Lili doesn't love the presence of people, but she does find the absence of them to be comforting. She thinks it's probably a side effect of having to live alone for all of those years in that derelict shack. She'd hated it at first, hated how easily she'd clung to the safety of those rusted tin walls and ragged polyester rugs. She would leave that shack, of course, but only after three years of aimless sulking. The world outside their tiny paradise was dangerous, after all—Ava never let her forget that. Not even years after her death.
Lili grits her teeth as she continues to aim the camera at the Ferris wheel. It's big—really big. She hasn't felt this dwarfed since her first encounter with an actual, real B rank. It was a Butterfly Matriarch, and it had scared the absolute crap out of her because they were several kilometres up in the sky with an engine that threatened to shit itself out at any moment.
But back to why she's angry. There are too many people walking around the wheel for her to get a good shot of it. Some are looking at her weirdly as they pass because they've never seen a handheld camera with that much bulk to it—a DSLR, Lili had realised when she first brought it to Therius, is a wholly Human creation. The other realms have either moved past the technological need for a mechanically complex camera—instead opting for something more compact—or they've evolved their version of the DSLR to such a point where even their phones can achieve a similar outcome. Lili doesn't like phone cameras. She's started dedicating herself to the craft lately, and she doesn't trust herself to stay focused on a phone.
She sighs. There's no way she's getting a shot with absolutely no one in it, and she doesn't want to try dabbling in the mysteries of digital manipulation just yet. She wonders if 4 AM is late enough for the crowds to start thinning out.
Defeated, she flicks through the photos she's gotten so far. A shot of a lone cruise against the pitch-black ocean, illuminated only by the strands of lights that hung from the railings. A daring shot of a Kattish couple, their figures silhouetted by a fantastic display of a sky in flames. From the way she's taken it, it's hard to tell that it's a couple—their figures look more like an unintelligible blob. She idly thumbs against the scroll wheel, reminding herself that she's definitely taken some ok-ish photos and that she isn't wasting the night away on a shot she'll never take.
Lili leans down on the seat. She slides her finger across the screen of her GlassLink. It's only ten. And if she does choose to stay until the morning, then she'll probably have to miss the last train home and sleep outside too. Probably on this very bench.
Fuck, she feels tired already. But she's slept in worse conditions. With worse motives.
She flicks onto a candid photo of a Palerian child taking a glossy, sugar-coated apple from a Human storekeeper. She took this one near the pier, where she could see the pure void of the sea in all of its post-sunset glory if she turned. Her stomach growls while she's looking at this image. But when she tilts her head upwards to search for food stalls, she finds that they're all in the process of closing up shop, or they've already locked down their garage doors for the night.
There's one place that she knows will still be open: the bar. She'll be getting a lot more than just a snack if she dares to venture into a bar at this hour though, so she just groans and bites down on her discomfort.
Deciding that she's in dire need of a distraction, she gets up and slings her camera strap over her shoulder. Aurores is a beautiful city; she'll probably find some intricate towers or a street slathered in overhead light strings to shoot. All of which are fucking boring things to photograph. She's more interested in the tiny rat scurrying across the pavement. It's got an unpopped kernel in its mouth.
She's so busy following it that she doesn't notice where she's walking. Lili walks right into something—someone. Two someones. She lands on her ass a second later. The rat darts between the legs of the couple and gets away.
Fuck.
There's something wet on her shirt that smells faintly of rosewater and burned sugar. She looks down. There's boba all over her skirt. A disposable bubble tea cup rolls across the pavement and stops at her shoe.
It dawns on her what she's done. The woman in front of her is profusely apologising like she's the one who walked into her. There's a man in front of her too, and he's just as flustered. They're both Kattish, Lili realises, which is why they hadn't fallen over with her, probably.
Sucks to be Human tonight.
"I should be the one sorry, if anything." She lets the woman pull her up to her feet. Her grip is surprisingly firm. "I wasn't watching where I was headed at all. Fuck."
Lili laughs and rubs the back of her head. The woman looks taken aback; for a moment, Lili is painfully aware of how weird it is for her to swear so casually in front of a stranger.
The boyfriend steps in. "We're so sorry. I've got napkins if you need them."
He fumbles around in his girlfriend's bag and takes out a hand-sized package of napkins. She accepts them gratefully.
The woman suddenly tugs on the man's sleeve. "Come on," she says. Her tone is sharp enough to slice through stone. Lili wonders if he's just made some kind of mistake by handing her those napkins.
