202 Unwelcome Visitor (5)

Once Kyro decided that this particular conversation required two people since it would take forever with clipped answers like the previous one, he let go of it and put his phone away. Iris watched him as a fox, clearly wanting to say something, but it wasn't meant to happen. His knowledge of yips and screams wasn't sufficient for a conversation.

In the end, she curled up by his side and closed her eyes. Her animal form was incomparably cute, so his arm moved almost on its own to caress her head. Who could resist a brooding beautiful fox?

She didn't shy away from his touch. Her eyes opened up, but only a for a moment. As she leaned into his touch, she returned to trying to rest.

They lay like this and must have fallen asleep, for a sound brought Kyro back. He listened carefully and heard voices. People were moving about below.

'The rest must have returned.' He thought to return to sleep, but what if the others decided to check up on them? There were going to be a lot of questions if they noticed him sleeping with a fox while his girlfriend had left somewhere.

He rose up with care, hoping not to wake Iris. It had been an eventful evening for her, and she needed a good night's rest. They would leave in the morning, while everyone was still asleep and wouldn't see it like running away.

The floorboards creaked when he stepped on them, and he glanced back at Iris, but she didn't raise. Washed in moonlight, since they had forgotten to close the curtains, she slept in the middle of the bed.

Closing the door behind himself, he went downstairs.

The first one he saw was Jimmy sprawled against the dinner table. He looked to be asleep, with eyes closed, but he was muttering something under his breath in an imitation of singing. There was no tune to it, and the only saving grace was that it was on the quiet side.

Nearby, Ted sat with Emily in his lap. The two were red-faced from drinking, but not gone yet like Jimmy. Ted was whispering in a no way quiet voice, and Emily blushed, looking away from him.

This only left Marge out, and Kyro went outside to look for her. The other three posed little to no problems, since all of them were to insensate to even remember what had happened earlier.

Outside, Marge was standing at the beach by herself. She walked by the shore, sometimes raising her head to look up into the distance, while at other times following the movements of the receding water.

"Still not tired?" Kyro asked, coming over.

Marge jumped at his words, pivoting on one foot to face him. While moving, she recognized him and took in a deep breath. "Don't sneak up on people!" she ordered.

"I didn't…" He really hadn't. She was just too distracted. "So what pushed you here into the cold? Got tired of the young love?"

A laugh escaped Marge's lips, and she turned away to gaze into the sea. "I've just grown sentimental. When I was young, mother would often tell me that love is just an illusion, a story that the rich decided to sell everyone who is unhappy. Because of that, I became a terror in school, beating up all the boys who said they cared about me.

"And yet here I am, married and about to have my first child. My best friend is now engaged as well, while even you have found someone you care about, which everyone had long deemed impossible."

"Impossible, eh?"

Those words did ring a bell. The others hadn't been the only ones to speak them. As he shifted his gaze to the calm waters of the sea, he remembered how this sight had pained him at one point of history.

Once upon a time, he had decided to ask Jane to come with him to somewhere by the sea. But the plan had never become any more than that because she left the first day the classes were over and didn't speak a word for the whole summer. Her only excuse was that she was busy.

He'd been pretty annoyed by it at the time, but he cared too much about her to put it between them. Though he should have. The end result might have been less painful if he'd done it.

After the abandonment, he'd sworn to never trust women. His hatred ran deeper than the river Styx, but years dulled the emotion. He also grew up. It was childish to judge billions of people because of one bad apple. Jane chose her path, and he had his own. There was no point to holding it against her.

"How did you meet Iris?" Marge asked after a while.

"An accident, in truth," he said. Their meeting could be seen as fated, but it was mostly just luck. If he hadn't decided to walk home that day from the meeting nearby, or been a few minutes late, they would have never known the other existed. "We were lucky."

Marge turned to him then, hands on hips. "You're not telling me anything here. Stop being to cryptic!"

He laughed and shook his head. "You wouldn't believe me even if I did."

"Try me."

"She came to my house, saying she was the fennec's owner. It was over a month after I've obtained the little thing, and I had no wish to let go of it. Especially when its owner was pretty much homeless and out of luck."

"Homeless?" Marge's hands fell, and she tilted her head. Her ferocity in demanding an answer turned into confusion. "What did you do then?"

Kyro shrugged. "What could I do? I tried to reason with her, saying that I could give the fennec a much better home. In the end, she agreed to it if I allowed her to stay at my place for a few weeks. The fox had ran away due to the confusion after her flat had caught fire due to a gas leakage from the pipes. She'd been living at friends' for the last month, but they were running out of patience, and she still hadn't found an affordable place to stay."

The look on Marge's face was priceless. Her expression was torn between horror, pity, amusement, and disbelief. She couldn't decide what she was feeling the most intensely, and her face kept twitching, forehead wrinkling up and relaxing.

The story had to be far-fetched to explain how he met Iris, someone who wasn't part of his circles, and even let her stay at his place, but he'd chosen this version in particular to see people's reactions. They were bound to be struck speechless, and it had been awhile seen he'd had this kind of childish fun.

"Kyro Hemming, you want to tell me that you just let a strange woman into your house, and two weeks later, she became your girlfriend?" Marge demanded, her face going red even though she hadn't drank a drop of alcohol. "How mad are you exactly?"