Re: [restaurant; ren & hannah]
The heartbeat's blink was noticed, because Hannah noticed things. She was intense in her attention when she was with someone she cared about, and she cared here. She wanted to know him, and she was voracious about it, and so she noticed the way his eyes looked in that moment of vulnerability. She understood secrets too. She understood secrets better than most people, and she understood carrying secrets that became heavier and heavier with each step of living. She understood. She wasn't afraid of the real him, whatever it was, but she was pretty sure no one would ever accept all of the real her. Maybe they'd accept her in pieces, but not as a whole.
"Right. Facts not truths." The transition, after that moment of silence across the table, was an easy one for Hannah. A blink, a circle of her finger around the edge of the wine glass to make it sing, and then a bite of food that made her close her eyes in pleasure at the taste. "The truth may belie the facts sometimes, but facts always have to support the truth," she echoed, thinking about the words as they sat on her tongue. "Sometimes the facts can make you look in the wrong direction, though. 'Look here! Look here,' they say, and so people turn their heads and you can hide the truths longer." She knew it was a telling little bit of information, but she felt comfortable there, with him. "Like you tell me all about theater, and I ask about that and not about the things you don't talk about much, like your family or your lovers."
"Well," she said, liking his smirk very much and smiling brightly in testament, "then I think whoever you submitted scripts to was really not smart." She liked imagining him jumping into cold water to impress a boy; it was a telling little story, a cracked open door and a peek through a mostly-curtained window. "Did the boy decide you mattered? Oh! And who was the relative?" And then she thought about her own things. Thoughtful, thoughtful, and she took another forkful before she spoke again. "When I first moved to New York, I made a pact with myself that I was going to step on every crack on every sidewalk every day. On my first day of work here, planted a tiny tree outside my window. Last week, I sneaked into one of the big mansions by the lake, one of the abandoned ones, and I wandered inside for hours." She sat back, and she took a sip of her wine.