They're sitting at opposite ends of the couch: Rosie sunk into her assigned reading for history class; Beau curled up on the cushions, his blocky, spotted head resting gently against her feet. When the buzzer sounds, breaking the quiet of the moment, both girl and dog look up. "If she's brought Salem with her," Rosie says, putting her book down and getting up, "you have to be nice. He's not...your normal cat." The understatement of it makes her laugh.

Calling out a brief greeting to Sabrina through the intercom, Rosie presses the button to unlock the lobby door. She ignores--or tries to--the sudden, fluttering nervousness that starts up within her. They're best friends, and while the situation between her and Nick has shifted to some new shape she's not yet familiar with, very little about that has changed. It couldn't. Neither of them, she thinks, would let it--unless it was a change for the better.

There's the faint chime of the elevator down the hall, and a knock on her front door only a moment later. "Hi," she says, opening the door and letting Sabrina step inside. "Neil's out, so it's just us for now." Rosie smiles, soft and with an edge of hesitancy. "Can...do you want something to drink or anything?"

Rosie lets out a breath of her own as Sabrina wraps herself around her; something not quite a sigh and just slightly shaky. It doesn't stop the twist of nerves in her gut, not entirely. But it quiets them a little.

"I'm glad you're here," she says, keeping her friend held close for the moment. "Things went...they were wonderful, they really were." Though her face is pressed a little into Sabrina's hair, she still smiles at the memory of that evening, staying close to Nick as they talked and kissed and began to figure out what more they were to one another now. "But I wanted to see you. Needed to, I think."

She traces a hand gently along Sabrina's back--down, then back up again, soothing. "We're okay," she echoes, and though her voice is still a little hushed, it's steady all the same. "All of us are, I hope."

As close as they are still, Sabrina's breath is warm against her skin as she speaks, and for a second Rosie is aware of how very near her friend's mouth is to the--suddenly rapid, suddenly fluttering--pulse point of her neck. It's not entirely an unpleasant realization, brief though it is. But there's other things to focus on; ones more important, and a little more immediate.

"I do know," she says as Sabrina takes a slight step back. The hand that was at Sabrina's back moves to grasp her hand, gentle and loose enough that she can pull away if it's unwanted. Rosie doesn't think it will be--but still, there's that slight twist of uncertainty. "That night, Nick said...he said you'd be okay with it. With us, being together, because--" She pauses, a slow, bright, still-disbelieving smile crossing her face. "Because it's me."

With anyone else, all of this would have made her bristle, and rightfully so. The thought that she needed permission from anybody at all, the idea of being just one of a pair rather than the singular focus of someone's affections, the broader sense that she's somebody else's--Nick and Sabrina and Charlie's Rosie, she thinks--before she's her own person. It isn't anyone else, though...and that makes all the difference.

"And you and Charlie knew early enough to set everything up the night of the movie," she continues, her smile skewing into one that's a little wry as she leads Sabrina over to the sofa and waves her free hand at Beau. Making a soft whuff, he jumps down, padding towards the kitchen. "I ought to have known something was up when neither of you tried to convince me to come with you."

Rosie sits, looking up at Sabrina, their fingers still gently linked. She takes another deep breath. "But you and I haven't talked, and we should. I want to."

Rosie listens as Sabrina talks, her chest growing a little tight to hear all the sentiment--the love, for all of them--behind her words. Despite her romantic daydreams, her girlish fantasies of being presented at court or swept off her feet by some handsome stranger, at heart all Rosie has ever hoped for is this: for someone to think her wonderful, to want to spend time with her, to care about her hopes and dreams.

The form in which she's found all of that now may not be quite what she expected, but the plain fact of it is everything she wanted.

"It wouldn't work if it was anyone other than the four of us," she says, and when Sabrina tilts her head up, Rosie meets her gaze without hesitation, her dark eyes as bright as Sabrina's own. Her cheeks pink a bit as Sabrina says our Rosie, a kind of echo of the thought she's only just had herself. She squeezes her friend's hand once, a reinforcement of what she'd said as much as an added reassurance.

"I don't know as much about how this ought to work as you do, or Nick," she says after a brief pause to put her thoughts in some kind of order. "But I know I want to try, and I know I never want to be in the way of how you and he are together, and I know I love all of you, and...that's a start."

Sabrina says Nick or Charlie or you so smoothly that Rosie doesn’t quite catch it—at least at first. Again, she thinks back to time spent wrapped around one another in Sabrina’s bed (or beds, if she chose to count those few hours of peace in the middle of June’s terror); of Nick gently but idly suggesting other combinations, if we find that works. It’s enough to deepen her blush, to set a different twist of something going in the base of her stomach, and Rosie nearly asks about it, the question coming half-formed and uncertain to her lips.

