The problem with Marta's presence here is that he's out of time where he was supposed to have an abundance. More time than anyone in their right mind would want, but he's never claimed to be in his right mind. For every bit of sexual frustration there's been an equal and opposite relief at the buffer between himself and Marta, even if it was prison walls and his brain occasionally leaking out of his ears from boredom. She'd been working at dissolving that buffer, but he'd thought he still had time to come to some kind of reckoning with its absence.
To decide if he would prove her right and run, or spite her and stay. Regardless, to put her through her paces and make her prove herself again and again because he doesn't trust her and doesn't even know if he wants to. To know what he can live with. He's more philosophical about his choices than he's letting on. You don't live through what he has over the past year without something giving or else breaking with sanity entirely. He knows it's unknowable because it's all unprecedented. But he was going to try for some kind of self-determination. Now that's been taken from him too.
"Then given the choice — and in the interest of giving you something to complain about," he searches her face, perhaps for her veracity on this point, "— I think I'll abstain."
His stare does withdraw somewhat following that statement of intention, the intensity of it less diminished than turned inward. Just thinking ahead; he knows the supposed consequences, but he's not a person who's willing to accept literally anything on faith. And maybe there's a part of him that would still need to know what it's like for himself.
no subject
The problem with Marta's presence here is that he's out of time where he was supposed to have an abundance. More time than anyone in their right mind would want, but he's never claimed to be in his right mind. For every bit of sexual frustration there's been an equal and opposite relief at the buffer between himself and Marta, even if it was prison walls and his brain occasionally leaking out of his ears from boredom. She'd been working at dissolving that buffer, but he'd thought he still had time to come to some kind of reckoning with its absence.
To decide if he would prove her right and run, or spite her and stay. Regardless, to put her through her paces and make her prove herself again and again because he doesn't trust her and doesn't even know if he wants to. To know what he can live with. He's more philosophical about his choices than he's letting on. You don't live through what he has over the past year without something giving or else breaking with sanity entirely. He knows it's unknowable because it's all unprecedented. But he was going to try for some kind of self-determination. Now that's been taken from him too.
"Then given the choice — and in the interest of giving you something to complain about," he searches her face, perhaps for her veracity on this point, "— I think I'll abstain."
His stare does withdraw somewhat following that statement of intention, the intensity of it less diminished than turned inward. Just thinking ahead; he knows the supposed consequences, but he's not a person who's willing to accept literally anything on faith. And maybe there's a part of him that would still need to know what it's like for himself.