or, shivering, and he grins. "Putting out the embers."

I take his gloves and toque from him and add them to the drippy pile beside me.
I've got a foam tumbler of whiskey and I pass it to him.

The night passes in the warmth of twenty sweaty, boozy, speedy bodies, and I
hobble from pissoir to whiskey, until the whiskey's gone and the pissoir is
swimming from other people's misses, and then I settle into a corner of one of
the ratty sofas in the parlour, dozing a little and smiling.

Someone wakes me with a hard, whiskey-fumed kiss on the cheek. "How can you
*sleep* on *speed*, Maxes?" Daisy shrieks into my ear. I'm not used to seeing
her cut so loose, but it suits her. That twinkle is on perma-strobe and she's
down to a sportsbra and cycling shorts. She bounces onto the next cushion.

I pull my robe tighter. "Just lucky that way." Speed hits me hard, then drops me
like an anvil. My eyelids are like weights. She wriggles up to me, and even
though she's totally whacked, she manages to be careful of my knee. Cautiously,
I put my arm around her shoulders. She's clammy with sweat.

"Your Dad, he musta been some pain in the ass, huh?" She's babbling in an
adrenalised tone, and the muscles under my hand are twitching.

"Yeah, he sure was."

"I can't imagine it. I mean, we used to watch him on the tube and groan -- when
the bugouts got here and he told everyone that he'd been invited to explain to
them why they should admit humanity into the Galactic Federation, we laughed our
asses off. My sister, she's thirty, she's somewhere out west, we think, maybe
Winnipeg, she had a boyfriend in highschool who ended up there. . . ."

It takes her four more hours to wind down, and I think I must be picking up a
contact-high from her, because I'm not even a little tired. Eventually, she's
lying with her head in my lap, and I can feel my robe slip underneath her, and
I'm pretty sure my dick is hanging out underneath her hair, but none of it seems
to matter. No matter how long we sit there, I don't get cramps in my back, none
in my knee, and by the time we both doze away, I think I maybe am in love.

#

I should have spent the night in my bed. I wake up nearly twenty hours later,
and my knee feels like it's broken into a million pieces, which it is. I wake
with a yelp, catch my breath, yelp again, and Daisy is up and crouching beside
me in a flash. Tony arrives a moment later and they take me to bed. I spend New
Year's there, behind a