But then Sabrina keeps talking, and any question she might have asked gets pushed aside. “Oh, goodness, of course,” she murmurs, feeling her face grow all the hotter at the implication. “I wouldn’t ever...of course we’ll use protection, whenever it’s...when it’s the time for that.” It’s something she’d already been thinking of herself, if distantly—for all that she wants it, she wants more for it to be right, when it happens—but Rosie can’t help growing a little flustered regardless.

She watches Sabrina fuss with her hair, echoing her soft and faintly rueful laughter. “It’s alright,” she reassures her, smiling despite the deepening red of her face. “Not having a plan, I mean. We’ll just...I suppose we’ll work it all out bit by bit, when we need to. Talking, letting each other know what we need.”

Rosie goes silent for a moment, turning another question over in her mind. “How...how do you want to talk about this, about the both of us being with Nick? It’s...I’ve asked you to be discreet when you’re talking about Charlie so I can still manage to look him in the face, but if we’re both with Nick...” She trails off, catching her lip in her teeth for a moment, her shoulders lifting in a helpless little shrug. “Maybe it’s not so different, really.”

The reassurance is nice, even a sort of balm--of course they'd still be the same close foursome they'd grown into over the last few months--but Sabrina's laughter and the joking ease with which she brings up the rumors leaves Rosie quickly and surprisingly stung. "I...they will, won't they," she says, the line of her shoulders growing just slightly tense. "At least--at least we'll be in it together." She looks away, trying to let go of the sudden humiliating swirl of her thoughts. It's not quite as easy as she might have hoped, though the quick shift in topic helps--even as the answer Sabrina gives, that enigmatic shuffling of part of the conversation to some other time, seems to invite a few more questions.

If she wants to wait, though, Rosie's happy to give her that space; it isn't as though they don't have plenty to discuss otherwise. "Alright, good," she says, her smile a little more settled on her face. "I'd want to talk to you. Maybe not about everything, but...most things. I'd hate to think we'd need to give up gossiping about our relationships entirely because of this." It's her turn to laugh now, the sound of it maybe a little faint and tinged with that tension from before; hearing it, she inwardly kicks herself for her own awkwardness. There's nothing for it but to press on, and so she does.

"What sort of--what might he expect of me, when it's..." Rosie blushes again, struggling to put together the question she wants to ask. "Oh, this is ridiculous." She huffs out a sharp, exasperated breath, forcing herself just to talk rather than think. "I know he's good, or expect he will be, really, with all his...his experience. But I haven't much at all, not really, even if I was already with someone, and...I guess I'm just wondering what he...likes."

The more she said, the hotter her face had grown. She doesn't take any of it back; just looks steadily at Sabrina, studying her friend's expression as she waits for an answer.

"Oh, you're terrifying," Rosie laughs, letting the squeeze to her hand push away a little more of the sudden tension that had settled within her. "But only in the best way, the way that protects the people you care about."

With Sabrina's legs now draped over her lap and almost pinning her in place, Rosie has no choice but to listen to the rest, none of it really doing much to make her blush any less. It's not quite the answer to the question she was asking, but it's useful and almost comforting information regardless. "And...I want him to make me feel good," she admits, with a small and almost secretive quirk of her lips. "That'll be...well, you know what David was like on that front." Rosie crinkles her nose, making a quick moue of disgust. "And I know it's going to be different, much different, now I'm with Nick. In so many ways. I just...I want to make him feel good too, however...whatever he wants of me."

That he will want something of her is a fact that Rosie doesn't even think to question. Of course he will, even if the timing of it all is her own to set, instead of the almost superficial thing it had been with David--being made to believe her choices were her own, rather than something he'd nudged her into bit by bit until the charade had lost its luster. It won't be that, but it has to be something.

"I know it won't be like it was with David, I just--" The shocked and slightly murderous look that crosses Sabrina's face, combined with the charge in the air that briefly lifts a few strands of her hair, makes Rosie drop the matter rather than continue to talk it through. "Alright, I can...of course I'll be honest with him. I want to be."

Sabrina relaxes, her legs still draped over Rosie's lap, and Rosie lets the tense moment get a little further away before she speaks again. "How long have you and Charlie known?" she asks, breathing out a quiet half-embarrassed laugh. "That Nick and I were...that we were getting close?"

Seeing Sabrina's expression shift into something so immediately sorrowful makes a cold and heavy guilt settle in Rosie's chest. It's only momentary, at least, banished almost as soon as it occurs as she hears the fierce protectiveness underlying each word of Sabrina's explanation. "I know we've talked about how things like this were different at home for me," she murmurs, one hand curling gently around Sabrina's ankle. "Or even for you, for that matter, with all that staying a virgin for your Dark Baptism business. And I know David used that in his own stupid, awful way to get what he wanted, I do, but..."

She sighs. "When you've always heard that letting a boy have certain...advantages means you can't be surprised if he decides you ought to offer him more, it's not so easy to forget."