The thought of it immediately sours her mood, so she starts thinking about whether or not she would be able to take them both on in a fight. The man is as tall as she is, and he's got the added strength of a Kattish male, but he's also got his hair in a ponytail that Lili just knows she'll be taking advantage of. The woman is the one she probably has to look out for. She's actually got a vendetta against her. And Lili is very well acquainted with the raw capabilities of an insatiable desire for revenge.
Before long, she's left alone again. With shaky fingers, she rips open the packaging and starts patting her skirt down. Ever since her retirement from the off-realm forces, she's begun to rationalise every awkward encounter into a brutalised fistfight. It helps with her social anxiety. She'd forgotten how to talk to real people a long, long time ago, but at least she knows how to throw a punch and avoid lethal hits.
Right. The Ferris wheel. She checks the time. It's only 11 PM, but the crowd's already started to thin.
Maybe she'll be in time for the 1 AM train after all.
She leans against the rail that surrounds the wheel like a mantle. There's an entire network of railings leading up to the attraction, but there's no line anymore. Even the ticket master's starting to pack up. Fear grips her as she worries about whether or not the Ferris wheel turns its lights off after closing. It's a small thing to fret over, but it's not like she's got anything better to obsess over. Not anymore, at least.
She rolls the camera strap between her fingers. The mundanity of everyday life as a citizen of Aurores is something she'd gladly take for granted. She would love to take a lot of things for granted. Like the knowledge of waking up to a new tomorrow. Or her safety. She liked being safe, but sometimes she saw the overhead commercial planes, and even though she knew it was safe, she could only see herself on that fateful day in the sky as the Butterfly Matriarch spread its gelatinous body and sickly-yellow organs and engulfed them in—
A sniffle. Lili rubs her eyes, afraid that it's her sniffle, but she finds her eyes painfully dry as usual. She looks over. Someone else is leaning over the rails with her. It's hard to see what they look like because of the lights in the background.
Lili freezes. She loathes these kinds of situations because she knows that if she doesn't say anything, she'll be a jerkass, but if she does, she'll probably end up saying the wrong thing anyway—the duality of mortality.
"You're not obligated to comfort me," the figure says, his voice raspy from crying. Lili recognises the voice from the man she'd crashed into earlier. A familiar heat spreads from her neck to her forehead.
She looks at the stranger. He's looking straight ahead at the Ferris wheel now, allowing Lili to see his outline in vague, halo-like strokes. There's something pretty about the way the decorative string lights catch in his copper eyes and bubbling tears. If she stares hard enough, she finds that his ears are drooping against his head. She used to have a Kattish crewmate, so she's been around with them long enough for her to get used to the antics their ears are capable of. She's just never seen it happen on this scale of emotion before. It intrigues her.
"You've either never seen someone cry in public, or you're just awkward as hell." The man keeps looking ahead. Lili flinches, blushes, and thumbs through her photos out of habit.
"Y-yeah. I'm no good with stuff like this." She wishes she could just shrink in on herself. Then, without thinking, she says, "Where's your girlfriend?"
The man wipes his eyes to glare at her. If looks could kill, she'd be a splattered, pulpy mess on the pavement.
"Man, I'm just gonna… fuck." She's gone through all of her photos now. They're looping all over again, starting from the cruise floating in the pitch-black ocean.
Then he snorts. Looks back at the Ferris wheel. "Just broke up with her."
"Oh, that's, uh." Lili wants to bash her head against the rails. "That's really bad."
He looks at her. Lili considers all of the ways she can win in a fight with this guy. She wonders if he's trained in self-defence at all. If not, she could probably pin him down with just her ether alone. If he is, she'll just have to exercise some caution.
Then it occurs to her that he's not crying anymore. He's got a cocky grin on his face that makes Lili wonder if he's silently taking her up on her wordless challenge. She feels her legs tense.
A laugh comes out of him instead. It's light and soft, and it makes his ears perk up and stay perked up until he braces himself against the rails again. It's only when he starts taking deep breaths that Lili is finally aware that he's laughing at her.
Another blush skirts up her face. Her body is torn between decking him in the face and walking away.
"No, no, you misheard me." He's looking back at the Ferris wheel again with a mischievous glint in his eye. "I broke up with her."
"You were sad, though," she points out. She'd sell her left kidney for the power to shut up, she swears.
Another laugh, though this one is short-lived and tinged with the grit of self-deprecation. "I've been seeing her for three years. Can't a man grieve?"
