She sagged back against the console, disappointed. “Sorry. My mistake. Unless I’m just that bad a kisser,” she joked, half-heartedly.
He cocked his head to the side, looking almost amused (damn him!) – or as amused as anyone with those eyebrows could look. “Fishing for compliments now, are we?”
Clara shrugged, crossing her arms over her chest and affecting nonchalance. As if her little gambit hadn’t just failed miserably. As if she wasn’t falling apart and aching with the need to just say the thing that really mattered, for once. “With you, sometimes I have to.”
The Doctor looked at her pensively. “You’re doing something with your face again. That sad smiling thing. You know I hate that. Have one emotion at a time or don’t have them at all, I say.”
A surprised laugh escaped her, then, though there was no humor in it. “That’s not how emotions work. You don’t just pick one and say ‘oh alright, I suppose I’ll wear my annoyed face today. But I could change it for a smile if the weather gets better.’ I can’t always control what my face is doing or how I’m feeling or who I…” She clamped her mouth shut before anything else could escape.
How could she have even expected him to see her the way she wanted to be seen? Not long after the ghost adventure through time, he’d been telling her to get another boyfriend!
See me, he’d said to her once, just see me.
Now that she did, all she wanted was the same courtesy.
See me, Doctor, she thought. Just see me, here in front of you. Wanting you.