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As she made the second half of her list he wound his fingers through hers, and then began guiding them, toying with them as he often did, but with purpose: pressing the middle two fingers to her palm, coaxing the others apart, and then gathering her hand to his chest. One of the first signs anyone ever bothered to teach you after "thank you" and the alphabet, not that most people needed to teach it to you, absorbed as it had been into mainstream culture.

"I am going to go," he whispered, "and have that nice comfortable hammock all to myself, and let you wake up with a crick in the neck, if you fall asleep right now." But again he didn't move. Again he only ran his hand over hers.

"Maybe we should," he said, with an indulgent air that suggested he might be easier to win over on this point than others. "Maybe."

When they were settled, when he'd nestled her in the crook of his arm and informed her she'd have to turn the pages for him and made commentary on the atrocious state of her hair, maybe she'd be surprised by how easily Taym (shy, so susceptible to embarrassment, to a prickly defensive refusal to do anything that ran contrary to the image he tried to cultivate) took to reading to her. He read aloud like someone who'd spend a lot of time doing it, and he had--not just with his sisters and his daughter but with his mother, with his friends, with a particular girlfriend.

In stoned literary enclaves there'd been a sort of pleasantly bohemian, anti-establishment quality to the idea of reading aloud to one another, passing a book around, and it had besides kept them from thinking about the fact that there was no music and no TV because no one had paid the bills and they were, again, in the dark. April had read to him for much the same reason; he'd read to April although this was harder even with the hearing aid in place. He'd read to Bird, a few times.

The primroses were over, he started. He read easily, with a flat, not-unpleasantly toneless cadence. There was no doing of voices, as he informed her with great dignity as soon as dialog happened, but in a way this only made listening to him more akin to truly reading: a careful space for projection, for filling in the blanks as any reader would. He read, not like a man who loved to read aloud, but like a man who loved to read.

And he read quietly, and maybe once the initial flowery passages bringing the reader down to the view from the rabbits' eyes were out of the way and the imminent danger was threatened and the trembling seer's warnings disregarded, maybe once the story truly started she'd find herself absorbed, or maybe she wouldn't, drowsy as she was.

But Taym knew this story back to front, and not just the ending but the various turns it would take right up until underground, the story continued and beyond, and as Hazel and Fiver gathered with the discontented rabbits of the Threarah's Owsla just before being ambushed by Holly, he hit the end of a sentence and hesitated to see if she was still awake, dog-earing the page and tossing the book aside before abruptly curling around her.

"Still on Island time," he murmured. "Can't decide if a nap would be the best possible use of my time here or the worst."

Just long enough to wake up, she said, and for an achingly fleeting instant, the space between two breaths, he loved her: not just in the way he'd loved her for months now, not just in the way he did when she looked at him with eyes full of interest or fondness or irritation, or even in the way he did when she was out of reach (because this, too, was a lulling pleasure for him: the pleasure of self-deprivation, of wanting), but in the way he had loved (and did love) Bird, or Harley, or even Alex, doped-up jackass that he was. It was the kind of love that he'd told her about once, the kind that came wrapped up in fear, and the wretched realization of how much potential for failure and misery had been handed to him.

(The kind of love, maybe, that made you think about inevitable some days, and want to break things.)

It was a brief moment, but it kept him awake long after she'd drifted off, and true to her suggestion he barely had time to doze off with his lips against the curve of her neck--just long enough, in fact, to wake up, to submit to her enthusiastic insistence, to allow himself to be dragged to the water's edge, still fighting shreds of exhaustion until he'd stripped off his coat and his jeans with a sniping sarcastic comment and let the shock of the water finish the job of waking him up.

He would realize later that it didn't occur to him to be afraid until he'd already made a demonstration of the fact that he could not just swim but swim well, making a grab for her ankle, and by then it was too late to make room for fear.

