Chapter Text
Nancy bursts into the washroom and frantically digs out her phone to send out an SOS.
N: BESS!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!
N: this is. the worst. I hate you so much for this. I am trapped!!
N: I hate you even more for being in a detox-spa-whatever w no phone. Call me AS SOON as you’re done
She moves through her inbox and texts literally anyone she thinks might reply. She hovers her family group chat before dismissing it, deciding it would cause more questions than it was worth. Her dad duo can be insatiably gossipy.
George responds to remind her that she’s on a ‘reeeeally great’ 3rd date with a friend of a friend that she remembers hearing about - Ned or Nick or something - and doesn’t want to give him the wrong idea that she’s blowing him off.
N: Stop being better at dating than I am. Call me later so I can hear details.
She sighs and turns her eyes to the mirror. She pulls at a loose hair on her shoulder, wipes a small mascara smudge away. She rarely goes through the effort to get dressed up and it had been a labouring process. She’d watched damn youtube tutorials for eye make up.
Shouldn’t have bothered.
Her phone lights up with a message and she breathes a sigh of relief when she sees it’s a lifeline.
A: I got you. 5 mins.
“Oh, thank fuck for that,” she grumbles under her breath and sweeps out of the restroom. In retrospect, she might have lingered in there for longer than society would deem appropriate.
Nancy grits her teeth as she makes her way back to the table where her ( ugh ) date is sitting. She lets loose an eye roll when she sees him check his watch, just before he notices her approaching.
She pastes on the best fake smile she can muster and slides back into the chair opposite him. Only a few more minutes. Only a few more minutes… she chants internally.
He smiles a too-toothy grin at her. “So as I was saying…”
Oh, god.
Oh how she wishes she could be blunt and say how not interested she is, and that they should never, ever do it again. This is a practiced bad-blind-date ritual of hers, and while it is not always met with a sunny response, she’s never been forced into an awkward second date.
But she can’t.
Bess had begged her, because he works at the firm she desperately wants to intern for. When he’d seen Nancy’s picture, he’d seemed interested and Bess thought a blind date might put her in his good books and make him put a word in for her.
And for the first 90 minutes, Nancy had been a real trooper. But her stamina is fading fast and she knows she needs out. When the waiter had asked if they wanted to see the desert menu and he’d said yes, Nancy fled to the bathroom to put an end to this neverending boredom pit.
It might be a painfully obvious get-out, but she’s desperate. And Mark is not making an impression as the sharpest tool in the toolshed, so worth a shot.
Though a tool he definitely is.
Nancy is staring vaguely in his direction so it may appear that she cares about the ins and outs of entertainment law explained in excruciating detail. Mostly she’s looking at a couple at a table behind him that appear to be breaking up.
Must be a vibe in this restaurant.
Just as Nancy is wondering how long five minutes can possibly drag on for, her clutch starts buzzing on the table. Though it’s not a phone call buzz, 4 or 5 text notifications in quick succession. She wonders if someone else is responding to her SOS.
“So, it’s not as glamorous as everyone thinks it might be-”
“So sorry,” Nancy coos, fishing the phone out of her purse with a polite smile as she cuts in. The first 4 texts are nonsense but the top one in the stack reads:
A: hang up once to be polite, answer the second time.
“Everything okay?” Mark asks. He does a pretty good job of at least trying to sound concerned but Nancy’s pretty sure he’s just pissed that his monologue has been interrupted again.
“I think so.” As soon as she places her phone face down on the table, it starts to ring. She wants to grin, but holds it in, biting her lip gently.
She lets it ring a few times and holds Mark’s increasingly annoyed stare as she declines the call.
She pads through a few minutes of drivelling small talk before the phone rings again.
“I am so sorry, do you mind if I get this? It won’t take a second.” She picks up the call before he can answer.
“Hello?”
“Nancy Drew, just the person I have been searching for,” Ace says into her ear, his tone completely flat.
“Ace? Can this wait? I’m on a date,” she says, shooting a smile across the table. This seems to please Mark, who goes back to pushing food around his plate.
“It absolutely cannot. It’s an urgent matter. Without your help, I fear I might die…”
Nancy does her best to look shocked but she’s struggling not to laugh. “Oh… What can I do to help?”
“Come quickly, Nancy Drew! You’re the only one who can save us now.”
She turns to grab her coat from the back of her chair and uses the opportunity to let out a smirk at the absurdity of his words, coupled with the monotony of his tone. “And which hospital is that?”
“Oh, I’m in the hospital? Aren’t I clumsy. You think that’s enough or do you want me to ramble on for another 30 to 60 seconds.”
“Got it, I will see you soon.”
“You’re welcome.”
Nancy’s pretense of an apology is one of the more decent bits of acting she’s done in the recent past, and Mark seems to lap it up without questioning.
Panic rises when he rises from his chair and offers to get a cab with her to the hospital that she isn’t actually going to, but the waiter appears at the commotion and is saying something to Mark about the check and she takes the opportunity to make her escape.
