It was getting easier. If you call the way it felt to be aware, pins and needles under the skin, easy. It was loud and maybe it was getting easier because Julia had forgotten what it was like to be quiet outside the dark cool of the basement. It was like getting adjusted to a cramped apartment where the pipes dripped down the walls: you got used to it because that was what you got, simple. She'd adjusted before.
You adjusted to wealth, if you let it sink in. She'd given it a couple of years before it had turned, now she noticed all the fingerprints of a black Amex over their life. Flowers, cashmere, the way the car purred.
She shed the skin on contact with Repose. Cashmere coat folded into quarters, the slim spike heels tossed into the corner of the trailer. Nick was tolerant, so long as when she came back she was furled up again, like one of the white tulips they brought in by the arm-load, to sit on the hall table under a mirror that probably cost more than the house back in Jersey. It took remembering, that worth wasn't a price-tag. She'd forgotten a little while. She remembered now.
Julia was in sunshine-colored sneakers grass-stained at the toes and the kind of denim you wore and wore until it wore old and thin and comfortable like skin, black shirt under plaid, cuffs that fell to fingertips and hid, under thrift-store black coat and tangled-blond hair. She stopped into the antique store because of a tea-cup in the window. Whimsy, there hadn't been a lot of room for whimsy and she stopped because the pattern of blossom on brittle-thin china looked like it could fit in the trailer, a collection of things that belonged now.
She stopped in and in the absence of an obvious vendor - hey, I want the tea-cup in the window - wandered. Little less boho but once upon a time she'd been wild. Julia's smile for the woman in front of the bird-house was old mischief, taken out from a pocket where it had been folded long enough to make the creases like knives.
"You a bird person now?" Jersey. Less thick, more modulated. That was Nick, dampening where she'd come from but Julia leaned in to home-comfort now. She dug her fingers into her pockets until the jacket swallowed her wrists and she'd forgotten the tea-cup.