Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
Hannah was laughing. Not that morality and a person's approach to the world wasn't really important, but maybe it wasn't so very important in the face of good company and good tea. Hannah liked people. She'd been warned not to, but maybe that rule didn't apply to her, because she liked even the bad people. Sometimes, she liked the bad people very much, but she was willing to blame that on her programming, since Amy's husband hadn't been very nice at all and she was supposed to like him a lot.
She wasn't unaware of her prettiness, but it didn't really matter very much to her. She thought other things were more attractive in the people she met, and their faces really didn't impress her like their personalities did. She thought all those black curls were twist and twine and pretty, though. She liked his laugh too. She liked people with good laughs. Not the kind that was quiet and tittering and without commitment, but he had a good laugh, and she smiled sunbeams as he leaned onto his elbow and spun a tale about his friend. "Is he handsome? Mysterious men like that are always really handsome, or they're really ugly. Either one works for the story, and I think the ugly man is probably more interesting."
She turned her teacup in her fingers as it rested on the table. One turn, two turn, three turn, and she considered the woods. "I like the woods too, but not as much as the beach. I like being able to see the sky, and you can't in the woods, not really."
Sip, sip, and her name was a borrowed thing reclaimed by someone new. "I don't think I believe in gods, but isn't the Torah just the Old Testament? Or is it something different?" She couldn't just check databases for an answer. She'd been disconnected for a really long time, and authenticity meant she didn't have access to anything like Wikipedia in her mind. She could have that done, could install something that let her access information for all the things she didn't know, but she found she didn't like that idea at all. She would rather ask questions, and she put her teacup down and awaited his response.
Loudly, she clapped her hands together and glee lit her face like flashbulbs. "I love arranged marriage stories. I've read a bunch now. The old romance novels at the secondhand store are only fifty cents, and they're all about arranged marriages and pirate rogues. I don't think it's wonderful in real life, an arranged marriage, but I wish it was. I hope someone out there is having exactly that kind of wonderful arranged marriage." She sat back and regarded him as seriously as she could, which really wasn't very seriously at all. "I don't know if you could be Rochester or Heathcliff, but maybe Darcy. I bet Darcy had lots of curls."