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He'd been expecting her, of course, but he'd still managed to fall asleep, bone weary and half-drunk. The face that met her at the door was still clinging to the remnants of it, bleary-eyed and bedheaded (his hair, now, the perfect short length for disarray the instant it made contact with a pillow, and the worse that he'd laid down right after a shower). He didn't bother to turn the light on, just hesitated in the doorway before he reached to take the chest from her, wordlessly, and ushered her in with a jerk of his chin. The dim glow of the cats' cage and the sickly light of the laptop screen was enough to function by.

He was subdued not just because she was leaving but because their last meeting had nearly turned disastrous, which would honestly have been preferable to the way it had ended: uncertainly, distantly, carefully friendly on his end. He wasn't sure if she'd been aware of any of it. He stooped to examine Tubadiah through the bars, and the grin was only a little forced.

"I'm going to spoil him so much he'll switch allegiances," he informed her.

He hesitated, uncertain what to do with this sudden information. It somehow had not occurred to him to worry, not more than he already did, not more than the general baseline fear and anxiety that accompanied him every moment of every day about everyone and everything around him. And never mind that looking back over a will was the sort of thing every sensible Hunter did before a mission, or sometimes just because. There was nothing inherently more dangerous, he told himself, about disarming some traps in Russia than there was in being at any moment called out to dispatch a Titan or poke around some suspicious backwoods campground.

It didn't stick. Fear crested and tumbled in to the gap she'd suddenly made not so much by the admission but by her hasty correction, a second of dissonant vulnerability, an unwonted softness. He had grown dependent (against his will) on many people here, but especially on her. He hadn't realized to what extent until this moment, and he'd been ashamed three nights ago of a childish throat-aching pain at the idea of a month without her but a month was nothing compared to forever, and forever was always a threat.

"I feel bad," he said after a few seconds, quietly, and it was a joke but the tone didn't settle properly around the words. "Mine leaves the cats to Peyton." And then, before she could answer: "It's only a month."

(It was impossible not to compare the could-have-beens to one another, the various ways this conversation might be happening, had the trajectory of their relationship been different: not just the snug bedrooms and quiet murmured conversations tangled up together under the blankets but the casual text messages, the passing in the hallway, the mocking, laughing bravado over a friendly dinner.

Instead there was this: just frustration, just longing that felt even to Taym like melodramatics, just a constant unease and a false front and a bundle of assurances that meant nothing at all, and the looming threat of forever made concrete by a single moment of admission. He'd gotten too invested.)

He hesitated before sinking down next to her, still a featherweight, barely there. Another hesitation before he reached out to gingerly stroke her hair, twining a few strands around his skinny fingers.

"Good motivator to get the internet back up and working," he said. Optimism did not come to him naturally--hardly came at all--but he tried anyway, listing things off. "Immersion is the best way to learn a language and Bashmet's been out of practice for months if not years, so maybe you can best him when you get back. We can make one of those soldier-comes-back-from-the-war-and-meets-his-dog videos with you and Tubadiah. Those always choke me the ******** up," he confided. "You will have the satisfaction of everyone missing you, which is gratifying, I am sure. And I'm sure," he added, barely a hitch in his voice at all, "that the house has never looked better than it will after a month gone." A pause. "How'm I doing?"

"As soon as your phone connects it will be a ******** onslaught," he promised quietly, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. As always (almost always; all that counted any more) he touched her as if she might cut his fingers if he was not careful. "Even though you didn't send me sappy ******** emails like I requested, as I recall. Or even dirty ones."

"A photo date," he repeated. "Is that what that was? It wasn't--I don't know--just guessing here--an attempt to make me feel bad for running off to the Sahara by showing me all the fun I was missing out on?"

By some miracle--possibly the influence of I miss you and the hazy pleasure of stroking her hair and the fact that she had sought him out at all, to entrust him with a tiny helpless thing and also with her emotions for a minute--his tone was drily playful, and not angry at all.

If it was--if he saw any of that please promise me the thing you still haven't really promised me--he said nothing. Nor did he agree to any photo dates. Instead he paused, and his hand slipped away from her hair to reach for hers, instead, the barely-there shaking the more noticeable for it. "Did you already do the goodbye thing with Bashmet," he asked tentatively, "or are you going to--do that right before you go?"

How much time do you have. Whatever the answer was, it was probably also enough time for you to do something stupid. He could have asked her, but did not ask her, if she'd still love him if he ******** up more than he already did.

His own thoughts were running along the same lines, although to a different end, undoubtedly, than hers.

It had been torturous to comb his fingers through her wet hair, listening to her chattering stories, his mouth forever drifting closer and closer to her bare soapy neck, to the back of her ear, always shying away before she noticed, and he'd felt that it was cruel of her to tell him yes but he was the one who'd asked. That had been almost entirely physical, an animal ache relatively easy to stifle and brought on by the way her teeth closed on a cherry, by the slope of her body into the water, by the idle flexing of her toes. This was worse, and more difficult, because he felt the I miss you from before where she didn't speak one now, felt the fondness, felt the reluctance to leave this place that might not have been due to him but on which he had a tiny, desperate claim.

He lifted the backs of her fingers to kiss them, and that would have been innocent enough even for the strained holding back between them, but he kissed, too, the inside of her wrist, and then shifted, the trajectory obvious: her forearm, the cove of her elbow, her shoulder. He didn't make it any further than her wrist, because he hesitated as though to ask her permission and realized that he did it, and although he did not let her go he loosened his fingers from hers so that she could draw away from him, if she wanted. He always struggled intensely with relinquishing control and never more than physically; whenever the dam of restraint had broken before it had broken instantly and completely, not in this halfhearted way: his unease was obvious.

"Give me a hug at least," he said roughly.