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"Listen to me," he said, suddenly venomous. "You came crawling into my room terrified and hurt and you needed somewhere safe to be, and I gave that to you. I gave you my ******** bed. I gave you space. I gave you all the safety in the ******** world, you, drunk in my room and desperate for some kinda ******** validation. So what, twenty-four hours after you meet Blind Man Bluff you do the same to him, you're hurt and you're scared, and what's he ********' do? He talks you into his ********' bed, he talks you into kissing him, fully ******** aware that you're emotionally compromised, and then he airs your sexual history on Twitter and doesn't understand why that's unacceptable behavior until you point it out to him? He told me you were acting like a child. You know that?"

The grip on her wrist tightened still more, and he was meeting her eye now. "This isn't an issue of jealousy, sweetheart. I'm watching your ******** back. So yeah. He took advantage of you, cold-blooded, and you fell for it even after he publicly disrespected you. I did what I thought you wanted me to do, and gave you somewhere safe to be. What a ******** monster I am."

Fiona had largely made herself absent from the conversation, and it didn't occur to Taym to realize it until she resurfaced.

Talked yourself into a corner now, sir, she observed dispassionately.

And she was right, of course--she almost always was. These were revelations he could have done without and as much as he would have expected them to bring some kind of relief, they didn't. Nothing he could act on, and given her other tastes, nothing he could even take any kind of vicious pride in. Revelations that meant nothing and yielded no physical rewards, just an awareness, just something else to have to tiptoe around, just one more landmine he didn't have the energy to avoid.

And he'd just made an impassioned speech about how he was better than a man who'd take advantage of a girl like Peyton, and here he was, talked, as Fiona said, into the corner of not taking advantage of her.

For a split second his hindbrain scrambled to rationalize why it would be OK: tried to tell him he was fond of her disproportionately, tried to tell him he was over-thinking the consequences of entangling himself with another Hunter, tried to tell him he could manage some sort of no-strings thing and it would be OK because she was an adult who could handle it, a series of suggested excuses considered and discarded in fractions of a second. He wanted to snap at her, to bark a curse. He wanted to pretend he cared long enough to take what he wanted from her, knowing full well that he could. But he'd gone and talked himself into a corner.

Instead he let go of her hand, gently, and steepled his fingers over his face to rub his eyes in exhaustion.

"So now I know," he said flatly, "that I could kiss you right now and you'd let me, and you have no ******** idea how hard that is on me. I know I want from you and it's not what you want from me. We established your feelings about that in that little conversation we had on the phone when Solomon took it on himself to broadcast your secrets." He couldn't bring himself to elaborate. "I just... think that you can do better than him, and you ought to."

"There's different kinds of taking advantage," he shot back, a subdued snap. "He doesn't respect you. He made that abundantly obvious to me. But unlike him, I trust you to make your own decisions. I just--figured I'd give you my unsolicited opinion."

It hurt. She was all long tanned arms and tiny ankles and big tearstained eyes, six inches away from his hands, and in another place he'd have lied through his teeth for her or just about anyone else, especially in a moment like now when all he wanted, desperately, was something to shut down his brain and efface a week of bad memories. Everything was too complicated here. Nowhere to run when the inevitable came about, no way to quietly disappear.

"I don't want anything from anyone here," he echoed, half-skeptical, half-bitter. "I'm here to work. I don't need the... the complications. I just want--"

What he wanted was simple. Would have been simple, anywhere else.

"--I'm just not going to lie to you," he settled on finally, as much a tired, somewhat surprised self-revelation as a promise. He wanted to lie to her, and realized he wasn't going to.

He barked a sarcastic, tired little laugh in answer to her question. "Christ," he whispered. "You're so ******** young sometimes."

He dropped his hands away from his eyes, and he hazarded a glance at her face, but only a glance.

"What's my track record now?" He didn't answer her because he felt like the answer was obvious and wasn't going to articulate it for her gratification. "Half of all our conversations end normally instead of with me making you miserable or you making me miserable? Less than half? Probably less than half." This time the laugh was shaky, shakier than he'd meant to betray; it suggested that Peyton wasn't the only one swallowing tears and that she was in fact doing a better job of it, and he was humiliated but pretended it hadn't happened. "Christ. You really do have bad ******** taste."

"Me too, since the eighth, so you're trumped."

He paused, and then he reached out to take her hand again, and he toyed with her fingers distractedly.

