A/N if you're here without having read chaps 1,2 or 3 please go back. This all is a wandering with the getting there being the point, there's no grand ending.

High around his neck, the pure, sharp green of my wool scarf contrasted agreeably with his face. A foil to the drab shadowless woods where we walked. It was a Sunday, near Boston, thirteen days into 1946.

Uncharacteristically he was silent, giving no sign of anything much. I wondered if what was to me a depressing combination of gray wildness and cold would stir him as such things had done at Devon. Left to my own devices I would probably end up projecting my mood onto him. I'd done it before, after all.

He unwrapped a candy bar and offered me some. After I shook my head no, balling up the paper, he swung back his arm to cast it out of sight into the trees, then changed his mind, reached over and slipped it into my pocket next to my gloved hand. We shared a glance without a smile. We were alone and save for us, the park seemed empty.

He broke the quiet, pushing back my muffler, revealing my shirt's yellow collar, "It isn't your color; not at all."

"Is that why you relieved me of it for two years? Editing my wardobe?"

"I took it because, I wanted, well, a keepsake. Besides, it looks better on me; even wore it for your coming back, and I've been waiting all this time for you to at least ask about it." He finished with ironic disappointment: "But no, until now, no reaction at all. So like you, Forrester."

Phineas' unpredictable sentimental vein was fully exposed, and a little mystery was solved. Something came back to me; admittedly something I hadn't wasted much mental energy on. The day I'd left Boston two years before, my packing done, my back turned, he'd stuffed a shirt of his in with my things and evidently extracted the yellow one. That shirt of his was probably still in my room back at home, folded neatly in a back of a drawer. My mother hadn't known what to make of it. "So pink" she'd said, shaking her head.

I'd forgotten all about it.

"I came back to a thief, then?"

"Stole your heart, didn't I?"

Mentally I rolled my eyes. "Could you be any cornier?"

More silence. A very few half-hearted snowflakes fell, then stopped.

I asked "Seriously; you said once, that night, back at Devon, that you'd loved me for a long time already. When did you know, first?"

He answered easily, without any sort of pause to consider.

"The first time you jumped from the tree. I was treading water looking up; when you hit the surface, and splashed my face, I took a breath, then opened my eyes. You bobbed up right next to me. Sounds silly, but it was then."

"Because I jumped. What if I hadn't?"

"Well then, I guess it would never have occurred to me. What do you think?" He said, in a voice too mild for sarcasm.

"Guess when I knew, first, when I felt it for you." Asking him, I had no clear moment in my head, more a series of shifts towards knowing him, myself.

"When I knew you . . . Not sure. Does it matter?"

"Just asking." That was a lie - I truly wanted to know, wanted the blanks filled in.

In his best, vaguely oracular mode, he read my thoughts. "No, you're not, you really want to know."

Avoiding his eyes, I looked up at nothing in particular. "Yeah."

"You were so very boys' school; butter wouldn't have melted in your mouth. I never thought you might end up thinking like this. Don't know if I even wanted you to. After I fell, and came back, in November or December, I realized that, whether you knew it or not, that you did. Then after I fell on the stairs I caught you telling me with more looks than I can remember. You thought I was thick that way and wouldn't see."

"I didn't think that."

"I thought you did."

"I went from hating you to hating myself - still haven't forgiven myself - loving you came out of that somehow. In some weird way back then I felt I was part of you." I still felt that way, but wasn't comfortable telling him so. My words once spoken seemed slightly ridiculous.

The sun broke through somewhat, giving us our shadows back. His face clouded over. "Not to encourage this crap, but which part of me were you, exactly?" There was no answering that.

An answer came anyway, words almost without my wanting them. "The scars on you leg. The damage I did."

"Shut up."

My look on his face told to me stop. He had me down: my cross and petulant way; to the life.

I said nothing.

It was snowing again and the sunlight though still filtered, was stronger. Back at the parking lot where patches of asphalt showed here and there, his car was the only one in sight, its paint a glossy medium gray reflecting the light off the snow.

Unexpectedly he pressed me close against the car and shut my mouth with a kiss, a long kiss. He tasted of chocolate.

"I still love the cold, the snow; I still love you." He said, steam rising from our mouths melodramatically. "I know it sounds corny, but it's true enough."

I allowed my head a moment on his shoulder, "I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"The same thing as ever."

He pushed me back to arm's length.

"Please try and be sorry about something else."

I closed my eyes to his face and saw his almost naked body, a frozen moment, in space, falling.

We sat down on the running board. I muttered low into my gloves "I won't say I'm sorry ever again, unless you want me to." Words addressed more to some unbelieved in deity than to the twenty year old I sometimes shared a bed with.

"I can hold you to that?" he asked.

I turned my head to his profile, which like anyone's, was his most abstract angle and the least revealing of anything personal, and gazed at the almost ripple in his nose until he turned. I answered him "You can hold me any way you want."

The word play was automatic, the sentiment serious. Again neither of us smiled.

On his haunches, with a hand on my knee, lit by the snow's refracted glare, he said "What you did, you can only turn over in your head so many times before it starts to eat you,"

He had these words from experience. Three years before he never would have said them, felt them. I'd inflicted them on him.

His voice pulled me in. "And we don't want that, do we?" We said together, surprising ourselves.

Half lost in my own head, I couldn't find the sorry in me. Anywhere. My persistent sense of guilt had drowned in him. There was nothing left to be sorry about. He'd told me so. This time I believed him.

He reached over, dug the crumpled wrapper from my pocket, stood up, pressed it together one more time, "It's been with us so long, maybe I should kiss it goodbye." Briefly, he seemed to consider the idea, then like the defeathered shuttlecock years before, he hurled the unkissed pellet far into the trees and out of sight.