[ Bastien’s little smile returns, in acknowledgment.
It’s odd, not to know what to say. He usually knows a thing to say, at least, if not the right thing. A thing that can safely deliver everyone to the conversation’s shore. But he feels a fragility, too—with Alexandrie, not with Byerly. He thinks he might hurt her if he offers outright to tidy up behind her, as if he is the expert and she’s incapable of handling it herself; he thinks she might hurt him if she asks him to, like a tool she can extend to tend to Byerly from a distance.
So he’s left silent for longer than he’d like. Still, because he hasn’t unintentionally fidgeted in twenty years.
Then, tentatively, because it feels like it could go just as wrong—and because it is digging a finger into his own bruise to talk like a supportive friend who will soon disappear for ten chapters and reappear to say congratulations at the wedding— ]
You know, he never—we do not sit around talking about you. Especially now. But before, for as long as I have known him, he has never had an unkind word for you. Nervous words and confused words, and— [ she knows, or he wouldn’t say ] —he really does not care for your husband. But never anything hard and petty. There has always been tenderness at the heart of it.
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It’s odd, not to know what to say. He usually knows a thing to say, at least, if not the right thing. A thing that can safely deliver everyone to the conversation’s shore. But he feels a fragility, too—with Alexandrie, not with Byerly. He thinks he might hurt her if he offers outright to tidy up behind her, as if he is the expert and she’s incapable of handling it herself; he thinks she might hurt him if she asks him to, like a tool she can extend to tend to Byerly from a distance.
So he’s left silent for longer than he’d like. Still, because he hasn’t unintentionally fidgeted in twenty years.
Then, tentatively, because it feels like it could go just as wrong—and because it is digging a finger into his own bruise to talk like a supportive friend who will soon disappear for ten chapters and reappear to say congratulations at the wedding— ]
You know, he never—we do not sit around talking about you. Especially now. But before, for as long as I have known him, he has never had an unkind word for you. Nervous words and confused words, and— [ she knows, or he wouldn’t say ] —he really does not care for your husband. But never anything hard and petty. There has always been tenderness at the heart of it.