His tail swoops deeply from side to side—clearly upset. Lili feels like a racist for noticing all these things about him. For marvelling at something she should be taking for granted. The other day, she'd marvelled at the consistency of her room's heating functionalities. She tells herself it's normal, that she's just recovering, but something about this stranger's mannerisms has her re-experiencing the excitement of discovering the myriad of off-realm races all over again. Yeah, that makes her a racist. And a cracked out weirdo.
She thumbs through her camera again. "I'm sorry, I'm talking out of my ass. I've never been in a relationship before."
Oh, she's oversharing. She's definitely oversharing. Her cheeks actually manage to redden even further. She's not sure how that's even possible.
"I mean, you're still pretty young." His head tilts off to the side as he leans on an arm. It reminds Lili of the contentment of dreamers. "I wouldn't rush into anything. That's the biggest mistake people make when they first come out of high school. They over-commit to the closest person they know."
"It could work," she blurts out.
"In another place, another circumstance, maybe." Something changes in the way he's looking at the Ferris wheel. It's like he's thinking about hopping into a cart after the ride has closed. "It certainly hasn't worked out for me tonight."
Lili presses her lips together.
The man breathes out hard enough to make stray strands of his hair flutter up. "Actually, I'm sorry in advance, but I can't pin down whether you're fresh out of high school or in your second year of uni."
Her hands tighten against her camera. "I'm twenty-four," she says.
He hesitates. Balks at the air. Hangs his head down and laughs out of equal parts shame and amusement. "Oh, stars. I'm sorry. I really—fuck. I'm so sorry."
Yeah, she's just gonna stand there. It's not the first time someone's vastly underestimated her age. It certainly won't be the last. Her crewmates have told her that the innocence hasn't quite faded from her eyes yet, that she resembles a lanky and awkward teen, and that this means she looks eighteen to most people. It's a dumb argument, and it proves that people who claim to be able to see a person's innermost workings through the glaze of their eyes are speaking absolute horseshit.
Or maybe they aren't. Not entirely, anyway. The man's eyes are really pretty. Even in the warm bask of the Ferris wheel, his copper eyes don't blend in—no, they stand out. It's like they've got lights of their own—like he's somehow managed to capture all of those bulbs and lamp posts and reflected them in his orbs like a city trapped in the turbulent mirrors of the ocean.
She wonders if all Kattish eyes are like this or if it's just this one guy.
"You're staring again." He offers a grin. "It wasn't that bad, was it?"
"I demand recompense." She straightens her back and steels her features. This is exactly how she managed to worm her way into a variety of mercenary ships as a Human, and this is how she's going down tonight. "Tell me your age."
He's leaning against the rails again. "You're not going to like this."
She narrows her eyes just a bit—not enough to make her look childishly angry, but enough to (hopefully) send a chill up his spine.
"Fine." The man pushes off the railing but doesn't let go. "I'm four years younger."
Which makes him twenty. When Lili was twenty, she was working her ass off for her first ID. The examiners could discriminate against Humans, but they could not discriminate against someone who levelled a B rank in front of a thousand witnesses—a crowd. The exam had benefited her that year. She was lucky it hadn't been a written test.
Feeling awkward, she dangles her arms over the railing. This man is four years younger than her, and yet he seems like he's got more of his shit together than Lili ever will. Jealous drags its jagged fingers across her heart as she considers this fact. She'd been a competent mercenary on Earth, but on Therius, she is nothing.
The man flashes a toothy grin at her. His teeth shine white like distant stars. "Let's go on one."
Lili doesn't know what he's talking about until he looks back at the Ferris wheel. They'd switched off the lights a long time ago, but the iron frame still clicks and squeals against itself. The wheel still turns.
She turns back to the man. "Fun, but I don’t think that’s the greatest idea."
"Yeah, and I've made way too many good ideas today, so it evens out," he replies. Then he leaps over the railing, then the one after that, all the way to the empty ticket box.
Lili has to use the guidance of her GlassLink's inbuilt torch functionality to see any further than the ground beyond her shoes. By the time she's reached the wheel, the man's started squeezing himself through the windows of the nearest carriage. He lands—presumably on his ass—with a thump and a yelp. The carriage gives a dangerous lurch to the side.
Then he gets up and stretches a hand out for Lili. "Get in, come on!"
She hands over her camera and swings into the carriage herself, landing gracefully on her own two feet. She doesn't even need a tail for this.
