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He moved restlessly for a few seconds before settling near his freshly-repaired window, although he left it closed while he smoked, forehead propped against the wall. No use pretending to be cool now, even if she wasn't looking. Every cigarette, like every vice, was just another crutch. Somewhere to put his hands. Something to avoid thinking. He kept an ashtray on the windowsill because this was where he ended up when he wasn't trying to impress someone.

He stopped at his dresser before he returned, opening the carrier and with difficulty extracting its unruly inmates. He made no comment as he settled back down next to her--closer, this time, leery and tense but closer--and deposited them (or it, he still didn't know) onto the pillow in her lap, reaching for his phone to set the timer. One hour a day. This was what he was permitted. He gave them to her.

"Give them a minute," he said quietly, reaching for his drink again, and he'd apparently gotten his voice back under control, at least, "and they'll settle down. I can't promise they won't try to sit on the keyboard, though. They are cats, sort of."

He wasn't even sure why. It simply felt right, and appropriate, to offer the only comfort he had besides cigarettes and cheap whiskey. A clumsy, uncertain apology he wasn't even sure he was making.

He was wretchedly aware of how little he deserved thanks and how much she did, but it wasn't in him--it was never in him--to not grasp desperately at any positive human emotion, to wag his tail hesitant and confused at an outstretched hand.

So he said nothing, just awkwardly reached to run his hand over one unresisting cat.

He was twenty-five years old and felt much older; he was supposed to be married now and on his second or third kid, with a dog and a boring job obtained partly through nepotism and partly through genuine if surprising aptitude. He was not fifteen any more, and even when he'd been fifteen he'd had no timidity in him. He'd been brash and pretentious and over-confident and not at all the sort of fifteen year old who glorified the idea of touching a girl. His first had been in the downstairs bathroom during a party he was throwing, and he'd been fifteen. He'd accepted her advances as the natural course of things, unafraid and unperturbed.

He watched America's hands as she cradled the cats and was terrified. It had been a strange and difficult decade, between then and now.

"Figure skating," he said finally instead of acknowledging the thank you: sarcastic, disapproving.

And he snaked out his other tremor-wracked hand to tangle his fingers with hers. "Really?"

Shaken by the abrupt destruction of his careful walls, relieved by the fact that she neither pulled him nearer nor pushed him away, exhausted and vulnerable and needy: in that moment she could have talked him into finding the inside of a greasetrap fascinating and wonderful. His eyes searched her face for anything but sincerity and came up with nothing and the corner of his mouth twisted up in the closest thing he could manage to an actual smile.

Sir, came the pragmatic warning word in the back of his head, and Taym gave himself a mental shake, aborted his half-formed plan to run his thumb over the backs of her fingers like he had in the shed in the rain.

He still had four weeks until he had to leave. A month was, he knew from experience, ample time for him to bring himself and everyone around him misery.

"I'll tolerate it," he said magnanimously.

He let himself a tiny gesture: he returned the squeeze of her fingers, and the unspoken words behind it: thank you.