The past week, two weeks--however long it had been since Shiloh's death, since dealing with Maebe's grief, since Jordan and the trials and the fallout and the silences and the mission and the news of Aria and every other small thing--were a deadweight around his neck, a loop of buzzing thoughts he couldn't seem to shake. He would have given damn near anything for a hit, for a few drinks too many, something to make himself stop thinking. A list of things he couldn't have.

He tried to tell himself he didn't even find her attractive, which would have been true any other time, any time he wasn't desperate for some sort of comfort, any time she hadn't just as much as told him that she would have enjoyed his attentions, even if he didn't think it spoke volumes about her taste. Not, especially, when he reminded himself it was a thing he shared with Solomon, of all the ******** people on the Island.

He cupped his hand around her fingers and he felt as isolated as he had before the Island, when two dozen people in a row would walk by him and pretend he wasn't there, the chain broken only by someone deigning to give him a sneer.

He would have taken anything. Honestly, he'd have felt blessed to just have a pair of arms to lie in, or better still, someone to lie in his.

But why stop there. Why ever stop there?

Fiona rustled in resigned disapproval.

He lifted her hand to his lips, pressed the backs of her fingers there, and he spoke in the middle of his own train of thought, picking up a conversation she hadn't been a part of as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "But I could make you happy," he whispered, searching out her eyes.

And then he let her go, instantly, to press his hands to his eyelids, the strain returning to his voice and breaking. "You should probably go. It's been a... it's been a hard ******** week. I'm sorry."

Sir.

It was a quiet warning, one that he could ignore.

Fiona was just the more audible, the more concrete of the thousand and one voices telling him that he was making a mistake. But he was accustomed to ignoring those: the protests of his better judgment and his future selves. Very rarely in the past decade of his life had he bothered to give them much attention. Why start now?

Sir.

So she didn't leave. Why should she? He could make her happy. Temporarily, anyway. Briefly. Make them both happy. It had been a long week (it had been a long month; it had been a long, long year), not just for him but for her too. Longer for her, maybe. They were young and they were constantly skirting the edge of imminent death.

Sir.

So he sat up, he leaned for her, one hand sliding around her waist and the other tangling in the hair at the back of her neck in less time than it took for him to realize what he was doing, and there was nothing innocent about the kiss that he gave her, or maybe took from her. Just a sudden subdued aggression, an undertow of unmistakeable intention that he fully expected her to get swept up in.

Sir!

His hands were steady and unshaking and he knew he should have shaved and shouldn't have smoked, but that was the last coherent thought he really had for the ten-seconds-like-forever that followed, his arms possessive, his stomach in knots, and his heart, inured to the circumstance by old, old habit that returned as easily as any other, not racing at all, in contradiction of the expected narrative. This was what he'd wanted: the buzzing short-circuiting of upper brain function, the shutting down of introspection. That was the goal. The body in his arms and the mouth under his were just a means to an end. The wall he'd built around Fiona's voice was forgotten, and crumbled.

Taym! You ******** idiot!

And it was that, the combination of the familiar name and the language, that shocked him back to reality. A sudden ache in his throat finished the job and he yanked himself away from her, pushing her back in his hurry to get space between them, and he pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

"Please leave," he said, the words tight.

I ever do that s**t again you ******** stop me before I ******** up that badly.
I tried to sa--
Try harder. You heard her. She's ******** rehearsed that speech. Probably more than once.

Humiliation swept in to replace loneliness, and close on humiliation's heels was nerve-raw anger. He picked up the worn copy of Alice and flung it viciously at the closed door. The candles fluttered and the resulting bang was louder than he'd expected, made him jump.

I need off this ******** island.
Yes, Sir. She was subdued again, professional again, not a trace of emotion in the words ringing in his head or in the amorphous presence of her.

You gonna say 'I told you so'?
Wasn't planning on it, Sir.

It was worse this way; worse that there was a witness to his every failure now, worse that every ******** up got an audience with the closest of front-row seats.

You were wrong anyway. ********... speeches. Not even a real... just... gone over in her head a dozen ******** times, probably. Made a ******** fool of myself yet again.
Yes, Sir. A pause, and then: I'm sorry, Sir. Not an apology. Just sympathy.
"Keep it to yourself," he snapped aloud, and he hauled himself up and into the rickety chair in front of his desk, yanking his cigarettes towards him with one hand and one of the volumes scavenged out of the library with the other.

When all else failed, there was always work.