Re: [Secondhand books: Hannah & Aleksi]
Hannah wasn't sure if Amy had been polite. She knew Amy had been raised to be polite, and she knew how to move in upper-class society, Hannah, but she did it with the whimsical entitlement of someone born to privilege, and she knew her brothers didn't move in the same way. She wasn't sure how much of her oddity was her and them, and she wasn't sure how much was her marriage and the life she'd lived before she'd died. Galas and outings and laughing on cue, and she did those things now, too. It was hard for her to extract Amy from Hannah, and it was harder and harder still these days.
But he was smiling and saying something to drink sounded nice, and she rocked a little onto her toes in a way a crone would not. "Alice," she said fondly when he said he'd been looking, and she glanced toward the soldiers in the form of spines as they lined up on the shelf to prepare for literary battle. "I remember it from when I was this big," she said, and she brought a hand up to about the level of her belly, and then she glanced at the book beneath his arm. "Oh! I've wanted to read that. Is it really hard?" Older books were harder books, but she'd heard about the book telling the tale of the reanimated monster, and it tugged, tugged, tugged at something within her. "I think it sounds really sad. I haven't read it, but I feel really broken for the creature in it," she admitted openly, and Hannah wasn't the type to hide things she felt, not at all.
She nodded her head when he agreed he felt the tether-tie-tight, and strawberry blonde tumbled loose over one shoulder with the movement. She looked as he looked, her own cock of head to shoulder birdlike and curious, not precisely all human woman in a bookstore, and then she straightened and motioned toward the little tables. Step, step, small steps so he wouldn't be left behind. "You don't feel like a stranger either," she admitted, fingers dancing careless pirouettes around the chair's back. "I've been to lots of town strangeness. Parties and dances and dreams, and this feels different to me," she admitted, again, without thinking of not saying the words aloud, and she lifted her head a little to motion with her chin to the counter. "I'll go get us things, if you want to sit? What do you like?"