She hadn't really intended to detain him, and she felt a little surge of panic as he turned around. It was all well and good to throw an apology down the hall as a parting shot, but if he actually wanted to talk about this — what on earth was she supposed to say? He wanted to know what she was thinking, but she hadn't even sorted through it all herself, yet. It had seemed simpler in the abstract, when she had been thinking this through before she'd come. She'd arrive, make her announcement, and he would kiss her, and that kiss would... well, she felt silly now even thinking about it, because she supposed she'd expected it to be some sort of magical moment where she might just know whether or not she wanted him to keep doing it. She'd thought it would just fall into place and everything else would make sense, and they'd both know what to do next — or that it wouldn't, that instead of the heavens opening up in joyous harmonies there would be the clash of an instrument striking a chord out of tune, but even then she would know. She hadn't been expecting to still be just as undecided after the kiss as she had been before.

And she hadn't expected it to have taken as much of a toll on him as it clearly had. The emotion on his face a moment ago had been unmistakable, and everything he'd said since she'd pushed his hands away indicated he was hurt. She hadn't anticipated that this would be an experiment with collateral damage. She hadn't considered his feelings at all. She'd expected that after the kiss the answer would be so obvious to both of them that they couldn't fail to be on the same page. Whether they did or didn't move forward with this, she had anticipated that the sentiment would be mutual. Either there would be some sort of immediate chemical spark, or they'd both realize this had been a huge mistake and agree to speak no more about it.

"There's a whole school of magic devoted to that, you know," she said weakly. She half-shrugged her shoulders as though she were joking, but since she still had her arms crossed the point was probably lost. She stood for a moment looking down at the couch, chewing her lip and trying to figure out what to say next.

"That was the first time I'd been kissed," she began hesitantly. "Or, well. The last time was. This was the second time."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

He didn't respond to her first comment, because any comment at this point would have been self-deprecatory. He wasn't skilled enough to learn legilimency, and even if he was, he would not use it to pick Miss Binns' brain. That seemed like the worst invasion of privacy to date—maybe he ought to be glad that she wasn't a legilimens.

Gaze flickering back and forth between the wall to his right and Miss Binns in the living room, he considered whether or not it would be a good idea to move a little closer. He finally decided to step a little further down the hall, pausing by the doorway into the the guest room, where he leaned against the doorframe. Catching her gaze proved more difficult than it had before, because she was looking away and every time she glanced back up at him he found himself looking away on instinct. Only when she mentioned this—him—being her first kiss did he find the courage to meet her eye again.

"I didn't know," he said, a bit remorsefully. He wasn't sorry for kissing her this time—not really, even though he'd told himself he regretted it at least half a dozen times since she'd pushed him away—but he was sorry for the first. "I thought you might have - I mean, I don't think that you—" He forced himself to take a breath, because he was wandering back into the territory of implying things he didn't mean. "I only mean to say that I'm sorry if couldn't have been with - someone else. You know... all things considered." He thought back to how she'd shut down the first time he kissed her, and suddenly it made sense that she hadn't wanted him anywhere near her, and now she'd gotten angry when he'd insinuated that she wanted to kiss him, too. She hadn't, and he'd been stupid, and maybe he deserved to feel disappointed with how he'd treated her. She wasn't just inexperienced; she lacked any experience, and he'd taken advantage of that in his own home.

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— way too attractive set by mj <3 —

Juliana hadn't expected him to have anything to say in response to that point. She'd paused more to collect her thoughts before moving forward, not because she was expecting him to speak. She'd thought it might have been rather obvious. She was considered a spinster, after all, and had never had any serious flirtations during her debutante years (nor had she particularly wanted any). When would she have been kissed? And if he'd thought she was the sort of run around having secret love affairs (like Camilla apparently was), her physical reaction to the first kiss must have disabused him of that notion. She clearly didn't know what she was doing, when it came to this sort of thing, and despite his having said earlier that he liked it she was sure he could tell. So she hadn't meant that as a confession, but rather as a way to introducing what she wanted to say next.

Which was entirely lost at this point, because what he'd responded with confused her so much. Sorry it couldn't have been with someone else? Had he forgotten that she had arrived unannounced in his home that afternoon and essentially invited him to kiss her? If he was concerned that he'd taken too many liberties and she would feel used and abused, the notion was ridiculous. Lachlan MacFusty could not have taken advantage of a woman if he'd tried, she was convinced. But maybe that wasn't what he was saying? Was it supposed to be that remarkably different, with a different partner?

