"That sounds like a great idea!"

"Oh good." She can probably put off being struck dead by sheer embarrassment then.

He finds a place to put Kanael down and comes back and finds that kissing is improved by not needing to worry about squishing a baby.

It is! Apart from the fact that she has nothing else to focus on now and oh merciful ancestors Ettelië is kissing her.

She thinks her feelings about this might be somewhat more complicated than they are supposed to be, which is sort of an inconvenient attitude to have about one of the best things that has ever happened. Like, five parts overwhelmed happiness and three parts panicking dread and one part annoyance that her feelings have to be divided into parts over something like this.

If she does not say any of this to Ettelië he will not figure it out, because inconveniently she does not have the kind of mind he can read.

It's pretty unfortunate that panicking dread is really bad for her ability to think about things. Why did people make Liar brains this way. That was pretty dumb of them. Unless maybe they wanted panicking dread to produce passivity and learned helplessness and a tendency to just keep doing the stuff that you think you should probably be doing, in which case that actually makes total sense, that is absolutely how she'd design a slave if she were for some reason going to do this.

Nnnnnope, not gonna say anything. Gonna make a mental resolution to say something if ignoring it doesn't make it go away, and then she's going to ignore it and hope it goes away. Maybe she's not even right about her feelings and actually being really really happy is just easy to confuse with panicking dread for some reason, how would she know, it's not like she's ever been this happy before.

Cool how her favorite person is kissing her, though, that's very nice.

After a while her favorite person stops kissing her to get them ice cream, except every few seconds of this process he gets distracted and kisses her nose or her forehead or her hand and then goes back to trying to get them ice cream.

"You're adorable," she says, blushing but looking generally delighted.

Her brain can incoherently scream at her on its own time, she decides. Right now she's gonna eat ice cream.

They have chocolate and caramel and confetti and blueberry ice cream. He gets all of them out and makes her a big ice cream cone and makes himself one.

"I'm never going to eat nutrient blocks again," she informs him, cheerfully eating her ice cream. "The next time I see one I'm going to have to make a concerted effort not to light it on fire on principle."

"I am so glad that you can eat our food! It'd be terrible if we couldn't share any of this."

"Yeah! Uh - I guess that would have been logistically complicated, in terms of keeping me alive, too, but it's very nice that it also allows for eating ice cream."