There was a protest there, on Ignis' lips, before Liliana kissed him, about how he would only end up keeping her up, when she needed her sleep for the next day, but even if the kiss hadn't stopped it, it wouldn't have gotten any further, anyway. Because as much as he'd wound up bending himself over backwards with that justification the other night, he realized just how wrong he'd been.

He hadn't wanted that kiss to end. He wanted to cling to it, for as long as he could, so he clung to her every word that followed it instead. "I'm sorry," he breathed out, shaking his head, lightly, not wanting to sacrifice the closeness too much to do so. "I just...didn't want to get it wrong, and, in my caution, it appears as though I've only wound up at exactly that."

Not to mention that natural impulse to just insist that he didn't need that kind of care lavished on him, quelled by the memories of when he'd tried to push away the others in the aftermath of Altissia, they way they all rejected it, in their own way, and the same thing had happened then, too, hadn't it? Their synergy was off, nothing felt right, and it took a malboro nearly taking them all out for them to realize...

...and then, after that...

If they hadn't wasted so much time being so stubborn and stupid...

Ignis kissed Liliana again, but this one wasn't trying to make up for anything; this one was far more resolute and forward-thinking toward all the other kisses still to come.

"Let's not," he then murmured, "do that again. I didn't care for it at all."