It isn't unexpected, but Elvis feels his stomach drop upon hearing it anyway, and he looks at her as if trying to make it untrue through force of will alone. Maybe he's misunderstood. He tends to do that with her, and anyway, he doesn't know what the hell message she's talking about. Her face gives it away, though, and the quiet sound of her voice, and before he can even stop to consider it, Elvis is sitting up to pull her to him, an arm wrapped around her slender frame, its fragility deceptive. Whatever she was going to do, she's anything but fragile.

(He closes his eyes, for no more than a second, and sees his mother's body floating down the river; then her dark hair turns golden and he knows without needing to see her face that it's Anabelle. It only makes him hold her a little closer, as if proximity alone could be enough to keep her from trying again.)

"Shit," he says through his teeth, under his breath, shaking his head all but imperceptibly before he draws back to catch her gaze again, hand going to her jaw, thumb brushing against her cheekbone, in a way that's utterly incongruous with the almost pleading intensity still in his eyes. He wants to get angry, to ask her what the hell she was thinking, why she would go and consider a thing like that, but given what he's so recently told her, what's more than apparent just to look at him, it isn't really his place to. He's not that much of a hypocrite. Besides, though he knows he can't really blame himself for it any more than he can blame her for what he so nearly did, he's unable to help feeling somewhat responsible for it anyway. If he'd been there, it wouldn't have come to that. Now, he has no intention of letting it to do again. "Just — don't, okay? You do have someplace. I'm here now, and you're here, and... I don't know what message you're talkin' about, but if it saved your life, then I'm glad for it."