Everyone flooded out of the pub around two in the morning; the singer and the twins walked along the pavement with the busker and girl, pleasantly buzzed and listening to the transistor radio on Phil's belt.

"It's really fucking cold!" the busker yelled the moment they stepped outside the pub. A few people walking home across the street shouted their agreement, and they all laughed. "Why is it always so fucking cold in winter?!"

"Because it's winter," the singer pointed out slowly.

"How drunk are you?" the girl asked him with a laugh. The busker mock-glared at her, but then seemed to realize that he was, indeed, quite drunk.

"Drunk enough to act stupid and reckless, but not drunk enough to use that as a real excuse," he grinned. Then he nudged the girl's shoulder with his own, the plastic bag containing his new telephone bumping against her leg. "How drunk are you?"

The girl laughed and shook her head, but seemed to really think about it. "Drunk enough for my accent to come back, but no' drunk enough to forgive myself in morning for what I do tonight. Pretty much de same."

They exchanged a tipsy glance but said nothing, simply traipsing along as the radio's tiny speaker crackled halfheartedly in the dark.

Break me out tonight

I wanna feel the sun rise in anywhere but here

Come with me

This could be

The only chance we get

We've gotta take it

If we don't do this now we'll never make it

Lose this crowd

His hand brushed hers in the dark, and their eyes glittered as they looked around at the singer and the twins, and then smiled at one another.

Break me out

Without warning they took off running, hand in hand down the icy sidewalk with the other three laughing and chasing them like it was a game, and all the busker could think was to hold onto this moment. You'll never be this young again.

Then the girl started to slip in the ice, screaming with both fear and laughter until she fell into a small drift of snow. "Are you okay?" the busker asked through gales of laughter. She was covered in the fluffy white stuff, her hair tousled and eyes a bit dazed. She seemed unhurt, but wasn't laughing. Instead she mutely raised her arms and he lifted her out of the snow, and then into a piggyback ride.

"Where are we going?" she asked wearily, her chin digging into his shoulder comfortably and one hand in his hair.

"Home."

"Okay."

They passed the airport on their way back to his flat, and just when he was suspecting she had fallen asleep on his back, the girl slid her way to the ground and was breathing fast as though she were horrified. He touched her shoulder but she flinched away. "Miklos?" she called out, and then the busker looked farther ahead of them and saw a man sitting on the pavement outside the airport's parking lot. His head rose at the sound of his wife's voice and he stood, swaying in the cold. The girl ran ahead of them all toward her husband, her good heart winning over her own fear of confrontation.

"Miklos, proč jste tady?" she asked, her light hair blowing behind her as she jogged to meet him.

The busker had never seen the girl's husband before, and it was strange to imagine such a bearlike man to be with such a small young woman like her. He was at least a foot taller than his wife, with dark glittering eyes and broad shoulders. And yet there was something about him that, at the moment, didn't seem very frightening at all. He reached out one hand and touched his wife's face, as if testing if she were real. "I-I come to find you," he said in obviously broken English.

"Chtěl jsem se vrátit."

"Neřekl jsi mi, že jsi chtěl."

"Nechtěl jsem, abyste za mnou!"

None of them knew what was being said, but the busker managed to get the gist of it when he started shouting and gesturing toward the airport while she hit his chest. He hardly moved an inch even when she put most of her weight behind it. He said something that sounded sharp and bitter no matter what language it was in, and she slapped him with all of her strength and it barely left a mark. Then he reached up as if he were about to do the same, but the singer, busker and the twins all took a step forward to intervene and the couple seemed to finally remember they weren't exactly alone.

"Prosím. Jen se mnou mluvit," said Miklos quietly.

She regarded him silently for a moment, and almost instantly the hostile mood shifted, leaving behind only a man and a woman who had loved each other once and loved their daughter and wanted to turn this sinking boat around.

"Prosím," he pleaded again, one hand reaching out tentatively. The busker watched her shoulders slump for a moment before squaring up, and she nodded and took his hand. Her husband pulled her into his arms, and for the first time in months around her husband the girl felt safe and loved. With little effort she was able to pull away and she drifted back toward a crestfallen and hurt-looking busker. Shame and guilt made her turn her eyes away from his.

"I 'ave to talk to him," she half-stated and half-pleaded with him. "As long as he follows me, if I say no, then I gave up. I called quits. I can't…" Her eyes begged him to understand even as she sensed him closing himself off. She grabbed his arm in her hand and squeezed it lightly.

