“Yeah, can’t stand her,” that was a bit of a lie, Manu wasn’t really all that worse with Harlee as he was with most people but he was an amazing liar and even his mother wouldn’t be able to tell that he wasn’t telling the truth right then so there was no way in hell she would know. Manu was a very one person dog, only because of his breed. He was incredibly protective over Rick and whenever he was out would wait at the door until he came home. In fact, the dog had gotten himself in a lot of trouble when Jade first moved in, but now it was fine with the little girl. Now, Manu didn’t necessarily like Buffy, but he didn’t hate her and that was saying something huge for the dog. Her hands kept moving from his shoulders to his chest and he wasn’t completely sure he liked it, but just sat there and lived with it. If it helped her then it was all going to be okay in the end.

When she thanked him he only smiled and nodded. Okay, good he helped and she was feeling better. Yes, she was wanted in this household. Damn, Rick, an eighteen year old had his own household, and he really wasn’t ready for it either. Anyone willing to help with Jade that Rick trusted was alright in his book, and something he needed. He needed a very large support system right now, because of everything that was going on. He had never seen himself as a father and was suddenly thrown into the world of having a kid, something he wouldn’t say that he was exactly ready for. It was one thing that he wouldn’t say he was good at, and that was saying quite a bit since Rick’s downfall and biggest sin is his pride. He just has a lot of trouble with that one thing but if that’s was all it really was then he was going okay, oh so he would like to think.

He couldn’t say he exactly liked her straddling him like that, but if he helped he would let it pass. It wasn’t like he didn’t like the feeling or something, but it’s not something that happens exactly… often you could say. When girls straddled him it usually meant they would be having sex later that night and he was hoping that wouldn’t be the case with him and Buffy. She was in such a fragile stat as is and he had a feeling that if things went to far she’d be thinking things that every fling she may had heard of him having simply didn’t involve. Sure, he knew he shouldn’t sleep around and no, it didn’t help him feel better about anything he did or didn’t do or whatever else, but a part of him was just convinced that it did. It got his mind off things for the time being, but once they were done they were right back on his mind. Hell, he couldn’t get away from it all with sleep, thanks to his insomnia.

Gently he reached up both hands and wiped away her tears before letting his arms drop to his side again. She was fine; she didn’t need him holding her anymore, well unless she showed she still wanted it, when he would go back to doing whatever he wanted, to a degree of course. When she started to ask why he picked her up he bit the inside of his lip for a second while looking away, but it didn’t take her long to realize why. Seeing the look on her face he tried to give a reassuring smile in her direction. Listening to what she had to say he gave a small shrug of his shoulders when she said something about if he was still able to go to the party. He would be able to, but he’d have to drive himself which meant he wouldn’t be able to drink much, which was kind of why he had wanted to go so much. He really missed and drinking games he used to play but he couldn’t risk too much anymore. Jade needed her father; she had been through enough as is already.

“It’s fine, don’t worry too much, they’ll be others,” he said, giving a small smile towards her. Yeah, he couldn’t say he exactly liked the idea, but there was nothing he could do about it now and he wasn’t going to make her feel bad about it if he could help it. Finally she got off his lap and grabbed her hot chocolate; when he got his as well, sipping at the hot beverage. It wasn’t long before Buffy got close to him, when he looked over, and got a soft kiss on the lips, which surprised him to say the least. Maybe it was a United Kingdom thing, but where he was from friends didn’t really kiss their friends on the lips, it was that simple. When she spoke he gave a smile and nodded once again. “Really glad I could help,” was all he said, taking another sip from the luckily still hot beverage.

