"Oh shit, my little sister just finished her freshman year at Drexel, she's doing uh..." he paused and rummaged through the attic that was his brain, flitting through various metaphorical memory cabinets until he'd hit the right one.
"Doing Mechanical Engineering. She's been struggling a lot but she's a smart kid so I trust her to do fine. And Drexel isn't for morons," he would raise an eyebrow at Nico.
"It's a pretty solid school, it's not Temple but you know..."
He would watch how Ari and Nico responded to his little tactical teasing nuke and at first began to panic as Ari responded more viscerally than Nico, but as his heart rate began to rise he found a familiar aura taking hold of his heart and banished the panicking to the shadow realm (AKA New Jersey.) This would be an interesting dynamic to watch play out, and if he was going to take things slow and let Nao adjust to him in person, he would have to vent his desire to tease elsewhere.
"But speaking of tickets, you guys wouldn't need to pay for tickets I can just get your VIP passes. The Ivory Rose is one five main troopes that puts the faire on, so we get a bunch of freebies to give out to friends and family. The only locals are like, Me, Tony, and one of the squires David, so we get free reign over a veritable loot pile of passes, merch, and all sorts of other shit. Just lemme know, I could hook you two- err, you all up." Fuck, Nao wanted to go to Philly now. That was fine, he could see her all dressed up in cute winter clothes, hold her hand as they walked through the park, bump into his Uncle who would tease him relentlessly about having a girlfriend, his little sister who would badger them relentlessly on stories on how'd they'd met, or worse yet, his mother who would badger him about getting married and having grandchildren.
He would turn back to Nao, and for a moment would peel his gaze off her pretty face as he noticed she was fidgeting. He might not have Hyper Sense IRL, but that didn't mean his eyes were useless, he just had to work a little harder.
"Hey, Hun." He would turn to Nao, dabbing a bead of sweat off his forehead.
"It's a kind hot out here, but I didn't see where you grabbed the cups. Could you show me where they're at so I can everyone some water?" His eyes would flit to Nico and Ari, both still in the the throes of whatever emotion his taunting had instilled in them.
"I'm pretty parched, I can only imagine you two must be thirsty after making that walk three times eh?"
It was flimsy, but at best he could buy him and Nao some time to escape into the house, leaving Romeo and Juliet to duke it out on the porch for a moment.
@Yugam
