Why Is It Called A Blind Date?, TAG: Jo

So apparently John and Whiskey had both had the same idea having seen the Jessica Fox ads for Valentine's Day matchmaking and either A: wanted the other out of the apartment for the day or night or what have you, or B: Might have genuine interest in the other getting a more real love life. Not that John had any real priority for a love life, but his sister had signed him up for this so he was not going to just skip out on it or anything. Besides, apparently it had been left to him by the matchmaker to set it all up.

Responsibility, he could handle that. Though he was nervous as a long tail cat in a room of rocking chairs. He had his tail wrapped around him for that fact. Metaphorically of course, he'd done what he could to make sure this exactly blow up in his face or hers. He'd also received contact information so that he could ya know, contact her with. Oh and her name was Jo Harvelle. He had an idea or two as to what kind of date to plan. He'd start it in a bar though. Her profile said her ideal date setting was a bar and her favorite food was anything one would find in a bar. So he took his genius brain and set something up. But that was a surprise.

He was waiting outside the address he had found for this girl, woman being more accurate. There was a place picked out and he didn't just throw darts at pictures of bars. He put some work into it. He scouted out several bars, Brass Monkey, 230 Fifth, Trinity Place, all bars which had good reviews, but he was also going on gut instinct and intuition in making his choice. Well the 23 Fifth actually had some negative reviews. Most common complaints were bad service and rude staff, despite the rooftop bar and scene. And so upon reading that and scoping it out John crossed it off the list of possibles and the total list had started off at something like ten but by the middle of the day had been reduced down to two. And after further scouting and feeling around it was the Brass Monkey that got the spot. He wrote down the address, the name, and a time, just as the sun was setting, about 5:30.

But this place seem to be just right for such an occasion as was now. It had good service, nice reviews which indicated good food, service, drinks atmosphere etc. And Kings felt he had the right place after a visit or two that day in scouting places out and getting a feel of atmosphere etc.

And so he waited himself outside until he figured it was a good time to go meet this Jo lady. Wow lady actually makes her sound kinda old. But what were the chances of that right? He knocked on her door, praying for the best.

She was going to kill Dean. She was actually going to kill him; this was the last thing that Jo had ever wanted to do. Blind dates, seriously? She’d seen the adverts, of course – it was pretty freaking hard to miss them, actually, and that stupid woman with her sickly voice...Jo wanted to shoot her just to make her shut up – but she had dismissed it as something for other people, not for her. It wasn’t that Jo didn’t date. It wasn’t exactly her scene, but she’d had a few boyfriends in the past, she sure as hell had a crush on Dean, proving that her heart wasn’t entirely cold and dead, like the rest of her had been a few months back. She’d date if she wanted to date, if she found somebody that she liked—and that somebody was someone who actually committed instead of hooking up with a different woman every night and somehow making it seem charming rather than sleazy. She might not have done a lot of it since she’d come back to life, but there had kind of been more important things to focus on, really, like the fact that vampires were roaming the streets like they weren’t blood-sucking monsters, or, you know, the fact that she wasn’t dead. Dating kind of came low on her list of priorities, compared to that. It wasn’t like she didn’t have options. If she’d wanted casual sex, Dean was right there, and judging by recent events, it seemed as though Sam would be interested in hooking up with her, too. There were the patrons at the bar, who did their best to hit on her, and then just stared down her shirt when that failed. She had too much self-respect for that, however. She wasn’t just going to tumble into bed with the first person that asked. She never had done, not even at the Roadhouse, not even when the freaking world had been ending. That didn’t mean that she needed to be set up. Far from it—and now Jo wished that she had decided to sign Dean up for it. That would have been nice pay back.

She was, however, too nice to stand whoever had been given her name up; it would have been rude, and it wasn’t as though she actually had anything better to do tonight. She could have cleaned her guns, she guessed, because it was always good to make sure that weapons were clean and in the best condition they could be in, but there had been no big Valentine’s Day plans. She tended to ignore the date entirely, really, because what was the point in marking it? She wasn’t in love, and neither was she a grumpy, frustrated singleton. She was single, sure, but she didn’t feel the need to exclaim every five seconds that Valentine’s Day was a commercial waste of time and nothing like the saint’s day it had been modelled after. It was just another day. Vampires to kill, weapons to clean...blind dates to go on, apparently. Thanks, Dean. They’d probably want to meet somewhere fancy, and she’d be woefully underdressed, since Jo was still wearing jeans and boots – she had on a nice, pretty shirt, however, and a leather jacket, just to class herself up a bit – and it would be awkward because she couldn’t talk about hunting, and that was the only thing that actually meant anything in her life. She didn’t have a lot of other things to talk about, really, which didn’t matter most of the time, since she hung around hunters, and had done her entire life. Civilians probably didn’t want to hear about her life, and she wouldn’t risk telling them. But hey, maybe she could be a vaguely normal girl for once, as long as some monster didn’t decide to interrupt whatever was happening; she wasn’t going to go unarmed, however. She wasn’t that stupid: her knife was in the pocket of her jeans, as always, she had her smallest gun in the inside pocket of her jacket on one side, and a stake on the other. So she probably had too many weapons for a date. She didn’t even know if the guy she was meant to be meeting – John Kings – was human. It wasn’t like Jo was going to risk it. Not with all the creatures currently being completely crazy.