It occurs to her right then that she's never been on a Ferris wheel before and that she's surprised that there are such ancient attractions in Therius at all. The man takes his seat opposite hers. He looks so calm, so serene, even though they're likely a couple of metres above the ground by now, and that the only stopping them from an untimely death are several bolts and screws. She doesn't like the idea of giving her life to someone—something else. Despite herself, she starts thinking of ways to escape the box, how she'll scale down the wheel safely if it ever comes to that.
"Anxious?" he asks once they're a good portion of the way up already. "I can’t tell if you like breaking the rules or if you’ll follow them to the ends of the world."
"I…" She falters. "I break rules all the time. I'm an avid fan of breaking the rules."
Another chuckle. Lili doesn't know what's so funny about the things she says, but if they get him laughing, then she's fine with it.
Once he's had his fill, he turns over the camera in his hands, feeling every tiny dial with those slender fingers of his. She stares at her own hands. They're square and tough from being honed in the blood of her adversaries. She finds it ironic that it's all she's good for. Life has granted her the power of death.
He eventually finds the switch that turns on the camera. The display lights up, and for the first time, Lili can see his face. He's got those Kattish marks on the sides of his eyes that wrinkle and stretch with every emotion he allows to grace his features. His lips are supple—not pencil-thin, but thin enough to give him a masculine edge to his overall visage. An Adam's apple bobs in place whenever he swallows. She could be describing any Kattish man at this point, but for some reason, the things that make this man pointedly masculine are what arrest Lili's attention the most.
"How does this work?" he asks. It surprises her that he cares at all. She expects him to find her outdated caveman technology to be offensive, but he’s handling her gear with the care of an actual, professional photographer. She wonders if he’s seen such things before. His copper eyes glow with wonder.
“Ah. Just there.” She’s not sure how photography is on Therius, but she’s assuming that it’s all streamlined now. “You flick it to auto, lightly press the button at the top while you point at the thing you want to focus at, then you push it all the way down to take a photo.”
She waits for him to point the lenses out of the carriage. He points it at her instead. Before she can even react, she hears the click of the shutters and the flicker of her kit flash.
The stranger looks at the image. His ears actually droop. “My photo’s kind of garbage. You’ve got some real skill, handling stuff like this. Could I look through yours?”
Lili nods slightly. He presses another button, and the glow on his face changes from stark white to warm orange.
The blinking city lights seem way more interesting to her now. He thumbs through another photo before he stops entirely.
“Sorry. Wow. Nice photos.”
He’s only thumbed through one of them, but he’s already handing the camera back over. Maybe Lili's photos aren’t that great after all, and he’s only saying it out of respect. The prospect of jumping out of the carriage is becoming more and more tantalising by the minute.
Lili looks down at the offending photo. It’s the one with the Kattish couple.
She looks back up at the man in front of her.
Fuck. Fuck this camera. And fuck her for taking that photo. She’d been way too adventurous tonight, and now she’s paying that debt.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have taken the photo, but you two looked perfect against the evening sky, so I just had to, and I’m digging myself into a hole, so I’ll just stop right here, I guess.”
Now she’s just tapping her pointer fingers together like a lost kid at the playground. The whole incident is so sad, so pathetic, that she makes a silent promise to herself to never talk to the stranger ever again if she can help it.
The man scratches his neck. "It's a good photo. It's just… not the right time for it right now."
She presses her lips together. She feels like a kid back in a year two prefab, and the teacher's scolding her in front of the class.
"Mind if I bend your ear for a bit?" He's looking out of the window as he says this.
Lili shrugs. "I won't mind." She's used to hearing complaints from her fellow crew members, whether they'd been about lovers back on Therius or other crew members or even about absolutely nothing at all. She'd heard it all and not spoken a word.
The wind ruffles through his hair. They're almost at the top, and it's starting to show through the sudden drop in temperature. Lili is glad for her baggy hoodie, though the man in front of her seems worse off in his loose-fitting t-shirt and overcoat. It's a good thing they'll be descending and getting off soon.
"Your photo," he says suddenly. "It's pretty close to how our relationship felt."
Holding the camera by the lens, she looks at the photo again. "Like a blob?" she asks. What dumb thing is she going to grace this stranger's ears with next?
To her surprise, he nods. "We looked like one thing—one amalgamation in that photo. She suffocated me. The only time I ever felt like I could be myself was when I was by myself, really."
Lili can't feel her face. Her photo being the culmination of all of this stranger's pain is so mortifying that she's decided to get rid of it.
