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Ashton could feel the faun staring at him. They turned slightly in their chair, not looking into her big green eyes.
"Do you wanna play a game?" She asked, chin resting on her intriguingly darkened hand. The rest of their party seemed to have headed up to the rooms they’d gotten at the inn. FCG was in the corner, ministering to a drunken and slumped over dwarf.
"What kind of game?" Ashton pulled out a ribbon they'd stolen from Fearne earlier, causally winding it over their fingers without looking. If Fearne noticed, she was doing a good job of hiding it.
Fearne cast a glance at the clock above the mantel. It was about 15 minutes to midnight. “Let’s say we’ll meet back up in 15 minutes, and whoever has the best stuff wins.”
Ashton wasn’t so sure if this was a good idea, but he liked the mischievous glint in her eyes. He may not have been as skilled at pickpocketing as she was, seeing as he usually got caught whenever he tried to lift something off of her. “Alright,” he said, knocking back the last of his drink, “I’m in.” She was off in a flash of skirts and a trail of flower petals. It was hard not to watch her go. She just always seemed so much more alive than anything else around.
Ashton watched Fearne slide up the bar, toying with a strand of hair as she approached a large tiefling with deep red skin, horns, and wings. They watched her lean in closer, batting her eyelashes. Ashton looked away, forgetting that he was supposed to be scanning the room for a mark, not watching Fearne. It wasn’t like he was jealous or something. He was distracted by a loud noise from FCG; the drunken dwarf he’d been talking to seemed to have awoken, and seemed to be in the process of trying to remove one of FCG’s arms despite his polite protesting. The dwarf dropped his hands and mumbled something as soon as Ashton appeared behind FGC with a menacing look on their face.
“Thanks Ashton,” FCG said. “Are you heading upstairs?”
“I’m going to wait for Fearne,” he said casually. He turned back around to see where she was. The tiefling was gone, but there was a large hobgoblin standing next to Fearne with a pissed off expression on his face. His hand was around her wrist, holding up up an object that Ashton assumed she’d tried to steal.
‘I’m so sorry about that,” he said, sliding up to the bar. “My uh, wife here, gets a little carried away whenever she’s had too much to drink.” He nudged the fawn slightly.
“Oh, I think I just had too much wine. I really think I should lie down,” she cooed, putting a hand to her face. Ashton put thei rarm around her the best they could, despite the height difference between them. The hobgoblin’s eyes narrowed. Ashton slid him a few coins across the bar. “For your troubles,” he said casually.
“Come on, love”, he said. He couldn’t deny the jolt of pleasure he got at being able to use the pet name. For someone who did not like being touched, he also couldn’t deny the way that the warmth of her wrapped around him, like sitting in a patch of sunlight or in front of a fire.
She wrapped her arms around him, laying her head on top of hers as he guided her to the stairs and up to the room she was sharing with Laudna and Imogen.
She turned at the door, with an expression so stricken that he thought she must have gotten hurt downstairs somehow.
“I didn’t get to steal anything!” she said, making a face he could only describe as a pout. Before he could respond, he watched her expression change, that mischievous glint back in her eye. She leaned down closer to him. Her lips were impossibly soft and warm as they brushed against his. She disappeared into the room before he could even process what had just happened.
Ashton leaned their head back against the wooden wall of the narrow hall. “Well, fuck,” they whispered to themselves. “That’s just really hard to steal back.”