Re: NYC: Hannah & Hugh
They weren't her children and they were underage, and they didn't feature very much in the news articles. She didn't talk about them much, either. They weren't hers, and they'd never been hers. All those years with Marcus, but living in that house was about protecting oneself, and nowhere was that more obvious than in the children that had lived there. "I think it's okay to not want children," she told him, and that was true, but she still could see him with one or two. Later, later, down the line, when he wasn't working as much and had more time. "I think that once people thought they needed to have children, even if they didn't want them." But it made her think of her parents and five children, and she suspected there would've been more if her mom had lived longer.
"He was in the play, but we didn't really talk," she said of Noah, but she knew the name and the face and the laughter. She didn't know Atticus, but she thought someone who showed Hugh new things was a good thing. And Theodore he'd mentioned before. She thought he was just like the others, just a friend, but the hesitation made her blink, intelligent blue eyes narrowing in a little. "You enjoy talking about what?" she asked curiously and wondering if this was a new romance. She wanted to tell him that it was okay to talk to her about those things, but she didn't say it, not right away, not based on the weight of her assumptions.
She was still ruminating on that when his voice turned serious, and she watched him talk. His mouth moved and moved, and the words came out, but it was his face that made her own face go soft, warm, and she reached across the table and squeezed any fingers she managed to find there. "I know. But you don't need to apologize. You don't. You cared about me as me, and that doesn't happen ever. I could tell from the beginning that you were good and safe, and you are, and you were never bad to me, and I never felt scared or pressured by you." She wasn't lying to him. He had been kind to her in a profession when people just weren't very kind at all, and she knew he wanted good things for her. "I want good things for you too," she told him. Maybe it was a statement without segue, but it was true. "I want really, really good things for you."