Gwenaëlle has leaned one arm, similarly, underneath herself (on top of him), and her other hand rests lightly on his elbow, her cheek against his bare skin as she settles to listen, to let him work through it if not perfectly in his own time then not outright rushed, now that he's sketching the picture of it for her. Eugene, Beverly, Donna, Victor. The origin, she supposes as well, of some skills and knowledge that must have been proving more useful to him in Thedas than in New York—
Nothing he had missed about living that life. It catches her ear, the disdain — she thinks about how much he sounds like Stark, often, who had certainly not come from a life like that, about his fastidiousness and his appreciation of fine things. Crass new money, he had said, unabashed about it. How extremely willing he'd been to let her dress him up like a handsome doll when they'd barely known each other, shrugging into the finest version of himself available to him here,
yes. It isn't familiar, exactly, but she thinks wryly that he's not far wrong, you know everything that matters. He isn't telling her things that change him. He is a man she understands.
It also isn't the only part of what he says that catches her, tracing circles on his arm with her thumb. We were, when he was a part of them. Fair. But it's a telling past tense, she thinks, when nothing about his framing suggests that they had shed that life the way he has, and after a moment,
“What happened to them?”
Maybe she's wrong. Maybe he'll say, my sister married some hick and my brother became one, or I could have introduced you in New York but they wouldn't have been real or—
no subject
Nothing he had missed about living that life. It catches her ear, the disdain — she thinks about how much he sounds like Stark, often, who had certainly not come from a life like that, about his fastidiousness and his appreciation of fine things. Crass new money, he had said, unabashed about it. How extremely willing he'd been to let her dress him up like a handsome doll when they'd barely known each other, shrugging into the finest version of himself available to him here,
yes. It isn't familiar, exactly, but she thinks wryly that he's not far wrong, you know everything that matters. He isn't telling her things that change him. He is a man she understands.
It also isn't the only part of what he says that catches her, tracing circles on his arm with her thumb. We were, when he was a part of them. Fair. But it's a telling past tense, she thinks, when nothing about his framing suggests that they had shed that life the way he has, and after a moment,
“What happened to them?”
Maybe she's wrong. Maybe he'll say, my sister married some hick and my brother became one, or I could have introduced you in New York but they wouldn't have been real or—