Kori hesitated only a minute before she closed her fingers around the jacket and hesitated a couple more before she slipped her arms into the sleeves, fussing with the collar a little before she turned a smile on Toby. “Punk rock Cinderella,” she joked along with him. “Creative.” And the jacket helped a lot with the chill in the air, even if she felt like she as swimming in leather just a little. It was peculiar to feel calm wash over her when she could connect that it wasn’t from herself. “Thanks,” she told him, for both the reassurance that he wasn’t expecting her to be more than she was, and for the shift in emotions, since she suspected that was his doing.
“I knew you weren’t complaining,” she assured. “It’s not the same, but I know how trying to juggle school and anything else can be hard.” Though, being the youngest of her siblings she didn’t know what it was like to have a younger sibling depend on you. That was something that Leah, Lilah or Brandon could probably relate to better than she could. “I don’t think I would have ever survived med school. One of my friends at school was pre-med, and that seemed bad enough.” Ericka. She hadn’t thought about any of her college friends in at least a couple of years; she didn’t like thinking that some of them probably hadn’t survived this long.
If she didn’t think of them then she could trust that they were still out there somewhere, whether it was the safehouses ran by the government or something else entirely. It was foolishly optimistic, but she thought she was allowed some of that.
Kori held her thumb and forefinger up in the universal sign for ‘just a little’ at his question. “Don’t be sorry, it’s just part of you.” She didn’t mind listening either. She actually thought that Toby was a lot smarter than she was, not that she was unintelligent, but it took a lot of intelligence to do what he did, to know what to say to a client in any given situation. “So what you’re saying is all those really confident people that act like they don’t give a crap, they’re actually just as insecure as anyone else?” It was interesting to think that people had more common ground than they thought.
“Toby Brooks, that is a dangerous, dangerous offer,” she warned lightly, no even a shred of seriousness in her words. “You’ll become my own personal complaint victim, and even up regretting the offer, I’m sure.” Exaggeration. Even her serious complaints were usually short and short-lived. “But thank you, It’s nice to know I have more than just Rae to bend an ear on.” The fire conversation seemed to have reached an end point, so she let it die with his last statement, in part because she also didn’t know what to say to help him. Fears were a strong thing, and it wasn’t fair to tell someone to get over theirs.
Pulling the leather of his jacket in a little tighter, she quirked her mouth into a smile in return. “It’s really not a big deal. It’s what friends do,” she replied before she caught Emma and Elisa winding their way back over.
“Hi ladies,” she greeted the two of them once they’d reached the adults. “Have you been having fun?”