The moment didn't return. But it didn't need to: things unwound and became easy once again, or as easy as they ever were with the two of them, and Taym, finding himself as fascinated with her as if she'd shed her skin and stepped out new-made, interrupted her incessantly with questions, making good his promise that it would not be him talking: when did you learn to swim and did you ever swim in the ocean before the Island and (as he cupped a minnow beneath the surface in the palms of his hands for her to see) how come I never catch anything whenever I've gone fishing--and, finally, sly as he tread the water next to her, fingers tangling again (water pooling in the hollows of his collarbone, ignored): who do you think would win if we raced back to the dock?

He didn't let her win because he didn't let her finish, intercepting her halfway there. Stern admonitions about proper swimming safety ensued--this was his job, you know--and threats of mouth-to-mouth, predictable but swiftly acted upon.

"I hope you brought towels," he said later, after more desultory conversation and nosy questioning, tempting her to stay in the water, after commentary on how exceptionally prunelike America had become, and of course she had brought towels, because if Taym was a good boy scout she was an eagle scout, and an optimistic one. And as much as he'd balked at getting in he childishly balked at getting out, a theatrical groan of dismay and a lazy, indulgent somersault underwater before reluctantly surfacing, flicking damp hair off his forehead with a coltish toss of his head.

(And of course he started shivering almost instantly, of course he huddled up close, and maybe it was one-sided, and maybe he forced it to stay that way, but maybe he earned the right to another photo anyway. Maybe. He was on his best behavior, at his most desperate to impress her, to make himself valuable, to remind her of how indispensable he was.)

He helped her with her hair after he got dressed, and he asked what that market she'd mentioned was (he wanted to go out with her, to be seen with her, to hold her hand) and did they have food there (see, he's trying, he's trying so hard, please believe him) and was there still time (remind her it's fleeting; remind her there's another week between now and next time, because that will remind her there's a next time) and then, quietly: I wish I'd known you too.

And so much of it, so many unspoken words and wishes between the truths of I want to be seen with you and I wish I'd known you were lies that he told her, that he told himself.

"Sometimes I feel like I did, almost. Not quite, but almost," he told her. "All those stories."

His protests over the cats are semi-genuine, semi-token; he would have succumbed more easily were he not obviously entertained by her attempts to win him over. He eats a few things--bread, mostly--but not as much as he drinks, and he coaxes her into teaching him a few words in Russian, which he speaks back ungracefully, uneasily recalling a future with some anonymous assistant chattering at him in the same but obediently and badly parroting the phrases she supplies.

He returns the favor by demonstrating with his trembling fingers a few words of sign--words for foods, for cat, when they pass one; for water and weather and perfect and brat. This only lasts a little while before he falls into a spirited nerdy word journey about ASL grammar, punctuated with frequently-stressed assurances that it's all a bit of a faux pas to try and act like any kind of expert as an outsider in the Deaf community, that what he's doing is something akin to taking a year of high school French and claiming to be a cultural expert on all things Parisian.

"But it's so interesting, though," he says anyway, and goes on to explain why.

And on the walk he tells her about Lolita, which he'd read at seventeen, and then again at eighteen, and then again at nineteen, and every year thereafter at least once. "It's the book people who aren't smart but want to be say is their favorite book," he tells her, not sounding especially bothered by it. "But it's still Lolita."

But mostly he watches her, watches her interact with vendors, watches the look on her face when one of them greets her with more familiarity than another, and he thinks about all the life she leads when he is not around, and whether it is all tiny Russian women with fond smiles or if there is danger in it (danger lopping off a foot of rare and perfect hair), or--other things, that he doesn't dare to dwell on. She knows nothing of what happened in the school, of what happened underground. He knows very little of what has happened here, and he wants to ask her about Romeo and Juliet but the thought of even inadvertently talking shop repels him. He asks her instead about anything and everything else.

Twenty-four hours is not, he thinks, as he coaxes from her the synopsis of her latest Investigators book, nearly enough.