“But it was Sasha?” he asked, as if to confirm what he had said. “Now, I don’t know Sasha, we don’t talk and aren’t friends, but Jade pointed him out to me a few times, the tattoos, you know how kids are, and I’m good at reading people, I have to be for my job,” he continued, looking over at her with those piercing hazel eyes of his. He could find the good in most people, it was just who he was. It was really hard for him to really hate anybody; he was just too kind for that. Damn, he really did have to work on this whole people pleaser thing. “He’s been through a lot, if you’d allow me to say, and I can’t tell you exactly what but he got through it better than either you or I could have but it also has to make him the way he is. He’s just on a different level emotionally, from what I can tell from the few times I’ve spoken to him, probably to just get him through everything and you can’t expect him to just change in a day from what he knows, whatever that may be.
“To be honest, I think you could really help him, but you can’t take what he says to heart,” he once again smiled at her with a not. “If anyone could help someone like him, it would probably be you,” he looked away and gave a shake of his head before finally standing up from the couch and walking over the bar area, which held no alcohol because it was too low and he was always worried about Jade and there were still social workers coming to check up every once in a while, only because Rick was considered suicidal and Jade had been in the system for a few weeks before they finally managed to locate him. And the fact that Rick didn’t know about her when they called made them a little nervous, hell they had to do a DNA test after all before Rick could get custody.

“At least that’s my take on it all, he could have had the best childhood you’ve ever heard of and I’m losing my touch drastically,” he smirked at the words as he took out peppermint from the bar and added it to the hot chocolate, stirring it in. Usually, he would use Schnapps, a drink his friend had introduced him to a while back, but decided he was going to say completely clean and sober tonight, just because it sounded like a better idea. “Want some?” he asked, looking over at her once again. He just had to get away from the idea that she wanted something else to happen that night because, even though he would love the sex, he knew he would feel like shit the next morning just for leading her on. She was too nice of a girl to have a random fling.

“Not to mention, if you were willing to strip for him, you have to like him quite a bit,” he joked. Yeah, she was getting to be a good friend to him; he was willing to joke with her about sexual things so it was okay. When it came to his female friends, which he had a lot of because he was good at being sensitive, when he was good friends with them he started to really get them to want to be happy with other guys and that’s the point it was getting to with Buffy, even though he kind of wished she would get with a nicer guy than Sasha, but whoever she wanted was okay with him. Besides him, tonight, she hadn’t heard of any other men that she had liked in the past.

Though it didn’t show at all, Rick was getting really tired of Buffy. At the moment she seemed to think the world revolved around her and it simply didn’t. Even he, who had been quite spoilt because of the fact he was the first born son, realized that life didn’t always go his way. Hell, life very rarely actually went his way. Monica was dead, he was depressed, he had to finish high school away from his best friends, he had a daughter with his dead girlfriend he was now the single parent of and had to move across the country for that. No, he was over the stage where he thought people needed to bend over backwards to make him genuinely smile, but Buffy didn’t seem to be at all. It seemed like she expected Sasha to change just for her and for himself to do exactly as she wanted tonight and that wasn’t how it worked. It was just as if she didn’t realize that because a guy didn’t want to sleep with her didn’t mean that he didn’t like her and if he had a say in it, Sasha had wanted to sleep with her but had his own reasons not to, whether it was because of a problem with her or confusion within himself or even something else that Rick didn’t understand, there was a reason besides Sasha not wanting to sleep with her, there had to be. Sasha just seemed like the sex obsessed type who enjoyed woman for their bodies and never had a female friend unless it included benefits. Little did Rick know that he was in fact wrong in that respect, but did hit the nail on the head about why sex had been out of the question that night, at least with Buffy.

Rick liked sex, hell Rick loved sex and everyone back home knew he was one to have flings, though he did try and keep friends with benefits out of it, but Lily was an exception to that little rule of his. He had found out the end of his junior year that sleeping with your friends just led to trouble. A few weeks after Monica had died and Rick’s best friend Kylie’s boyfriend had just dumped her because she had been spending so much time with him to make sure he was okay. Kylie had really liked him but in the end she had been crying on his shoulder and one thing just led to another, but the next morning Kylie had woken up first only to start crying. The two of them didn’t speak for a week before they finally decided to simply not talk of it again and forgot about it all. It was the best thing to do but the last thing Rick wanted was for the same thing to happen between him and Buffy, and if they slept together it would be close to that simply because Rick would feel like shit for leading her on like that and once you knew Rick you quickly knew that he hated hurting people.

