Re: [Webster's Vinyl: Holly & Dietre]
Holly could kinda tell Dietre was deflating over there, but he didn't know why. There were a million options, and was he, Holly, worked up? Not really. He was kinda feeling something like inevitability, like of course it had been too good to be true, but none of that showed itself on his face, right? The whole point of cultivating deadpan was to appear cool in the face of crushing emotions. He was even trying to feel, like, calm? As if he could falsify what he was projecting in Noah's general direction. Well, it never hurt to try. "Are you okay?" he asked, because Dietre looked like he might be sick or something, which didn't do anything to allay Holly's nightmarish concerns.
But, right, Gramps.
"It's just what I call him. Um... he was like my dad's uncle." Which worked better, maybe, and he'd never thought about the need to call Daniel something other than Gramps. "I never knew my grandfather, so I called him Gramps." Which, you know, wasn't entirely a lie. But Holly didn't mind lying, so there was that advantage.
He heard Dietre's quiet murmur, and he got that this was, like, two shockers he'd delivered unintentionally. "Yeah, I just got here recently, so maybe that's why," he offered, though he really didn't feel super eager to make Noah's whatever feel better. "I live upstairs," he pointed up. "Not, like, in his apartment, but across the hall." He assumed Dietre knew that Gramps lived upstairs.