be a sniper around to just put an end to his misery, when something strange caught his eye.
The woman’s hair was such a peculiar shade of blue.
Vegeta didn’t think he had ever seen hair of such a bright shade. It rather reminded him of a waterfall, one that wildly clashed with the blood red material of her short dress.
He found his gaze drifting downwards, to eye her long, pale legs; a lapse in sanity that he blamed on his utter boredom and festering irritation.
The man she was with chattered endlessly, and he curiously peeked, noticing that the woman had slumped down on her end of the table and was avidly sipping her drink.
Perhaps, he was not the only one miserable in the entire damn restaurant.
Vegeta stretched, barely suppressing a yawn, before he turned his attention back to the door. The whole night was a pointless waste of time.
“…And that is why it is important that a woman stay at home to watch the kids, and the husband be in charge of the finances. You know what I’m saying?”
Bulma yawned behind her hand, rapidly going beyond miffed and well into being pissed off. Seriously, the nerve of this man! Apparently, Kai was not a real nice guy. He was one of those guys who thought themselves nice, eventually revealing the soul of a misogynist, fedora-wearing mansplainer.
That was it. She was out.
With a wide, sarcastic grin, Bulma stood, lifting her purse. “Excuse me. I need to go to the ladies’ room.”
She turned away, and in her ire, she purposely let him watch as she pointedly walked in the exact opposite direction of the toilets. Along the way, however, her eyes once again fell upon a particular table hosting a solitary, dark-haired man. Before she could really consider a more sensible course of action, Bulma found her steps moving determinedly in that direction.
He had completely zoned out, simmering in irritation as he finally accepted that his date was not coming. He had been stood up! His hands were balled into fists on the table, and he was about to wave up at the nearest waiter to get his bill when a wall of red suddenly entered and blocked his line of sight.
A small, pale hand moved quickly across the table, unerringly reaching for his wine flute, swiping it from right under his nose. He shook his head, startled, his eyes widening slightly as he followed the hand that now held his drink.
The flute was lifted up to lush, red lips, and he felt his jaw drop as he watched the whole thing get tilted back, his remaining wine gulped up in a single swallow. The lips then formed into a smirk, and he felt his face redden in outrage as he recognized the woman’s strange blue hair. She sat on the chair across from him, apparently taking his stunned silence as his consent for her to join him.
“You- what the-” he sputtered, staring at her in stunned indignation as she smoothed down the skirt of her red dress and made herself comfortable, nonchalantly placing the empty wine flute back down before him.
She leaned down, elbows on the table, supporting her chin as she smiled wickedly at him. Her low-cut neckline revealed a more than decent amount of cleavage, the round globes made more conspicuous by the round pendant that hung right between her breasts. The sight very nearly distracted him from his righteous fury.
“You have good taste in wine,” she commented, before she lifted her hand to wave at a nearby waiter. “Could you bring us two more glasses of this wine, please? Thank you.”
He stared disbelievingly at her, registering the sound of her voice; at face value, she was loud, and rather obnoxious, but her tone held a small, bell-like inflection that seeped into his ears like honey.
She was smirking at him as he picked his jaw up off the ground, and he blinked, before he felt his brows furrow low over his eyes.
“Who the hell are you, and what do you think you’re doing?” he growled, his ire rising when she did not shrink back in apprehension as expected, but did quite the opposite: her lips spread into a wider grin, her bright blue eyes sparkling mischievously beneath her fringe.
“My name is Bulma,” she chirped, extending a hand to him, holding it out steadily, boldly. He stared heatedly at her dainty hand, realizing that she would not put it down until he caved and reached out to shake it.
He did so petulantly, clasping her hand in his, and as he did, he noted that her touch was warm, rather warmer than he would have expected. It was surprisingly foreign, infusing their first contact with a shockingly memorable sensation that made his eyes go wide.
She felt something too, it seemed, as her eyes diverted momentarily to their joined hands before darting back to look into his. She was an attractive woman, he would give her that, with pinkish cheeks and well-proportioned features, and an overabundance of arrogance to back her up.
“I’m here,” she continued, “to be your date for the evening.”
He stared at her as she pulled her hand back, resting it primly on her lap as the waiter came back with their wine. She thanked him quietly, before turning her attention back to him.
Vegeta was still rather confused, and he lifted his hand to point dumbly at the equally-stunned man that she had left behind. “Your date is over there.”
She scoffed. “My previous date was over there. My current date is here.”
He frowned. “And what made you think that I needed a date tonight?”
“Oh please,” she laughed. “You’ve been glaring at the door for the better part of half an hour. Whoever she is, she isn’t coming.”
“What made you think-”
“Unless, it was a he?” she asked, wiggling her brows suggestively. “I mean, there is absolutely nothing wrong if your preferences are-”
He sputtered furiously, feeling his blood rush to his cheeks. “No! I was waiting for a woman, you infuriating-”
“Oh, whew, that’s a relief,” she cut him off. Then, her brows furrowed curiously, before she spoke, “what is your name, by the way?”
