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Library; Wednesday [ 10/10 ]

When Adah limped into the library today, she was paying especial attention to the solidity of everything around her; if something looked even minutely temporal, she was encouraged to take the dragging steps (left...behind, left...behind) toward it, to touch it, feel it, prod at it to make sure it was real. It was just that she was wondering about certain things that seemed fuzzy in her head, moments that really couldn't possibly have actually have happened and had to have just been some sort of trick of her brain, something in the air here, the water, lucid dreams of unexpressed wants manifesting in imagination. They felt like they had existed, but they were too unfeasible to have actually happened.

She spent about five minutes before opening the library just assuring herself that the desk itself was real.

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"Mmm," he said and nodded, eyes wide. "We both got the typical stern lecture from my father...over the phone. I ended up having to do all the yard work the rest of the summer which, let me tell you, wasn't fun. Gets hot on Caprica. Zak got off easier because he's younger and blah blah blah. I think I hit him for that. Unfair, but I was angry."

Adah smiled up at the Eel for a moment before slowly lifting herself up from her arm, reaching slowly for her notebook, pulling it in.

"Stern lectures from a military man. Now imagine stern lectures from a military man who is also a preacher. That's what my sisters and I got when we got in trouble; no physical labor; even if it weren't that Leah was the only one of us built for that sort of thing, Nathan Price isn't the type to think females capable of anything worthwhile. Instead, we were given the Verse: one hundred verses of the Bible, copied out in long hand, starting at one point and almost always ending with a line that was supposed to be a morality message for whatever crime we committed. I can't even tell you how much of that book I have memorized thanks to how many Verses I've gotten."

She left a space, indicating a pause.

"Most of mine were on pride."

He winced sympathetically and said, "Yeah, I think I'd take the yard work over having to do that. Mostly because my handwriting is terrible," he teased lightly.

At her last sentence, he paused and looked at her quietly for a few moments. "You've got a lot pride," he said and it wasn't a question. "It looks good on you."

And, really, there was only a single appropriate response to a comment like that, Adah straightening as well as she could with a very knowing, crooked grin of agreement. Yes. She knew. Thank you for noticing.

"It's hard to surprise you," he observed, tapping a few fingers against the desk. "Isn't it?"

Adah, with a cool glance up toward the Eel, took a moment to tap her own finger a few times on the desk, lightly mock, teasing him for his ticks. "Can't afford to be surprised," she told him, leaving her hand there, open, instead of writing. Weights and balances. The thing with talking is merely a matter of knowing when to do it.

"Ah," he said, containing his grin at the mocking. "I, myself, tend to like surprises."

He picked up his hand, hovered a finger just over hers and drew a circle in the air above it.

Smiling softly with her eyes intently on their hands, Adah slowly turned her hand over, so that her palm was facing his finger, receiving the phantom feel of his circling finger. Phantom feelings like the phantom memories that she had difficulty denying in the moment of another one. Still felt removed from everything else, though, suspended time, interaction, No it care tni. So, he liked surprises, did he? Well, he could afford surprises. He, unlike her, was solid, had, assumingly, a fully functional brain. And those arms that suddenly made the other day very real and not at all imaginary. Surprises. She watched his finger move as she considered options.

He dipped his finger lower, gently drawing one circle on that open palm before picking back up, hovering again and drawing more circles in the air just above her palm.

"Like waking up one day expecting rain and seeing the sun," he said quietly, keeping his finger moving. "Finding...something in a place you never expected to."

He drew another smaller circle on her palm before repeating the same motion as before and was back to drawing circles above her hand.

Almost impulsively, Adah's fingers curved around the slightly tingling feeling of the circle that remained after the Eel had pulled his finger back, just slight curling, thumb passing over her palm as if to erase it, despite that it didn't work. She drew in a breath, looking at him for a long, careful, deciding moment before asking, "Metaphor?"

"Hmm." He didn't answer right away and slowed the circles his finger was making. "More honesty than metaphor. For me, at least. You don't look for something and it finds you anyway."

Adah kept her steady gaze on the Eel and her fingers started shifting a little more, the digits moving as though to count out the seconds he had left before she decided that leaving her hand there for him to touch it at the deprivation of her usual method of communicating wasn't worth it. "And what," she asked, "is it?"

If the morning had convinced her of anything for the day, it was that she was getting a little tired of blurs. She had enough trouble with colors and sounds being that way.

Keeping his eyes on hers, he dropped his hand to her palm again and spelled out T-H-I-S very slowly against her skin.

He paused, fingers still, before spelling out a longer word, slower. C-O-N-N-E-C-T-I-O-N.

