For all his fumbling and rephrasing, Juliana thought she knew what he was getting at. That made perfect sense, actually, because a part of her did want to sit there and pick apart his motivations and his impulses, to dissect them so that she could trying to understand them (though not to laugh; that was projecting a coldness onto her that she didn't think was warranted given any of their previous interactions). It was not, however, the purpose of today's experiment. She wasn't testing him to see if he would kiss her. She'd actually taken it as a foregone conclusion, and she hadn't planned to be rejected. It hadn't even occurred to her at all until the second after she'd made her declaration. He'd kissed her before, and she'd just... assumed that whatever had made him want to kiss her before, it would still be present now.

Then he asked would you kiss me back, which was, at least in Juliana's mind, an entirely unrelated question. She hadn't thought that far through things. Well, of course she had thought of it, but that was about as far as things had gotten. She couldn't picture it, because she simply didn't have any experience to draw on. She supposed she'd seen people kiss, on occasion, but it wasn't like she'd ever actually observed it. She had never been kissed until the last time she was here, so she certainly didn't have practical expertise to draw on.

"Oh," she said, biting her lower lip and looking down at her hands again. "I — uhm." She hadn't expected there to be this much talking beforehand. She'd thought that when she made her announcement he would just come over and kiss her, and then the question of whether or not she would kiss him back could be decided by... science. Not by her. This was awkward, because the whole point was that she didn't know, but she didn't think he'd appreciate that answer. That was the experiment, really. She'd been turning over everything Camilla had told her weeks ago about what it felt like to like someone, and particularly about what it felt like if someone you liked kissed you. The last kiss had surprised her too much for her to remember feeling anything while it was happening, other than panic. This time, if she was ready for it and he kissed her again, she'd be able to figure out how it actually felt to be kissed by Lachlan MacFusty. Which she thought she was entitled to know, all things considered. Since he had kissed her, and all.

"I wouldn't know how," she admitted, glancing up at him nervously.