Lovers & Devils [BxB]

New town, new me?

         I canted my head on the tinted car window, the leather seat belt uncomfortably in a crease of my neck. A fragrance of eucalyptus and minted cleared the sinuses of yesterday. I wasn't asleep, muted light snuck to my eyes whenever they closed mistakenly. My lashes fluttered and hooded. I studied the pebbly texture of the slate plastic panel as if it would metamorphose in a blink. I didn't realise the driver had stopped.

"I think," I heard the cherub purr, and the click of a seatbelt ensued like a mouse he brought me. "If God were to send forth another meteor, you would sleep through it."

Smart-butt
I mumbled words of weariness, feeling the metal buckle sliding diagonally up my chest before I pull it off of me. I opened the car door and stepped out under the glaring white sky, like glowing buttery sun daubed the blue underneath it. I heard about the manic Irish weather, but I didn't expect how down it made me feel. Cars scudded down narrow sooty roads between the cubed-stone footpaths and the lane of parking spots. I went round the silver car, a long yellow taxi sign on its hood staring me in the face before I met the suited albino on the curb.

"There is so much to do today!" Helena, his assistant exclaimed, shutting the passenger door with gentleness that betrayed her movements. She stomped over in her white stilettos and her prim navy blazer and pencil skirt. "I cannot believe you're making us take a detour."

Ezekiel upheld his hands in defence. "Don't be so hasty, sweetheart. It'll be good for our Lukas to know his way around the town."

She sighed and joined us on the path, the skirt somehow not a cumber to her long legs. "I suppose, but let's not dawdle."

The path curved around a pharmacy with cream pop-corned walls further out than the ostentatious discount store preceding it. I ambled between them and it was almost like they were my security guards. Helena stood at a prodigious hundred and eighty-three centimetres—but shorter than me, at a hundred and eighty-five—and Ezekiel was a staggering hundred and ninety-seven.

The cherub smiled chastely at an ogling freckled woman with long penny-coloured hair, moving in to let her pass. He bowed his head to look at Helena. "I think you should grow out your hair."

I screwed up my face at him. "I like her short hair. It suits her better."

"Precisely. And, I would grow out my hair only, if you cut yours."

"Oh, come on! Rio will appreciate it..." He winked. "Besides, don't you miss that cute brown bob you had in the academy?"

I stifled a laugh, replacing it with a cough as we passed a rusted blue metal recycling bin.

She stiffened. "Ezekiel...Don't make me hang you from these seven-kilovolt power lines."

"I'm just giving you my opinion! I thought it was adorable, don't you, Luka?"

"It was...I miss all the clips and headbands you put in your hair."

"Yes, the star-clips!"

"Enough, both of you! Your opinion is irrelevant, Ezekiel!"

Ezekiel and I guffawed, quickly cupping our mouths with our hands. I shook my head, smiling wide as I glanced around the drab town. There was an odd line of shops with irregular bushed trees and vines in between; a spruce-blue carpet store, a green knickknack store and an animated black-and-white vinyl shop.

"Where exactly are we?"

He inhaled through his nose dramatically, as if that would give him the knowledge. "The land of Saint Patrick and Guinness..."

I cocked my head dubiously. He and Silas were more alike than he could perceive.

"Ezekiel, Saint Patrick came from Sub-roman Britain." Her points clacked on the stone, crisscrossing through the dirtily debossed gum. "We are currently in White-Carrick in County Kildare, with a population of thirty-two thousand."