A smile flickers across his face, slanted and wry. He wouldn't have called it a competition, either, until she said that— and he knows he definitely treated it like a competition, in those days. Maybe still.

"Lot of things are more ordinary than books make them out to be. Like what being on a ship is like. Or how hard it is to ride horseback." He rubs at his jaw, looking at the fire again. They're real references presented as hypotheticals; he does it mostly unconsciously, years of inertia around avoiding invoking Bethany's memory too directly. "Guess they'd be boring otherwise, though."