fandomhigh | Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

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Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

Adah limped into the library this Wednesday, October the Second, supposedly the Year of Their Lord Two Thousand Seven without the usual armful of books; it was a sad moment for her, really, as she instead had to clutch to a thermos of hot tea to aid in soothing her throat, which was inexplicably sore these past few days. She felt unbalanced without the books. And she let out a soft sigh when she saw the stack of books that needed to be put away on the desk, waiting for her, as though her usual stack was displaced, leaning tower of literature.

She dropped into the chair, looking at them idly, and decided that she'd just read them instead of putting them away.

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He raised an eyebrow at that and tapped his fingers against the desk.

"You don't think I'm that clever?" He leaned forward just a bit and said, "That I wouldn't create something like that to see if you'd react?"

Tucking her lower lip under her teeth for a moment, Adah tried to restrain a grin as she settled her eyes carefully forward toward the Eel, reading his expression while also trying to work her way through this game.

"Not at first, no," she wrote, finally, when satisfied with an answer. "Can you honestly tell me that all of the fidgeting is purely to get a reaction out of me, and that none of it at all is just a reaction of your own?"

"All the fidgeting?" He grinned, shrugged a shoulder. "Nope, not all of it. Some of it's from reactions to certain things, distractions for others. The other part?"

His grin widened. "Did you react in your dream?"

Adah nodded her head, a very controlled and pointed action. "I did. Of course, I was a bit more able to react then than I am at the moment."

And now both eyebrows were raised both in amusement and in question.

"Do you...want to react right now?"

There was another small moment of consideration; it became evident that Adah had reached a conclusion with a sharp upturning of the corner of her moth.

"Technically speaking," she wrote, "I already am. You seem to have forgotten your hands for just a bit now, I see." She dragged her eyes up toward him, steadily on him; her smile was one of slightly victory.

He laughed quietly, looked down at his hands and started swirling his fingers around on the desk, occasionally spelling out words like 'touch' and 'clever.'

"But you haven't," he pointed just a bit smugly. "Have you? Forgotten about my hands even when I have?"

Adah had been feeling like she'd been doing pretty well of not letting anything slip so far, so, smiling slightly, she let herself do that, just a little.

"Of course I haven't." Drawing in a slight breath, she looked at him with a slight bit of nervousness. It would have been impossible to forget. True, Adah had a tendency to remember everything, but that touch before, the near-real REM ember this weekend...lead to something that lurked under the skin, itched to be remembered.

His own smile softened and he stopped moving his hands, turned one palm up.

"You haven't," he repeated with a small nod. "You remember my hands even when I don't. What kinds of things do you remember?"

A splash of pink heat across her cheeks, Adah's eyes fell into the Eel's open palm, straightening slightly, left shoulder leading, toward him. Her fingers slid slightly against the pencil in her hand, lips pressed together in thought.

"I believe you have me at checkmate," she wrote, eyes darting up from the paper as if to make sure his hand was still there. "I could take your hand right now, but then how would I answer your questions?"

"Here's a better question," Lee said quietly. "Do you want to take my hand?"

The Eel was rather clever today, wasn't he? Because now there was a question she could answer without even having to write anything. Of course, she could also still write something and let that knowledge hang in the air. The cynic, difficult side of her wanted to do just that, but, looking at him, his waiting hand, and taking into consideration the softness of his voice, REM emembers, everything. She smiled softly, lifted her hand, and very lightly placed it on top of his, fingers curled down to graze his palm.

And that just left her wondering: now what?

"There's my answer," he said, still quiet. He curled his fingers around her hand lightly, thumb brushing back and forth against her hand.

"Would you believe me if I said this has been the best part of my week?" His smile returned. "Because it is."

Lee must have had an absolutely terrible week, then, and Adah slid over to him a doubtful expression that tried to express as much.

Although a good part of that was just on account of needing to keep up her cynicism. It was holding hands, for Dog's sake. If it weren't for her ridiculous complexes, it would be so silly, childish even. It wouldn't mean anything.

But she did have those complexes. And she knew that it kind of meant everything. She thought back to her weekend dreams, soft presses of lips against knuckles, and smiled softly. Despite herself, she started to think that this wasn't so bad.

"It's been a bad week," he told her, rubbing a hand through his hair with his free hand. "If you trust me, trust that I'm telling the truth when I tell you that."

Another smile and he used his free hand, just one finger, to write invisible words on the top of her hand.

"Soft."

