And that is presumably Theo sliding down against the door so he can sit on the floor.

Sadde waits.

And after a few minutes Theo will come back out of the bathroom.

"Hi."

Sadde looks up at him, having sat against the wall himself.

"Hi."

"So I continue to be screwed up but I think the best thing to do next would be to see if the magical love thing is after like-thirty-minutes-or-whatever or if it's some other thing." He checks his watch. "Probably not literally right now seeing as people will still be at school, but next thing when feasible."

"Okay. So did you feel deprived or something when I was not right there? Or did my breathing or heartbeat or whatever still count...?"

"I'm not sure it's quite a magical vampire love but I don't have anything to directly compare it with. That was mostly fine."

"Do you have anything to indirectly compare it with?"

"… It seems like you're fascinating?"

"...really? That's interesting."

Nod.

"Can you qualify that? It's a weird sort of fascination if it looks like you might like me at first..."

"It's not just fascination, it's also– like, I don't know, if you told me to jump off a cliff I would go do it and then while falling," he rolls his eyes, "ask myself if I really wanted to do that or just wanted to metaphorically-not-actually see your reaction when you found out I did it."

"...okay that's actually even worse."

He nods. "And now I don't want to tell you anything else about it because I really think you'd hate it more, and I don't want to do that to you."

He looks just so happy about the fact he's saying this, doesn't he. Not at all conflicted, no siree.

"...I very strongly prefer knowing things."

"You might want to clarify that because I have an intense desire to just spout literally everything about my life story here and I'm not sure that's what you intended– but I also want to make sure nothing hurts you, possibly by lethally attacking anything that threatens you, would not like to bite you because that is something you don't want and conveniently I am also not in the mood for biting you except for that little bit of me that wonders how you taste, lovely I know, and I don't know if I can verbalize the rest of it right now but yes 'creepy abusable vampire fascination stroke protectiveness stroke whatever fucking else you can think of that might be creepy and make this even worse stroke better for me' is basically what it boils down to."

"Okay, I'll qualify it, please do not keep knowledge from me 'for my own good' or anything like that, you can keep information from me if you personally do not want to tell me. As for the rest—that is so overwhelmingly terrible I want to hug you for a while but I'm not sure that would actually help."

"And am I meant to disagree here so you can hug me and feel comforted or am I meant to agree that it's terrible and not get hugged, because I have no idea!"

"I don't want to hug you to feel comforted, I want to hug you to comfort you! Act as if my preferences were your preferences, yes?"

"… I assume you mean that the way where I should use my preferences as a guide for what you probably want, but the unfortunate thing about copulae is that they imply commutativity, how nice of them."

"Look, surely you still have preferences somewhere under there, right? You have not in fact kissed me yet even though everything I have said so far would imply that if this were a thing you actually wanted then kissing me would be an equilibrium point."

He looks at Sadde's lips again and then makes a noise of frustration, looks back at his eyes, and says, "I don't know that this is helping!"

"It's demonstrating that you do, in fact, have preferences other than the ones forced upon you by creepy vampire mind magic, so you could try focusing on those."

"Okay, so– I should try to pretend I don't care about what you want so I can try to think about my preferences? Because for some reason that sounds like a really bad idea."