"I'm going to delete it," she says. She fumbles over the buttons in the dark. Fuck, this is going to be a pain.
The man looks taken aback. "What? Why? Don't do tha—"
As he reaches forward to stop her, the carriage gives an ear-grating lurch that throws Lili against her velvet-padded seat and makes the man trip forward onto his palms.
For a moment, she actually feels like they're just dangling there with no support. Even the slightest movement rocks the carriage to the point where her stomach feels it'll drop out of her body.
The man swears. He pushes himself up to his feet immediately, which has the added effect of amplifying that motion hundredfold, which causes him to trip right back onto Lili. Even then, he's still swearing and panicking. She has to hold him by his arms to stop him from thrashing around, but it all goes to shit when he looks outside and realises not only how high up they are right now but also—
"We—" The words snag in his throat. "We're not moving."
And maybe the wheel had a life of its own, but in a strange fit of comedic timing, the framework gives one last, blood-curdling squeal before allowing the carriage to still entirely.
His hands tighten against her shoulders. "We're not fucking moving. Oh, stars. Fuck. Fuck!"
Their new predicament isn't that big of a deal to Lili, but it's like it's the end of the world for this stranger. His knuckles are white. It's starting to hurt a little.
Her ether pounds through her muscles as she pries off this stranger's hands and eases him onto the seat next to her. It’s a lot easier than she’d initially anticipated. From the Kattish frontliners she’s met on Earth, he’s a lot weaker than most of them. Fuck, he’s even weaker than most Kattish backline casters (sample size of one, she’s never met another one like him either), and that’s saying something.
The stranger is still breathing heavily. Lili is worried he’ll breathe himself into hyperventilation, and then they’ll be all screwed. Then something from her frontliner days pops into consciousness, like a lightbulb that hasn't turned on in a while.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“I—I’m, I, uh, fuck—”
This isn’t working. Being stuck inside a literal iron death-trap miles above the ground must suck for a civilian, but for Lili, it’s just another cheap, dry thrill. She’d rather be elsewhere, sure, but she also wouldn’t mind just being here. Every hint of a breeze makes the carriage rock like crazy, which is kind of awesome. But it’s clearly not awesome for her stranger here.
Quick, she has to think fast. What would she have done four years ago to help herself calm down in a situation such as this one?
Then she realises the answer; nothing but time and experience had helped her grow over her fear of death.
Luckily, the stranger’s got himself under control. “A-Avett. I’m Avett Ironsturm.”
“I’m Lili Wang-Rosales,” she says. “I’m an A-rank mercenary from Earth, and I’ve been defending my home ever since the Migration. But for now, I’m just a hobbyist photographer.”
“Oh.” Avett nods to himself like he’s trying to process both the fact that he’s stuck in a carriage and that she’s a scarily capable fighter despite her awkward demeanour. That’s no good; it’s meant to distract him.
Fighting off another bout of nausea, Lili asks, “Are you working, or at school?”
“Um, I’m just working, yeah.”
“What do you do?”
“R-repair work at my dad’s friend’s workshop. I’m a mechanic.”
He looks like he’s about to cry. His fingers are gripping into the seat so tightly that his knuckles look like they might burst at any second. Another question—something outrageous, something that’ll turn his fear into palpable anger or dazzling confusion. Being light on her feet, Lili already has the perfect response. The ball of air that she gulps down in anticipation nearly suffocates her.
Without hesitation, without any of the nonsense she knows will get her killed on the battlefield, she says, “Avett, would you go out with me?”
His response is wholly expected. He doesn’t say anything at first. The weight of her confession is more than enough to still the rocking of the carriage.
Then he goes, “What?”
It occurs to Lili that the ‘leap first, think later’ mentality might have a bit of a flaw to it. Ok, she’s gotten this far, so what’s she going to say next? She’s got nothing. If this had been a fight, she would be dead.
Avett picks up the slack. “Excuse me, we’re hundreds of metres up in the sky, trapped in a tiny box that could fall at any moment—”
“It won’t,” she interjects.
“...That feels like it could fall at any moment, and you’re asking me on a date?”
She’s going to have to start talking soon. She has to say something, anything, even if it makes the man in the carriage unfathomably angry at her to the point of violence. “You know how when you’re about to die, you start getting really horny? Like insatiably horny? You’ll fuck all your friends if you have to—”
It works, because he crawls right over and slaps her hard enough to rock the carriage one last time. He’s not even bothered by it anymore. Lili, on the other hand, is reeling from the attack. She hadn’t bothered toward her head with ether at all. As a result, she’s smacked her head on the window frame.
