This situation don't make much sense
But it's what we've got... so we'll make the best of it
Cause we're gonna live forever, like Peter pan
Second star to the right, on to neverland

Late Afternoon; March 22nd, 1890 — Alfred's Flat, London
J. Alfred Darrow

Despite having only known Alfred for just under two months, Jo felt a tenderness for her friend she generally reserved only for Saturn and Holsten. He was frighteningly easy to talk to and was accepting of generally anything she had to say. Even where he dissented with her opinions the conversation wasn't heated or otherwise frustrating, it was simply a debate between friends. It was a friendship Jo wasn't keen on losing.

The week of silence that passed between them set her nerves on edge. Every day that a note from him didn't arrive she turned her attentions to the two sealed envelopes on her nightstand and wondered once more if she ought to post them. Not that Zelda deserved any sort of goodbye from someone as kind as Alfred, not when she had left him to die without any information as to when. To live with a noose around one's neck — a definitive how but no when was a fate worse than death itself. Even now, knowing Alfred was going to live and was fine, Jo still felt the pressing weight of fury at her friend.

Alfred deserved better.

Upon receiving his note, Jo abandoned her plans for aimless wandering and floo'd directly to his flat. Hopefully his roommate wouldn't be in the living room, as that would be mighty awkward.

  

Alfred was breathing better, and feeling more himself, but he was still definitely recuperating. He'd gotten winded just going down the block to mail a letter, and he'd had to stop and rally his strength before heading up the stairs, so he was in no hurry to leave the house again anytime soon. Luckily Bilton was quite understanding of the situation (and grateful to hear that the curse didn't seem to be transmittable), and the house was well stocked with food, so he was perfectly capable of staying home.

He'd only been back a few moments when the fireplace erupted with green flames. "You're speedy," he commented as she stepped into the living room. Either that, or he'd been sitting on the bench downstairs working up the fortitude to get back to his flat much longer than he'd thought. Maybe a little of both. "Nothing to keep you busy these days, then?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Since Mr. Lintor (the insufferable cad) was taking over some of the responsibilities and shifts at the shop Jo's time had cleared up considerably. The man had a horrendous work ethic and completed only bits and pieces of the job, but Mars hadn't complained thus far so Jo's hands were tied in terms of firing the bastard. All she knew was if Mr. Lintor was her employee on an excavation he would be removed immediately. Jo had no patience for ineptitude when it came to work.

"You must be alive if you're able to sass me." She teased as she plopped herself on the opposite end of the sofa. "Mars hired some idiot to manage the shop, so I'm off the hool somewhat. At least until she realizes what a fool he is."

  

"Mmhm," he agreed, shifting his weight so that he could converse more easily with her as she took a seat. "Alive and getting myself into trouble."

Well, he'd been doing his best to stay out of trouble lately; he'd gotten himself into enough trouble (both physically and socially) on Tuesday to suffice for the week, he thought. His lungs were obviously still recovering from his brush with death at the hands of the curse, and he wasn't sure Evander was ever going to forgive him for the reception he'd given his brother in the hospital room. And Zelda — well.

"I'm sorry about your manager," he remarked. Then, thinking of the Captain of the Serena, he added, "You seem to be surrounded by incompetent men."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"Is there much trouble to get into from your sofa?" If he was as boring as his letter made him out to be Jo couldn't imagine there was much trouble to be had. Unless he was sending some sort of scandalous letters, but even that wasn't terribly damning. Short of writing erotica and mailing it to unsuspecting debutantes Jo really couldn't think of any sort of trouble.

She leaned her elbow on the back of the sofa and let out a laugh. "All men seem to be incompetent as of late." Not including Alfred, she supposed, though nearly dying from a curse probably was incompetent on some level. (Briefly, Jo wondered if he could even function properly anymore. Exactly what did the curse do to him?) "That's why women are far better company." She was teasing, of course. Alfred had to know she enjoyed spending time with him, otherwise she wouldn't have come so quickly.

  

She might have been trying to tease him with the line about the sofa, but Alfred wasn't fazed. He didn't think he was at very high risk of being called boring, regardless of what he got up to today or for the next few weeks. His life had had quite enough drama to keep him safe from that particular label.

"Burning bridges," he said with a light shrug. "That sort of thing. Plenty you can do from your sofa."

He couldn't help but laugh at her comment about all men being incompetent, because he assumed once again that if there was any serious criticism in there, it was not directed at him. As for women being better company... "I suppose that's one reason," he allowed with something of a mischevious grin. "Though it's not the one I hear cited most frequently."

He was alluding to what were sometimes called feminine comforts, of course. It wasn't until after he'd said it that he realized he didn't think he'd ever said something that flippant and vaguely sexual to a lady before. Although his language was hardly anything to blush at, the implication was clear — but he supposed he didn't think of her as much of a lady. Which was probably just the way she wanted it, from everything he knew about her, so he hardly thought she'd be offended.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Burning bridges? Jo knew boredom led to destructive behaviors sometimes, but setting fire to relationships simply because one could didn't make a ton of sense. Though, if the bridge was with Zelda perhaps it was better off burnt. Friends (or whatever they were, Jo still hadn't asked) didn't allow friends to die of curses.

Before she could press the subject, Alfred moved the conversation along. It'd been awhile since her last encounter with a woman, but that wasn't for a lack of trying. British women were decidedly prudish compared to most other countries, and many were wholly unwilling to admit to their sexuality. There was only so much sleuthing in shady bars Jo could manage before giving up on her search. Maybe her next employer would be a woman and she wouldn't have to extend much effort looking. "And which is the most frequent offender?" Jo teased, fully aware of the answer.

(Distantly, she wondered what it was about herself that left Alfred uninterested in her. Any other man would've ceased the opportunity to bed her the second her corset came off. Meanwhile, Alfred had his hands on her breasts and she hadn't even felt a reaction from him. Maybe the relationship between Zelda and Alfred was wildly different than she previously thought. Maybe he, like many sailors she knew, was more interested in other men.)

  

She was teasing him, clearly, but Alfred was willing to play along. He shifted his weight again slightly on the couch, bringing one knee up to rest on the sofa cushion so that he was more or less fully facing her now. "Well, their excellent conversation skills, of course," he said with a grin. "As though you've never gone to visit someone just to have a nice chat."

(Hopefully he hadn't entirely misread her character, because that sort of insinuation would have been quite offensive if he had, but ... well, she had agreed to come over to his flat after only having known him a few hours, which didn't do much to convince him he was mistaken. Sure, nothing had happened, but he was convinced that was more his doing than hers. She'd offered, after all, to take her corset off, which was about as bold as one could get).

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Were he not recuperating from near death Jo might've kicked him for his cheekiness. Instead, she rolled her eyes at him and bit back a snorting laugh. It'd been months since she felt this at ease. She hadn't had a laugh like this since before leaving South America.

"Women are skilled linguists. Something to do with how they move their tongues." She said. His shifting prompted her to curl her knees beneath her to better face him.

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   J. Alfred Darrow

Alfred did not have a lengthy track record of intercourse with English women (in fact, it was really just the one, which... given the circumstances, didn't seem like it ought to count), but he had certainly heard a good deal about their sexual habits from his friends or his sailors. To be fair, any portion of that might have been invented, as men were wont to brag in that department, but his impression was that typical British girls didn't do much with their tongues — at least not by comparison to the prostitutes his crew met in foreign ports. He raised an eyebrow at her comment, then, surprised and for a moment not sure how to respond.

"English women less so than others, from what I've heard," he retorted. Not that she really counted in that respect (he imagined); so he continued, "At least, the ones who don't tend to travel much — perhaps for want of practice."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"They are awfully prudish, aren't they?" Jo laughed. There were some girls in school Jo knew were curious about other girls, but none ever acted on it (to her knowledge anyway). It wasn't until her first stint in Central America with Mrs. X that Jo learned what it was to be intimate with another woman. If only all curious souls were afforded such an opportunity.

"People love to criticize the native's liberal feelings towards intimacy, but I think the civilized world could learn a lot from them, don't you? If only to have partners to chose from that aren't paid for."