“Vegeta,” he answered, before he could think about a wittier response.
“Vegeta,” she nodded. “So, anyway, I came over because I thought, why let your night go to waste, when you can have a beautiful lady – me,” she bats her eyelashes as she shamelessly points a thumb towards herself, “to talk to, instead.”
He felt a twitch begin above his left brow, half a second before he saw the abandoned male get up from his table and begin walking towards them.
The man cleared his throat as he lifted a hand to tap the woman’s bare shoulder. “Um, excuse me-”
Without taking her eyes off Vegeta, she lazily waved him off, and quipped, “You’re excused.”
He looked confused, predictably dumbfounded as he looked between him and the woman. “What is going on? You just left in the middle of our date.”
“Our date is over, and I am on a new one, now,” she replied airily “Oh and thank you so much for taking care of the bill, very kind of you.”
“The bill-”
“The man should take care of the finances, isn’t that what you said?” she asked, and Vegeta almost smirked at the clearly falsely-innocent widening of her eyes. “The receptionist over there should be able to bill you out, now. Have a nice evening!”
The other man just sputtered, mystified; Then, with a frustrated scowl, he turned away, going over to the reception and slamming down a few cash bills, before leaving the restaurant in an insulted huff.
“Now, where were we?” she asked, clearly unaffected.
He had to admit, he was rather impressed by how much of a bitch she could be, while still looking for all the world like she was the most innocent woman in the entire establishment.
“You were bragging, unprovoked, about how beautiful you are,” he responded. “Right after stealing my damn drink and somehow finagling my name out of me.”
“Well, a first date involves getting to know each other, right?” she winked, taking a sip of her wine. She brightened, looking into the purplish red liquid. “This really is good, I should ask the waiter which brand this is.”
“How forward of you,” he said, “to assume that we are on a first date.”
Her fingers flew up to futilely cover her smirk. “The two of us are sitting across from each other, in a really nice restaurant, and you are talking to me of your own free will. This. Is. A date,” she asserted. She then lifted her wine flute again, taking a relaxed sip, before she continued, “You could get up and leave me all alone here, if you really don’t wanna stay.”
He weighed his options. He could either stay and make pointless small talk with this conniving little witch, and rightly brag the following day about how he had been able to make it through an entire evening with a rather attractive woman; or, he could stand up and leave, and the next day, be forced into admitting that the bitch that Kakarot had set him up with had not shown-up, leaving him to look like a complete fool.
The first option was the less embarrassing, less emasculating one.
Not to mention, she really was quite striking – this, he admitted with utmost resentment – and was proving interesting enough as she brazenly wormed her way into his evening.
Mind made up, Vegeta sat back, crossed his arms before his chest, and raised a brow. “Alright then, date,” he said. “What next?”
“We order food, obviously,” she responded, hailing the waiter again. The waiter then approached, two large menu cards in hand, and the woman calmly reached for one and began silently perusing the options.
He made no objections as the waiter handed him his own menu card, but he didn’t even glance down at it as he continued to watch the woman go about choosing her food, perfectly placid and comfortable in her hijacked date night.
She ordered a serving of salmon, before turning to him with a brow raised in question. He blanched, quickly looking through the menu, and deciding to go for the first item that his gaze landed on, a large serving of steak. As he rattled off his order, he realized that in all his aggravation, he had somehow managed to work up an appetite.
He sipped his wine as he waited, watching the woman fidget slightly with her purse. A smirk worked its way onto his lips as he realized, for the first time, that the woman may not be as completely arrogant as she presented. However, she had somehow managed to muster up enough blind confidence to leave an unappealing male, and go up to him, a random stranger, instead.
She was a woman who knew what she wanted, and could go so far as to forego common decency, so she can have her way.
That, he had to admit… was hot.
Bulma looked up and was surprised to find an amused smile playing at her impromptu date’s lips. She sat stunned for a second, taking in exactly how unforgivably handsome the man was, especially up close.
His eyes – damn, those eyes – were as dark as a starless night; The small, reluctant grin on his lips lightened up his features, giving him the aura of a grimly entertained monarch.
Seriously though… What kind of stupid woman stood that up?!
She found herself at a loss for words, feeling the blood rushing up into her cheeks as she looked down and discreetly cleared her throat. Her heart was beating fast, and she gathered her wits about her before facing him again. She plastered a bright smile on her face as he raised a brow at her, a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“I suppose, being on this date with you will not be the worst way to end my night,” he said.
Bulma grinned, crossing her legs under the table as she leaned over, making sure to give him an eyeful of her womanly charms. She rested an elbow on the table while the other hand circled the rim of her glass.
“The end of your night?” she asked, cheekily quirking her brow up at him. “I don’t think so. This date with me, is just the beginning.”
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To be continued…