Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
You could say you didn't want or need much, Ella knew. You could think you could live off starshine and the warmth from two hearts instead of heating that worked and a roof over your head but it didn't work that way, not even a little bit. You didn't grow out of needing, you grew into it and she put one hand over his, the nails close-cut and clean and patted his hand. "Everyone needs things," she said, real certain that need and want sidled up alongside each other and one became the other.
And then she smacked his arm at that little shrug. "You don't have to be a doctor," okay, maybe he wasn't going to do anything that required a lot of school or anything that meant a lot of certificates on paper, but there was ambition, "But you have to want to do something." Of that she was certain. Bars and cement and nights locked up were unimaginable, surely when you were shut down you looked for ways out. "Sometimes you just got to dream a little bigger than you can afford." Her dreams didn't fit into a box, and hadn't come along for the ride in the storage unit.
"You're a good man." Of that, she was clear. The convict part got a little muddled but Max's advice got lost the further away she got from it and Max didn't know the man who sat on the step and shrugged off dreaming like something he couldn't afford. "You can make a life over there. You've just got to think smart. Make use of all that family you got."