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He was watching her with that look he got sometimes, like he wasn't sure if she was pulling his leg or possibly even if she was real: bewildered, marveling.

He could have made a pirate joke, or a fireworks joke; he could have earnestly apologized for missing her last birthday. Instead he pushed another crumb back and forth with the end of his spoon, eyes dropping away.

"Did you like being alone for that?"

"I don't blame you. You are very good company," he said after a pause, as he set to clearing the table, piling up the dishes neatly, less out of consideration for their waitress than general habit and the sake of having something to do and because he thought that maybe if he did that she'd somehow not notice that he hadn't really eaten much, while he'd been trying to stop watching her with that strange mix of fascination and alarm that he always had while she was eating. "Sometimes I desperately want to be alone and then once I am all I can think is <********, this was a stupid ******** idea.

"Sometimes," he said suddenly, twisting up a straw wrapper over and over, "when you're over at my place and you're--taking a bath or reading or whatever--that's like being alone but better." And he did take a strange delight in it--in ignoring her, in winding an arm around her just so that he could read a book over her shoulder, in bending over a stack of notes while her distracted nonsense singing wandered out of the bathroom and into the silence of his room. "It feels like what I think being alone ought to feel like, when I think I want to be alone." He hesitated, words gathering behind his teeth and swallowed back as he pushed the neatly-stacked plates to the side and grabbed at her ankle again, giving it an impatient shake. "You ready to go?"

Surprisingly he made no protest. Or possibly not surprisingly, given his distaste for making a scene (although he did silently tuck an exorbitant cash tip under the edge of a plate, because it's my birthday, he said, as if that made any sense at all). But the lack of protest was accompanied by a lack of dirty looks or rolled eyes, and it continued until they were back on the sidewalk, where he instead said thank you, quiet and pensive. Perhaps he realized that the tone was not really appropriate, because he followed it up by grabbing her hand, swinging it childishly and leaning to grin into her hair because even now he never quite grinned where she could see it.

"I have not skated since I was--god, I don't know. Long enough that I'm sure I'm about to make a complete a** of myself, which I hope you're ready for. You are sure to figuratively skate circles around me so please spare me the indignity of doing so literally as well while I'm falling on my a** for the hundredth time."

"I know," he said. "I trust you."

He ran his eyes over the people on the ice, his fingertips brushing hers, and then, unexpectedly, he leaned to kiss her cheek, with all the nervous bravado of a little boy mustering the sudden courage to run up to Aladdin in Disneyworld. It didn't last; he shied away, his own skates already on.

"I'm being forcibly reminded," he said, not looking at her, "of that ice scene in Bambi." Lower: "She thinks it's funny."

It took a bit longer for him to follow suit, and it was strange to see him not just awkward but clumsy, and maybe this was why he refused to dance with her: even at his most tense and jittery he had a sort of angular grace of movement, like a spider feeling its way across its web; when he was afraid it simply translated into the restrained fluidity of a threatened cat not quite ready to run but clearly capable of doing so when it chose. And of course when he was neither tense nor afraid, or when he was caught up in the joy of violence, the movement of his body was something most would consider by far his most attractive quality.

On skates, Fiona's mocking reminders of the Bambi scene she'd forced him to rewatch three times were startlingly apt. He almost but did not quite fall down, mostly because he had no qualm in holding back America's need to glide away in favor of using her as a crutch.

Rather than give this the sort of laughing dismissal that would have made it easy, he instead simply became grim-faced and stubborn and miserable, hard on himself until, after too many far-too-long minutes, something of old muscle memory started to return. His natural grace aided the return to form somewhat but not completely--it was obvious that he was going to be outmatched by America even when he first managed a sharpish turn. It wasn't until then that the misery dropped away and it seemed like he might actually make an effort to enjoy himself instead of being, as he so often called himself, bad company.

"Driving was easier," he said.

Although it might have gone appreciated by America the music was lost on Taym, which might have been for the best given how intensely self-conscious he already was, swallowing uneasily at the giggling of the girls and then falling quiet on their first sweep past the aspiring figure skater, averting his eyes.

He loosened up, some--silently daring her into very small races which he had no hope of winning, meeting his next fumble, when he grabbed hold of her arm to avoid an actual spill, with an exasperated half-laugh instead of anger. He goaded her into talking when she'd have it, and allowed her her silence when it was obvious that she was busy trying to wear movement like a second skin. He knew that look on her now, recognized it from running and elsewhere, and always felt vaguely that interrupting it would be like having a coughing fit in the middle of the most solemn part of Mass, never mind that her tangible joy was as far from solemn as it was possible to get.

When he volunteered to go get her a cup of hot chocolate it was half to leave her to it and half to get out of the cold--he was shivering through his many layers--and by the second time he demanded a break from the cold (one actual fall later, met with theatrical grimness) he'd eased up sufficiently to warm both their hands together in his pockets, jacket drawn around her and his chin on her shoulder, a quiet laugh in her ear as one of the gaggle of girls took an especially dramatic spill and shrieked with hilarity at her own clumsiness.

The family was packing up and leaving; he silently watched them file out flushed and laughing, his fingers tightening around hers.

"This is good," he said finally, quietly.

He thought of the little mudroom on the island, of walking through the snow and throwing damp clothes into the dryer, of the both of them squeezing through the same doorway, reluctant to let go of one another's hands until they had to, to make dinner, clean the kitchen, drift off in the warm living room with the lush green island foliage tossing incongruously in the dark outside the snug-curtained windows.

(He thought intead of stands of dogwood and Bradford pear, of Magnolia and black walnut, of live oak and the dying branches of honeysuckle and forsythia; of a beat-up project car in the driveway and an extra room, painted yellow because they didn't know yet, and here he stopped the thought, throat aching)

They'd leave here, eat a late lunch or an early dinner in the first warm place that seemed likely, and probably she'd accompany him back to the sterile white second-floor room and probably he wouldn't even have to coax and bully and beg to get her to stay the night, just one night.

"This is good," he repeated, and he meant it, mostly.

But before the not-having-to-ask, after the late lunch/early dinner where he ate very little but more than he would have without her there (but more then than he would have a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago), after a long walk in the cold that he seemed reluctant to end despite his shivering and the inevitable dragging-her-into-a-bookstore, there were further surprises.

He'd stepped back into the balmy Island air with an audible sigh of relief, tension smoothing out of his shoulders and shivering subsiding. On the path back to the dorms he hesitated after reaching for her hand, and then wound an arm around her waist just as he had in the world outside, taut and nervous against her but his quiet chatter (he was trying to parrot back the figure skating terms she'd taught him at his coaxing and making an intentional mess of it, what's it called the pigsomething, something about milkshakes--or was that the--it was some beast of burden spin--triple oxel? No, something more exotic. Alpaca?) carrying on without a single uneasy hitch.

By the time they were up the stairs and it was obvious that they had the hallway to themselves he relaxed enough to pinch her a** while he unlocked the door, lazy and indulgent and jokingly crass in the way he got when he was at ease, when he'd call her baby and put on the drawl and rake his fingers through his hair and, if there was a toothpick handy, inevitably end up passing it from one side of his mouth to the other with a long and drawn out weeellll...

He dropped his shoulder bag, heavy with books, in the entranceway. The fact that he wasn't bothering to carefully shelve them and was besides leaving something in the floor was enough for her to know that he had other plans occupying his immediate attention, but he didn't get further than pulling her close before he stopped, looking over her shoulder at his desk, at the pile of confetti and packages there, and he laughed one of those rare and genuine laughs.

"Goddammit," he said.