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pinkgothic:
They had no particular schedule. Leila came to visit Mateo when she felt like it and had healed up enough from her previous spell-casting to try again and he imposed no particular cadence on her. Sometimes it was Mateo who visited Leila, sharing some papers he thought might help her better understand the craft. She was still a way's away from being able to visualise a rune from the descriptions in the papers, but she could by now work them out piece by piece, cross-referencing her notes on the nomenclature.
Today, Leila was visiting Mateo, ringing his doorbell.
It took half a minute for it to actually open. “Leila,” he greeted.
Past his shoulder, she could see Nyarai Pretorius sitting on the second stool Mateo owned, almost clipped to the computer's table, glancing up as the door opened, locking the screen with what looked like a well-honed reflex. Her eyes opened a little wider and some kind of curious smile tugged at the corner of her lips, but unlike the last time they'd crossed paths, there was no immediate commentary.
Still, it was easy to imagine those eyes held the question 'so it was a date?'.
Nymphetamine:
It had been nearly two months of meetings between them, usually once a week, or whenever she healed up. Leila devoured the materials that he offered her, taking notes in a personal tablet of hers (rather than one supplied by work), locked behind biometrics that she hoped would be enough. Their efforts to keep this between them had seemed to work, and no one commented on the botanist who had begun to refuse to roll up her sleeves too much while she worked. (She had since taken care to carve runs higher up on her arm, just so that her forearms were able to be uncovered.) It was slow progress, but there was noticeable forward momentum. The runes were becoming easier to recognize, and she practiced as much as she could before she actually applied the strange stylus to her arm. Mateo was the one taking all the burden of risk upon himself, what with procurring the nerve-blockers, the other tools and papers that he shared with her.
When she arrived at his door that day, she was dressed in the usual sort of clothing that Martians wore. Something entirely more functional than fashionable. Her hands and arms were freshly washed after the workday, and her hair pulled back in a braid. She was not expecting him to already have company, so the sight of Nyarai Pretorius was a bit of a surprise for her. “Mateo. Hi… Am I… Am I interrupting something?” She gave a little smile to Nyarai before her attention swiveled back to Mateo himself.
pinkgothic:
“Not any more than in the most tautological definition of 'interrupt',” Nyarai said, before Mateo could align enough polite words for an answer. “In that we were doing something. But it's quite interruptable. We can easily shelve it and continue some other day.”
Mateo frowned mildly. “That's not necessary,” he said.
“You want to send your lady friend back home?” Nyarai feigned indignation.
Mateo grimaced. “She's not–”
“Not your girlfriend, yeah, yeah. You're meeting a lot for people who aren't dating,” Nyarai protested in amusement.
“Men and woman can be friends,” Mateo hissed.
“In your wildest dreams,” Nyarai grinned.
“Are you my girlfriend?” Mateo retorted, glowering at Nyarai.
“Oh-ho-ho,” the sorceress lit up like a Christmas tree, as though Mateo had handed her a gift. “Maybe I am,” she joked and smiled light-heartedly at Leila. “Leila, watch out, competition.”