- Tale Number Five: Addiction -

Pad was kissing Melody, and for the moment, nothing else mattered.

He gave no thought to how or why this was happening; he was just happy that it was. In the back of his mind, he knew that he was almost certainly going to get slapped across the face as soon as this was over, but he didn't care. She was so warm and alive in his arms, her embrace so fierce and passionate. Having since kissed another girl (he could not possibly think of her name at the moment), he now appreciated what made Melody's kiss special: She was not needy for emotion, but rather overflowing with an abundance of it. She gave as much and more of herself as she took.

He pushed her farther back into the couch, and he heard a pleased murmur escape Melody's lips at his ardor. It was an effort of will to release her lips so that they could catch their breaths. When they did, he couldn't help but stare at how she was even more beautiful with her hat off, her soft brown hair so charmingly disheveled around her face. They could only hold themselves like that a moment, however, and then they were clutching each other in a passionate embrace again.

Just being this close to her made Pad's heart pound with excitement. Unable to help himself, he groped her shamelessly, feeling the slope of her back and the feminine curve of her midriff. His right hand wandered to her knobby knee, briefly exploring its firm shape before sliding up her wonderfully long leg, eventually daring to go up under her skirt.

"Mmmmph!" Melody protested into his mouth, and then grabbed his right arm by the wrist. Pad retreated from her lips, and she gasped out, "N... no. I'm not ready for..." - she blushed, and continued in a mumble - "I'm not ready for that yet."

"Sorry," Pad said, blushing himself as he removed his hand from under her skirt. "I didn't mean to rush ya." To be honest, he wasn't really ready to go to second base yet himself; he'd just gotten carried away.

"Yeah, well, you should be sorry," Melody shot back, getting up off the couch. Pad was just about to remind her that he'd just said that he was, when she hooked both arms under her skirt so as to straighten out her underwear, just as though another person weren't sitting right there. Pad barely managed to jerk his head away in time to avoid getting a sneak peek. "I'm very sensitive about my body, and if -" She caught herself mid-sentence, and when he timidly turned to look at her, Pad saw her brow furrowed and her eyes screwed up, as though she'd just stumbled upon a perplexing enigma.

"What is it?"

"...Did we just make out again?"

For a moment he wasn't sure what to say. "Yeah, I guess we did."

"How the heck did that happen?" Her voice was incredulous.

"Um..." To his abashment, he couldn't immediately come up with the answer to that question. It was a bit odd; just a few hours ago, they'd been angry with each other and he'd been on a date with someone else. "Let me see... After I said goodbye to Alyona, I came back here..."

"Here" was the inn they were all staying at, of course. When he got there, he found the room he was sharing with Eddie was empty. When he knocked on the girls' room, his answer was a bitter "Go away!"

"It's me," Pad said.

"Go to hell, then!"

That made him mad; all he'd done was knock on the door. "Yeah? Well -"

"What are you doing back here, anyway? Did your date figure out what a loser you really are?"

He hesitated, realizing now that she didn't sound so much angry as upset. "No, I... I got rid of her, actually. Will ya listen to me a sec? I got somethin' to tell ya."

"What?"

He scratched at the back of his head. Man, this is hard. "Can I come in first? Ya know, so that I'm not talkin' to a door."

"Fine, come in, whatever."

He turned the knob and stepped inside. The room was pretty dull and ordinary, except for her. The one thing that struck him as unusual was that there was a couch - or maybe it just seemed unusual because she was lying across it, on her belly. Her head was tilted up, though, eyes studying him carefully.

"Well?" she demanded, when he didn't say anything for the first half a minute.

"Geez, let me think a sec, okay? This is kinda awkward, ya know?"

"Ugh," she said, and buried her face in the couch pillow. "Wake me when you grow the balls to actually say whatever it is you wanted to tell me."

That pissed him off. What did she know? It wasn't like she'd ever told him anything like this. Why was he even sweating over telling her this when she hated him so much? She probably wouldn't even care. "Well, fine. Ya know how I told ya I've made out with lots of girls before? Well, I lied."

Her head shot up. "What?"

"Yeah, you're actually the first girl I ever kissed. Not that I couldn't have gotten some - I just didn't have time for girls, ya know, growin' up the way I did. I mean, some days it was hard just gettin' enough ta eat and a safe place ta rest, so it seemed kinda dumb to be smoochin' girls. But with you, I didn't even think about any o' that. I just felt I wanted ta do it, so I did it without even thinking. I lied, too, about it not meanin' anything to me, 'cause it meant a lot. In fact," he went on, growing more smug as he observed Melody's face growing redder by the minute. "...I wouldn't even call it lying, really, because lyin' means you're plannin' on the other person believin' ya. I was just kiddin' around. I didn't think even you would be dumb enough ta fall for that one."

"You...!" Melody leapt off the couch, arm raised to slap his face. Pad was expecting that, though, and easily caught her wrist as soon as she swung. She tried the same with her other hand, and he caught that one as well. Face burning with rage, she squirmed and struggled to break out of his grip. "Lemme go, you big creep!"

