Bret did notice, but he tried hard to shrug it off and keep pretending everything was peachy keen. To be honest, he didn't have a lot of experience with real conflict - petty things that he could shrug off without any thought at all and the organized rallying-against of certain political movements, but he didn't have any experience with really strong personal conflict. He supposed he was lucky that way that he'd always just been okay with going with the flow of things. People were going to have their reasons to dislike him and it had never threatened him before.
But he wasn't going to think like that. He wasn't going to start thinking the worst of the situation even when, more than anything else, he really wanted to just reach over and grab Tommy's hand under the table. He settled for shifting a little and pressing the side of his leg against the side of Tommy's leg, plastering on that smile again.
"Cool," he said. "I didn't figure they'd be doing business directly with you or anything like that - like you said, that's not really where you're going to make your money. But I figured I'd make the offer since it couldn't hurt." Actually, it was more like a guarantee that Bret wasn't going to do anything stupid like rat out Marc and his operation. If he involved himself in it directly, knowingly, then he had to be perfectly aware of how much he stood to lose should the whole situation go down somehow. There was no way he could let the secret slip now unless he wanted to take himself down with it. And as much as secondary motives were often better kept secret, he hoped that they would see this one and understand that he was trying to give them a promise - better than a promise - because words could lie but this... this was what it was, no denying that.