“It was so lovely meeting you, but I’ve gotta go!” Nancy calls over her shoulder, letting just a little sarcasm ooze through. The girl at the table beside them shoots her a shit eating grin and nods her head, clearly having heard the whole exchange. Nancy shrugs and smirks back before she tears out of the restaurant without looking back.
She leaves Bess a voicemail on the subway home. “I love you, but please never, ever do that to me again. I had to get your right hand man to bail me out. More details when you’re back.”
She gets off a stop early so she can go to the liquor store that’s two blocks away from their apartment. She’d chosen to have water with dinner and that was a mistake .
She has to wrestle with the boxes piled around the front door when she actually gets home. Despite living here for nearly five weeks now, the whole place is in varying stages of chaos. The bedrooms mostly look okay - Nancy’s at least, Bess’ is a bombsite with a perfectly organised closet. The hallway and general living areas are pretty much still cluttered and boxed up.
Bess insists that once they’re through their ‘busy period’, and Nancy had learned years ago that getting Bess to operate on anything other than her own schedule is a near impossibility, so she doesn’t press.
She crosses the threshold of the living room and nearly jumps out of her skin when she sees a person sitting on the couch. Then she clocks who it is and she relaxes. And rolls her eyes.
“Did I miss the part where you live here too? How’d you get in?” She steps out of her heels that she regrets wearing, and shrugs off her coat.
Ace is sitting on the couch, socked feet propped up against the coffee table. He hasn’t looked up from his laptop so she presumes he’s knee deep in some computer code or hacking job or something else that she could not begin to understand.
“Bess is my platanchor. Platanchors get key privileges,” he calls out to her while she retreats to the hallway to hang up her coat.
She’s been living with Bess since freshman dorms, a little over 3 years now. For most of that time, she and Ace have come as a packaged deal, pretty much all of the time. She’s grown used to having him around.
“Well, you might have noticed your platanchor is not here right now,” she says, sweeping into the living room again. “And although I appreciated your help, I do not remember inviting you here.”
“I have been here for 3 hours,” Ace says blankly, still not looking up at her - typing something at frightening speed. “Your apartment is nicer than mine,” he shrugs, like it’s a justifiable reason to break in, “even with the boxes.”
Nancy breathes a hybrid scoff/laugh and shakes her head. She doesn’t really mind having him here all that much, just a little warning would have saved her the minor heart attack.
“You spoke to me on the phone. Didn’t think to mention that you were waiting in my apartment?”
“I was in character,” he says, like it’s not ridiculous.
She just shakes her head in disbelief as she shuffles over and slumps down heavily beside him. She watches him for a few minutes. As predicted, she has no idea what is going on on his screen, it’s a whole other world but occasionally his long fingers fly across the keyboard and inside her head she remarks on how nice his hands are.
It’s not the most unpleasant part of her evening.
She’s always thought that Ace was the kind of person who made a comfortable silence easy.
She replies to a few texts - friends finally responding to her call for her help, her dad had asked if she needs any money and sent some before she had had a chance to respond.
“I got stuck for a while and thought I needed to take a break,” Ace says, suddenly breaking the silence. “And I found a bookcase that needed building and thought I’d try my hand at being helpful…”
Nancy has sunk so low into the couch that she has to look up at him. It’s an angle that should not work but annoyingly does. She’s never been particularly interested in him, but she doesn’t care to deny how attractive the guy is. He’s around a lot and she’s got eyes.
She’s not uninterested, either.
“Why am I sensing this ends in disaster?”
“Well as it turns out I am just as clumsy and shit at building things as I remember, because I fucked up and broke it. I texted my friend Nick some pictures, because he can fix anything, and his verdict is that it is unsalvageable. So... your new bookcase will be arriving on Tuesday. I promise not to touch it.”
Nancy isn’t sure what to say, she just stares at him with a confused frown.
The trance that has kept his eyes glued to the screen suddenly breaks and he looks to her, quickly scanning her. “You look nice,” he says casually, a quick quirk of his lip.
She sits up straighter, smoothing out the pant leg of her navy blue jumpsuit. “Thanks,” she says, giving him a genuine smile back.
Ace sighs and slowly shuts his laptop, leaving it onto the coffee table, before falling into the couch beside Nancy.
“So, tell me. On a scale of one to awful, how awful was your awful date?”
Nancy turns towards him and props her elbow on the back of the couch. “How’s this for an answer?” she drawls. “Would you like… to drink some alcohol with me?” she says, pulling out the small bottle of vodka she’d picked up.
“Ohhh, that kinda awful. Gotcha,” he says, while nodding a yes to the drink.
Nancy flicks the cap off and takes a short, sharp swill that she regrets quickly, scrunching her face in disgust.
“It was that bad?” Ace laughs, pushing himself off the couch and swanning into the kitchen, like it’s his own home and returning quickly with two glasses and an armful of possible mixers.