"And let ya hurt me again? No way." He readied himself to dodge for when she did the obvious thing and tried to kick him in the nuts, but for some reason she made no such move.

"It's what you deserve! All this time, I've been so mad at you for that kiss, and now you tell me that was a lie all along? That you felt something when you did it after all?"

"Well, I didn't know ya'd get so upset about it!"

"So you just assumed, huh?" she spat.

"Hey, don't talk to me about sensitivity! You're the one who's always yelling at me for no good reason, ya self-centered nag!"

"You... you lousy rat!" Her struggles renewed with increased vigor, and she squirmed in vain against Pad's superior strength. "I hate you! I hate you!"

"Well, maybe I hate you back!"

"You don't have enough emotion in your heart to hate, you - you scum-sucking snake!" As she spat this out, she managed to thrust her head up so that her face came within an inch of his. She probably thought this would intimidate him, but Pad instead saw an opportunity.

His own head darted forward, and he briefly pressed his lips to hers.

Melody's eyes went wide with shock at the stolen kiss. Seeing this sent a surge of bravado through him, and he leaned in to kiss her again, this time pushing his tongue in to meet hers. She was even sweeter than he remembered. But after a moment his bravado slipped away as easily as it had come, leaving doubt and even a bit of shame at his cheekiness, and he removed his mouth from hers. He looked over her face with a certain anxiousness; her eyes were closed now, and he was uncertain what sort of retaliation might be coming when they reopened.

But her eyes remained closed, her lips remained parted, and her wrists had gone limp in his grip. No retaliation was coming. She only murmured, "Pad..."

The thought of holding back had no time to enter Pad's mind, nor was it likely to have held much sway if it had. His mouth eagerly met with hers, his hand released her wrist so that he could tenderly hold the side of her head, and she gripped him by the hair, pulling him to her as tightly as she could. Everything else seemed to fade away into an inconsequential background.

"It gets kind of fuzzy after that," Pad finished, scratching his head. Then he noticed Melody had her head turned towards the table a few feet away. "Hey, are ya listening or what?"

"My potion!" she burst out. "What happened to the potion I was - Ohhhh, nooooo!" she cried, her eyes falling down to the shattered glass and yellowish fluid on the floor. It was melting a hole into the wooden planks. Melody fell to her knees before it. "I was working on that for hours! And now the innkeeper is going to kill us!"

Pad hated seeing her unhappy like this. He knelt down behind her and squeezed her shoulders in a gesture of support. "Hey now, it's okay... we-"

"Don't touch me!" she screeched, jerking herself free of Pad's grasp. Then she turned and shoved him away, knocking him onto his back. He groaned as the back of his head impacted with the wood floor. "This wouldn't have happened if we weren't... you know! We must have knocked the potion over on the way to the couch!"

That made sense. Pad knew that in the blissful haze he'd been in, he would never have noticed. "Okay..." he groaned as he sat up, rubbing the back of his head and wincing at how sore it was. "So we'll just clear stuff like that out of the way anytime we're, uh, alone together."

"That's not the point! We have to stop doing this!"

"Why?" He said this as though she'd just told him they had to stop traveling around the world.

"Because it's a bad habit! An addiction! Look, from what you told me this is the second time we've started kissing right in the middle of an argument." She put her hands on her hips and leaned towards him in that bossy way of hers. "Does that sound like something normal, sane people do?"

"...I guess not," he admitted.

"Well, then! The obvious, healthy thing to do is stop!"

"Okay," he sighed.

"Not just 'okay'! We have to do something about it!" She spun on her heel and walked to the other side of the table, ignoring the spilled potion. There was a book set there, and she cracked it open. "Let's see, I'm sure I can work something up in no time... Oh! I've got it!" Her entire face lit up, and she began flipping through pages with a passion.

"What?" Pad prompted. "What's your idea?"

"Gimmie a minute, will you!"

He sighed again and began casting nervous glances at the book. He couldn't help but feel more than a bit leery of a solution which Melody had arrived at after just a few seconds of considering the problem. And that wasn't the only thing.

"Are ya really sure that our kissing is a problem?"

"I just explained it to you," she said, her voice slightly irritated. At this point she had stopped flipping through pages and was searing through the text with her eyes.

"Yeah, but really, how do we know people don't always argue before they kiss? Sure it sounds crazy, but maybe it's actually normal."

"Did you and your date argue before you kissed?" Melody challenged.

"Huh? What makes ya think we kissed at all?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," she returned, her voice so heavy with sarcasm that Pad was surprised that the words managed to drag themselves out of her mouth. "So you totally deny that your lips ever touched hers?"

She had him there. Whether or not she really knew what had happened between him and Alyona, he couldn't bring himself to outright lie to Melody. "Okay, okay, we kissed," he said. "But it didn't mean nothin'."

"Like I care." She took a pair of flasks and began putting ingredients into them. Powders, fluids, seeds which she ground with a pestle beforehand. "You just keep right on kissing girls that you don't have any feelings for. It's none of my business."

"H-hey!" he protested, but had a hard time thinking of a counter that wouldn't just get him into more trouble. Instead, he blurted out, "It was her idea, not mine!"

