"It's better when Varric does it," she admitted quietly. "And I'm not telling him anything." He'd be just as bad as Isabela, even if he didn't breathe a word of it to anyone else.

It was hard to fight the grin that seemed to stay on her face no matter what she did. "By all means," she encouraged loftily, though she really had no intention of dragging out anything that made him uncomfortable. She squeezed his arm to say that much.

Hawke leaned a little into the movement of his lips, her hands working slowly against his upper arms in a light massage of his muscles. It wasn't anything special; she just needed to keep her hands moving somehow. "I'm not sure how to do it otherwise," she confessed. One hand moved around to his back, fingers pressing into the muscle just beneath his shoulder blade. "You do the same. I know you've let go when I can see exactly what you're thinking on your face," she confided quietly into his shoulder.