The family sat around the fire, spread out in the living room, all with glasses in hand except the children. Even Finn was holding a mug of beer.
"Mild!" Polly had called to John, who was trying to smuggle his younger brother a shot of whiskey. Arthur and John were playing cards, but Esme was mouthing Arthur's hand to John over his shoulder, so Arthur was losing spectacularly. Tommy was half watching, half lost in thought. Polly was reading the paper. Tessa was drinking, and trying not to think about her father, and the Germans, and the plan, and failing.
"Fancy a game, Tess? I think I've got luck on my side tonight," John gloated over Arthur's "Shit!" as he slapped yet another winning card down.
"I'm alright for now, thanks. I prefer watching, anyway," she smiled at him, as best she could. Tommy's eyes jerked from their gaze into the fire and scanned the room.
"How about some chess, John Boy, eh?" He asked. John's smug face fell. Esme winced. Chess was much harder to cheat at. Tommy saw the look of trepidation on John's face, and rolled his eyes. "I'll let everyone else help, to even the board." Esme raised her eyebrows, waited for the bomb to drop. "If you all drink every time John loses a piece."
"Give it to him, Johnny!" Arthur said, rolling up his sleeves like he was going into a fight. Polly shook her head from her spot at the table. "We'll show the arrogant bastard what's what."
"You'll have us all knocked out in an hour, Arthur," Polly said, eyes still on her paper.
"They need you, Pol," Tommy said, and there was a little sparkle, a little mischief in his eyes. It made Tessa's heart clench. Who had he been, before?
"Fine," she said, folding her paper with a rustle. Ada was passed out in the armchair closest to the fire, cheek mushed against it, snoring quietly.
Tessa watched them play, watched them all get progressively more drunk and lose more and get drunker and lose more, and she realized suddenly that she was crying, tears splashing gently down onto her lap. A family. She had never had this. Not even the kind that still had blood on their clothes from the events of the day. Her brother left to fight in the war while she was still young, and never came back. Her mother's delicate fingers, the ones she had passed on to her daughter, clutched empty bottles with empty eyes. Her grandfather had been the only one to ever show her any true warmth or affection, and by the end of his life he wouldn't have been able to tell her face out of a sea of strangers. They were all dead and gone and she and her father were likely about to go the same way. She stood up, swaying slightly, keeping her head down to hide her eyes, and felt Tommy watch her as she left the room.
She heard him climb the stairs quietly a while later, after she had cried silently until all the liquid left in her was 80 proof. He opened the door and leaned against the frame, and she could see him out of the corner of her eye but she didn't turn around. She was smoking one of his cigarettes out the open window, listening to the sounds of the trains and the factories, still awake, always awake, even in the dark, even through the night. He walked over, stretched out on the bed beside her, and sighed.
"Saw you this morning. Holding the pipe," he said, nodding to where it lay on the bedside table where she had placed it haphazardly when she woke up. He held a hand out and she passed the cigarette to him, and he brought it to his mouth.
"Mm," She said. She took the smoke back. "Got any more?"
"Not here, no." He wasn't looking at her. All she could see was his profile. She turned back to the window.
"Pity." The smoke curled out between her lips, whispered away into the night sky, where it mingled with the stray clouds covering the stars.
"I did get you this," he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a bottle of white powder. "For return payment."
She went to take it, but he held it firmly in his hand, then turned to look at her. There were expectations in his face, written all over it like a child's school board. She furrowed her eyebrows and snatched it from him. Then she stood, the rusty bed creaking loudly with her movements, knocked some out onto the desk in the corner of the room, and cut it into practiced lines with the edge of her lighter. Finally. He stood too.
"Tessa," he said, with the same voice he used on anyone who wasn't obeying him. She was, though. She had agreed to be the lamb in his little offering. She did not deserve that tone. She ignored him and put a finger on her nose and breathed in a practiced line, closed her eyes. He came towards her, she could hear it, she could feel it. Like when you know something dangerous is nearby, like how you would know you were standing on the edge of a cliff even if you were blind.
"What?" She said, eyes still closed. She opened them when it became obvious he wasn't going to answer until she had.
"I'm not going to be your fucking snow dealer. This," He gestured between them, "was just because I owed you."
"No?" She said. She smiled at him, but it wasn't kind. "You're everyone else's, but not mine?"
He lifted his chin and looked down at her, head tilted, eyes like sin, like greed and lust and pride. His jawline would make a lovely seat. She licked her finger and swirled it through the crystals on the table, took a step closer to him.
"No," he said. But he let her slide her finger into his mouth, leave the powder on his upper gums. She trailed her finger across his teeth, straight and white on top, the single crooked one on the bottom. "Not yours."
"Why not?" She asked, half seductive, half demanding, and her eyes flickered up at him, like grenades going off. "That's what gangsters do, isn't it?"