"Why?" she asked, brows furrowed. "What things considered?"

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Lachlan shifted uncomfortably on his feet, one hand coming up to rub the length of his other arm. To get into the specifics would mean he'd have to divulge his own insecurities, his own fears, and those were a bit too - intimate, given that it was likely that this conversation would be their last of its kind. He thought that every time they spoke, but this time felt different. He'd hurt her feelings and she'd hurt his, and they'd kissed and it didn't seem like she'd really enjoyed it, but resuming a normal acquaintanceship would be difficult given that he wasn't likely to forget the feeling of her lips anytime soon.

"I don't know," he said evasively, shaking his head. "I don't know what I mean. Only that - I would have kissed you differently, if I'd known it was your first at the time." Not in his kitchen, not after their bickering, not in a spur-of-the-moment decision to get her to stop talking. Really he might not have kissed her at all; it wasn't as though he'd had anything to base kissing her off of except the tension in the air at the time. Only afterwards had he overthought it, allowing her to consume his thoughts when he shouldn't have, which is how he'd reached this point. He'd been hopeful, as if there was some chance that she might like him, and that—at least for a little while—he might not feel so lonely.

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   Juliana Ainsworth

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— way too attractive set by mj <3 —

He ought to have known better than to say vague things like that, to use words like differently without any further elaboration, given what she had conveyed to him so far in this conversation. All the same, her heart rate increased. Was this the element that had been missing from her experiment? If she had told him this before and they'd had that shared understanding of the context going in to it, would the kiss have been so different? Would it have made her feel any different?

She wanted to ask: How? She had no template against which to compare the kiss they'd just shared, and so when he said something like differently she really had no idea what he might have meant. A detached, logical list of how things might have been different wasn't really what she was after, though. That wasn't what had made her heart rate pick up. What she really wanted to know was whether him kissing her differently would affect her differently, but of course he couldn't tell her the answer to that, because he wouldn't know how she would react.

She wanted to say: Show me, but she knew she couldn't do that. Their last kiss had meant something to him, and when it ended and she brushed his hands away it had affected him deeply. She didn't know if anything would be different a second time around, but what if it wasn't? She couldn't set him up for that again, now that she knew what the stakes were. She couldn't ask him to kiss her when she didn't know what sort of unspoken promise he thought that was, and when she didn't know whether or not she would be able to deliver on it.

So instead all she said was: "Oh." She uncrossed her arms and started unconsciously fidgeting her hands in front of her stomach again. She was watching him and trying to think of how to segue away from that and onto another subject — any other subject — but she seemed stuck here, on the possibility he'd just dangled in front of her, even though she'd already resolved not to take it.

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   Lachlan MacFusty

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

It seemed that they'd come to an impasse. Her little oh, a complete non-answer, seemed unlike her, and Lachlan was used to her carrying the conversation. She was good at that, being decisive and saying what needed to be said. Lachlan was different: he ran on emotions, on impulses, and when those impulses disappeared he was left speechless and without direction. He'd never been a fan of small-talk because of it.

She watched him and he watched her, his eyes flickering back and forth between her big doe eyes and her fumbling fingers. Her expression said everything and nothing at all; it said she didn't know what to say or that she had nothing left to say, but if the latter were true than she, in her typical Juliana-like fashion, would have announced that this conversation was over and that it was time for her to leave. Lachlan stayed leaned against the door, unconsciously beginning to mirror her mannerisms. He rubbed the bank of his hand with his thumb and scratched his wrist.

"Tell me what you're thinking," he said quietly, because she had to be thinking something, "and tell me the truth." If that meant she was thinking that he'd gone and ruined everything, that she wanted to go home, or that she wanted another cup of tea and biscuits - at least then he'd know how to move forward, but the silence was almost as painful as the thought of being left alone to his thoughts.

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— way too attractive set by mj <3 —

Well, she clearly wasn't going to do that.

She picked a little too hard at one of her nail beds and felt a prick of pain. Glancing down, she saw a small dot of blood, and she moved her thumb up to her mouth without thinking. Her eyes scanned the couch in front of her as she tasted blood on her tongue. She wasn't going to tell him what she was thinking at the moment that he'd asked, but maybe she could backtrack and tell him what she'd intended to say a few minutes ago, before he'd said he would have kissed her differently if he'd known it had been her first time.