What she did was hardly what Rick called initiating a kiss. Hell, he got kisses like that from Jade so what the fuck was he supposed to think? If she thought he would have known that she wanted more to happen from that little thing she would have had to think him completely psychic, another thing she seemed to think a lot. So far tonight she had expected both Rick, who noticed that she was trying to get him to understand and he just didn’t, and Sasha, who was good at being able to tell if someone wanted him dead but was actually quite bad at working out a woman’s mind, to know exactly what she wanted from the most mediocre signs, probably because she was too nervous to give anything more but she still couldn’t expect too much from either of them.

Buffy was doing exactly what she thought Sasha was doing earlier that night. Rick was too nice (something he was used to hearing) and Sasha was too much of a bad boy and too cold. She wanted too much from a guy and it was going to take her a while to find it. Something she didn’t realize was that Sasha did like her and would change for her in smaller ways. No, he wasn’t going to quit a game, one of the many reasons was that he would be killed before he was allowed to quit, no she couldn’t expect flowers every time he came to see her and he wouldn’t go out of his way to make her breakfast, but give him some time and he would show affection in his own ways. Whether that was taking her out to some beautiful place on the trails only he knew of or have some nice French food he had eaten as a child, he would do something. Then there was Rick, who simply didn’t like her as more than a friend. Yes, she was a friend and she should understand that being a friend to anyone was a good thing as well. So what, they didn’t like you romantically, so sue them. She had to understand that just because she wanted a guy to like her right now did not mean it would happen. Hell, she was seventeen, not even a quarter of the way through her life yet and she was convinced she’d meet her soul mate now? It was stupid, though Rick would absolutely never say that out loud.

“Come on,” Rick said softly, looking up to the ceiling as if it would help him. “That’s exactly what he would like you to believe and I think a bit of him believes it as well, that he can’t get hurt because he’s locked away those emotions. Hell, for a time I did it as well and I’m not gonna get into the story, but it did not end well,” he forced himself to remember to say only kind things, but he was going to tell her what he thought, but of course in a very nice way. He paused for a second again, wondering if it was the right thing to say, but in the end decided it couldn’t hurt. “I’m sure he does, hell, I like ‘um experienced as well,” she would have to know that he was no stranger to sex; he had a beautiful daughter after all. “But if I had a girlfriend who was a virgin I would have no trouble with that at all, but then again if I virgin just wanted to sleep with me as a fling I’d have to say no as well. They shouldn’t lose it like that, that could have very well been his thinking behind it.

“I mean,” he ran a hand through his hair, “he either really likes you or hates you to say no, and if he went to get you that tattoo hating you can’t be the right option between those two.” He nodded as she said he didn’t want anything and came so he was standing behind the couch, sipping at his hot chocolate. When she continued to speak he bit the inside of his lip and shook his head. Something that could have very well have been a slip of the tongue and she was getting this pissed about it? If Monica got this mad at him every time he said something stupid well… Jade would never have been conceived to say the least.

“You’re not helping yourself thinking like that,” he said, obviously meaning it. “You need to talk to him, you need to give him a chance. No, I would never let him near Jade but let me just say it’s obvious you like him. If you are that hurt by his words you have to like him more than you want to believe,” he sighed once again, shaking his head. Hell, he was giving relationship advice and his only two relationships had ended in suicide and a very messy breakup thanks to him finding out he had a daughter, but both of them had been very good relationships while they had lasted and he had seen many blow up so knew exactly what was a good and bad thing to have.

