Saturday morning sees Bella with her notebooks about magic all in her knapsack, her medallion safety-pinned by its chain to her bra just in case she trips the wrong way, waiting with Charlie for pickup for the Avalon trip.
Shyly, he moves to hold her hand.
Good, good. Runes! Wonderful runes! Darren approves of numbering for spreadsheets, and tells her so.
"I can show you my index if you want to copy over the numbers into whatever you're using for reference so we match."
She flips to her index, which has mini doodles of the runes in neat columns beside numbers in Bella's excellent handwriting.
Darren copies the numbers over to an index of his own, obviously much larger than Bella's, and then goes back to giving her more runes.
Eventually she says, "I could totally go for some fish right about now. You?"
"We could," she says, once she's pulled out into the road from the driveway, "decide in advance how we're dealing with the check to avoid later possible awkwardness."
"I kind of figured I was paying, honestly? Because I was the one to ask you out."
Darren snickers. "I mean if you want to pitch in feel free, but this was my idea, sooo..."
"You can pay, then. The entire thing is obviously all your responsibility, I had nothing to do with it."
"You're probably somehow managing to kidnap me in spite of the fact that I was convinced to choose a restaurant and am now driving."
"There is no escape. You can't drive somewhere else, you must go to the seafood restaurant. It is the only option."