“You can carry all of that with ease but you broke a flatpack bookcase beyond repair?” she laughs as he carefully places all of them on the table in front of her. “And yes, Bess will never be allowed to set me up again for the rest of time.”
“First, I was a dishwasher in a diner for 3 years and excelled at it better than I did my classes in high school. I can carry any amount of drinkware with ease. However, I never claimed to have any carpentry skills.” He gestures to the bottles, silently asking what she’d like. She points at the soda and smiles in thanks as he makes her a drink.
This is not the first time Ace has mentioned his dishwasher job. He’s not typically a chatty person, but she knows if you ask him about his hometown, you’ll get a slew of anecdotes. Stories about eagle scouts and archery camp and seaside town superstitions. She gets the sense that he really misses being there, sounds pretty different to New York.
“Second of all,” he continues, handing Nancy her drink and settling back in beside her, “I would love to know what was so bad about this guy.”
“Well, I’d hope that Bess barely knows him because otherwise I can’t imagine why she’d think that we were well suited. At first, he could barely hold a conversation, and then when he got the hang of it, I could’ve begged him to stop. He talked about his job and nothing else for the bulk of the evening. Every time I tried to change the subject, he blew it off. Barely asked me anything about myself. Just… painfully boring.”
“I’ve been burned by a Bess blind date before. She means well, I think,” he shrugs. “Better a lawyer than a matchmaker, for sure.”
They chat easily for a little while, exchanging questions about each other’s questions, swapping a few stories about Bess,. His dry wit matches up with her humour amazingly well and she finds herself laughing easily and often. It’s nice.
They drain a few drinks and when Nancy leans forward to make them both another, a thought pops into her head and she splutters a laugh.
“What if I’d brought him here?”
“What?”
“My date,” she explains, handing him his glass. “What if it had been a great date and I brought him here and you were just camping out on my couch?”
Ace takes a sip and hisses a little at Nancy’s heavy handed ratio of liquor to soda, which makes her smirk. “Oh… well, I would’ve pretended to be your boyfriend and made things very awkward for you.” Nancy laughs. “Or, y’know, hid in Bess’ room until I could sneak out.
“Smart,” she nods. She pulls her legs up and tucks them beneath her, so she’s facing him a bit more. “Was never a possibility anyway… You know, he told me to my face that he doesn’t really like redheads? How did he think that was going to go down with me?”
Ace’s face wrinkles in genuine bewilderment. “What? How?” he says, slightly exasperated. Tentatively, he pinches a piece of Nancy’s hair between finger and thumb and lets it slip through his grasp. “I think it’s hot,” he adds.
Nancy’s cheeks flush with fire. The casual contact paired with the sly compliment and the alcohol is creating a cocktail of funny feelings low in her stomach.
“Well. That’s good to know,” she muses, a small smile creeping onto her face.
From that point, something shifts a little. There’s a few more casual touches sprinkled in - when he asks to see her tattoo, a tiny magnifying glass on the inside of her wrist, he cradles it gently and runs a thumb down her forearm. It gives her a very satisfying set of shivers. She puts a hand on his shoulder as she tells a story and he smiles at it.
They flirt quietly, as if they’re hiding it even though they’re all alone.
The evening slips away, warm and wavy, and eventually Ace sighs and reluctantly breathes that he should go. She shoots him a wide eyed look that silently asks him to stay a little longer, not ready to brush off the evening just yet. He holds her stare and doesn’t move from the couch for another 30 minutes.
Eventually, Nancy follows him to the hallway. They linger together behind the closed door, not ready to break the bubble yet.
She glances at the clock and chews at her lip. Part of her thinks she should ask if he wouldn’t just rather sleep on the couch. But she’s teetering on the edge of drunk and Ace is looking paticularly fucking pretty, so it feels dangerous.
Instead, she says, “Thank you, for bailing me out and actually salvaging the evening.”
A soft, boyish grin rarely seen on him creeps onto his face as he murmurs a ‘Welcome’.
It would be stupid to kiss him right?
Right?
Right.
Don’t do that.
But it would be good.
He’s very pretty .
Okay, she admits, definitely a little drunk . Maybe a little more than a little.
“This was nice, Nancy,” he says, softly. “Should do it again.”
“Yeah, you’re not so bad.” She grins. “Hey, next time you break into my apartment, will you at least text first?”
“Now, where would be the fun in that?” He jokes, but promises to anyway.
His hair looks very soft.
“I should go,” Ace says, his voice barely above a whisper. “Goodnight, Nancy.”
“Goodnight, Ace.”
She falls into bed with a grin plastered on her face, shining for no one to see. The earlier part of the evening, just a bad memory, forgotten.
It all worked out right in the end.
--
8:34am
Bess: OMG!! HAVE YOU BEEN FLIRTING WITH MY PLATANCHOR??!