He removed his hands, and Fred immediately felt adrift. For all that it hurt, she needed it. She needed him. Something she'd been trying to tell Wesley in countless ways since first realizing how she felt. Countless cowardly ways maybe, but they were still there. But why should things suddenly change just because she did? Wesley had made it perfectly clear how he felt before, and even before then she'd come to realize it. Her silence had been her answer. And wasn't that what his silence was now? An answer?

Fred swallowed again, ignoring the fire it stoked as she reached out with one hand to graze Wesley's elbow. To selfishly reestablish contact. With her eyes she asked him not to move.

"You're right," she admitted, all of the doubts collected in the past month carried in those two words. "We probably never should have come here. And logically I know it was a mistake. I knew it the minute we got into that limo. But..."

Fred's fingers curled, then relaxed. The last thing Wesley wanted or needed was her clinging. He was undoubtedly hurting too. But again there was the need to remind herself that he was real. That something deadly and far too final hadn't transpired in that office.

...because -- you're not real. Or I'm not real. Somebody here isn't real and I suspect it's you. So if you're not real, that means that my head came off back there and that I'm dead now. Dead. And with me being dead and you not being real I can hardly be expected to have some big conversation with you at the moment...

Some big conversation. Fred very nearly laughed. It was barely a bubble. The start of something before her body protested at the effort from the inside out and it became nothing more than a burst of choked, compressed air.

"...but I can't bring myself to regret it. Maybe this ship is sinking. But I don't feel like I'm drowning. Not anymore."