fandomhigh | Library [Sunday, October 28]

"Don't dispense the dream so quickly," Adah grinned as she wrote. "You might still be eaten by a snake yet. And I'm noticing a distinct lack of modeling in that plan; how disappointing to see such raw talent go to waste. As for me, I fully intend to have my name repeated a multitude of times in medical journals for my groundbreaking work in the field of virology, studying viruses and the diseases they cause until I know every single one of them as well as I know the back of my left hand."

"If I get eaten by a snake," he said, laughing at the absurdity, "I'll be sure to specifically thank you when I write my memoirs from inside the belly of that snake."

He smirked, leaned the tiniest bit closer and said, "I knew you like that side of me. The modeling side, I mean. Is it my eyes? Arms? Way with words? You can tell me."

And then there was an extravagant wink and a grin.

The wry smirk and the lifted eyebrow above Adah's steady gaze suggested that, with comments like that, she felt it a shame that this rewritten Jonah wasn't already stuck in the belly of that snake. In the light of such a wink, however, it was hard to sustain her cynicism, the expression cracking around the edges, to a point where she almost laughed as she wrote out her response.

"I never claimed to like it! I simply said that it would be a waste of talent. One doesn't have to like the taste of a fruit to know that it's good for them."

"I can see that you like it in your eyes," he said, nodding very emphatically. "It flits through your eyes like a mantra, over and over again. You like my modeling, you like my modeling, you like my modeling."

He grinned, put both hands palm up on the desk. "It's okay to admit it. I won't tell."

The Eel's stubbornness in the matter was almost impressive, right up on par with her stubbornness in refusing it, and, my, that would lead to quite the interesting class. She peeked at him through her hair thanks to her head, lowered in determination, a corner of her mouth turned up in a smirk. Her eyes fell from his to the open palms on the desk, and she laid her pen across the words on her notebook in favor for a different form of writing. One finger poised over one palm, slowly tracing out a very distinctive N before sliding over to the other and drawing out an accompanying O.

Already laughing before she'd even finished the 'O', Lee said, "Is this your very subtle way of wanting to touch my hands?"

He knew it wasn't but it was fun to tease.

Grinning, Adah simply moved her hand right back to the first palm. Dragged her finger out again in the beginnings of yet another N; a laugh, however, caught her just as she finished it, but she assumed she didn't need to complete the word for the message to get across.

Keeping the palm she'd just traced still, Lee grabbed his formerly forgotten pen and wrote, on the wrist just above the already inked 'N', Really? Why not?.

And then he turned his wrist towards her again.

Grinning at the inscribed wrist, Adah leaned in toward the Eel's hand to concentrate on her own ghostly, unseen inscription, finger dragging slowly across his palm to make sure that each letter was clear and precise.

"I did not think I needed an excuse to touch your hands."

"You don't," he said quietly after he'd figured out what she'd written. "You don't need an excuse. But, maybe, I wanted to give you a reason."

"Reason? I think in this case," Adah slowly traced on the same hand with a smirk before shifting slightly over, leaning heavily on the desk to make up for any attempts on gravity's part to thwart her balance with the shift. She finished, after a good pause for anticipation, the statement against his other pause, "you just got lucky."

"I'll take lucky," he mumbled, eyes on her fingers, his hand. Lifting his other hand, Lee slowly traced a finger across her cheek, making a small circle and coming back.

Adah's own eyes, her attention, had been down at the Eel's hand as well, so perhaps that was to the cause behind the unexpected reaction that his finger against her cheek, tracing its own lines and messages. Perhaps it was everything that had happened that weekend with River. Whatever it was, the response was not a bad one, it was just...He'd barely gotten halfway around the circle before she tensed up a little in surprise; he'd probably feel the increase in warmth as blood rushed to her face, filling it with a sudden blush. She felt surprised, but knew she should have expected it, like usual. She brought her lips together with a sort of bated reluctance to let her head tilt into the touch, eyes closing slowly, and her own hand retreated from the one it currently hovered over to slowly, lightly, slide up his arm to rest, barely, over the one by her cheek.

"Is everything all right?" Lee asked quietly, keeping his hand light on her cheek. He'd felt the change and, when he couldn't figure it out on his own, decided to ask.

Her smile in response, the small breath of something of a laugh had a nervous edge to it, which also gave it another edge of irritation, at herself, for that response. It didn't make sense; it was the response of someone who was guilty, ashamed, both things that she refused to be and should not be; lightly, she shook her head, and then trailed her hand softly down his arm, toward her pen. The desire to keep the position make writing out a response a little awkward, but she managed.

"It's just been a strange weekend that left me displaced in several ways; my mind and my body seem to have failed to reach an agreement on how to settle into them, but that is nothing out of the ordinary."

He nodded quietly, re-reading the words a few times before saying, "Should I...do you want me to stop?"

"And therein lies the problem," Adah said lightly with a small, unfortunate sort of smile. She let go of the pen in favor of his hand again, moving fingers to link together. "Of course I don't want you to stop, but there's this thing in my stomach telling me you should. Ever the disagreement; half goes one way, half goes the other."

He twined his fingers with hers, held tightly and asked, "I don't want to stop either. I'm...sorry if I'm making it hard on you for whatever reason. I just like being around you, like this, more than this, whatever I can have."

It would have been impossible for her smile not to ease at hearing something like that. "For all we know," she commented as she closed her eyes, tightened her own hand in his, "the whole stomach thing is just something bad I had for lunch yesterday, anyway."

"Maybe," he said and ducked his head, brought their hands closer to him, eyes on her. "You should come watch the stars with me sometime. I do it to relax. You could count them, lose count, start again and still never finish."

"Or," Adah offered with a light grin, her eyelids fluttering in the desire to look and see where the Eel was drawing their hands, but keeping them closed for want of the surprise and a more satisfying confirmation of her suspicions, "count them all until I've finished, then count them again, to see if any of them have burnt out in the time it takes me to count them."

"Counting all the stars in the sky is a big task," he said, pressing a very light kiss to her knuckles, barely even touching lips to skin.

The expectation of such a kiss helped make it seem more than it was, and she grinned at the soft feeling. "I wasn't finished," Adah drawled objectively. "After I'd counted them and if I'd find one burnt out, I would then have to calculate, based on how long it took me to count the second time, how long ago the star burnt out and, then, use that as a measure for how far away from us it was."

"Sorry," he said, pressing her hand to his cheek for a brief moment, listening to her talk with his eyes closed. The words made him smile, made him content because no one would say anything like that except her.

"You're better at observing the stars than I am," he teased lightly, "and I come from them."

"That's probably why I'm better," Adah teased back, simply with a sharpened grin, lightly brushing against his cheek with her thumb.

Library [Sunday, October 28]

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