Well, it was raining outside, and he didn't figure he wanted to disturb Nialla this late, so Jochy had returned to his room, pondering what the hell to do with his future. This took all of five minutes, so once that was done, he was reduced to laying on the bed, hands crossed behind his neck, looking at the ceiling.

His thoughts just kept going in circles, 'round and 'round and 'round.

Life was too damn complicated these days.

There was a light rap on the door. "Jochy?" Elaine's voice called. "It's Elaine. Are you in there?"

"Yeah" Jochy replied, pulling himself up to a sitting position. "Door's open, and I'm decent. Well, moderately anyway." Not that she'd mind, but he wasn't sure if she was alone or not.

Elaine took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped inside. She shut it, took another deep breath, and instead of moving toward the bed, stayed where she was. "We need to talk. I'm dumping you. And I need you to let me explain before you protest or convince me not to."

Jochy's mouth was half open with an argument, or perhaps a surprised exclamation. But instead of talking, he simply gave her a dark look, crossing his arms over his chest. "Go on..."

Asking Jochy not to talk was actually harder than to ask him to stay chaste.

Elaine bit on her thumb for a moment. "All right. It's like this. I was talking to Starling, and he-- he didn't convince me to do this," she added insistently. "I'm doing it. For me." She took a eep breath. "I realized the thing. Is that I know if Starling and I don't end up together, the only thing that'll change is we won't be kissing each other or sleeping together. We'll still talk the same way we do now. Everything else will be the same. But you..." she bit her lip. "I don't know. I don't know what would happen if we're not together. And I think it's important to know, to know if I can still be close with you if I'm not in bed with you."

Jochy didn't look all that surprised. He didn't look happy mind you, he was frowning and running a hand through his hair, but surprised? No.

"Figured that one out when yer jumped to the conclusion that I was planning to dump you earlier. But yer made me hope that things might be different there for a little..." He sighed, but kept his eyes on her.

"Thanks for doing it now instead of in Cecilia. Makes it simpler I suppose."

Elaine rolled her eyes. "You know, if anything this is a self-fulfilling prophecy you brought upon yourself by accusing me of having already made up my mind," she snapped back. "You're an asshole, Jochy. And I don't need to waste my time on somebody who tells me that what I mean isn't what I think I mean and is looking for the bad in everything I do. And that's not even what I just said. I need to know we can be friends. If you're not even going to try to be friends, then you're pretty much making up your own mind about how this is going to go. I can't know if we can be friends if we don't try it."

"Elaine, I love you. And yeah, that means that I like you. I ain't gonna stop wanting to be around you just 'cause I don't sleep with you, Nialla tried that already and it didn't work out very well. And I ain't gonna have another argument with yer right now, I'm all argued out. There ain't anything I can say anymore that could possibly make any sort of difference. If yer wanna be pissed and blame me for this, go right ahead. Ain't changing a thing." He took a long, deep breath calming himself down.

He had a dozen lines in his head that just would make this argument worse, but he swallowed them all down and just gave her a faint smile instead.

"I'm damn sorry it has come to this though. But I'm not gonna turn into Seth."

Elaine shook her head. "I'm not arguing. But you just did try to blame me, and I'm not even-- this isn't even something permanent. I just want to see. If we can do it. It's more important to me than anything I can get out of fooling around with you for the next little while."