For a moment, the kiss stuns Laertes; he freezes with Susan held against him, the music going suddenly hollow and distant in his ears. He wants her, he realizes, but he doesn't want to have had her--he doesn't want to be a lover to her, to have her understanding of him always colored by the knowledge of his body. He doesn't want anything between them to change. It feels as though their friendship is a precipice that he has scaled through great effort of will, straining fingers and toes jammed into the crevices of a sheer rock face, and now the buffeting storm of his desire threatens to hurl him into the abyss.

Then he shakes himself, and lets go to draw Lancelot in for a kiss. "My sweet-heart," he says. There is lipstick staining the corner of his mouth, blood-red.