"P-Please don't peek," she asks, unaware that Kiri and his mother were only kidding (he is too much of a gentleman to do such a thing).
She forces herself to be polite because he is, after all, the savior of the world, and if he should demand something as insignificant as a peek at her while she showers or…other things…well then who is she to deny him?
"I won't," he tells her, and El heaves a sigh of relief, though she knows she's out of the woods yet.
But he stays true to his word and the curtain stays closed, and she finds that her worry was all for naught.
"Why'd you ask so nicely?" he inquires later, when they are alone again, and she turns to him in surprise.
"What?"
"When you said 'please don't peek,' why'd you ask so nicely? You could have just ordered me not to, y'know." And she bites her lip and debates whether or not to tell him the truth.
But she does (honesty is the basis of a good relationship, after all, and if she's going to be stuck with him they might as well get along), and when she's finished, she can't look at him, shame-faced and embarrassed for her logic that now sounds so stupid.
"Do you really think that way about me?" he asks and the cold, hard edge to his voice is hard to miss. "That I would take advantage of the end of the world?"
But she doesn't know what to say, or what to think, really, because she's only just met him, so she says nothing. And they fall into an uncomfortable silence—the first of many—because he can't get up and stalk off angrily and she can't crawl into a ditch and hide, waiting for death.
And she wishes she could take it all back and tell him what a nice boy he really is, and how she knows he wouldn't and has known from the beginning that he would never, and that she's sorry for insulting him like that.
And she's damning her etiquette for getting her into this mess at all.