Let's see where this goes

"I should like to say something," Lilly says, "and I should like you not to be clever about it until I've finished."

"I'll do my best."

"That's all I'm asking, though I suspect it's more than you're capable of." The corner of her mouth lifts, but it doesn't stay. She looks down at the cobblestones, then back up, and when she speaks again she says each word as though she were setting it down carefully, one at a time. "I came to Vienna to be left alone. I told everyone so, quite firmly. A new city, a serious degree, nobody to tell me who I was supposed to be. But meeting you... i don't know. I think you'd fit in perfectly fine with my family. But also, you' re so different. At lwast from what is the norm for the types of blokes one meets."

"I did tell you I was confused by the railway timetables."

"You were being clever. I did ask you not to." But she's smiling properly now, and the smile softens everything about her face. "What I'm trying to say is that I find I'm rather looking forward to the autumn. To sitting beside you in that dreadful lecture hall, arguing about Mearsheimer and Rawls, pretending not to notice when you've done the reading and I haven't."

"You'd do the reading."

"I'd do the reading *twice*, in case you caught me out." She laughs, quietly. "I'm looking forward to studying with you, John. That's the whole of it."

You hold her gaze. The square has nearly emptied, and the lamps have gone soft in the cold, and the ordinary part of your mind, the one that keeps a tidy list of things it is sensible to say, goes quiet.

"We don't have to wait for term," you say. "To spend a great deal of time together. I'm not sure I want to wait that long."

She is very still, he hand reaching out for yours.

"Is that so," she says, more softly than she means to.

"We've got a few weeks. There's an entire library I don't know how to use. A café you declared *adequate for tourists*. There are palaces, apparently. Eleven of them, I'm told. Real palaces, not the gloryfied manor hauses in Essex or town houses in Eaton square we decrepid remains of aristocracy reside in." You hear your own voice drop, and you don't try to stop it. "I'd like to be badly lost with you in all of them."

"Eleven palaces. " Her breath clouds between you. "That does sound rather thorough."

"I'm a thorough person."

"Are you." She says it slowly, and there's a flicker of something in her eyes that wasn't there a moment ago, warm and a little reckless. "I'd begun to suspect it."

Her hand, the one that has been resting an inch from yours for the better part of ten minutes, moves. It's a tiny gesture. The back of her fingers brushes yours, and then, as though she'd been deciding something that has now been decided, her palm slides into yours and her fingers fold through your own.

Her hand is cold, and you wrap your other hand around it without thinking, warming it between both of yours, and she watches you do it with an expression that is almost helpless.

"Rather forward of me," she murmurs.

"I wouldn't call it forward."

"What would you call it?"

"Overdue."

She laughs, and it's not the composed laugh, the practised one from earlier. It breaks in the middle, and she ducks her head, and you realise that she is nervous, and that she has been the whole evening, and that she has been hiding it beautifully.

"We ought to make some sort of plan," she says, mostly to your coat. "Properly. I'm told that's what people do."

"Oh. I've got not much planned yet, and i am sure neither do you. We're both young, free and flexible. Or as flexible as we are ever likely to be."

"Thursday sounds nice. Or if not Friday, then. Or Saturday. Or..." She stops, shakes her head, looks up at you with a small, rueful smile. "I'm hopeless at this. I plan everything. I've never in my life wanted to say *whenever you like*."

"Then say it."

"Whenever you like, John."

"Oh we'll see esch other soon. I promise."

"You're quite impossible." But she doesn't let go of your hand. She steps closer instead, so that the toes of her boots are against yours, and tips her head back, and you can see the individual lamps reflected in her eyes. "I'd also like to say that I've been wondering, ever since the clock struck the quarter, whether you were ever going to do anything about it."

"I've been trying to be a gentleman."

"I've *noticed*." Her voice has dropped to almost nothing. "It's been exquisitely irritating."

You lift your free hand and, very gently, tuck a strand of red hair behind her ear. Her eyes close for a fraction of a second at the touch, and she tilts her cheek into your palm, the way someone does who has been wanting a thing for longer than she would ever say. Her skin is cool and impossibly soft.

"Lilly," you say.

"Yes?"

"I'm going to kiss you now."

"Yes," she says. "Please do."

You do.

It starts as a question, barely a touch, her lips cold from the night air and then warm all at once, and she makes a small sound, caught somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Her free hand curls into the front of your jacket and pulls you in, and the question becomes an answer, and then another. She kisses the way she talks: unhurried, precise, and with a confidence she makes you earn. You feel her smile against your mouth, feel her fingers tighten in the fabric, feel the small shiver that runs through her when your hand slides to the back of her neck, under the fall of her hair. She tastes faintly of the mint from the café and the cold, and when she finally draws back, only an inch, her breath is coming a little unevenly, and so is yours.

Neither of you lets go.

"Well," she whispers, her forehead against yours. "That was a great deal less theoretical than I'd imagined."

"You imagined it?"

"Don't be tiresome." She kisses you again, shorter, a promise rather than an answer, and her thumb traces slowly along your jaw. "In rather more detail than I'm prepared to admit in a public square."

The words sit there between you, warm and dangerous, and you feel the quiet charge of them travel all the way down your spine. Her eyes have gone dark. She's very close, her coat open slightly where your hand has pushed it aside, the warmth of her pressing through the layers between you, and the sensible part of you is struggling, a little, to remember why you were supposed to be taking this slowly.

"I ought to go home," she says. She doesn't move.

"You ought to."

"My flat is only fifteen minutes from here." Her voice is very low. "I'm saying it purely as a point of geography."

"Purely geography."

"Naturally." She looks at your mouth, then at your eyes, and then she lets out a long, shaky breath and, with enormous effort, steps back, her hand still in yours. "But not tonight. I should like to do this properly, I think. Slowly. I should like to be thoroughly *looked forward to*."

"That's a very Lilly thing to say."

"It's a very Lilly thing to *want*." She lifts your hand and presses her lips, briefly, to your knuckles, her eyes on yours the whole time, and the gesture goes straight through you. "Walk me to the tram. And then go home and think about what I said. In detail."

"Detail will not be a problem."

"I'd rather hoped not."

You walk to the tram stop hand in hand, her shoulder against your arm, neither of you saying very much, the old city lit gold around you and the cold only a rumour. When the tram arrives, she turns at the step and kisses you once more, quickly, fiercely, like someone trying to commit something to memory. Then she's gone, and the doors close, and through the glass you watch her lift two fingers to her lips and look at you across the dark with an expression that says, quite clearly, *as soon as possible*.