Alfred furrowed his brows. He was having a hard time following. Maybe it was him, or maybe it was her. Maybe it was the alcohol.

"Of course you're smart," he agreed, though he did not see how it was particularly relevant.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

He still didn't get it. Zelda knew she wasn't phrasing it right, still - was additionally frustrated by this. She waved one of her arms in her exasperation.

Jo Smith made her feel small.

"She was weird and defensive about you last spring and then I find out you both like each other and then everyone acts like I'm crazy about it," Zelda said, "And then it's all oh, Jo said I can tell you everything? So it's fine? What questions do you have?"

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AMAZING set by MJ

Zelda was getting exasperated, and Alfred still had yet to really figure out what she wanted. Apparently not for him to offer to tell her everything, because she'd just said that like it was a bad thing, which he really did not understand.

"Well, I don't know what was up with Jo last spring," he said. He also didn't feel like he could reasonably he held responsible for that, but — this was not the moment to argue the point. "But — yeah. That's basically it. What was I supposed to do?" he asked. "You didn't really seem keen on me trying to explain it."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"I was fine! I was done thinking about this! And no one would leave me alone about it!" Zelda said. If they weren't in her yard, she would have started yelling; as it was, she was just waving her right arm to punctuate each point, and her voice had become high-pitched. "I don't want to hear other women call you handsome and I don't understand what's so wrong about me hating that!"

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AMAZING set by MJ

"Okay, but —" Alfred protested, holding one hand up either to defend himself from Zelda's wild gesticulating or to try and catch her arm to get her to stop, he wasn't really sure. She was angry, now, and he got it. He did. He would not have been particularly interested in hearing any of Zelda's friends make comments like that about her, either, and he rather wished Jo had kept that particular thought to herself. But: "Do you have to be mad at me about it?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda sighed, and let her hand fall back to her side. "I didn't want to be," she said, frowning; then he had gone and sent her letters and talked to Jo and turned up drunk, and she had other reasons to be upset with him, now.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Oh. He had not considered that. He was not even entirely sure what she meant. Had he misread her letters entirely, thinking her anger at Jo was directed at him? He wasn't sure he believed it. She had seemed so obviously upset with him.

"But — you were," he insisted, refusing to believe he'd been so wrong about it.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Had she been angry with him? Not when the letters started, surely - but the ones on Valentine's Day, she'd let her temper get the better of her. Sure, she'd been pushed there - but she had been angry.

"Yes," Zelda admitted, looking down at the ground under her. "With you and the - whole situation."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred sighed. He was frustrated, but not with Zelda, necessarily — with the situation, to borrow her words. "This isn't how I pictured this going," he admitted, almost sheepishly. "I thought you'd be mad — about something," he said. That wasn't exactly the right way to phrase it, but hopefully she was tracking his meaning and wouldn't get offended at his poor word choice. "And we'd talk about it until we both felt better, and then I'd kiss you and go home. I didn't expect —" He hesitated, waved his hand vaguely to encompass — what was it she had said? The whole situation. "This is just as bad as the letters."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda sighed, and looked back up at him. "Yeah, well," she said, and trailed off. She sort of wanted to yell at him for being drunk, again - to the extent that she was able to yell. She was mad about that, too - and that was an anger that felt more justified. Alfred put them at risk by coming here, and he'd done it so that - what? He could accuse her of being angry about Jo?

But if she was admitting things: "It was just... It was hard for me to take letters and read about how I was violating your privacy and know that she can go where she wants, that - you could have touched her and I would have never known or anything, and I can't go anywhere right now."

Zelda felt trapped because she couldn't see Alfred, but that wasn't all of it - she couldn't go out for drinks or pop in on a friend she wasn't related to. She couldn't skitter over to Irvingly or to London or walk around the museum or hang out in the library outside of work hours. And she had never been a debutante, she had never signed up for this level of scrutiny, and she had it all the time. And Jo had none of it.

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Several responses came to mind, as she spoke. First, he had never been cranky about supposed violations of his privacy, so that was another in the category of things she shouldn't be mad at him about. It wasn't really entirely fair to keep having that impulse to throw Jo under the Knight Bus, as it were, but he was starting to get a little irritated that Zelda kept blaming him for things Jo had said. It wasn't as though she'd consulted him on any of that, or like he had any control over it. But: this was also in the category of things that it might not help to bring up, particularly.

Second, he considered responding to her closing sentiment: I can't go anywhere right now. He'd joked about it in the hallway at the luncheon, about how he would run off with her in a heartbeat if she wanted, but if it was something that she was feeling seriously hurt by... well, it wasn't a joke, to Alfred. Her family may have been imposing all of these restrictions on her, but the only thing keeping her here in this house and living under their rule was her. If she really wanted to break free again, she could. He would marry her tonight, if she wanted, and when she was his wife he wasn't going to impose any of this bullshit on her. That sort of conversation was... tricky, though. Maybe he could manage it in a way that sounded supportive and loving and reaffirming, but it could have also come across as impatient, pressuring. He wasn't sure he had the wits for it at the moment, honestly.

