Page 88 of Prodigal Son

Instead, she sighed, and melted, and gripped his shoulders tight.

And then they were kissing in earnest.

He slid one hand to the small of her back, tucked her hips in flush with his, and with his other he finally touched her face. Cupped her soft cheek, and the lean angle of her jaw, and felt the tension bleed out of her as she opened her mouth to the gentle probing of his tongue, and gave, and gave.

Time spun out slow; a pulled-taffy moment, sweet enough to make his teeth ache in a good way, for that long, hot handful of seconds before it snapped, and reality came crashing back.

Axelle pulled away first, and he was proud that he didn’t chase her, that he had that much self-control, at least. His gaze tracked over her face, though.

She was beautiful. Lips pink and damp from kissing, eyes heavy-lidded, pulse pounding in her throat.

“Okay,” she said after a moment. “That happened.”

“Sorry.”

A small smile. “Don’t be.”

~*~

When he was sufficiently armed – “Holy shit, how are you even going to carry all that?” Axelle wondered – they walked back to the pub to see what sort of state Raven was in.

A bad one.

She’d made an alarming dent in the Smirnoff and had slumped down into a human puddle on top of her table, head resting on her folded arms, hair in a kind of wild disarray she would have never allowed while sober. The tables around her had cleared out; the patrons at the nearest, a good two yards away, shot her concerned glances.

“Shit,” Albie said. He put a hand on the table, near her elbow, and leaned down. “Raven? Raven, you awake?”

Her eyes blinked open slowly, gaze unfocused. “Fuck…you,” she murmured.

“Right then.” He handed his duffel to Axelle – who actually staggered beneath the weight of it before she got it balanced – and reached to hook his hands under Raven’s arms and pull her out of the booth. She protested, but weakly, dishrag limp and barely conscious. “Can’t you hold any of your own weight?” he asked when he had her upright, one of her arms pulled over his shoulders, his own arm hooked around her waist.

“Nope,” she sighed, and dropped her head down on his shoulder.

“Of course not.”

Her shoes had fallen off, no doubt still sat beneath the table somewhere, and her bare feet, her bright red nails, looked unbearably fragile against the grungy old hardwood of the pub floor. She had slender feet, the bones prominent beneath her skin; old calluses where impractical shoes had pinched over the years. Unstable as she was, she stood with her ankles turned at bad angles, terribly off-balance.

As if reading his mind, Axelle set the bag down, ducked beneath the table, and came back out with the black pumps. “I don’t think she needs to put them back on now.”

“No,” he agreed. “Follow me up?”

“Yeah.”

Slow and careful, staggering more than walking, Albie got her across the pub, and up all three flights of stairs to one of the many guest rooms. He was panting by the end, sweat gluing his shirt to his body.

“You could help a little,” he said.

Raven mumbled something indistinct and stumbled, nearly taking him down with her. They were of a height, and she ran heavier than he’d anticipated.

“Fuck,” he said when, finally, he eased her down onto a sun-faded coverlet and reached to rub the stiffness from his neck.

Axelle set the shoes down at the foot of the bed and looked like she wrestled with a grin. She went into the en suite and came back with a paper cup of water and two aspirin that she set on the bedside table – a shiny cherry wood piece older than all of them combined, nicked from years of love and abuse. When Axelle clicked on the lamp, Raven murmured a protest and pressed her face into the small mound of decorative pillows piled up at the headboard.

“No, no, here.” Albie again reached for his dead-weight sister, maneuvering her onto her side, close enough to the edge of the bed so she could curl over and vomit into the wastepaper bin, but far enough back that she (hopefully) wouldn’t roll right off onto the floor and concuss herself. “Do you need anything?”

She didn’t respond, her breathing evening out, slow and deep.

“She’ll be down for the rest of the night,” Axelle said. “Unless she gets sick.”

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