Rosie shakes her head in answer to the shift in topic. "You said a little, but not much," she says, her thumb starting to rub a soft, idle circle along the hollow of Sabrina's ankle. "That it's set around Valentine's Day, but it's just for witches, I remember that much. And that you were celebrating it with Nick."

"More than a touch of Red Riding Hood in there, too," she says, the corner of her mouth ticking up as Sabrina laughs. Not for the first time, she thinks about how much she likes that sound. More so, when she's the one to cause it. "It all sounds like a lot, especially if you'd never been with someone before."

Rosie keeps up the touch to Sabrina's ankle as she speaks, that gentle circling of her thumb, a few times letting her hand run a bit up Sabrina's calf and back down. If this sort of thing works to soothe Sabrina, the feeling of hands in her hair does much the same thing for Rosie; when the other girl's fingers find their way into her curls, Rosie tips her head into the touch, her eyes closing briefly. "Tragedy aside, and I'm sorry there even was one in the first place," she says quietly, "I'm glad the rest of it happened the way you wanted. That's...how it ought to be."

Rosie feels her own spike of anger at David then, one that's a little more internal than Sabrina's crackling rage from before.

"I suppose not," she says, her cheeks pinking a little once more. "Not if an...an orgy was the point of the evening." Just saying the word makes Rosie's stomach flip a little; the sensation odd but not wholly off-putting. "Though you do look awfully good in stockings, as I'm sure you know."

There's a shift in the way Sabrina's fingers move through her hair, something slight but faintly--and again, oddly--reminiscent of the way Nick's had twisted in her curls as he held her in a kiss during their evening together only a few days ago. Then, she'd gasped against his mouth, deepened the kiss until she was dizzy and breathless with it. That's not going to happen here, not tonight.

But it could, she thinks, the realization surprising in its suddenness. Sometime later.

Rosie makes herself focus on what else Sabrina is saying, the explanation and reassurances she's continuing to provide in this sharing of her own history. It helps, a little. "Oh, I see," she says. "So when the rest of us were escaping those gingerbread men, you and Charlie were celebrating the turn of the new year in a much nicer way." She nudges Sabrina, teasing, and laughs, hoping the faint note of something strained she hears in the sound isn't audible to her friend. "Good for you."

"Goodness, Sabrina," Rosie says, looking down at her. Pressed as close as they are, she can't help but feel the faint tremor that goes through Sabrina, and it--along with the thought of what that would be like, to be out in the open, under the stars--nearly sparks an answering one of her own.

She has to talk to her about this, and soon. To Nick and Charlie too, maybe. But not quite yet.

When Sabrina's hand twines itself out of her hair, for a moment she thinks maybe whatever this has become since she opened the door to her apartment has passed; that there'll be a distance again, something still close and still intimate, certainly, but veiled in friendship. And then there's the light press of Sabrina's fingertips against her neck, and somewhere at the back of her mind Rosie knows it's only just begun.

"I," she starts, though it comes out more like a sigh than a word. She swallows, and tries again. "I want that too. Whatever firsts there are, whatever ones remain, I want them with someone who cares about me. Who really does, not someone...pretending. Not someone who makes a fool of me." Despite the increasing thud of her heartbeat, when Rosie smiles, it's easy and bright. "And I know I'll have that now."

Her eyes go a split-second wide and startled, not at the thought itself but the way it so accurately echoes her own. In a way, the most surprising thing is how unsurprising it is, how natural it already feels to be considering this new alteration in the way they are together.

She never expected this--any of this--that day she came barreling into Sabrina's room at the Home, having heard Salem's meow. But oh, how glad she is to have it now.

"I do," she says, her voice almost as quiet as Sabrina's. The sight of her white-blonde hair against the fabric of her blouse looks so right, so perfect, that it makes Rosie's breath catch just faintly. "If that's...we'll need to talk to Nick and Charlie, or maybe I will, maybe you already have, about how it ought to...fit. How we should be together, as part of all the rest of it." She doesn't know if any of that makes sense, is nearly certain they could be doing much better things than this jumble of half-formed thoughts and practical planning, but something about it grounds her all the same.

Rosie looks down again, quiet for a moment. "But I know I want them. Whatever firsts there are, down the road. If we can have them, I--I want them."

"You should," she says, trying her best not to show how much effort it takes to agree to that. She shifts a bit, letting Sabrina have some space. "And Nick and I need to have our time, you're right. We need to find out how we are together, before..." Rosie blushes, a faint pink along her cheeks. "Well, before the two of us do."

She nods at the rest of it, though the thought of Nick liking the idea of her and Sabrina together--other combinations, if we find that works, she hears him say again--makes her head spin, just a little. "I'll talk to them both too," she says. "Charlie, especially. He's my best friend, and I'd never want any of this to hurt him, just like I already knew I didn't want to get in the way of you and Nick, how you are together."

There's a surging wave of love that fills her then, for all of them; something that makes her chest briefly tight. Gently, carefully, Rosie puts an arm around Sabrina, squeezing her once before letting go.