"I suppose I can't stop you, but I can ask you, and I'd hope that you would respect my wishes enough not to let protectiveness overrule them," Natasha pointed out, but she was still smiling a little as she said it; no real good to try and talk Carol back down from swinging in to avenge a slight when it was something still imagined. And she was right - the painting was weird, Clint was weird, but it was all the best kind of weird. The kind that aligned with her own weird, the things that would make people stop and blink at her, too. Maybe it was just that one woman's weird was another woman's painfully endearing. She had loved the stupid painting.
Maybe she just loved seeing a Clint who still wanted things, and enjoyed them, and hadn't chosen to set fire to his own life over a series of years and forget everything left in the world that still mattered. It was a tossup, but either way, the painting had made her smile.
She traced little circles in the damp sand with her fingertips, pondering Carol's question. Or Carol's turn of phrase, really, because she wasn't planning to launch into the why. It was a monologue, and at some point, she still wanted to turn the question back around onto the other woman to do a little spilling. "I don't...know if there's a with him, yet," she said, carefully. "This is still new. I'm not looking to lock anything down or for...labels or definitions. Maybe it'll just be the once. I hope not, but I think if I've figured out anything new, it's that we all eventually run out of time, so at least I don't feel like I've left too much off the table anymore."