"That's not—" Gleb starts, a quick, half-desperate rebuttal, though he cuts himself off before he can say anything he can't take back. The last thing he needs is to make this somehow worse than it already is, with so much uncertainty in the air between them. True as it might be, no good will come from telling her that they were never happy, that they never had an opportunity to be. Maybe they came close, in the time between Dmitry arriving and her coming to tell him that Dmitry was in love with her, but it wasn't what it might have been under other circumstances, what it should have been. If only in his own head, there was always that doubt, that worry.

Then it seemed like he'd been right to wonder if Dmitry's arrival would cause them problems, and it's hard not to let that color his memories of the rest of it now, to think himself a fool for the moments when he convinced himself that there was nothing wrong. He never expected they would wind up where they are now; he never had any reason to. Knowing that is one thing, though, and trying to articulate it is another entirely. How is he supposed to tell her that it's hard to believe that she could want to be with him, just him, when what she said before seemed to suggest otherwise?

"I just want to be sure," he says, lifting their interlaced fingers so he can brush a kiss against her knuckles. "I don't want you to... to choose this and regret not being with someone else instead. I don't want to be with you and wonder if you'd be happier that way. I believe you, I do. But we wouldn't be happy with all of this still overhead. We already never had a chance for that. And I don't want to do this only to lose you all over again."