“Let’s just say, if you don’t talk to him, I’m going to,” he said, very jokingly as he put a strong hand on her shoulder and gave it a kind squeeze. When she left into the kitchen Rick watched for a second before following slowly behind her and leaning against the doorway to look in on her. He was about to tell her she didn’t have to do that, they had a dishwasher after all but before he had a chance to she was pretty much finished and had started talking to herself, something he listened to very closely but absolutely hated to hear. He finished his own hot chocolate but didn’t do anything as she finished, but Rick turned and left back to the living room before she could really know that he was listening to her speak. He sat on the couch and placed the empty mug on the coffee table when Buffy came back in.

“Here, sit down,” he said very softly, patting the couch beside him. When she came over her leaned back and sighed deeply. “Look, hold onto your virginity. I know it sounds stupid coming from me, but learn from my mistakes. My first time was… hell I was twelve, maybe eleven in all honesty, but I can’t remember who it was too or why I did it but when I was with Monica, Jade’s mother, and she found out she wouldn’t be my first… well, that was the biggest fight, maybe the only thing you could really call a fight, we ever had,” he took a very deep breath and closed his eyes for a second, shaking his head yet again. “For good reason too,” he nodded slightly, knowing Monica had a very good reason for being upset learning that her boyfriend, fourteen at the time and about half a year younger than herself, hadn’t been a virgin. Anyone not upset needed their brain checked.

“You want to remember your first time and you want it to be someone you truly care about. If you can’t look back on it and smile there’s no reason to have done it in the first place. I would love to remember my first time with Monica as my first time period, but it doesn’t work like that and it haunts me,” he said, gently placing a hand on her knee and smiling at her. “You’re the smarter one out of us for simply keeping the only thing that really matters to the person you care about. It's absolutly flattering knowing someone wants you to be their first, if they know you want it because you want them of course,” he added to not back track on and progress they had made about the Sasha thing, but he finally finished his speech and looked away. He couldn’t say he was embarrassed, but he wasn’t exactly sure of what he said. In the end both hands crossed over his chest and he relaxed back in the couch. “So, if you would like to stay here for the night, that would be fine. Work starts late tomorrow and Jade’s going with her grandparents so I can drop you off wherever you want to go."

“Yeah, I think we’ve all had that feeling sometime in our life,” he said, nodding slightly once again. Luckily, he didn’t seem to have that part of life as bad as many people did. The only person he had ever really wanted had been Monica and she had wanted him as well, but there were those times, especially after she had passed, that all he could think about was her. He missed her and he couldn’t really deny that and if he could go back and do anything differently to make it so she would still be around, including never sleeping with her, he would do it. If they had never had sex she would have never gotten pregnant and, according to the suicide note he had only recently found, Jade was the reason she had ended her life. Little did she know, at the time, that Rick would end up the legal parent of their little girl. She had to expect Jade’s adoptive parents to be around for her for the rest of her life, or at least long enough until she could take care of herself but that’s just didn’t happen and now the life Rick had known was over. Luckily, he did actually think that he would grow to like this father thing, Jade was already what was always on his mind, and now in a good way. You just had to give him some time to get used to it all, he was sure. He had been thrown into the whole situation.

Rick really did hope that he was helping at least a little bit, otherwise this would be a waste of both of their times. Not as if he could drive her home, with Jade asleep upstairs, but if he wasn’t helping at all the best thing to do would have been to call her a cab or bring her straight home from that other guy’s house. Fortunately, it did seem as if whatever he may be saying was actually helping, even if he wasn’t quite sure exactly how. It was just a good thing he was used to helping people like this and knew what to say and what would probably be very, very stupid to say. Even though he didn’t know Sasha as well as he was acting like he did he realized it would help if he spoke as if he did know what he was talking about, and that he had to have a better input on the mind of a guy than she would, even if he and Sasha were about as different as they could be, as Buffy was good at discovering by now.