He stares at his splayed palm, which is now a bright, angry red. Then he’s back on her and apologising profusely. “I—I didn’t think that I could actually hurt you,” he’s saying over and over.
“You don’t stop feeling pain; it’s not a cumulative experience kind of thing,” she says, her eyes dazed and looking elsewhere. “You either get slapped and cry about it, or you learn to love it like an overbearing parent.”
Avett lifts her head from the frame and checks for bruises.
“I didn’t hit my head and get dumber,” Lili corrects him. “I’m just like this. And I’m fine.”
“Oh, fuck,” is all he has to say to that as he lets her head rest against the velvet seat.
His breathing has finally slowed to something more socially acceptable. He’s starting to stare at her again. Lili can’t tell what he’s seeing in those glassy, copper eyes of his. Well, obviously, he’s looking at her, but what’s his opinion of her? A complete fuckwit? She won’t be blaming him for a second if he thinks of her as a fuckwit.
“You.”
Lili looks back at him. He’s loosened up now, with both of his arms resting between his legs as he leans against the wall. It’s Lili that’s been tossed to the dogs, in fact.
“You asked me out.”
Her chin bobs. She’d asked him out.
Another question. “Did you mean it?”
Lili freezes. She looks at him, like really looks at him. All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem right for her to leave him hanging like this. But he is genuinely a lovely person, a person—a normal person, not a mercenary—she’s actually had the pleasure of enjoying the presence of. The first person on Therius, she realises, to tolerate her.
Her heart feels like it’s freezing over. Her lips press together, locking whatever she had to say behind closed bars of reinforced steel. It brings a danger to her that feels like she’s being ripped apart from the inside, and if she doesn’t keep it all in, if she doesn’t curl in on herself and hold her legs to her chest, she’ll explode like an old star.
She doesn’t like this type of thrill.
Avett completes her thoughts for her. “You did,” he finishes. “You did mean it.”
“So?” she asks.
“So…?”
“So.”
A subtle twitch of his right ear. “You’re looking at me like I’ve got some kind of leverage over you.”
She flinches back. Avett isn’t carrying anything, but he might as well be armed and dangerous. He could destroy her by batting those pretty eyes at her. With a snap of his thumb and middle finger. With just his pointer finger alone—why is she thinking about his fingers? Her mind sputters.
"Listen, Lili," he starts. Her name on his tongue is enough to kill her. "I've kind of just broken up with someone, and I hardly even know you. I'm… not exactly open to a relationship right now."
This shit is the reason why Lili doesn't like it when she has to talk with people. She says, "Oh," because what else can you say? Certainly not an apology. Or even words of gratitude.
"But." He claps his hands together. "I'd still like to get to know you. And you've got a GlassLink. So."
He takes out his own phone and—before Lili can object—bumps the plastic head of it against the rectangular bulge in her jacket's pocket. When she takes it out, she finds that she's got a new contact: Avett Ironsturm, age twenty.
Her heart thunders violently. "I—I can't have this," she stammers.
"Cute. You're going to have to take it, sorry." He turns his screen around and shows her Lili Wang-Rosales' contact number, who is twenty-four years old, likes peaches, and lives at the Louisa Complex in the third house on the left.
Another thing. He's just called her cute. Does he mean puppy eyes cute, or the other, darker, seductive kind of cute? Or maybe he thinks she's the worst kind of cute, the kind you get from watching a sad pug attempt to breathe. She's feeling the latter; the former two are way too confronting for her to even consider without going into cardiac arrest.
The carriage swings again. Avett yelps, takes one look outside, then scoots over to Lili's side. His shoulder—it's warm and… not soft, but there's a masculine hardness in there that yields to touch—rubs up against hers. "Look, I don't want to lead you on, and I'll definitely be leading you on if I do this, but I just don't feel safe up here, and I could really use something to hold onto right now, so I'm really, really sorry about this."
And then he wraps both of his arms around Lili, killing her instantly. No, that's an overstatement—or understatement, if she's still thinking about speaking in metaphors. The heat death of the universe could come and go, and she'd still be a living, burning speck of embarrassment and flushed cheeks. Physically though, she's just frozen in a state of unbeing.
He falls asleep right after. Lili, unluckily, finds herself in a state of extreme lucidity for the rest of the night. Later, she'll pass out on the first train back to Louisa with her head adrift upon the daydreams of the days to come.