But there was something in the middle of what she'd said that stuck with him. Something that was a little closer to the sort of conversation he'd been expecting to have, tonight. He hesitated — she'd just slid over it, and he could too, but if he did it might never come up again. Not in a time and place when he could talk freely with her, at any rate. So he steeled himself and asked the question, tentatively: "What do you mean by touched?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda bit her lip, considering; out of everything she'd said, she hadn't expected him to focus on the last part. If anything, she'd half-expected another conversation where Alfred talked about how they could leave right now, and Zelda had to say, again, that she could not leave her family forever, couldn't do that to Roslyn's reputation in particular, and that the scrutiny of marrying swiftly wasn't necessarily going to help them, either.

So the definition of touching was a different conversation. Zelda's hand went back into her pocket; she should have pulled another layer on before coming out here, she could feel the hair on her arms starting to stand up from the cold. She wrapped her arms around herself before she answered, trying to create some of that heat.

"You know what I mean," she said, "The sort of touching that men and women do when they're allowed to be alone."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred hesitated. That wasn't as specific of an answer as he'd been hoping for, and now he didn't know how to proceed. He didn't know if what had happened with Jo last spring would count, in Zelda's definition. It certainly looked bad on paper — he and Jo had established that, when they'd talked on Valentine's Day — but it hadn't meant anything, and it hadn't lead anywhere. In fact, it had very specifically lead to a hard stop, a go-no-further — part of him felt he ought to get a little credit for that, because he hadn't been courting Zelda or even talking to Zelda that consistently, at the time, and he had not had to stop Jo from moving things forward.

There was also a different question floating in his mind, as well, beyond does it count, which was whether or not Zelda would actually want to know. Alfred didn't want to create a mess for himself down the road where he might be accused of keeping it from her, but so far she had not seemed particularly receptive to any confessions of this variety. The subtext he'd been getting so far, really, was that she wished everyone would just stop talking about it — so surely she did not want all the gory details.

"I didn't sleep with her," he supplied, realizing only after he'd said it how awful that sounded. "Or kiss her. I could have kissed her, and I didn't — I said no," he said, quickly. This confession was spiraling, he thought — Zelda was not going to take this well.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda didn't take it well.

She also didn't take it badly. If anything it was a non-reaction, as she stood there in her pajamas and coat and slippers, hugging herself, staring at him in the darkness behind her house. He hadn't slept with her, he hadn't kissed her; that was all - well, sure, fine, that was good, although it wasn't delivered in a way she liked. It was the could have kissed her that caught her attention, and her brain felt like a rush of white noise in the aftermath of that sentence.

"What," Zelda said; her tone was more of a statement than a question.

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Now that he'd started talking it was tumbling out. Alfred didn't think he had done anything wrong, still, but everything he said so far had sounded wrong, so he needed to say more to explain himself. He had to give her enough context so that she would know it wasn't like that.

"She asked about my tattoos," he said, still talking quickly. "So I had my shirt off. And then — she's got tattoos, too, so — so —" He broke off in an emphatic shrug; he could not quite bring himself to actually put words to the fact that Jo had been essentially naked in his flat. "And it wasn't like we were, like you and I were together — this was when I was supposed to be in India, and I'd just found out the Voyager was cursed —" (this may not have been the actual sequencing of events, but between the alcohol and the way things were just spilling out at this point he was hardly capable of a cohesive timeline) "— so she sort of — you know, that moment right before you kiss someone. So I could have — she was right there, you know, I could have — only I couldn't. Because even though we weren't, you and I weren't — even though I thought you might never want to talk to me again I couldn't kiss somebody else, because all I could think about was you. And I told her that," he admitted. "And it hasn't happened since then — and she's seeing someone now, anyway —"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

He was talking in her yard and it was really, actually, worse than Zelda expected. Despite the chill she could not help but reach to touch her index fingers to her temples, because all she could think about was Alfred's tattoos under his shirt, and tattoos that Jupiter had that were usually pretty hidden by clothes, and her sudden, strong desire to scream at him.

She tamped it down, but only barely - kept her hands pressed to the sides of her head. She tapped her foot against the ground and listened to him and held her tongue because she was fairly certain that one she started talking she was never going to stop. Unfortunately it seemed like Alfred was never going to stop, either, and so she was going to have to talk eventually.

"This?" Zelda said, "This makes me feel insane." And that was a good summary, and maybe she could have left it there, but now that she started she couldn't stop herself. She started doing the wild gesticulating thing again almost immediately once she was going, because she couldn't raise her voice out here. "She was my friend and then she was your friend and - I don't even get to see your tattoos, Alfred -" maybe not the most important note, here, but she couldn't keep it from spilling out of her mouth "- and she's seeing someone and you're seeing me, and fine, great, but I don't understand how I'm not supposed to walk around all day thinking about how this - ugh!"

Zelda cut herself off, partially because she was running out of air, and partially because she was running out of articulate thoughts to hiss at Alfred in her garden.

"And you're drunk," she said, "You're here and you're drunk and you're telling me this, and if anyone comes outside I'll never get to  leave the house again."

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