He watched her. Her eyes trailed back down to his mouth. He could almost see her pupils dilating.
"If that's not what you are, then what are you?" She asked, her fingers grabbing on to the front of his vest. "What are you, Tommy?" The two unsaid words hung in the air. Her chin was tilted up so that she could stare right at him and he was looking down at her, asking her with his eyes if she knew what she was doing, if she was ready for the consequences.
She knew he knew what she was asking. She knew he knew that she was drunk, and high, but she didn't think that that would stop him, and that just made her want him more. She could feel every tiny bit of space between them, in the tiny room he had grown up in, in a tiny corner of a tiny world. She felt like she was being cracked open, like an egg dropped out of a shopping basket onto a sidewalk. She could feel him breathing. She could see each eyelash, she thought she could probably count them if she wanted to. She let go of his clothes before she let herself start. Took a step back. Her veins were thrumming, her head felt bright and warm.
"Why do you do it?" He asked, and she was thrown off. The whole world was thrown off when he was near her and the only color in it was his eyes. Everything else was grey and black and grey.
"It can help," she said, echoing his words back to him, and his stare was so intense, everything about him was so intense, and he was all around her, his smell, his room, she was drowning in him and it still wasn't enough. She looked at him, looked at him, waited for him to break. He didn't. He watched her right back, reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes, only breaking eye contact when his eyes flickered down as he lit it. He took a drag, pushed the smoke out of his mouth and breathed it right back up through his nose.
"I'm not going to fuck you when you're high," he told her.
She wanted to slap him. She tried, but it was halfhearted, and he caught her wrist with one hand, took the cig out of his mouth with the other.
"Who fucking said anything about me fucking you?" It was a little slurred, which she tried to make up for through the venom in her tone. But who was she kidding, really? She could scream it if she wanted to and it still wouldn't hide the fact that just the way he was looking at her was making her tremble. Maybe it was the cocaine. She told herself it was probably the cocaine. She wanted to move closer to him. That was the vodka.
"When I fuck you," he said, deep and slow, impenetrable stare fixed on her, "every part of you will be there for it. Every part of you will be asking for it," his eyes moved down her body and back up again, taking their time, "so when you decide that's what you want, stay off the drugs and let me know."
She was shaking, she was gasping, he was hardly even touching her. She wondered if he could feel her pulse in the wrist he was still holding. He watched her fall apart in front of him like he was completely unaffected, too composed and too in control and she wanted his walls and his facade and his apathy gone, she wanted a reaction, any kind of response, the powder would make her do anything for one.
"So talk to me until I come down," she said, and he breathed the smoke in sharply between his teeth, hissing like a snake, taken by surprise at her boldness and she felt a brief glimmer of victory for having power over him too. He blew it out through his nose over her head.
"Talk to you?" His voice rumbled through his chest.
She slid her free hand up around his neck, feeling the short hair on the back of his head, brushing her fingers over it, up and down, the texture forgien and oddly pleasant. Tommy closed his eyes and lowered his head.
"Your family listens to everything you say. Like you're a king and they're your subjects."
"My family has a lot to be grateful for," he said, but not like it made him proud. Not like it made him anything at all.
"Does it get lonely up on the throne?" She asked him, or the drugs asked him, or the whiskey asked him. His head was bowed down, mouth near her ear, and when he breathed it made her shiver. He didn't answer.
"Talk to me," she said.
"What is it you want me to say?" He asked her, like he would tell her whatever she wanted, but probably only to stop the questions.
"Something in Romani."
He huffed a tiny scoff of a laugh. "A gypsy king," he said.
She kissed his neck. "Tommy," she said. She kissed him again, right below the first. His skin was smooth, supple, taut, stretched tight like him. He smelled like sandalwood forests, like cigarettes, like rain. His fingers flexed around her wrist. "Please?"
He sighed, but at the end of the breath, he spoke words she couldn't understand but loved to hear. He could be reciting a biscuit recipe, for all she knew, but she didn't care. She closed her eyes briefly and her lips formed a small smile, letting his voice wash over her, and it sounded like flutes and rivers and the language that people speak to animals, and the animals understand. She slipped her wrist out from where it remained in his grasp, moved it to his face, tangled her other fingers in his hair. She felt the line of his jaw, his cheeks, opened her eyes when she brushed the cut above his temple. He didn't flinch.
"That was just Arthur," he said. His eyes were open but gazing past her, at the floor. She was surprised that he hadn't already moved away. It felt like he wanted to. She was surprised he had even told her.
"Still, it might scar."
"Ah, well," he said, taking the last drag of his cigarette, tossing it on the ground behind her, "What's one more, eh?"
She wanted to ask him to speak Romani again, but she didn't. They stood pressed together, neither speaking, her breathing sharp and erratic, his slow and controlled.
"Are you sober?" He asked her.
"Yes," she said. No, she thought.