"What d'you want me to say?" he asked gruffly. "I'm not okay with this; if you stay with that arsehole you're gonna get hurt, and I won't always be here when you get scared and run away." He stopped and blinked a bit dazedly. "I really must be drunk; I didn't mean to say anything like that."

The girl closed her eyes and fought the urge to hold him while her husband was watching, but slid her hand down his arm and into his, squeezing that instead. He squeezed back gently. "I'm coming back," she promised. "I'm not gonna leave tonight."

Reluctantly, he let her go, she waved goodbye to the singer and the twins, and then she walked at her husband's side down the street, speaking quietly in Czech. They vanished around a corner and the streets were silent with the ache of her absence in his chest.

"I'm goin' home," he told the singer, Tim, and Phil, and took off toward his flat without waiting for a response.

It was 3 am. He had intended to stay awake until the girl returned, but the combination of drink and the long day bogged him down, and he slipped in and out of wakefulness on the couch until well past dawn. The morning bloomed cold and gray, the sort of morning where none too many folks could be caught dead outside, and still the girl hadn't come back.

He paced up and down the length of the tiny flat, looking out the window for a sign of her, murmuring songs he had written with her under his breath, and thinking about—three guesses who?—her. He couldn't banish the sight of her in the darkness, running blindly toward the man she had been considering divorcing for the past five days, from his mind. The hunger and longing on the face of her husband as he confronted the woman he had claimed not to care about living for a year without. They had been lying to each other and to themselves, simply because their reunion had been fuelled by her meeting another man, falling in love with him, and seeing him decide to go back to an old flame of his own. The timing wasn't right, but their intentions were.

His neck hurt, he was tired and hung-over, but he found himself as inspired as she apparently had been by him going back to Katherine. Without really thinking at all he picked up his guitar and his notebook and his tape recorder, and he wrote their song in the gloomy gray light of a new day.

I wanna take you to New York

I wanna pull back the veils and find out what I have done wrong

"I have missed you," he finally admitted softly over the table at the only café open this early in the morning. "It's been a long week without you."

The girl smiled, closed her eyes, and shook her head before looking down into her coffee. "I've missed you too. I've missed the way things used to be." After a few moments' thought she looked back up, eyes glimmering with a sort of disbelieving humor that couldn't be described. "Were we ever really happy together, or was it just easier than being lonely?" she asked with a sad little laugh

I wanna turn this thing around

I wanna meet you somewhere out there in this cold, cold, cold town

Mik reached across the table and covered her small hand with his. "We tried too hard to blame each other for losing our dreams that we didn't try to be happy. Then we blamed each other for not trying."

The girl seemed to accept this as what was as close to the truth as possible, running a finger over the rim of her mug. She bit the corner of her lip and then, as if it had been torturing her for months, she forced out: "I'm sorry you had to quit your training. I know how much you hate your job." He simply shrugged.

"I'm sorry you had to quit school," he said in the same way. "You're really smart; you could have gone far." She shrugged back, knowing immediately what she really wanted from him if she were to go back.

And we'll be low rising

Because we've gotta come up from this, we've gotta come up

Low rising

Because there's no further for us to fall

He had just fallen asleep again, sprawled across the couch with his guitar on his chest and his tape recorder still running on the floor, when the girl came back. He had left the door ajar when he returned that morning, and so she let herself in and was caught between smiling and crying when she saw him lying asleep. She put her bag on the floor by the couch and knelt there, watching him. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head there, reveling in the quiet darkness before the storm.

Low Rising

Until we feel we've had enough

"Huh?"

There was a muted bang of hollow wood on the floor and the gentle thrum of his guitar strings vibrating, and when the girl raised her head the busker was there in front of her and he put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey, are you okay?" he asked her. She blinked a bit dazedly – apparently she had fallen asleep – and nodded her head. The busker held her under her arms and pulled her up onto the couch. "What happened? Did you even sleep?!"

She shook her head this time, still trying to bring herself back to reality and laying her head on his shoulder. "We talked a long time. Got a lot of t'ings sorted out," she murmured into his neck, making his skin tingle with warmth, and he held her tighter.

"So what…?" he began to ask but couldn't finish. He instead pressed his mouth to the top of her head and closed his eyes. She sighed and closed her fingers around part of his shirt, clinging closer to him than she ever had before. She hadn't said the words, but everything about it rang like a death knell.

"I…" she pulled herself even closer to him, and he held her tighter as she started to shake with emotion.

