[This time Gai does kiss her back, not with raging passion but with considerably more desire than his last kiss. He's slowly getting there; a little more like this and he'll be ready to go again. Just this quiet intimacy is going a long way towards that goal, too.]

That's a pretty romantic image. [And he smiles.] Where I come from, we have a legend about destined lovers being connected by a red string. It's said that the gods tie the string to the little fingers of two people who are destined to meet so that they'll be sure to find each other some day. The thread can tangle or stretch, but it will never break.

Maybe there wasn't any coincidence to it after all.