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His eyebrows raised in slight surprise at her choosing the last of the options he'd presented, but he did not protest or pull back against her leading. The blue room, it seemed, was their destination--only appropriate, he supposed, given Kamiko's wish for a quiet night in. Blue was a color of calm and relaxation. Maybe it would help settle both their apparent nerves... Though he was quite sure he'd felt excitement from her, just a bit ago, the sense of the emotion heightened by their touch. Did he dare drop his shields a little to get a better read on her current state...?

"Good choice," he said with a smile, when she seemed to be waiting for a reply from him, and he led her the final few feet of distance to the loveseat on one side of the sizeable guest bedroom. Figuring she would probably like to lean against him as she had before, he took a seat first and leaned against one side of the plush furniture.

As she settled against him, he returned to holding her with an arm around her higher waist, all too conscious now that, with the change of clothing, that meant his furred hand rested against bare skin due to her bare midriff. Able to hear his heartbeat as she was, he fretted slightly about her wondering just what was up with the acceleration of said heartbeat due to his own nervousness...

When she studied him, he was studying her back, though his eyes were somewhat more distant and unfocused as he weighed once again the merits of keeping his shielding up versus letting it down. With as close as they were...would it be an invasion of privacy, or simply something Kamiko would expect as a matter of course of dating someone whose magic took the primary form of empathy? He doubted she was hiding anything from him; no, he was simply curious. Especially as to whether her emotions were anything like his at the moment... Very well. He'd at least get a 'glance'...

This decided, he lowered them slowly, though there was no indication to the physical effect he was even doing so. The pondering and arguing within himself had taken only a few moments, so he had plenty of time to study her face, her mask, her eyes more carefully while he felt her emotions become more clear. This was--oh. Oh. He'd felt this level of emotion before, but usually not directed at himself--caught it off Seth and Dacj, usually, when he happened to inadvertently stumble onto them unexpected. Elti would sometimes offer glimmers of it, powerful and clearly only part of the whole, though the Ti'ama didn't seem to want to burden him with the full feeling. Love. It was love. And the sense of it only grew stronger when she spoke again.

"I missed you too," he said softly, reaching out with his free hand to hesitantly touch her soft dark hair, the edge of a furred ear. Everything--it would have been so much more tolerable with her here, just as a quietly supporting presence. She loved him, and he could show her he loved her in more ways than one... Perhaps it was because emotions were familiar things, things he had control and mastery of, that helped him to be so bold where he'd often failed before. Or the long absence to make the heart grow fonder, or any number of reasons... It really didn't matter. All Eli knew was he found his hand lightly tracing his edge of her face, directing her slightly upwards as he moved to close the distance between them. It was a conscious decision he made, to project back his own feelings of love and affection for her as he tried, slightly clumsy and most certainly nervous, to correct a longstanding error--the fact that Eli and Kamiko had not yet kissed.

Eli didn't know if perhaps whatever force in the universe that normally tormented him so had taken a day off, or maybe it had decided he'd finally been harassed enough and needed a break lest he shuffle off the mortal coil due to hopelessness. Everything was perfect, it was a state Eli could almost not bring himself to quite completely trust in. But on the other hand, Kamiko's emotions were feeling quite persuasive at the moment, lulling him to a happy state of comfort and security spiced with a thrill of the connection of their first kiss--of her kissing him back. He was as reluctant to part at the end of their endurance as it seemed she was, but the moment couldn't last forever...

He smiled as she looked at him once more with those pretty dark eyes, flushed once more under her touch. Eli barely had taken note of what she'd spoken--how much?--before she nearly pounced him once more. There was no danger of his fighting back in this case, nor any inclination to object--he liked Kamiko being bold. This bold, he had to admit privately, he had not quite expected... But her passion was infectious, likely so even had he not been a vulnerable empath with shields rather down at the moment; he responded with like fervor as he returned the kiss. Brief thoughts of certain sisters' future I-told-you-so's were an inevitable flash across his thoughts, but he banished those easily enough. His hand returned to her hair, the other arm pulled her closer to him, so even when their lips parted once more she was still closer to him. "Did I mention I'm glad you're home?" he asked, stroking her hair with another smile.

He suppressed a chuckle at the sight of Kamiko's wagging tail--his own likely wouldn't be much better except for the fact it didn't have much room to move--and let her focus on hiding her enthusiasm. Eli, of course, could still read her emotional state fairly easily, and he was rather pleased with it. She seemed content to simply lay in his arms, snuggled close, and he felt her breathing slow as she drifted off to sleep. She likely had come straight home from the end of everything--she must be quite tired indeed to drop off so easily. He was glad that he could give her the rest she needed, help her relax... Yes, his inclination to avoid unpleasant subjects earlier had really been for the best. He would explain it all later...some other time...

The kuppy barely noticed his own slow drift to sleep, head placed against Kamiko's as his eyes closed.