"I had this idea — silly idea, the sort of thing you see in romance novels, I suppose — that after you kissed me I'd know what to do next," she admitted. She felt embarrassed just admitting it, because she really ought to have known better, but hearing Camilla talk about her past love affairs had gotten Juliana thinking along those same lines. Maybe those sorts of things were real, and they could happen to her, and why not? If they were going to happen to her, why not Lachlan MacFusty? He was kind, and gentle, and maybe cared a bit too much about things. He was interested in her, and he'd kissed her. Why not Lachlan MacFusty?

"I don't know what I was expecting," she admitted. Her thumb had stopped bleeding and she crossed her arms across her chest again, looking down and off to one side. "Butterflies in my stomach, maybe, or something stupid like that. Something to tell me whether this is worth the risk."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

The more she spoke, the more Lachlan found it difficult to keep a smile off his face. So much for being an analytical scientist type—he'd never considered that Juliana Binns had ever picked up a romance novel in her life. Of course, she had a whole life outside of their scandal, and there were plenty of things he hadn't learned about her, but he found the idea of her curled up on a sofa with a romance book in her hand to be absurd (but also a little cute).

"I think you're overthinking it," he said, "Overthinking in general. How can you expect feel anything if you're so caught up in your own thoughts?" She'd asked him so many questions after the fact that he could only imagine what had been going on during the actual kiss. He'd been thinking during their kiss, too, which made it a little more awkward than he would have liked. He'd been thinking about her body language, her reactions, the noises she was making, the way she was responding—and all of that had prevented him from just giving into his own emotions and desires. "I told you before—sometimes you just have to let yourself feel things. And kissing is one of those things you need to simply - feel." He smiled at her, small and with a hint of sadness, and shrugged his shoulders lightly.

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— way too attractive set by mj <3 —

At his small smile and his shrug, Juliana couldn't help but pout. Which was childish, she knew, but that was how she felt at the moment, being lectured by someone she'd only met two months ago about what the right way to experience her emotions was. She felt like a child being tutored in some basic principle she grasped but maybe hadn't prioritized in the way that an adult would have wanted, or a Hogwarts student being put on notice because of bad behavior.

"I tried," she complained. She switched the way her arms were crossed, putting the other one on top but maintaining the same basic stance. "I suppose I'm just not very good at it. At kissing."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Her pouting and complaining was enough to ease the tension in the air long enough for Lachlan's nerves to settle. He could push his insecurities to the back of his mind and focus on the present, which was probably for the best given that she was still in his house and he wasn't the one who could run off. He exhaled loudly through his nose in place of a chuckle, and moved in her direction, pausing next to her to touch her shoulder.

"If it's any consolation, I enjoyed it," he said, wondering if he should have kept that bit of information in his thoughts. He didn't take the time to let it weigh his mind down, and instead walked around the couch and grabbed the cup of tea she'd abandoned on the coffee table. "You know, you made such a fuss about my lack of biscuits, but you haven't bothered asking for one since I bought them." He was teasing, mostly, in order to take the attention off their kiss, but as he envisioned the jar of biscuits in the kitchen he couldn't help but remember how she'd looked standing there the night he'd first kissed her. His heart jumped but he shoved the thought away; it wouldn't do him any good to focus on the past when there was the pressing matter of the present.

He paused by her side as he headed back towards the hallway and towards the kitchen, and all the amusement dropped from his face, leaving him looking a little too solemn. "Would you like another cup, or—?"

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   Juliana Ainsworth

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— way too attractive set by mj <3 —

His response surprised her. His hand on her shoulder was... comforting, in a strange way — or was it only that she didn't know until that moment that he was coming down the hallway just to talk and not to kiss her again, and what she was feeling was relief at the latter? In any case, it was pleasant, and then he was changing the topic, which was such a relief she almost sighed. His tone was light, and it was such a stark contrast to him a moment ago, seriously telling her she needed to work on being able to feel her feelings, or whatever.

She hadn't realized it until this moment, but she had been waiting for this: for things to feel easy between the pair of them. She'd thought that kissing would have been the way to get there, but it had only added complications. This was so much better than standing on opposite ends of a hallway and trying to talk about kisses and feelings or lack thereof (because Juliana had been trying to feel things during the kiss, that had been the whole point, and she didn't really think that Lachlan understood what she'd meant when she'd said I'm not very good at kissing, but since she had only the vaguest idea of what she'd meant she wasn't going to belabor the point).

"I want a biscuit," she responded immediately, reaching out to take her teacup out of his hands. "I wasn't finished with this cup yet."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules