Desnia does want to come sailing, though she takes a moment and a coinflip to think it through. 

She's spent a little more time with him outside of the convention, on rooftops and in gardens, but on a boat feels - a bit more trapped, harder to get away. 

There's a way in which she should feel safer with the delegates who Detect Good, or even those who she's more sure she could beat in a fight, but in some ways he's the most comfortable to be around. There's something about him that reminds her of - traveling alone through forests on lightly trodden footpaths. This was objectively much riskier than most of how she's been spending her time lately, and yet she was rarely afraid then, and often ambiently afraid now, though notably less so with Jofre. 

She arranges for childcare - she's found someone that she's comfortable with for whenever she needs some extra time outside convention hours - and accepts the invitation. 

He was kind of expecting her to bring the kid but it will admittedly be easier to sail without having to make sure he doesn't crawl into the sea!

Jofre'll teach her the basics of operating the boat, knots and tacking and whatnot. Does she know how to swim?

The crawling into the sea was what she was worried about! She's reasonably confident Pere couldn't manage to hurt himself without her noticing in ways she couldn't quickly fix on land, especially since she has an advantage on most mothers what with the cures and channels, but falling overboard seemed like both a fast way to do himself harm she'd struggle to fix and harder to prevent than stopping him from playing with her knives. Even the rooftops she was sometimes atop with him seemed to her to be safer - the roofs themselves weren't moving around, and generally not so high that he wouldn't survive the fall - and she never went up without at least one way to do a cure and also often just held him the entire time. She didn't think she wanted to hold him the entire time here. 

Some of the knots were familiar to her from climbing, others were brand new, but she's a fast learner.

Desnia doesn't know how to swim. 

"Have you got an Air Bubble? Sea's calm and I don't see any monsters about, if you want to try it out."

She's scared.

She doesn't want to be scared. 

She'd seen people swim and there was something very free about the way that they moved through the water when they did it well. 

"I only have the one, and it won't last me very long. I'd try if you think it's safe enough even if I don't know what I'm doing. But I very much don't." 

"Oh, I wouldn't start with it up because the idea of swimming is that you're supposed to surface to breathe, like a dolphin; but you don't need to talk to cast it, right, so you could put it up if you're flailing, and I can sit up here with my shoes off and go get you if I see it."

She peers into the water dubiously. 

"Maybe you could show me first what I'm supposed to do to surface? I've seen people swim but I wasn't paying attention in the way where I'm about to try to copy it." 

"Sure." He takes his boots off, and his shirt, and dives right in. Splash. Paddle paddle. "You'll float naturally most things you could be trying. Dead bodies tend to float and they don't know what they're doing at all. But doing it consistently while you're moving around is a little trickier."

She watches closely for a minute, then pulls off her own shoes and shawl and coin purse and jumps in after him, holding her breath. 

She hits the water and briefly panics as she goes under and doesn't immediately come up - but she has some time before she runs out of air and even longer if she uses Air Bubble, and she manages to get her head above water before she's very tempted to use it. 

She hasn't got the knack of moving around fluidly yet, but she does like being in the water. She grins at Jofre. 

"There you go!" he grins back. "Legs're stronger than arms, so you want to do more kicking than arm-waving, especially if you're upright instead of going somewhere."

Following his instructions, she manages to somewhat reliably keep her head above water when she wants it while getting a bit of a hang of moving around. 

She still wears herself out pretty quickly with the unfamiliar and inefficient motions, and heads slowly back towards the boat after a short while. 

He swims easily alongside her and hops up first to give her a hand.

She takes his hand and gets back onto the boat gracefully.

She shivers a bit in the breeze and tries to wring some of the water out of her dress before flopping onto the deck to dry off a bit in the sunlight. 

Jofre leans on his elbows beside her, looking at her, and then rolls over and kisses her.

Desnia - freezes.

There’s a skill to rebuffing men who make passes at solitary women travelling. It’s a skill she had at one point been good enough at that she mostly didn’t need to resort to knives to be sufficiently discouraging. It’s a skill that hadn’t come up since she’d started travelling openly as a priestess. And right before that -

Part of her is reliving her worst memories. 

Part of her notes that she can’t win this fight - she’s starting from a worse position, she’s physically weaker and lower circle. While she guesses she’s probably more skilled with blades, her knives are in the pile of things she dropped before going into the water, one in her shoe and another in her coin purse, both well out of reach. 

