"If?"
"If this ends... badly." He dropped his head into his lap, as he had that night in Fort Angles. His anguish was plain; I yearned to comfort him, but I wasn't sure what he meant by 'badly.'
"Like, if you break up with me?"
"No, no, if I.." He sighed and moved back from the piano. "If you stub your toe and I try to kiss it better, but I kiss too hard, so hard that some blood comes out and I..." He trailed off again. My hand reached toward him involuntarily; quickly, though, I forced it to the table fearing that my rogue hand's yearnings would only make things worse. I slowly realized that not only should his words frighten me, but also their meanings, the words he didn't say. I waited for that fear to come, but all I could seem to feel was an ache for his pain.
And frusteration—frusteration that his stupid fake sister Rosalie had interrupted what was probably his marriage proposal. I didn't know how to bring it up again. He still had his head in his lap, hands twisting the hair around his fingers.
I tried to play it cool. "And you have to leave now?"
"Yes, I have to leave now." He raised his face; it was serious for a moment, and then his mood modified and smiled. "It's probably for the best. We still have fifteen minutes of that wretched dolphin movie left to endure in Biology IV—I don't really like dolphins."
I started to raise an objection but Alice—her short, spiky black hair telling the world exactly who she was—was suddenly standing behind his shoulder. Her slight frame was willowy, graceful, and much too thin to be attractive.
He greeted her without looking away from me. "Alice."
"Fredward," she answered without looking away from me, golden black eyes locked onto mine, hard, her high soprano voice almost as attractive as his. Wait, I mean—
268. Actually, they are watching a very long episode of Flipper, the dolphin sitcom.