She sighed, ran a hand through her hair as she checked herself in the mirror – just because she wasn’t wearing some impractical dress and heels, it didn’t mean that she had no consideration for what she looked like at all. Jo just preferred to be natural, herself, rather than some made up version of herself that wasn’t real, and in the event that anything happened, she wanted to be able to fight, rather than tottering about as she tried not to twist her ankle. No, thanks; she’d pass on that one. She shrugged, made a mental note to make sure that she made killing Dean an extremely painful task, and opened the door as there was a knock at it. “Hey, I’m Jo. I guess you must be John.”

What happened next was a little embarrassing but it was like his gears had locked up and started grinding. He had a moment of this look on his face that was just...god! It was like someone had whacked him over the head with a brick or something. But after a second or two of nothing he managed to snap himself out of it.

"Uhm uh..yes!" the exclaiming being just from his effort to get something coherent out. He would attribute the being dumbstruck to nerves. Though there was always that chance it was something else. Ya know like, maybe uhm Oh I forget what they call it Oh yea. Physical attraction. Just finding her to be a good looking woman. He had everything planned out with confidence though, he'd received suggestions and such and he figured what could go wrong if he stuck to the plan? Or if he just thought about it as just two mature people hanging out. It was odd for him, he would admit it if asked, that he had this moment of apparent panic.

He was not someone who was...very experienced with dating to be completely honest. Not that he was incapable of handling himself when on one. But he did not do it a whole not, not as much as others his age did. Well as much as they did to his knowledge or to expectation of the rest o the populace. He really didn't date much if at all, okay not really at all, we'll just put it that way. He'd socialized plenty with people. He'd been somewhat of a butterfly, being able to hang out with people of varying self divisions of the campus populace, you know, cliques. But he'd never really dated. Not that he was inexperienced in fields associated with dating. But that was irrelevant to the present scenario/scene. Just stick to the plan. What was the worst that could happen? Wait that may not be a good idea to ask that question. In movies that always ended up foreshadowing something going very wrong. Of course this wasn't the movies, this was real life. He didn't much think he would be unprepared for much though. So again, the plan was go to the aforementioned, chosen bar, the Brass Monkey for drinks, food, normal date stuff. And after they moved on from the bar for whatever reason may push them vacate it, he had set up time at a firing range. Maybe show her some stuff about the bow if she didn't know anything already. There was no mention of archery anywhere in the information that he had received, and if she did then well they could have some kind of friendly competitive shooting. They could do that with fire arms as well if one or both felt so inclined to do so. Regardless there was a small firearm in his belt, a .38 snub nose, stainless steel with black handle.

"So...Ready?" himself dressed as nice casual, new shirt, new pants, but the same jacket he'd had for some time, long enough he cared none too much for the notion of replacing it yet.

Jo didn’t date. She’d never dated. Sure, she’d had a boyfriend a few years back, one of the younger hunters who’d come into the bar, and it had been fun but ultimately hadn’t worked out – no hard feelings, and all that jazz – and she got hit on all the time, regardless of whether the bar she worked in was orientated towards hunters or civilians, but that wasn’t the same as dressing up and going on dates. That was something she didn’t do; she didn’t even pay mind to the flirting, most of the time, because it wasn’t going to get them anywhere. She didn’t mind flirting, with the right guy, and it was definitely funny to see some guy think he could get in her pants just by complimenting her ass and buying her a beer, but that wasn’t dating. Hell, Jo didn’t have time for dating. Not when the vampires were all completely crazy, not when there was something to hunt every single freaking night, not when she still had to figure out how the hell she was alive again, because there seemed to be no answers to that question at all – and the longer it got, the more worried she became. Not that she was going to tell anybody that, not even Dean, but yeah, Jo was worried, because she didn’t know if whatever had brought her back was going to come for her at some point. She didn’t know if it was going to control her and use her like a puppet, if she was some kind of a sleeper agent waiting for the right trigger to mindlessly kill her friends...Jo wasn’t going to stop living her life because of those worries, but they were absolutely there, without a doubt. She didn’t entirely trust herself, and it would all have been different if she’d had answers, but she didn’t have answers. That was the whole point—everything seemed to be rather lacking in the answers department, really, given that they knew just as little about the thing that had turned the creatures crazy. It was frustrating; now really would have been a good time for a brainwave, or some useful piece of information to turn up, thanks.

