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"Kiss me 'til I'm stupid," he said, and Ingrid, by nature, was always ready to comply.
With a single motion, Ingrid curled the upper half of her body to cover Claude's, pressed her mouth to his repeatedly, and held the sides of his face between her hands. Instantly she could feel him relax into her touch. It looked like nothing - his eyes had already been closed, he had already been lying on his back - but the tension melted out of him, just a fraction, as though his whole body had sighed. Not literally. His mouth was otherwise occupied. Ingrid smoothed one thumb over Claude's cheek, and he made no move except to kiss back.
Everyone was tired all the time now, of course, but the way Claude got tired was different. He took everyone else's tired and rolled it up into himself, in a way that sat between his shoulders and under his eyes. Remembering this, Ingrid moved both her thumbs to lightly cover Claude's eyelids, as if to tell him it was okay to keep them closed.
Claude no longer had the energy to keep up the playful tone he'd maintained all throughout their youth, and though Ingrid admired this serious side of him, she could tell it was making him sad. He'd explained it to her, once. Problem-solving, reassurances, managing the others, he was good at all that and took pride in it, and could say that he found his role fun, in the challenge of it. But somewhere along the way it had become, while not unmanageable, exhausting even for him. The way he'd acted when they were younger was a façade, but more and more these days, Claude expressed that he wished it could be real, for a brief spell. That he could turn off his worries and thoughts.
"Ingrid," he had asked, "Could you kiss me? Until the noise in my head shuts off. Until I can't think of anything but you." He had been unexpectedly serious, clasping both her hands and looking her right in the eyes the first time he made the request. And it sounded frivolous, but she knew to respond by setting to the task with the same gravity with which he had asked. This, after all, was Ingrid's pride: to be a pillar of support. So she had wrapped her arms around him and solemnly leaned up to his mouth. It wasn't their first kiss, and they still shared others, alert ones, born of joy, between all the times Claude requested Ingrid to turn his brain off, but as the campaign dragged on, these moments became more frequent. "I am sorry I can't be here for you right now, Ingrid, can you kiss me?" And the phrases got shorter: "Ingrid, I am thinking too much." Lately all he could muster the energy for seemed to be "kiss me stupid." It was enough; she understood.
Ingrid rolled fully onto him now, tired of twisting half her body to the side, and swung a leg across so she was straddled over his stomach. Claude seemed to welcome the weight. She kept up the same pace she'd started with, catching his lips repeatedly, and while he responded in kind, Claude's arms lay still beside his head, too drained to even wrap around her back.
She'd had him all wrong in the beginning. He wasn't thoughtless or careless, he thought and he cared too much, giving of himself beyond what he could rightly afford. Ingrid was familiar with this. But she'd always reserved it for a close group of people, and Claude seemed to care about everybody. He could try to play it off as strategic flattery if he wished, but it wasn't strategic to invest in everyone around you to this degree, not without proving first that they would reciprocate. It wasn't even normal. Claude did it because he believed it was the least they all deserved.
He'd even cared in this magnanimous way about Ingrid, not long after meeting her. This, though she would not admit it, was how he had won her over, more than inadvertently impressing her with his leadership skills. Though he was like this to everyone, and it didn't make her special to receive it, by the time she found out it did not matter to her. Maybe that was even part of it; Claude was perhaps the first person in her life to offer this level of interest with no expectation that Ingrid would even want to offer it back.
Except eventually, she did offer it back, and even though Claude continued to care too much about everyone in the world, Ingrid only had to care too much about her friends and her family and Claude. When he was alone with her and reverted to the jokes and unproductive conversations and laying in bed, it was a break Claude had more than earned for himself. Witnessing him distracted wasn't an annoyance to her anymore, it was a privilege.
Besides, Ingrid thought, using one hand to smooth Claude's hair back and away from his face, it wasn't like the dynamic had simply flipped and she was giving of herself with no return.
Claude hummed into Ingrid's mouth and finally lifted his arms, pulling her shoulders down closer. He rolled them both over, moving his mouth down to kiss at her jawline now. She carded her fingers through the back of his hair. His body, warm and comforting, pressed her back into the floor. "Kiss me 'til I'm stupid" sometimes ended with them both falling asleep, wrapped in each other's arms without the recollection of who had slipped away first, but others... sometimes Claude would kiss her back awake.