Reizo stared back at her, head tilted to one side, straw drawn out of the drink’s container now, jutting out of a corner of his mouth while he gnawed at it and considered her. Both eyebrows lifted in surprise when she backed down and slumped into the couch,, and he frowned gently around his straw when told she wasn’t anything like him. Who’d ever expected her to be? He was brought up to be a leader of a bunch of hard-assed criminals, and she’d been brought up as an object. At least with his there was a hope that he could do his own thing when the time came around.
“Of course you’re not like me,” he said, angling his head down and his drink up to work the straw back into it as he spoke, “you don’t have any family pride to consider. I’ve always known what I was, and what I was going to be, or at least I have since the day I got this beauty mark. I resented my choice being made for me, but it’s my family and I could never turn my back on them. I don’t hate it. I just wish I had a little more time for me.”
He stretched, poorly stifling a yawn, and when his arms came back down one was draped across the back of her shoulders.
“But right now, maybe we can work in some time for us?”
It was only a little surprising how easily he could ooze out of a mildly depressive frown into a vaguely suggestive smirk, and how the distance between them seemed to have closed without much actual movement going on.