But she doubted that it was going to, at least not just like that, and Jo couldn’t spend her life reading books until everything went blurry, sleeping for a few hours, and then napping. She had a new lease of life and she definitely needed to have more to it than hunting and her job at the bar (and hanging out with Dean when she could, although that was still going to lead to his death next time they did that, because regardless of the fact that it was probably a good idea for her to get out of the motel, she was perfectly capable of getting a date herself – she just had to hope that Sam had decided to be an annoying little brother and sign Dean up for this, because she sure as hell wished that she had done it herself). It was hard to focus on anything else when this was happening, though, and yeah, it was great that it wasn’t another apocalypse, it was great that Lucifer didn’t seem to have struck yet, although he inevitably would – unless he was behind all of this crap, which wouldn’t have surprised her, although she also didn’t see what he would have gained from making vampires crazy, from his perspective...not that she ever really wanted to know what went on in the freaking devil’s mind, thanks – but it was still as hard as hell to do anything other than damage control. They killed as many of the fanged bastards as they could, but it was never going to be enough, because there were too many of them. It was so frustrating, and pretty much the only thing that Jo could think about. Yeah, it was definitely time for a break, to think about something else for a change, even though she really didn’t feel like going on a date. It could be worse, she guessed. At least this guy didn’t immediately appear to be a vampire.

Not that vamps ever had flashing signs to tell her that they were one; it was usually the whole drinking blood thing that gave it away, and she wasn’t going to be stupid about this. He seemed human, but she couldn’t tell, so she was going to carry her weapons and not be ashamed about it. There were dangerous things lurking out there even if he wasn’t one of the creatures she wanted to try and kill. “Nice to meet you,” she said automatically, though she was reserving judgement until she knew that he was human, honestly, because you could never be too careful. She nodded, closing her door behind her. “Sure. You got plans?”

John didn't really date much himself, they were more like, simple social meetings between two people. Rarely if ever did it go well enough for there to be a second. Not that he was a bad date...he was just he lacked interest. I guess. There was just nothing he was getting out of it in the ways he thought he should, he wasn't making any more a connection than he ever had with just friends. But it really didn't bother him any. Maybe he just hadn't met the right one. Perhaps that disconnect came from the not so normal upbringing, or that when he hit the usual dating age, he just had his sister to ask. Who wants to ask their sister for dating advice when they aren't a little sister? If Whiskey were a man it might be just a little different but she wasn't, things weren't. He might feel less awkward is he knew she knew about the other side of life. Well, everyone knew anymore, so a better wording might be if he knew she was like him. Not only did she know, but she did something about it. But he wasn't much thinking of that right now.

What did pass through his head how pretty he thought she was. But pretty is too simple a word. Jo, a grander word may be required for her. She was not the average pretty face. Not to John anyway. He wasn't thinking about vampires or monsters too much either. Other than the feeling he had that Whiskey signed him up for this under suspicion this was some nefarious vampire plot. Which he was not getting that feeling but he could still very well be wrong.

"Have you ever been to the Brass Monkey?" That would be the bar he'd spent time coming to chose.

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. At the very least, it was something normal, and not related to vampires or death or anything like that, and maybe Jo needed a little bit of normality in her life, just for a little while. She wasn't going to go in unarmed, because she wasn't an idiot, but she could hopefully focus on meeting someone new, and not the fact that the world was in turmoil and vampires were everywhere. As long as he didn't turn out to be a vampire, anyway; then she'd have to kill him and that would kind of ruin the whole date thing, wouldn't it? She couldn't get away from hunting completely, Jo knew that, and she was always going to be on alert, because with vamps allowed into places there was no telling what might go down, but for the most part, she was going to try to do everything she could just to be a relatively normal girl, for once. Not that Jo actually knew how to do that, because she'd never been normal – and it had never bothered her. She was happy with who she was. She was proud of who she was, and being a hunter was a huge part of that. So she had never really fitted in with the other girls at school. Big deal; she didn't actually care about that in the slightest. She was who she was, and she wasn't low in her self-esteem in the slightest. She wasn't arrogant, either, she didn't think that she was the greatest person alive, or anything like that – she sure as hell didn't know why she of all people had been brought back to life, it wasn't like she was anything special – but Jo was happy being who she was. She was confident. Maybe she didn't want to be normal at all, but she could at least try, right? This could be fun. She was still going to kill Dean, but it could be fun.

John seemed nice, at least. Good looking, definitely, and she wasn't expecting this to go anywhere, she wasn't looking for a boyfriend all of a sudden, but she wasn't going to go into this saying that she hated him, either, just because she didn't want to date. Maybe she'd make a friend, at the very least, that would be something, and it had been a very long time since she'd even thought about anything romantic. She'd been dead for two years, after all, if she was being technical about how long it had been since she'd been on an actual date and not just been hit on in the bar. That happened all the time, and it definitely wasn't the same. She was going to stop thinking about this too much, anyway. This was happening, and it might not go anywhere, but that didn't matter. For one night, hopefully, she could stop thinking about all the crap in the world and focus on doing something fun, instead, something that wasn't just getting a few drinks in a bar after a hunt – as much as she enjoyed that, especially when it was with Dean. “I've heard of it,” she replied, making sure that the door was locked and tucking her keys into an empty jacket pocket, the weight of her gun comfortable in another one; she was glad to have it on her, at the very least. She felt unarmed otherwise. Heading down the path, though, she shook her head. “Never been, though. Is it near?”