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"It's unlocked." It was yelled but not unfriendly; if Kostya had arrived expecting immediate bridling or a moping, toska mess, what he got instead was far from it: Taym glancing up from where he was perched on the bed (laptop in his lap; open notebooks fanned in a semi-circle around him), indicating a chair distractedly.

"Evening," he said, neither hostile nor sarcastic nor tired. The window was open; a cigarette smoked half-forgotten in an ashtray and Taym, in accordance with earlier suggestions on Kostya's part, was attempting to give the whole "working with music" thing a go. He turned it down without looking up again. "Did you know," he added almost immediately, "that there are shadowlings nesting in the toilets down at the school? Or were," he amended, grimly satisfied. He was right on the edge of making a flushing them out joke.

He paused, hands motionless on the keyboard.

"In what context?"

"I can't until I know what the question ******** is."

This time, he turned the music off, and there was a long, motionless pause before he answered.

"Is this any of your business, exactly?"

"Does she know you're here interrogating me?"

Taym was doglike in more ways than the obvious, and one of those was a deep-seated need to be loyal: to have people and things to be loyal to. All the same, it was becoming increasingly difficult to think of Kostya as a friend, and if the wiser and better part of him knew that it was because of petty, misguided resentment, the wiser and better part of him had always been a small part, anyway.

Still, he tried: he leveled his breathing, measured each inhale and exhale, an old anger-dampening habit that had taken on new significance and new comfort since the Sahara (he would lie awake when sleep refused to come, a hand flat to his ribs as he filled and drained his lungs).

"I want more from America than she is willing to give me. So instead I take what she'll let me have, and I invest it with more significance than it warrants, out of--of ******** wishful thinking. Someone told me once," he continued bitterly, "that I have an unusual gift for deluding myself. I'm trying to work on that, but I can't if she's going to tell me she wants me to be one thing and treat me like I'm something else entirely. She wants to put a label on me, she wants to be the one to define boundaries, she needs to act accordingly. She wasn't. So I defined them instead. And they're better ones. I'm sure it would have been better for her ego if I hadn't, but it would have been worse for me."

"That was dinner," he repeated tiredly. "Yes." An intentional attempt to mislead himself, an orchestrated effort to sustain a lie for a few hours, and he knew it, in retrospect, even if he'd been in denial then. He'd known it when they'd checked in to the room and before (he'd known it over dessert; he'd known it standing under the awning listening to the rain coming down; he'd known it when he asked her to wear her hair up), and kept the lie going anyway.

After a pause, dully: "What did you think it was, then?"