Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
Hannah hadn't ever considered moral compasses, not really. She knew what she believed too bad to be good, and she knew what she believed good enough to be not bad. She'd known, even before coming to this tiny town, that there was the kind of bad in the world that was rotting around the edges and unable to be purified, but she hadn't realized there were little bits of that kind of bad in everyone. She'd learned that now, that even the people she really liked had kernels of rot inside them, and that morality was maybe deciding which kernels of putrid were okay to her. She now knew, too, that the answer was different for everyone, and that everyone had different things they could tolerate, and this was all an uphill climb on a mislabeled learning curve.
She didn't know what made him tick yet. Tick, tock, even though he wasn't crafted from gold now. She watched his fingers on the cup, and she took his humanity for granted. She wasn't like Reece; she couldn't see inside people like they were wonderful geared things with secrets beneath their skin. Jude, to her and here, was just a boy with fingers on a teacup and a nice voice that went well with his mass of curls. "I know about the antique store. I've never been there, but I looked up all kinds of things about the town when I first got here. It's not anything like any of the places I grew up. There isn't one skyscraper to be seen, and I can't smell the sea air when I inhale in the mornings, so I read things." She leaned forward like a teller of secrets, and her voice went quiet like whispers. "They say on the internet that the store might be haunted, and that the owner has a dark and mysterious past." Her eyes twinkled with merriment at that retelling, and she sat back again and summoned her own teacup with her fingers.
She ensured there was tea in the little cup, and then she took a sip and closed her eyes. Her processors were made to interpret components in things consumed, and she had a fully functioning digestive system. The tea was sweet and spiced and foreign, and she opened her eyes and smiled. "This is really nice," she said honestly, and then she turned her thoughts to names as she put the cup down. "Hannah is my grandmother." Hannah was not her grandmother. Hannah was a dead girl's grandmother, but it wasn't a lie, not to her way of thinking. That dead girl's grave, it said Amy Hannah, and Hannah had kept the middle name and lost the first and last. "Do you think it's a palindrome on purpose? I think it's biblical, and I don't think biblical names sound like they'd be complicated enough to deliberately be palindromes." She did try to think of boy names that fit the description, think and think, and she shook her head and lifted her shoulders and came up with nothing at all.
He laughed, and her echo was tinkling bells and mirth that made her belly jiggle. "I think people will run out of here in droves and say you're marrying an unknown girl, and we'll give them gossip for days and days as they eat turkey and light their Christmas trees."