"You were there too, as I recall. Present enough to bear witness to the effect you had on me, and I in turn was helpless to resist you." Even in the wake of her somewhat dramatic retelling of events, there is a sincerity to her answer, an honesty that only he can sense the truth of. As much as he might have been drawn to her, nothing between them would have transpired as it did without the sentiment being an entirely mutual one, especially when he'd left so many choices up to her about how exactly to proceed.

"He had a different way of coping with his own," she agrees, and while she herself hadn't shared Crais' penchant for leading with anger in response to her own losses, she'd also accepted the fact that his processing ability was simply different from her own.

Regardless, she won't press on the issue of this emotion; it seems as though the vampire against her is already wrestling with its significance, but beyond reassurance and reminding him that it is not a sign of personal shortcoming, she doesn't suspect her presence is needed for anything other than its existence.

"Good, else we'd be having a very different conversation at the moment," she counters, lifting her chin so that her lips brush over his forehead with her words before she urges a more purposeful kiss there. "Do you want to stay in tonight?"