[bookshop: ren & elijah]
Ren hovered for a moment on the balls of his feet as if he might step out from behind the counter to help Elijah with the books, but then it seemed as if the other man got things sorted out, and the sense was that he didn't need, or maybe didn't want help. Honestly, that was fine with Ren. For as much as he half-wanted the distraction, he was also finding himself more worn out than usual by the typical sort of social activity that he engaged in.
"Sure," he offered, and reached for his own cup of coffee again. Repose had weird people sometimes. He knew this, and he'd more or less accepted it as much as he'd also come to expect more normalcy than not in his encounters at the coffee shop, but this probably wasn't going to turn out to be one of those. There was a shrug and he took a sip of the coffee, finding himself vaguely lost in his own thoughts again, for better or for worse. And there were a lot to those thoughts too.
It would have been nice, well, comparatively speaking, if the break-up had just been a break-up, but instead it felt as if it had pushed a whole bunch of things to the surface, that he hadn't really expected and so he was left running through thoughts that only tangentially even related to relationships at all. Mid-way through a series of considerations of what a life without any serious relationships might look like, he glanced back up to check on his visitor. He didn't want to ignore him, but he didn't want to hover either. Ren didn't like hovering when he was in moods, and the best take he could get was that this guy didn't want hovering either.