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"Hell of a dramatic thing to be yelling aloud in a cemetery," he says drily. "Be sure not to wear black and a lot of eyeliner or someone might think you're an ill-advised piece of goth performance art." A pause as he lifts himself onto his elbow and gingerly moves to reach through the half-light for the grey shape of her face and specifically for the smudges tracked around her eyelids, a small act of ruination he's always a little smugly pleased to enact and seems to now want to remind himself of with his fingertips, although he withdraws them at the last second. "Is eyeliner ink?"

It's as well that he isn't paying much attention to her when she buys her supplies, too busy enduring his usual ritual of touching everything that comes to hand: a shelf, a display of eerily large-eyed stuffed toys, a box of wineglasses, and unthinkingly the small of her back. He assures her distractedly that he will be at maximum vigilance and at his most entertaining, with a dire footnote that this particular promise isn't much of one. As they pass the cosmetics he plaintively informs her, sounding vaguely hurt, that he'd been serious about the eyeliner question, anyway.

He turns out to know nearly nothing about calligraphy ink, informing her flatly that he just uses ballpoint pens, which tallies with the cheap spiral notebooks he's never quite without, although his fingertips linger over a restrained and elegant journal cover and then over a fountain pen as they figure it out together.

But squid ink he's better for--cuttlefish ink, as it turns out, because while Taym theoretically understands the removal of ink from a whole squid, he's never done it and isn't sure he can. A brief, pleasantly squabbly discussion ensues about her expertise in cleaning fish; there's a video watched and analyzed as they huddle over his phone in the aisles of an expensive grocery store, and in the end there's no whole squid in the case, anyway. But cuttlefish ink can be acquired in little foil packets, and is, along with a handful of peaches and a pear and a miniscule wedge of some ridiculously expensive piece of cheese and an earful of complaints about his food budget, as if she'd made him buy the latter and as if the sharp outline of his shoulderblade under his shirt didn't suggest he wasn't spending enough money on it anyway; as if the slice of raisin toast and cup of hot black tea that had comprised his entire breakfast hadn't proved it. He seems pleased to have something to b***h about it, and moreover pleased to have a captive audience to listen to it.

"Why'd you leave the girl scouts?"

There's barely a hitch in it. He'd been distracted once again by his new-cat assessment of the place that he repeated every time, and then when he caught the drift of what she was doing the distraction had been intentional and then, sinking onto the corner of the little banquet bench, he watched her with dull eyes, his hands shaking as they rested flat and formal on his legs.

When he was a teenager he'd tried once to quit smoking, a swiftly-aborted effort brought on because he'd looked at his youngest brother and seen a painfully familiar set of habits, all solemn dark eyes forever watching everything, and he'd been worried that Caleb would look for the same outlets he had, following Taym's ill-set lead. The nicotine headaches had been manageable. Not using his hands had been worse, but he'd found ways to occupy them. But the thing that had broken him down had been walking past a neighbor standing deep in conversation with a friend at the end of his driveway, idly tamping a pack down on his palm over and over. Of all the stupid s**t to break him, he'd thought, and then he'd gone and bummed a cigarette.

He watches her because he can't look away. Some days are better than others; this had been a good one, no dreams where he couldn't find a quiet corner or an easy vein for nearly a week, no restless agitated need for quiet, no creeping inexplicable despair, no persistent headaches. Nothing, really, to justify what he's experiencing right now, a quiet rising turmoil that's making his stomach churn as he keeps his voice level, flat, as he asks her the mundane question, his eyes tracking upwards to the hollow of her elbow, to the unbound shape of her biceps, and then back down again, a psychosomatic itch rising first in his forearms and then in the crease of his thighs: the last refuge before you die, they said, the final frontier of easy veins; and he'd dipped in a few times, towards the end. He is Pavlov's dog, or worse. Want, want, want. Or maybe need. His bile rises in expectation that will go unfulfilled.

He laughs. It's a real laugh, startled out of him, but it sounds odd and strained around the edges, as does his voice when he answers.

"Sorry," he says. "I guess it's not funny. Especially for Miss Aqua Net, but you too. I--"

And he stumbles, watching the spoon return to the flame, and hesitates before suddenly reaching as if to take over (just want to see how it feels to hold it) and then yanking his hand back into lap, where it remains for only an instant before an agitated movement that ends with him wrapping his arms around himself and leaning forward as if to curl in. He looks dangerously close to rocking, but doesn't. He hates himself for this, for feeling barely a ripple at things that should be so much harder to see (needle in a gutter, bruise on a forearm) and succumbing to this, of all stupid ******** things.

"Can you--can you do... something else. Can you do that when I'm not here," he says, his voice all twisted up and vulnerable in a way it almost never is, untempered by biting sarcasm or that petulant twist he gets when he knows he's being childish. Humble. Pleading. "Please."

Whatever it had been it's swallowed up more or less instantly by humiliation, which manifests as an irritated wave of his hand as he draws himself backwards and away from her.

"Sorry," he says, sounding more angry about it than apologetic or, to be fair, afraid like he had been a moment ago. He's reaching for his cigarettes, but he's stymied by her being between himself and the door and simply ends up with one in his mouth and his lighter being fidgeted with both hands. "Thank you. Stupid ******** s**t," he adds, a sudden violent outburst apparently directed at himself and not her, to judge from the face he makes when he says it.

By the time he's halfway into a cigarette he's looking calmer, a muted shame overtaking the rest of it and leaving him subdued and quiet in a way that resembles the empty still after a long and hard cry.

This is one of those times where it feels easier to sit on the ground, and so of course--contrarian, perverse--he doesn't, but he does pull his knees up to his chest, dangling the bottle from his fingers of one hand as he finishes the smoke with the other.

He looks out over nothing, just an excuse to avoid looking at her.

"You can make ink out of black walnuts," he says dully. "If you can find a tree. My grandma had a great big one but they're hell on your garden, apparently. Some kind of--of poison in them, or something. Disappearing ink, out of a lemon. Don't know what the implications of that would be. Dated a girl once who painted with coffee."

The cynicism is sharp and rising, and so he doesn't censor himself.

"Dated was a euphemism," he says, resting his forehead on his knees. "More like a susceptible target demographic. Vegan girls with gauges like guys who can't avoid a five o'clock shadow and name-drop Lolita like it's ********' original to think Lolita is a great book." A pause, as he considered who he was speaking to. "Usually." Another pause, and then, miserably: "Lolita is so ******** good, though." He sounds like he's still considering throwing up, that thick slur on the edges of it.

He makes a disconcerted noise without moving from his curled-up posture.

"It's about--about tyrants. And the destructive power of solipsism. And the incredible human capacity for empathy in some people--the people reading--and the, the, the--incredible lack of it in other people. It's about--lies, and memories, and--and the way memories lie. And--and about how beautiful the written word of the English language is," he adds, accusatory and indignant.