This sounded horribly lame even to him when it came out of his mouth, and apparently Melody felt the same, because she just went on mixing in ingredients without a word. After some additional stirring, she poured some of the contents of each flask into a bowl, then added a drop of something-or-other.

"There!" Melody pronounced, giving each mixture a proud sniff. "All ready for action!"

Pad raised an eyebrow at it. "What are they, anti-love potions?"

"No such thing. Besides, they're not even potions. Look." She pressed a finger into one of them, then took it out to show him the muddy crust sticking to her fingertip. Looks like whatever she dropped into the bowls solidified the mixture. Or something. I just don't get this magic stuff. "You just spread it on your lips, like this. They're both totally harmless... by themselves, that is," she said, giving a wicked smirk.

With that, she handed the other bowl - the one with the stuff she hadn't smeared on her own lips - to Pad.

He hesitated. She sighed with exasperation. "It won't do anything to you. I promise."

"Then what's it for?"

"It's a deterrent. Watch!" She took a pin, scraped its tip along the surface of the first mixture, then dropped it into the second one. A mild bang went off, making Pad jump and reach for his pistol, which wasn't there, having been discarded at the beginning of their makeout session. "Now, anytime we get the urge to kiss, we just need to think of how much bigger that explosion would be if all the mixture we put on our mouths were to combine. Clever, huh?"

Pad just stared. "And... this doesn't sound like a really bad idea to ya?"

"What can go wrong? I told you, the stuff's totally inert unless our lips touch!"

"Yeah, but -"

"Put it on, meat-head!" she said, shoving the bowl at his gut while shaking her fist in his face. "Or I'll make you wish you were never born!"

He stared back at her fierce glare. Man, she's so intense. I wish I could... But he shook himself out of it, stuck his finger into the bowl, and spread the stuff on his lips. "Stuff feels like dried clay," he groused.

"You won't even notice it after a few hours." She turned and put the bowls into her pouch. Pad wondered how she was going to keep the stuff from spilling in there. "Now remember, we have to re-apply once a week. Got it?"

"Yeah," he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Deterrent," she said - Hah! I'm already wishing I never came here, much less kissed her.

"Good," she said, but eyed him with suspicion as she added a bit more mixture to her own lips.

Pad and Melody disagreed with each other as naturally as they breathed. Whenever a subject came up that they were of one mind on - and by Fiona's assessment, this actually happened more often between them than between two average people - they would state their positions using different wording and act as though they were in opposition to each other. The two of them seemed to have got it down to a science by now.

As often as they disagreed, however, their arguments were nearly always limited to brief spots of bickering. They seemed as ready to let an argument quietly drop as they were to start one. For a while, this had changed, and they had become more argumentative, for reasons that Fiona could not determine. But things had gone back to normal, it seemed, and the spat they were having now was the first one she'd seen in the more than a month which had passed since their vacation in Kiev. The party was climbing back on board the ship, and the two of them were still bickering over whose fault it was that the bandit twins got away with the ruby brooch they'd been tasked to recover.

"I still can't believe you didn't shoot him when you had the chance!" Melody growled. "We would have had them!"

"Yeah, well, I still can't believe ya had ta get in the way and spoil my shot," Pad retorted.

"You didn't even take that shot! At least I tried to stop them."

"Well, what was I supposed ta do? Shoot through you to get him?" He stomped into his cabin, throwing his pistol at a wall.

Melody stormed right in after him. "Oh right, like my little body could completely block all of your shots."

"It ain't that easy! If ya moved an inch the wrong way, I coulda shot ya right through the heart! Do ya have any idea how I'd feel if I hurt -" The rest of this was cut off as Melody slammed the door to Pad's cabin behind her.

Eddie and Fiona stared at the closed door for a moment in silence. "Boy," Eddie said. "The way those two are going at it, there's bound to be an explosion soon."

BOOM!

The door bent against its hinges, the floor trembled beneath them, and a cloud of ominous smoke overflowed from Pad's cabin. Eddie and Fiona looked at each other, Fiona's brows bent in an accusing glare.

Wasting no time with defending himself, Eddie leapt into action and pulled the door off its already half-rent hinges. Smoke flowed out, and he stepped inside, coughing, to an odd sight.

The room was in disarray; that much Eddie had anticipated. The clothes drawer was cracked and tilted against the wall, several of its drawers hanging open and smoke steaming off of it. The few additional personal belongings Pad had were scattered across the floor. Pad and Melody themselves were to be found against opposite walls of the room, legs in the air and the backs of their heads against the floor. They were still conscious, though, even if they did look rather shell-shocked. Both of them were black with soot, with the curious exception of the little areas surrounding their mouths.

"Are you guys - cough - okay?" Eddie asked. "What - cough - happened in here?"

"Nothin'!" Pad and Melody snapped at him in unison.

Eddie carefully backed out of the room, sensing that this was another one of those little mysteries between Pad and Melody that was better left unsolved. Even under all the soot on their faces, he could swear they were both blushing with embarrassment.