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So, in the end, torn between desperately wanting to chase her out and wanting her to stay for a while, he'd opted for bribing her into the latter by offering to order Chinese food from the little place around the corner. He needed it: needed a few minutes, a couple of hours, something; humanity was an ill-fitting suit at the moment and he didn't want it to be.

Regardless of how ridiculous it was given the situation, he had that same tension humming through him again, keeping a careful buffer between himself and her hands and making excuses to keep his own hands occupied with a cigarette, with the dog, with a book, with the phone while he ordered online, taking her ooh, and-- suggestions as gospel and watching them piling up in the total.

He was already fully-clothed again, right down to a sweater on top of an incredibly thread-bare henley, and he gave Ivy a gaze of deep and profound betrayal as she lost patience with the way he paced back and forth, cigarette in one hand and phone in the other, and bounded up onto the bed to rest her head imploringly on America's knee.

He felt a little bit like he might throw up, and not just at the thought of a late-night delivery crab rangoon. His skin was crawling; he was panicky and he felt sure that if he got back into the bed he'd have forgotten (again) how to lie down in it properly, after all these weeks of re-learning it.

"Says it'll be twenty minutes or so," he said, his voice totally calm. Nothing to betray the barely-contained roiling. No hints that he was leaning against the cracked-open door because the air was calming his stomach and not just because it was a) a flattering place to be, aesthetically and b) a good place to people watch the coming-and-going of the neighboring rooms.

She'd commented on how clean the place was, and he'd told her, grimly, that it hadn't come that way, and that seemed likely. It was a piece of s**t, bluntly put: he'd asked her if I give you my address and it's a shady motel is it more or less creepy if I actually live there? It seemed an odd place to call home, but judging from the laundry drying on railings across the run-down complex he wasn't the only one doing so. Besides Ivy's dishes in the corner the only sign of personal habitation was a small stack of worn-out paperbacks on the nightstand, bristling with post-it flags and resting on top of an even more worn-out notebook. He was, apparently, literally living out of a backpack.

He'd turned on the TV after, just for the background noise, and it hummed barely-audible through some re-airing of a local council meeting or some other similar public access snorefest, and as he considered the recent local news and the desperate door hammering going on across the parking lot he lifted his gentle, quiet voice over the noise:

"You're gonna get murdered one day," he observed flatly, shaking his head in quiet incredulity. "Reckless. And don't--" he added, before she could "--point out that I both facilitated it and benefited from it. I know. Still reckless."

He doesn't bother to hide the roll of his eyes--an impressive eye-roll, one that makes him look very nearly eighteen himself for a second, if not sixteen.

"Statistically speaking it's more likely to be you than me, but thanks for the reminder," he says flatly. "I'll refrain from saying I know what I'm doing til I get your Yelp score later," he adds.

(He isn't a person who laughs much--well, normally; she's already learned there are ways around that--but he is a person who jokes a lot, nearly always self-deprecating ones, a don't patronize me to her damn right.)

"How was the being your own person thing working out til you got stuck here, anyway? Most people go backpack around Europe for that s**t."

He hasn't known her long but inwardly he's weighing the odds of how she'll answer that.

He flicks the cigarette butt into a parking lot already swimming with similar and worse, lighting a second one immediately as an excuse not to abandon his post and watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her extremely brief sketch of road tripping across the country sounds knee-knockingly pleasant.

"Been stuck worse places," he concedes. "I dunno how much you've seen of it trapped at the campground without a car--" and he doesn't continue with the observation that she's got the fortunate calves to suggest that this isn't really a hardship, plus the (in his estimation) unfortunate feet "--but there's some really pretty parts of town in that like... cold grey New England sort of way." He refrains from trotting out the word uliginous to tie it back to Florida, but he's thinking it.

"Not unless you're a liar you won't," he says grimly. "I haven't even made it to the library yet." This, as though this is everyone's immediate first priority, right in front of locating the emergency room and police station. A pause, while he considers whether "came from" implies anything that "comes from" wouldn't and decides that he isn't sure and isn't sure he wants to know, and then prods it anyway, gently and indirectly.

"Click how?" And then, directly contradicting himself: "There's a little Greenway thing. One of the--the, I guess trail heads? About a half mile from here, good place for a run. Ivy approved."

The question was answered but it raised others because while the old thoughts about his future no longer seemed like some inexorable inevitability, they still loomed, and he wanted to know--needed to know--if it was better or worse, for her to not be a person. Wanted to know if a question mark was better than the grim disappointment of an ellipsis. He made a restless, strange, meaningless movement with the effort of not asking. Maybe it was better: the way she said it, all non-committal shrugs. But maybe it wasn't, if she was glad of a second chance. He wanted to say I'm sorry but she'd think it was polite condolences instead of the apology it was, so he didn't.

"I could tell," he said. A pause. "It fills up an hour," he said, by way of explaining and of quietly acknowledging that no, he doesn't seem the type. "It's good to--be tired sometimes." To be inside your own body. All the time. It helped, as much as anything did. "And the dog likes it."

Ivy, it must be said, responded to that tone all too readily, butt wiggling excitedly and ears perking in a way that suggested she was accustomed to being spoken to that way often.

Taym scratched his eyelid with his thumb in the manner of someone trying to process information without relying on sarcasm and only barely succeeding. "The Sweet Pea," he repeated. And quietly resented her for even bothering to mention the chandelier, the days of sleeping with newspapers stuffed into his clothes close enough behind him that he found his skin crawling once again at the jolting realization of where he was and what he'd just done and was doing. "A hardship I'm sure you're taking in stride."

OK, maybe not succeeding entirely.

"Yet?"

(It may or may not be timed to a coolguy exhale.)

He presumably grinned, too, but it was visible only in the duck and turn of his head designed to hide it.

"My anxiety about that Yelp score is slightly assuaged," he said. And then, flicking the second cigarette out towards the first but remaining where he was: "So what's the plan when that old tin can is running again? You and Sweet Pea heading back out for round two? Or have you hit your adventure quota for a while?"