That made her pause. Her thumb moved in a small circle against his knee without, he suspected, her full awareness. He watched the color that had moved into her neck, slow and rising, the way that color was something the rest of her face couldn't hide even when she tried. He'd noticed that last night too. She blushed and was annoyed at herself for blushing, and was annoyed at her annoyance, and by the time all of that had worked its way through her expression it was frankly charming.

He traced his thumb along the back of her calf again - one slow, dedicated line - and she exhaled.

"You're doing that on purpose."

"Yes."

"It's early."

"It's seven-fifteen."

"That's early."

"Not particularly."

She turned over then, finally, in that slow cathedral roll of someone surfacing from deep water, and looked at him with her eyes still half-closed and her hair everywhere and the duvet pulled up to her collarbones, and the morning light was falling on her face in a way that made something in his chest do something he was choosing not to examine.

He looked down at her.

She looked up at him.

There was a quality to the silence - a texture - that he had noticed the night before too, when they'd talked for hours in the dark. When she'd told him things he suspected she hadn't planned to tell a stranger. When he'd listened, which was not his default response to anything, and had felt strangely, inconveniently, gratefully absorbed.

She blinked. Her free hand came up and pushed at his forearm with approximately no force. "You're in my light."

"No, I'm not."

"You're enormous. You're blocking the whole window."

"I'm six-two. I'm not blocking the window." He wasn't even near the window. She knew that.

She blinked again. Her eyes were very dark - dark enough to seem almost black in certain lights, in this light the clearest, deepest brown he'd ever seen - and they were fully open now, fully alert, the sleep-haze lifting and something else taking its place. Something more guarded. More awake.

He watched her remember where she was.

It crossed her face in order: first the pure, unthought morning openness, then awareness, then the slight tightening that came with full consciousness - the inventory, the reassessment. He'd seen this before. He knew what it was. Some people, when they woke up the morning after, needed to reconstruct what they'd agreed to. He found he minded it in her more than he usually did.

But she didn't close down completely. She looked at him steadily, biting the inside of her lip in a way that was either thought or decision, and then said: "Good morning."

"Good morning."

Her mouth curved - not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "You look very - awake."

"I showered."

"I noticed." She gestured vaguely at his hair, the damp that hadn't yet dried. "You didn't have to do that. You could have left."

"I know." A beat. "I didn't want to."

That color again, at the edge of her jaw. She pushed at his arm again, still without conviction. "I probably look terrible."

"You don't."

"I have mascara on my - I can feel it."

"You don't look terrible."

"You're being polite."

"I'm not particularly polite," he said, which was partially true - he was precise, he was civil, but politeness for its own sake bored him. "You don't look terrible."

She looked at him for another moment. Then she said: "Don't move."

She sat up - holding the duvet to herself in a somewhat futile gesture given the night's earlier record - and leaned across the bed to retrieve his glasses from the nightstand, which she'd apparently knocked slightly askew while sleeping. She straightened them on his face with both hands, fingertips barely grazing his temples. He sat very still.

She sat back.

He caught her wrist before it retreated. Held it loosely - not restraining, just - pausing. She looked at his hand on her wrist, then looked up at him. Her expression was doing several things at once: a wariness and a warmth and an awareness and something that looked, oddly, like grief, though for what he couldn't say.

She was not at all what he'd thought she was, at the gate.

He'd thought he knew exactly what she was at the gate, and he'd been wrong, and the degree of wrongness was still doing something to his chest that he was still choosing not to examine.

The morning light fell across them both.

Outside, barely audible through the insulated hotel windows, New Haven was beginning its day. A distant truck. The first light traffic on the street below. Inside: the particular hush of a room that had been all one temperature all night, that held the faint warmth of two people and their shared hours, that smelled faintly of her perfume and the cedar of his shirt and the lemon of the hotel soap.

She hadn't moved.

He was still holding her wrist. His thumb, without deliberate instruction, made one small movement against the inside of it, where the skin was softest.

She exhaled. The grip on the duvet loosened fractionally.

He leaned toward her.

She did not lean away.

He kissed her - slowly, without urgency, the way you kiss someone you're not trying to convince of anything - and she kissed him back with the particular careful attention of someone who was trying very hard to catalog the experience while it was happening, which made two of them.