233 Test of Strength (5)
Iris was asleep when her phone rang. She ignored it for a time, but then thought that it might be Kyro and forced herself to grab it from the bed table next to her. To her surprise, the caller was actually the guard.
"Missis, a taxi is bringing Mr. Hemming to your home."
"Thank you," Iris murmured with a yawn and looked at the time after ending the call. The small number at the corner of her screen showed five o'clock, in the morning.
That was a little out of expectations, but Iris quickly left the warmth of the bed and dressed up to welcome her wayward boyfriend. Could he really have been out for so long? Or did he meet someone besides Gale?
Shaking her head, Iris cut off the unsavory thoughts and went outside. In a few moments, the buzz of a car engine could be heard through the quiet neighborhood, and a taxi rounded the corner.
Iris waved at the driver, opening the entrance gates for him to come inside.
"Good morning, ma'am," a youthful boy greeted her. He couldn't have been more than sixteen, but maybe he just looked young. While she wondered why Kyro wasn't stepping out, the youth grinned at her. "He fell asleep almost instantly. Should I help you bring him home?"
"It's fine." Iris opened the passenger door and saw Kyro deep asleep. He was dressed in different clothes, a casual T-shirt and jeans, which were clean but crumpled all around.
She sighed, then shook his shoulder, violently. It was hard to wake him when he was just asleep, so now it should be even worse. But it wasn't. His eyes soon opened, and she saw two murky pupils staring back at her.
"Get up," she told him, and it took a good minute for him to grasp the hidden meaning of those words. Iris in the meantime paid the driver and closed the gates behind him.
When she turned, Kyro was still standing in the middle of the courtyard, staring at the sky and shivering. "Get inside," Iris ordered and pulled him along.
It wasn't easy, but she managed. At home, she led him to the bedroom where he dropped dead straight away. There wasn't even a moment wasted before his head hit the pillow and he fell asleep.
Lucy hobbled over soon after, and Iris picked him up to put on the bed. The cat looked at her for a moment, as if expressing his appreciation for her being so quick to understand his plans, and then curled itself by Kyro's feet.
Iris thought to join them, but her phone rang again. She looked at the caller id and was surprised to see it was Lily. "Did something happen?" she asked the girl, fearing the worst. No one would call at five in the morning without a serious reason.
"Uhm… I'm sorry to call this early… but… I didn't know what else to do…"
"What is it?" Iris asked again, her heart in her throat. Did something horrible happen while Gale was away? Did her parents come back for her or sent someone?
"What do you do with a drunk person?" the girl asked in a quiet voice.
For a moment, Iris stood still, then burst out laughing. So the disaster was that Gale returned seriously drunk? Chuckling to herself, she told Lily to just let him sleep and prepare some painkillers and a lot of water when he woke up. Also told her to not make any loud noises for the time being, or open the curtains to bring in light.
"Don't get anything heavy to eat, either, since alcohol is a sort of poison and his stomach should be sensitive for the next day."
The girl listened to everything with lots of 'okay' and 'understood', then thanked Iris and promised to do as she was suggested.
By the time they finished speaking, it was past six. It was a little too late for going to sleep, but it didn't seem like Kyro was going to get up any time soon. Iris was quite amazed at his preparations for what would happen, since the alarm didn't ring once; he had clearly turned it off the day before.
And so, she returned to bed. There was a slight smell of alcohol and cigarettes coming off Kyro, but she ignored it. In three months she'd known him, it was the first time he'd done something like that, so who was she to say anything. Besides, it should have been good for him to relax after working overtime for so long.
-
When Gale opened his eyes, he was met with familiar darkness. He was back in his room after another drunk venture, alone. A chill seeped through him, but he didn't mind it anymore. It wasn't like the women he sometimes met with were ever anything more than a momentary flash of warmth that was gone before he could take hold of it.
His head hurt like the devil, and he prepared for the humiliating task of crawling to the kitchen where he kept his medicine, when he took notice of a glass of water and painkillers on his bedstand. He could have sworn they weren't there yesterday.
Not having the spare brain cells to think of it, he chugged two tablets and washed them down with clean water. He then lay back down on the bed, eyes closed.
Once his mind cleared up a bit, he remembered that he hadn't closed his curtains, either. He could have sworn he had opened them the day prior to chase away the chill, and he wasn't conscious enough at night to close them. He could barely remember anything from after he dragged Kyro to another horrible bar that was open till morning.
It puzzled him, but he wasn't ready to tackle the problem yet. If he'd brought some woman into the house, he would need to kick her out, and his head couldn't survive the screeching just then.
Another half an hour later, his stomach made itself known. He was hungry, but the idea of food was nauseating. It was a surprisingly mild reaction compared to how much alcohol he'd poured into his body yesterday, so Gale decided to try and eat something. If he threw up everything, at least he would have tried.
Something clanged from the direction of the kitchen at that moment, and Gale forced himself to rise up. Might as well kick the stranger too. His one night stands weren't normally allowed into his apartment, so the sooner he got this one out, the better.
But the moment he dragged himself to the kitchen, his feet got stuck to the ground. Disbelieving, he stared at the phantasmagorical sight before him.
Instead of an unfamiliar face, it was Lily standing before a pot of water, watching as it boiled. Her young face was scrunched up with concentration as she poured a little salt, then mixed it and threw in a bunch of chopped up cabbage leafs.
Gale had no idea what she was doing, so he watched her for a bit more. She kept glancing at her phone, as if checking up on something, and then back at the pot, not looking happy for some reason.
"Is everything all right?" he asked, and the girl jumped in fright, almost pushing the pot off the stove.
"Ah!" she exclaimed, then looked between Gale and her pot for a few times. As she did so, tears welled up in her eyes, and she lowered her head.
Feeling not up to the task of figuring out his sister's moods with his pulsing headache, Gale still went to her. "What happened?" he asked in a soft voice, or planned to anyway. He sounded gravely and ruff, his voice chords seemingly having been abused the day before.
"I found online that cabbage soup is good for hangover, so I tried to make, but-but…" Her fingers curled around the edges of her dress, stretching them taut, and she looked to the side, refusing to meet his eyes. "Some ingredients were missing, and then I accidentally skipped a step, and—"
Gale didn't wait for her to finish. His heart burst with a feeling he'd never felt before, and he enveloped his little sister in a bear hug. She should have been playing with toys and worrying if her new classmates would like her, not taking care of him who was twenty years older than her.
And yet he couldn't help the warmth that spread through him. When had he last seen someone worry about him without expecting to gain something from it?
His hands tightened around her, and he voiced a thank you in his head. The world they lived in might have been created flawed, but he could at least make it bearable for Lily. Now that their parents could no longer touch her, he could make it so this fragile flower which was one of the few rays of light in his life would never have to suffer again.