Part of her notes that even if she did well enough in the immediate altercation to disentangle herself, there’s nowhere for her to go - and even if she won the altercation absolutely, she could neither swim nor steer this ship to land.  

Part of her notes that this is so completely and utterly her fault as a situation to put herself in that it seems almost unfair to harm Jofre about it. She’s lived in Cheliax her whole life, this predicament is a predictable consequence of her own actions, why did she not predict it? 

Desnia has no idea what to do with all these notes, and continues to lie limply on the deck.

It takes him a minute - maybe not a whole minute, but most of one - to notice that this is not going how he had envisioned, and pull back a little bit. "Uh? Is this... not...?" Not what we were doing? That sounds weird to say. Not okay? That sounds worse.

As Jofre pulls away, Desnia recalculates - she’s less pinned down now, she might be able to make it back to her stuff if she lunged for it now. But the other problems with getting out of her current situation still apply, and she’s still reliving some of her worst memories. 

It takes her a moment to begin to process Jofre’s question. He’s concerned? Because he thought she wanted this? That’s - actually a reasonable thing for him to have thought, she doesn’t think she’s ever been in a situation where someone might have had as much reason to think she wanted this, this is really entirely her fault. 

She hadn’t even tried to stop him, why hadn’t she tried to stop him, why did he stop if she hadn’t tried to stop him?

There’s an awkward silence for a few moments while she tries to reorient. Eventually, she forces out some words.  

“The last time I did - anything like this - it was a real bad time for me.”

She's got a kid. That... yeah, now that he thinks about it, that doesn't seem at all in tension with this statement. "Oh. So... you... swore off men or something?"

She had never really thought about it because - 

Well, before, the life that she had a calling for was one which was pretty incompatible with having children, and afterwards it was hard to think about and besides, she already has a child and her understanding is that the kind of men who looked after their children didn't like that. 

She doesn't know that much about lying with men, she isn't even entirely sure which of the many many things that had happened to her while captured were the kind of thing that led to having Pere, but she does remember being told in her travels by fellow women that once men got started they became ever more unwilling to stop and so there was little use in learning what would leave one with child and what wouldn't, the only safe thing was to avoid being that close to the situation in the first place. Advice which she had not heeded sufficiently here. Though... it might be okay anyway?

She isn't sure what words to say in response to the question. She sits up and shrugs.

"I hadn't really thought about it." 

"Oh." He picks at a splinter on the deck. "I'd just thought..." There is nothing to say here that doesn't sound stupid. Maybe he should jump back in the sea.

He looks so forlorn that she has the insane impulse to hug him - but she's only just extracted herself from that position. 

Admittedly, if she ignores the part where she had felt trapped and helpless and entirely convinced of things proceeding from there without her input, having his warm body against hers had... felt surprisingly nice? 

Her dress is only marginally less sopping wet than when she had gotten out of the water, and the breeze is picking up just a little. She shivers a tiny bit. 

She doesn't know what to say that, either. She shrugs again and hugs her knees. 

He sets about arranging the sail to take them back in to port.

Desnia collects her pile of items off of the deck and re-adorns them. Her dress is making the shawl wet, but it's still helping some with the chill. 

Now re-armed, she notes the direction that the ship has turned. And that Jofre still looks unhappy in a way that makes her want to hug him.

Would he be less unhappy if she were to hug him? Or would it just make him more unhappy that she's not sure if she wants too do more than hug him? 

They're both upright, and the ship is oriented towards land, and she feels safer with her knives in reach. 

She searches about for something to say. 

"I haven't sworn off men, I'm just not sure how many children I can support myself." 

That's true and yet misses the center of - what she doesn't want, what she's afraid of.

Especially since she has the vaguest recollection of her mother explaining that if she nurses her children longer, they'll be more spaced out, so that might not even really be a reason not to, here, since she's still nursing Pere some. 

"I don't really know how expensive they are... are you giving your stipend all away or something?"

"I'm only giving a bit of it away, so the stipend is lots more than I need for right now. But I'm not sure how much they are between when they're born and when they're grown enough to look after themselves, and the convention won't go on forever probably." 

"When they're little they're not expensive to feed but it's much harder for me to be always traveling between villages like I usually do, and I'm sure that'll get harder the more of them I have. It can cost a bit to pay someone to look after Pere when I need to pay for it, though I got the convention to let me use a free bodyguard to look after him during the day when I'm actually at the convention, so altogether it's not costing me that much right now."