This paper addresses embodiment and emotion in early educational contexts, even as they are currently being screened out as too risky to acknowledge and are only allowed in as emotional literacy or resilience, both responsibilising and individualising moves that abstract from classrooms and relationships. I take as the analytic focus two accounts of fleeting events, offering consecutive readings across theoretical frames including materialist and psychoanalytic perspectives -spanning school, university and tutorial contexts. The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships between affect (emotion, feeling) and effect (outcome, result), between teaching and learning, between incidental moment and primary task. Conceptualisation of what is understood as between is seen as vital in two senses: first, in the sense of bringing into being, that is, involving notions of agentic activity (albeit without necessarily implying singular agency or intentionality), as well as, secondly, the colloquial sense of being important. In linking these two vitalities, questions of relationship come to the fore in co-producing and constituting educational environments