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“What do you think happens if I kiss you right now?”
Ryan O’Reily didn’t so much as blink, wordlessly shoving down the hand that had come reaching up toward his face, fingertips brushing his jaw.
Alonzo’s mouth curved into a thin smile, his fingers curling into a loose fist against his chest, not coming up again as Ryan finished adjusting his pillows and leaned back with a heavy sigh, leveling him with a dull glare. “No answer?” he said. “Come on, I don’t need the truth. I’m dying. Just give me something that sounds good.”
Green eyes flicked over Alonzo’s face, darting briefly down to where his blanket covered bandages dressing his many stab wounds. “You’re not dying,” he said flatly. “And even if you were, I wouldn’t spin you some fuckin’ fairytale.”
“Then how about the truth after all?” Alonzo insisted, though he could tell by the slow angling of O’Reily’s body that, task accomplished, he’d be on his way again soon. The fact he’d lingered so far was a miracle.
“If you kissed me?” O’Reily humored him in as somberly a way as Alonzo had ever seen.
Even gloomy, spastic little Alvarez wasn’t as grim as O’Reily.
To think the scuttlebutt was that O’Reily used to be someone you didn’t want to cross, wily and ruthless. Now he was like a ghost that walked the corridors, an empty shell that shuffled up and down the hospital ward or pushed his dreadful, ailing father around in a wheelchair in Emerald City.
“Mm-hm.” Alonzo stretched his fingers, clenching and unclenching his fist as he waited for either the ghost in front of him to float away again, or say something interesting—prove the interaction a worthwhile attempt at distraction.
Convalescence was so unimaginably mind-numbing.
O’Reily continued to stare at Alonzo, expression inscrutable. “Well, you wouldn’t only be laid up here with a couple of shank wounds, I’ll tell you that, pal,” he said darkly, a shot of bravado there, in the suggestion that he’d finish the job.
Plebian, Alonzo thought.
And by all accounts, not O’Reily’s style.
“WAAAH!” Alonzo cut in, imitating a buzzer, the swiftness of his interjection forcing O’Reily’s eyes wide. “Wrong answer, sugar. Thanks for playing.”
“Yeah? Fuck you,” O’Reily sneered at once, whipping around.
Alonzo watched him storm off, smirking to himself as he sank back against his pillows, smoothing his hands over his blanket.
Well, that had been fun enough.
He scanned the hospital ward, searching for other potential targets, but found no one else of interest up and about in the dim blue afternoon.
There was… what’s-his-name, way over in the hospital bed down the way, but to strike up conversation with him would mean getting himself down into a wheelchair, and some busybody nurse had taken Alonzo’s bathrobe earlier.
He wouldn’t be caught dead wandering around in just his hospital gown.
So, Alonzo’s sight naturally drifted back toward O’Reily after a while, tracking his shuffling movements around the other end of the hall, where he stayed until the end of his work detail…
Avoiding Alonzo, he supposed, grinning sharply as he watched O’Reily leave for the day, not so much as peeking over his shoulder.
“Hm hm hm,” he hummed to himself as the last of the orderlies departed. He felt a promising crackle of anticipation under his skin, though maybe it was simply the itch of healing flesh.
O’Reily’s reaction was something to look forward to investigating further, either way, Alonzo decided—something to keep scratching at until he got to the meat of it—an interesting answer. Or the truth.
Maybe both.
Whichever came first.