The curve of Adah's smile came with a light snort; he'd said that, or something similar to it, in the dream, and the wry response was just an effort to keep herself from shivering too much at the light tracing of the Eel's fingers sliding across her hand. Not that it mattered; he could probably feel the small tremble in her hand between his, and it took a moment before she could bring herself to find a word to respond with. She who was so good with words. Sdrow htiw doog os saw ohw ehs, and her mind was a complete blank except for endless little internal tremors and a single foreign word.

She lifted her fingers lightly and slowly, shakily, spelt out her own. Bangala, dragging out the last a with an excess of tail, and then going back to place the two dots of the umlaut above the first a, like eyes, like specks, like punctuation.

He felt the tremble and answered it with a small smile, something quiet and for her only, before turning his attention back to their joined hands, back to the word she was spelling against his skin.

He didn't know the word, picked up a letter here and there but enough to fill in the blanks for himself. He'd look it up later.

He covered her hand with his completely for a brief moment before leaning closer, ducking his head so his lips, mouth, were closer to her hand but not touching.

"There's something..." He trailed off, looking up at her through the lashes of his eyes.

There certainly was something, and Adah found that all she could really do was wait with bated breath, wide eyes. She felt at the edge of a precipice, seconds from a loss of balance. She wasn't quite sure if she could handle it...but she also didn't want to repeat what happened last time at a moment like this. She closed her eyes for a moment, repeated a mantra in her head that it was all right; there really wasn't a reason to lose it. She could control it, she could.

She'd hate herself if she couldn't. It was close; very close...

With one more look, one quick decision, he closed that final bit of distance and pressed his lips to the top of her hand.

"There's something here," he said, moving his lips against her hand softly. He could talk and she could hear but this way, she could feel too. A few more words, just to talk, to let her feel before he finally did press a lingering kiss to the top of her hand.

The mantra repeated in her head; control, control...started to switch up. control, lortnoc, lortnoc, ehtaerb, ehtaerb. She wasn't sure if it was working. On the one side, she was sitting sitting there, her hand was still in his hands, although it wasn't like it could do anywhere, anyway, but she hadn't lashed out out of panic for the confinement. Of course, her body was stiff, tense, she was having difficulty getting through a haze in her head and the rapidness of her breaths, which was hurting her chest. And she almost hated, hated that such a little thing was having such a harsh effect on her. Almost. Maybe she'd hate it more if she didn't, at the same time, love it as well. It wasn't fair; things like this didn't happen to her. She wasn't built, physically, mentally, to hand things like this and it had her letting out a small whimper as his lips graced her hand.

"...Lee."

Her elbow jerked, sharply, but only slightly as she fought to contain it; it pulled her hand out so that instead of hovering over the back, they were where her fingers were twitching nervously. The tenseness was killing her, but she was afraid of what would happen if she just let go. Lortnoc, Control. Without that, she had nothing.

He almost let go, let go and apologized and made a vow to never take his hands out of his pockets again.

He looked up at his name, fingers still curled around her hand, head still ducked.

"Tell me," is what he finally said.

[*fleeeees home* Back soon!]

Her forehead creased with worry, Adah's left shoulder crept up on her. Another tremor ran through her arm, to her wrist, her hand, her fingers, lightly opening and closing against his hand, half spasm, half nervousness. "I..." she started, flinched lightly. Such strong pulls of emotions both ways, shifting and undulating uncontrolably between needing this and needing this to never happen again.

"Tell...," she spoke so quietly that if they weren't in a library, there'd be no way she would have bean heard, "tell you what?"

"What you're thinking," he answered, ran a thumb over the top of her hand again. "Whatever you want."

There were so many things Adah could answer to that. So many things. That she was afraid, that she was barely clinging onto her control by a thread, she she both simultaneously wanted her hand back and wanted to leave it where it was. She wanted to write her answer instead of speaking it, but couldn't pick up a pencil with a dead right hand and she certainly wasn't going to choose a pencil over the Eel's hand. She was also thinking of just responding by pulling away, fortifying herself into a little cocoon on the chair, a message that would need no words. She considered just babbling nonsense in French like she was writing before. So many options. So when she acted on one of them without a conscious decision, her eyes were wide with protest, but the control was completely slipping away from her and she couldn't even grab at it because he had her good hand.

"Why...why are you doing this?" Her voice was quiet, slow, reluctant.

He didn't immediately answer, choosing instead to take his time, gather his thoughts while he looked down at their hands. Speaking without thinking only worked sometimes.

"Because your hands are soft," he finally said. "Because mine are warm. Because maybe I think I'm helping you fill an empty space just a little. We can talk and not talk but touching is something more. I wanted to. I want to."

Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

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