As she realized what the Eel was doing, Adah's breath caught; another sensory overload was quick in the making. She wanted to hold his gaze, wanted to hold it steady, but she also wanted to be able to know exactly what he was writing. The problem was that each light drag of the tip of his finger against the soft flesh of her palm sent small, trembling, almost painful vibrations racing along her nerves, though her arm, elbow, her shoulder, shivers of feeling that distracted her from the solidity of exactly what was being done. The trembles went even to her lower lip, and she, drawing slightly away into her neck, had to bite on it to make it stop; she tried to steel herself in his eyes, forget the sensations, focus on the letters. Letter, formed by fingers. The slowness helped. C...like Color, pink, flooding her face. O...Orga...nic, as the first word that flowed into her head would not help with the color...N, Nauseous, like the bubbling in her stomach at those touches. Another N, No. An E, Ecclectic and another C, for Cactus, with prickly pears, again, like the touches. T, Timid, which she hated feeling but was stuck with it anyway. I, an Iota, that's all they were, with an O, Overload, of feeling, and N, another N, and end with an N...

Connection. She drew in another breath. She hadn't even realized until that moment that she had leaned in, leaned closer, as she tried to follow him. Adah Price might not ever say anything, but she was rarely ever speechless.

This was a bit like one of those moments.

When he finished with the N, with the final letter, he laid his palm flat against hers, keeping that touch.

He leaned a little closer to her and dropped his voice to a whisper. "That's what it is."

With a nearly spastic tick, Adah's fingers wrapped around the Eel's hand as it flatted; she kept her lean forward, but added another lean, a slump of her shoulder, a tilt of her head. There was a small whimpering sound in the back of her throat as her body crumpled slightly, but her eyes stayed on him strong, wide and clear as her forehead matched her frown, her pout, that expressed to him that that wasn't terribly fair. Yes, she had asked, but there completely went his theory about her not being easy to surprise, right out the window.

"I'm sure you can see that in my eyes," he said, still whispering. "I'm not keeping it hidden. I don't do things like that."

He squeezed her hand lightly, rubbing his fingers just slightly against hers.

"It's there."

Well, if he was going to be insisting on that so much, it was certainly going to make it difficult for Adah to continue denying it, wasn't it? There was a slightly sulking tilt to her lean now, but her eyes were still steady on the Eel, wondering, thinking, trying to make sense out of it. She supposed the next thing would be trying to figure out why, because that, ultimately, was the issue, wasn't it? Finding something you didn't think about finding, but what about when you'd never bothered considering its reality because it was just so not....ever anything that you'd even concern youself with?

"What're you thinking about?" Lee finally asked after letting the silence stretch for several long moments. "Anything good?"

Her fingers moving a little against the Eel's before she slowly tried to pull it away, Adah was reluctant to withdraw, but she felt more comfortable writing again. She drew in a slight breath as she picked up her pen, looking at him a moment longer, before the scratch of the nub against the paper made her wince slightly.

"I'm thinking about you, so, yes, something good. I'm thinking about you, and what you've just said, and how it confuses me because it's mostly illogical."

It's hard not to smile when someone says they're thinking about you so Lee didn't even try to hide it.

"I didn't mean to confuse you," he said. "But I didn't think you'd want me to lie either. I don't think it's illogical. It's just unexpected. And maybe unfamiliar."

"Maybe unfamiliar?" Adah's expression, however, said more than her words, even with the underlining emphasis. A light, crooked smirk and a quirk of her eyebrow. Maybe hardly seemed the appropriate word at all.

He laughed quietly and shrugged one shoulder. "Exploration's a good way to wipe out an unfamiliar situation, you know."

Adah's grin sharpened a little, but the pink on her cheeks seemed to increase a little.

"Why, Eel, you're not sitting there suggesting something that's going to be too much for my delicate Southern sensitivities, are you?"

He had to cover his outburst of laughter with his hand because library and all.

"I don't think I am," he said and rubbed his now red cheeks with his hand. "Not intentionally, at least. I still have to learn about delicate Southern sensitivities, I think. You say it's not familiar. I say, if you want to, make it familiar."

And her a preacher's daughter, too. Shameless, really, although Adah took another increase to her grin at remember who it was kissing who in the dark corner at homecoming.

"Unfortunately," she brought herself around to admitting, "you won't learn a thing about them from me. I'm impudent, profligate. What I'm not sure if I am or not, though, is ready."

He half smiled at her words, looking up at her after he'd finished reading and turning that half smile into a full smile.

"There's nothing wrong with that," he said quietly. "It's a lot. There's time and I'm not planning on disappearing."

Adah's eyes shifted away for a moment. Words that, of course, would mean she wouldn't be surprised if he was gone tomorrow, poof, burned away like the midnight oil. You couldn't plan things like that. But she wasn't about to express any of that. Not that the moment. She wrote just one word, and underlined it, twice, for emphasis.

"Good."

"Okay," he said and fell quiet. Really, anything else he'd say would just be a repeat of things he'd already said. So, he fell quiet, enjoyed the silence and hung around the desk for a little longer. There was time, after all.

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