This was the closest they had been since he had caught her, and they had already been pressed together for longer than that. He could have kissed her with only minimum movement. This was an incredibly distracting thought and Arthur was relieved when she leaned in to speak - maybe if he managed to involve himself in the conversation he'd manage to stop thinking about the curl of her hair against her forehead, about the curve of her smile.

"Oh, I'm sure he does," Arthur said, leaning in to whisper, "I mean, sometimes when I was second-string the first-string players would talk as if we weren't there - it must be worse when you're not even on the same team."

Leaning in was ill-advised, perhaps - but there was no other way to talk to her, and besides, they were friends and they were here.

"I'm not sure if I made the same mistake when I was a child or if I was just a loud little brat," Arthur added. It was probably, he thought, a mix of both - he had, of course, fallen off of the roof once.

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