  

All jokes aside, Alfred didn't actually know how he felt about that. There were some aspects of tribal life that he had learned to love while he'd been living in the wilds, and there were other aspects (like their "barbaric" sexual habits) that he had only observed and never partaken in himself. He had always assumed that the way he'd been raised was better, and it hadn't been until he'd returned to England years later that he'd had the opportunity to question that assumption. When he'd returned to England and looked at everything with a new perspective, the whole system that they had in place surrounding love and marriage and sex and everything just seemed too rigid and stiff to have merit — but he wasn't sure he was really ready to come full circle and endorse its opposite, and maybe he never would be.

"Well," he pointed out, "Maybe you can afford not to be prudish when you live in a village that's never heard of syphilis."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Syphilis was a fair complaint. One Jo thought of frequently whenever she had even the mildest ailment. She took precautions when possible, and generally tried to only involve herself with people she thought she knew, but it didn't always happen that way. There were times when scratching the itch was more important than the possible lifelong repercussions — when she got lost in the excitement of the moment and forgot about all else. But, she was trying to be better. Hell, outside of the frustrated morning with Holsten Jo had been celibate since January.

"Have you had many encounters with the disease, then?" She asked more serious than she was a moment before. The singular case she witnessed was a horrendous sight, one Jo really ought to remember when the situation grew too heated. "I've been fortunate in that regard, I guess, for I haven't."

  

"Yeah," Alfred admitted with a downward glance, before he realized the way that might sound and added hastily, "Well, not personally." Merlin, hopefully she didn't think that was what he'd been getting at. Though from her perspective, it actually might have made some degree of sense, since he'd invited her over to his flat several times now and never made a move to take things any farther. She might have thought he'd been trying to look out for her health by stopping short, instead of... whatever the actual reason was. He hadn't actually taken the time to think it through and pin it down in words, now that he thought about it.

"I've just, uh, seen the effects a handful of times," he clarified. "On men, anyway. I don't know what it looks like from the other side." Which was part of what had made him so hesitant to ever pay for sex, after his brief foray into it as a young adult; if he was confident in his ability to recognize the disease in women and prevent himself from coming in contact with it, he likely wouldn't have been so leery about sleeping with strangers. At least not in foreign ports, when everyone else was doing it, anyway.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

With her being as inexperienced as she was with the disease, all Jo could do to respond to him was nod quietly. She thought she knew enough to recognize the sores, but maybe she was better off remaining celibate. She hardly wanted to die of some disgusting illness.

But, she also didn't want to die of perpetual horniness.

"Much the same, I would think anyway." The more she thought about it, the more she became confident sex with unknown partners was extremely dangerous. Even Holsten felt like a risk in this minute, for Jo had little clue who he was involving himself with. He was wealthy, after all, and could pay for a parade of syphilis rotted prostitutes. Fuck. What was she to do? For all her experience with sex, Jo had never experimented with her body independently. She knew what she liked, knew what others liked, but had no idea how to turn that back into self pleasure.

Frowning, Jo turned to look at some random seam on the sofa. Was this why Englishmen were so insistent upon marriage?! But a wedding hardly kept either party from straying! "I know you must have some ... awful impression of me." Jo began somewhat awkwardly, obviously the most uncomfortable she had ever been in his presence, "but I'm not ... " Whorish felt like the wrong word to say, for she did mess around freely. But, she was careful whenever possible. That had to count for something, right? "I don't know what I'm trying to express here...I don't usually hang out at men's flats with my clothes off."

  

She might not have know exactly what she was trying to express, but Alfred thought that he understood her perfectly well. It was difficult when polite society didn't tend to talk about these sorts of things, because that meant there wasn't a ready supply of vocabulary to describe them, but he'd spent plenty of time between their first meeting at the dock and when she had come to his flat for the first time thinking about all of the gradations of human behavior that lay between respectable and not, and wondering where she fell in that range. He hadn't spent much time thinking about it since, because she had fallen into a strange sort of sub-category of women in his mind that he hadn't realized had existed before, which were women he had no particular desire to sleep with — but still. He knew what she meant.

"Oh, so I'm special, then?" he joked, to lighten the mood a bit. Since she was clearly feeling a little awkward about the whole thing, though, he waited a beat and then continued softly, "I don't have any awful impressions of you."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER