"Is there a terrace?"
"Yes, I think so. I'm sure there must be."
He looked at his chrono. "All right, baby. Half an hour?"
"Half an hour."
When she clicked off he felt his heart pounding. He felt dizzy. He felt as though he had just taken a quart of meth at one jolt—intravenously. He sang, more loudly and more off-key than ever. He went into the bedroom and started to get dressed again.
It wasn't until he was finishing the knot in his tie that the hunch hit him.
It was funny about that hunch. He would have said it came out of nowhere, and yet it must have broken from the bottom of his mind through some kind of restraining layer into the conscious levels. He didn't remember thinking anything that might have brought it on—his mind was strictly on Ciel. Maybe that was how it came through, with the attention of his conscious mind directed elsewhere.
With the hunch he heard Ciel's voice again, heard it very clearly, saying: "I'm sure we can find a quiet place. Out on the terrace or something." And with that other things started to fall into place.
As he thought, and as the possibilities of his hunch fanned out to embrace other possibilities he became suddenly cold and sick inside. He fought the feeling. "Got to go through with it," he muttered to himself. "Got to."