He is a little too giggly to be completely successful at kissing back, but it is a very pleasantly incomplete success.

Very pleasant. Giggle kisses: not the same as all-the-time-in-the-world kisses, but still pretty nice.

And when the giggles subside, there are still kisses.

He's tall enough that the height difference is starting to get a little inconvenient. So when it becomes evident that there are going to continue being kisses for a while, he gently picks her up and carries her a few steps to the nearby table and sets her down again. There, that's better.

Oh, yes, yes it is.

She appreciates the efficiency of being moved to the nearby table for maximized kissing enjoyment, and also, that was kind of hot.

These kisses: not precisely the all-the-time-in-the-world kisses, and they are no longer giggly. She'd try to think of a name for them, but she's too busy having them. Maybe they can be the slightly-ill-advised kisses, because she is not at all thinking about his self control.

They are slightly ill-advised but so wonderful. And he can tell how much she liked being picked up and moved - he wants to make her feel like that again, more, he wants to carry her to bed and rip her clothes off, he wants -

His hand briefly tightens in her hair, and then he closes his eyes and lets go and gently disengages from kisses.

She makes a sound when his hand tightens in her hair. It is not an unhappy sound.

When he withdraws, she is very briefly and very stupidly tempted to test his self control.

And then the parts of her brain that are not fucking insane reassert themselves and she takes a minute to breathe. Her arms stay where they are, comfortably wrapped around him, but she does not do anything that's very stupid.

He stands like that for a minute, breathing quietly, his hands resting on her waist, and then he opens his eyes and kisses her on the cheek.

"You're lovely," he murmurs. (That sound—)

"You're pretty great yourself," she replies, still a little dazed and breathless. "And can we get like. A room. Full of extra little healing water things in case of accidents because I feel like we might end up having at least one."

He laughs softly.

"I will definitely go fetch more healing water if you want it - although I would really rather not have any accidents -"

"Oh, I agree, it's just that also I was highly tempted to do something very stupid just then and think we should have some kind of insurance just in case."

"How sensible of you." Pause. "What exactly were you tempted to do...?"

"I was tempted to test your self control. Or did you mean specifics?"

"I was thinking of specifics, yes. If you don't mind saying."

It is maybe inadvisable to say this while his arms are around her and he's still in kissing range -

"I didn't really have a - a solid plan. Besides whimpering your name and looking at you hungrily and, um. Trying to pull you back."

"That," he says softly, "would have been a bad idea."

"Such a bad idea," she agrees, blushing and - she has some self control, here - gently unhugging to give them some clearly much needed space. "And I didn't, but. We might want to have the room filled with little healing waters."

He lets go of her and takes a small step back, somewhat reluctantly.

"You know what," he says, "I think I'm going to have a rare moment of being responsible and levelheaded, and go raid the healing fountain right now before I get any more tempted to kiss you again."

And he dissolves into a breeze and blows away.

"Okay, sounds good," she says, to the air. Feeling vaguely like it doesn't sound good at all and like she'd like him to come back and -

- wow yep that was a good idea he had there.

She gets off the table, carefully returns to her seat, and takes a minute to calm down.

He's gone for about ten minutes.

When he comes back, he looks - much less full of bad ideas.

"I filled the guest room next to yours with bottles of healing water," he says. "I feel very responsible."

By then she is much less full of bad ideas, too. She even looked over Ansati vocabulary some more.

"You are so very responsible," she agrees, smiling fondly. "Hooray! We handled that responsibly!"

"We did! And I'm glad we did!"

"Me too! I'm pretty proud of us, that was hard to do."

"Yes it was."

She ducks her head a little, smiling.

"Um. I feel we should attempt to talk about it, but I'm considering the wisdom of maybe taking an hour or two away from each other to clear our heads?"

"That... is a very good idea," he says. "How about I go - find some way to occupy myself - and you, being clearly the more responsible and levelheaded of the two of us, call my name when you think it's a good time to talk again?"