"—thank you," he says eventually, when he thinks he can trust his voice to work again. "For - for - I don't know. For this."

"You're welcome," she murmurs, squeezing him and kissing his hair again. Snuggle.

Yes. Snuggle. Good.

"You can snuggle me later, too," she adds. "This isn't a, a one time kind of thing. At least not if you don't want it to be." Nuzzle.

...he smiles. He nuzzles back.

She hums, happily.

"Though if we make a habit of this I might like to read," she muses, petting his hair thoughtfully. "Or something in that vein, anyway."

"Not a lot of books here," he murmurs. "No good way to get them."

"Oh." Snuggle. "... Do they sell any in the town over?"

"...probably?"

"Well, then I could go into town and acquire them for you. Maybe trade things you make for them, or something."

"...maybe."

"Granted, there are a number of practical limitations. I can't exactly walk up and say, 'Hi I'm a princess from another country, your local dragon kidnapped me, but I like it there and he likes me so this isn't really a bad thing, can I trade some of the nice things he showers me with for books,' or something."

Snort. "No. That would be a bad plan. And you might have to go farther than the closest town to find somewhere that has books to trade, I wouldn't know."

"Yeah. And I'm... nervous about being a single pretty woman alone in a foreign country. It was fine to just send a letter, but. I really don't know the area, and. I mean, I am not exactly bursting with life experience, you know?"

"Well. You're welcome to say you belong to the dragon if you run into trouble."

... She shivers a little, at the phrase 'belong to the dragon.'

"I. I'm not sure they'd be inclined to believe me? It's an, an unbelievable sentence, you know."

"...I don't mean—I'm not—I'm not claiming you," he says. "Just saying that if you told people you were mine, they'd be too terrified to bother you. And, hm..."

He conjures a necklace, a flicker of red light solidifying in his hand into a fiery red scale hanging from a golden chain.

"Wear that and you'll have no trouble convincing anyone."

"Thank you," she mumbles, taking it and putting it on. Is she blushing? She is probably blushing.

"I, I um. Didn't think you were - um, claiming me, I just. The. The phrasing was - evocative?"

"Oh. Um. Sorry."

"It's okay," she murmurs into his hair, snuggling closer. She's just - she's going to pack up her reaction to the phrase 'belong to the dragon' into a box to be dealt with... later. Yep.

Snuggle.

She's a little more... Squirmy than before. Less still and relaxed, more keyed up. Putting her feelings into a box is not working out as she planned. When he's this close it's a little hard to think of things that aren't, aren't picking her up and carrying her away, saying that she belongs to him -

"So um. What other things do you do for fun, here?"

...it's kind of hard to ignore her squirminess. He takes a few seconds and still can't think of any hobbies to admit to.

"I mean I suppose all the other hobbies probably take up a lot of, of time," she observes. Her breath catches in an odd way while she speaks. "What with how much there is to build, um. Around. What happens when you run out of mountain, do you, um. Start over? Make it bigger?"

"I change what's there, usually. Whatever I'm least happy with, or wherever I think I can make something better."