New girl smut

At the edges

Summary:

Because let's be real here: she is totally flirting with him, too. There's no question about it. She's flirting back hard, her hand wrapped around the stem of her wineglass and her laugh getting throatier and lower into Jessica Day sexy land.

It's Thursday evening, and they're out for Girl-And-Her-Guys night at the bar.

It's a ritual - a loft thing, really, just her and her three boys hanging out, chilling, being bros. She loves it. She loves this. The only thing is, tonight Nick forgot he has to work, Schmidt keeps making eyes at a severe-looking brunette on the other side of the room, and Winston is holed in the corner with Daisy doing gross couple things like breathing each other's air and sucking face and making the people around them vaguely uncomfortable.

So, what she's saying is: she's had better.

She ends up mostly hanging out at the bar with Nick, making friends with a glass of wine. She chats for a while with a woman next to her about the mechanics and harsh realities of empire waists (so hard to pull off and yet so right) and Nick squeezes in time between working the crowd to chat when he can. He has a towel slung over his shoulder. She loves watching him work, the neat motions of his hands and the efficient system he has for assembling drinks.

The bar closes down around them and she's still there when the room has emptied out, snorting into her wine with laughter as Nick balances the register and wipes down the counters. Schmidt had disappeared into the abyss of the night with the nameless brunette (he'd air high-fived Jess across the room, grinning widely, as he'd left) and Daisy and Winston have made good on their nascent threat to jump each other's bones and are long gone. Nick's plaid shirt is rolled up to his forearms now and he keeps teasing her about stupid stuff as he closes the bar up for the night, like do you really think those glasses make you look smarter and no, really, have you seen those glasses? nobody looks smart wearing them, Jess. Nobody.

And it's only when he's leaning across the bar with a smug little grin, all close to her face and emphasizing some dumb point or the other, that she realizes (with a funny shock) that what they're doing right here, this is flirting.

Nick is hardcore, balls-out flirting with her! Like he hadn't laid a disturbingly epic kiss on her a couple weeks ago, dropped the mic, and walked away with his hands in the air. Like he's just some random dude who wants to get into her pants and sex her up at the end of the night, and she's some anonymous chick at the bar who's had one too many glasses of wine and really wants to get her freak on with the hot bartender guy who's been working her over all night.

(Because let's be real here: she is totally flirting with him, too. There's no question about it. She's flirting back hard, her hand wrapped around the stem of her wineglass and her laugh getting throatier and lower into Jessica Day sexy land. She's gonna own it. She's an adult and fully capable of dealing with having hot and bothered thoughts about her friend/roommate/one-time make out buddy/whatever mess of a jumbled relationship they've built for themselves over the past year and a half.)

"Look, I'll prove it," he says then, and plucks her glasses off her face. The world fuzzes out a little at the edges. She can tell from the general shapes and movements in front of her that he's put her glasses on and crossed his arms over his chest, hands tucked into his armpits. "See? Do I look smarter now?"

"Uh, you just stole my glasses, so I can't really see anything right now."

He moves in closer to her and his face swims into focus. He smells faintly like the way-too-manly soap they all tease him about and the type of alcohol that burns the back of your throat. It makes her want to lick his face (and rethink her agreement with the general loft stance on douchey body washes).