Adam chuckled, all too easily envisioning this potential mugging of which Richard spoke. Eager to help, unwilling to appear a simple freeloading or off-puttingly nosy neighbor, he reached into the box, pulling away the excess newsprint. He smiled at its hissing sort of crackle as he balled it up, then searched for an available receptacle for it. As he tossed the slowly unraveling ball into the garbage bin he considered Richard's chosen profession, the ins and outs of which Adam had very little understanding of; it seemed a difficult career, and one which Adam's personality would have almost certainly never have allowed him to pursue. He could not imagine, for instance, going to bat for a company whose aim was to deny a claim; his was a nurturing personality, a caregiver, one who strove to provide whatever aid he could, and then to simply fade into the background again. Disputing claims seemed antithetical to the very fabric of his being.
His mind thus occupied by such rabbit trails, it took Adam a moment to realize the thrust of Richard's question. Once he had, however, the difficult part became formulating an answer that at once addressed the query and did not wholly embarrass its target. An off kilter twitch of a smile crossed his lips, his eyes darting down from Richard's, deep into the box before them. "Ah," he said. Carelessly he reached up, pressing at the paling bruise. "Sometimes I get hit, yeah." He pulled a fist full of cooking utensils, all neatly wrapped, from within the box. "People come to, you know, and they don't know where they are... sometimes they just flail more than we'd like. But this..." He gave a mirthless little laugh. "This was from an old friend. We had a misunderstanding." That word again - James' word, and Adam had gone along with it like any compliant, abused partner. It should have been shameful, and yet Adam felt no shame in it. At last he looked back up to Richard, forcing his shaky smile to grow a bit broader. "I'm sure that makes the best first impression, huh."