Rick had been around plenty of his female friends when they had been a bit crazy for some guy and Buffy had all the classic signs, which actually was something he found quite annoying after a little while. They always were so head over heels for a month or two until they broke up and he had to get used to just another new guy hanging out with the group. It drove him crazy after a little while, but luckily, he and Sasha would never simply go out for a drink or anything like that and if this would make Buffy happy and finally get her spirits up he said go for it. He wouldn’t deny that she had some bad luck with guys, including liking him (which he of course didn’t know at the time) and he ended up sleeping with her sister, that had to make her feel just great. Sure, now he felt awful about it but before this he had still been wondering why she was being so cold with him. It was hard to feel bad when you didn’t know why, but if anyone could figure out a way to do it, it would have to be Rick.

Rick didn’t like talking about his past, for obvious reasons, and he really didn’t need others to know what had happened. When people knew they tended to look at him differently, looking for a reason to say that he isn’t as happy as he actually is. He likes being the one to take care of people, which had to be the only reason he was doing so well as a father right now, not being the one that is taken care of. It always made him really annoyed when people worried about him and always asked how he was doing. Of course, after his suicide attempt that had gone up in ways that even he couldn’t imagine but that would be expected by anyone in their right mind. Hell, he was upset enough with life to just end it; maybe he did need a little more help than he would actually like the people around him to believe.

When she started speaking he looked over at her, his own hazel eyes still with the dark circles that were impossible to get rid of looked to her, the color of the actual iris quite attracting if you liked interesting and bright colors, unlike Sasha’s which were cold and plain, but also the very thing that pulled people into him. His eyes, though not really showing anymore emotion than the rest of him, managed to let you know exactly what he wanted you to see. “Don’t compare yourself to Harlee,” he reminded, almost interrupting her as he said it. She couldn’t do that just because Harlee was much… wilder to put it kindly. It would actually be like Rick comparing himself to Sasha, which would just be crazy in the end.

He was about to speak before he felt her arms around him once again. He smirked towards her, but quickly wiped it off his face. He just nodded at her thanks before reaching up and taking her arms from his neck. “First of all, that’s not the way to do it,” he smirked, this time in more good natured joking than some form of seduction or lust that Rick didn’t even know he had in him. She was a good looking girl and he was single, he was allowed, right? Nonetheless, it would be a bad idea and he knew it. “You’re next step would probably be touching him, not me,” he once again said completely joking, of course. He didn’t mind her falling asleep on him, it happened with a lot, if not all, of his female friends, even when Monica had been around. Yeah, Monica and he had such a good relationship that she simply didn’t care about things like that. She knew full well that Rick would never cheat on her, just like he knew the same. This was why he had known from the very beginning that Jade had been his if she was Monica’s child as well.

“But, seriously, stripping really can’t be called flirting,” he shook his head. She really had no clue, did she? “I don’t know what to tell you though, it just seems to come naturally, I guess,” a hand ran through his hair once again, obviously a habit of his. “And Sasha is either very observant or not at all, so he either already knows or the only way to let him know is to tell him straight out, and I don’t know which it is,” he shrugged his broad shoulders. “If I’m honest, I don’t really know what to tell you,” he said softly, not exactly liking to admit it. “I don’t know him well enough to be able to tell you that,” he shook his head for a second before standing up and taking his mug with him, jerking his head to show her to follow him into the kitchen, where he rinsed out the cup before putting it into the dishwasher while speaking as well.

“The only thing I can really say is always apologize, even if you know it’s not your fault,” he looked over his shoulder at her for a second. “Just believe me; it helps, especially with someone who doesn’t like to be wrong. If you can admit that you were first it may break the ice for them,” he finally finished with his cup and walked back over towards her so he could look up the stairs. “I think it’s about time we both headed to bed, though. Jade will be up early and I don’t want you to be too tired,” he gave a shrug of his shoulder. After all, it was already two in the morning, she had come around one already and only because Malin was a fast worker on tattoos, and Jade was usually up by six but if he tried he may be able to keep her quiet until seven, but at eight Manu would be barking at the people at the door coming to pick the young girl up. He knew that he wouldn’t be getting much sleep, he could usually just tell from the beginning, but that was no reason for Buffy to be deprived. “I can show you to your room.”