"It's okay," he whispered, stroking her hair. "It's alright, I know. You don't have to say it."

"I do," the girl insisted, backing away and out of his arms altogether. "I 'ave to or it won't be real." She put her soft, slender hands on either side of his face, already crying as she looked him in the eyes. "Mik and I talked about everyt'ing: getting married so young, and having Ivanka, and all of this mess, and…" She sniffled and looked away for only a moment. The busker covered her hands with his shaking ones.

All for the love of you

"Tomorrow, Miklos and I are going back to Dublin," she said, her voice slow and even as the busker's head started to spin. So that was it, then. He was going to be alone for the rest of his life. "I'm gonna go back to school, try to finish this time, you know?"

The busker couldn't help but drop his head into his hands. "Christ."

She bowed her head and stared down at her hands. "I wanted this, being here wit' you," she said through fresh tears. "But how long would we 'ave lasted? If all of this has happened in knowing one anudder for only a year, two weeks in person, then how long will it take for the fire to burn out? I…I just…how old are you?" The busker looked up at her with a furrowed brow. "Where's your mudder? What made you love music so much? Why do you know so much about me but I don't know you at all?"

He had no answer for her. He wanted so badly to be angry but couldn't muster up the energy for it. "Will this make you happy?" he asked wearily instead. "Is he gonna treat you better?"

The girl nodded and wiped her eyes.

He touched her chin and she looked up at him. "Then why are you still crying?" She shook her head, hiccupping, unable to answer only because she didn't know why herself.

"I asked him…I asked him to 'ave today wit' you," she said thickly. "I wanted to say goodbye here, not wit' him watching."

The busker clasped his hands between his knees, secretly glad that she had chosen this for them, if they were never to see one another alone again. "When d'you go?"

"Tomorrow morning, at nine."

He nodded silently. "And he won't be comin' 'round looking for you until then?" She nodded hesitantly, but then looked at him with more meaning in her eyes than had ever been present before. "So…what're we gon—?"

The girl craned her neck and kissed him for the first time, her hands reaching up to hold his face. It burned like sin on his tongue, but not enough to make him pull away. "No music," she murmured against his lips, "no husbands, no children, no parents, no age. I want today wit' you." She was crying again; her tears dampened his face as he leaned back and she moved down with him. He knew within moments that he was lost to her; he would never have a wife or family simply because he wanted it only with her. There would be no russet-haired children to sit with him as he lay dying years from now. But it was alright for the moment; he was content to die right there with a beautiful girl's lips and legs entwined with his. His gut was churning and palms sweating as if he were twenty years old again.

He pulled back suddenly, pressing his head into the sofa cushion, and looked the girl in the eyes. "I'm 33," he admitted like it were a deadly sin, slightly out of breath. She smiled.

"You don't—"

"Me ma died two years ago, a-and I only ever started playing guitar because me best friend did to get girls an' I was fucking jealous. He lost interest and I fell in love with it."

"Why're you—?"

"My friends know about you because when I got back with Katherine I was completely crazy about you and didn't even know it. I never stopped talking about you," he laughed quietly, brushing her hair behind her ear. "I was so humiliated when I realized I was in love with you that I stopped talking to 'em altogether. For six fucking months. Only Paul was left when I finally got off me arse and apologized."

"What about—?"

"Tim and Phil and all them are only visiting. I met 'em after I left Katherine and went crazy over you again. They're goin' back to Seattle in a few weeks."

He gingerly touched her hair again; it was smooth and almost blonde in the afternoon light filtering in through the window. "I'm 13 years older than you," he said softly. It felt suddenly and inexplicably wrong to be sprawled across the couch with a nearly-20-year-old woman lying on his chest, who was looking into his eyes with an impish smile. "What's so funny?"

The girl folded her hands delicately on his chest and rested her chin upon them, still smiling. "Mik's 38."

There was something so genuinely reassuring in the way she'd said it that he felt no fear at all. He smiled back at her, and she quirked her eyebrows as if to ask 'May I continue now?'

The first time was what one might call sloppy, and fast; she tasted of coffee and pipe tobacco, he of cheap beer and dust motes. After, they lay together on the rug with an afghan covering them and their arms keeping one another warm. "Is this wrong?" he asked.

She whispered, "No," and moved closer. "I didn't wanna go t'rough my life not knowing you this way. It's perfect."

They watched the sun as it began to sink in the sky, red as blood and blinding, and, the events of the past day finally seeming to catch up to them, drifted to sleep in the place where they belonged.