First Reply The End of a New Beginning

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

Isildor strolled the interior of Truce to glances and whispers. Membership was by invitation, invitations were by reputation, and reputation was the one currency the Hapan always has in excess.

He came through the private lift still wearing the gloves.

Not tactical ones, just thin black leather, the kind that looked like an affectation until you noticed how deliberately he hadn't taken them off yet. A small tell, if anyone here were the type to notice small tells. Most weren't. The ones who were knew better than to say so out loud.

The job was done. Clean, quiet. He hadn't stopped moving since. The lift ride up, the walk through the atrium, the particular restlessness of a body that had spent the last several hours being very still and very precise and now had nowhere to put all that leftover current; none of it showed on his face. It showed, if you knew where to look, in the way his eyes kept finding the exits in a room of glut and excess.

The disgraced prince went straight to the bar and set both palms flat on the polished marmer like he meant to hold it down.

"Whatever's pouring," he told the bartender, "for everyone. My tab." A beat, a grin that arrived a half-second after the words did, like it had to catch up.

A murmur went through the room, the good kind, the kind money and mystery bought in equal measure at a place like this. Nobody at Truce asked questions they didn't already know the polite way to avoid answering, and Isildor Laskaris buying a round with that particular glint in his eye was, by now, a known quantity to the regulars. Something had happened. Something usually did, around him. Nobody needed the details to enjoy the drinks.

He finally peeled the gloves off one finger at a time, unhurried now, folding them and tucking them into a jacket pocket. The wired feeling hadn't left him. It just had somewhere better to go now; into the noise of the room, the clink of glasses, the low hum of a hundred conversations that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with why he'd come here instead of anywhere quieter.

He raised his own glass to no one in particular and everyone at once.

"To the ones who don't have to worry about tomorrow," he said, "and the rest of us, who apparently do."

Open​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

This wasn't the typical hot spot on Nar Shaddaa, in fact this was quite possibly one of the only places she could think of, across the stars even, that Amara felt she could just exist as she was. All of the quirks and flaws that made her who she was still lingered there, somewhere just under the surface, but it felt like time stood still here. The clientele was quite a bit more exclusive, a consequence of being an invited one, and everyone knew not what questions weren't meant to be asked and what answers weren't meant to be given. Here she was just another woman, a more demure, perhaps muted, shade of the more social butterfly she could be once she stepped out of the door. Her clothes were just as quiet as she was tonight, an uninviting black turtleneck and pants that hid everything except her hands and face. Even her hair was purposefully done to minimize the attention she got, hours of careful curling and a not insignificant amount of hairspray and gel giving it the signature tousled bed-head look.

She had hardly paid any attention to the man strolling up to the bar, her thoughts floating light years away in a sea of alcohol that she'd been drinking for the last several hours. This was later than she'd usually been, normally the sort to show up when the crowd was quite a bit more sparse and significantly less loud, but she didn't hate the change in atmosphere as the day had dragged on, either. It wasn't until she noticed a small trickle of the whiskey she'd been sipping splash out of her glass and onto her hand that her focus was pulled back from the depths of space. "Huh?" She questioned, her voice hardly even a whisper, as her eyes - the only bright thing about her tonight - searched for the reason why the glass she had her hand resting next to was suddenly filled back up. She got her answer hardly a moment later upon realizing that the shadow cast over her was from Isildor Laskaris - the man who'd evidently paid for a round of drinks for the whole place.

She shot the bartender a look, confused, and was given a dismissive shrug in return.

Then came the bravado, or whatever it was when someone made a little speech for cheers after buying the entire place a round of drinks. The part of her that normally would have ignored him, or maybe rolled her eyes, was about as inebriated as could get, however, so she just raised her glass absentmindedly to him as her eyes worked him over. He seemed familiar, not in the sense that she thought that she might know him but rather that he carried himself like, and even looked the part of, the sorts of men that ran in the same circles as her father - in fact he almost reminded her of her brother, what with the dangerous pretty-boy vibes she got from him. 'Maybe handsome is a better word?' She thought as she lifted the drink to her lips and sucked it down. He definitely looked like he was a little more rugged than polished, at least through her hazily drunk judging gaze, but not quite as poorly groomed as some of the other ilk that filtered onto Nar Shaddaa. At some point she must've positioned the glass back on the bar in such a way that the bartender had taken it upon himself to fill her glass again because she felt the familiar cool splash of alcohol on her fingertips several moments later. She blinked, the slight sting at the inside corners of her eyes telling her she'd been staring.

"Shouldn't worry about what you can't control."

She seemed rather surprised to hear her own voice, almost as if she'd just vomited the words and hadn't remembered it happening. "You're cut off." She heard from behind her, although she didn't quite care - the whiskey wasn't strong enough anyway. Sometime between downing the previous drink and the last she had turned around to rest her back against the bar, elbows resting against its ledge, as if to acknowledge the stranger as much with body language as with words. "That'll only make it worse." Amara said, with a nod in the direction of the man behind the bar handling the glass he'd just confiscated from her. Sure she was clearly one step away from too far gone herself, but she also seemed to be sobering up rather visibly at the same time almost from the moment she'd finished her drink.

"Just so happens there's an empty seat right here, if you'd like to make things better."

She turned back around, hunched forwards slightly, and stared into her manicured hands with seeming disinterest. "Or worse, if that's what you're after."

 

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

The toast landed the way most of his did; a ripple of raised glasses, a few laughs that had nothing to do with him anymore, the room folding back into its own business within a breath. That was the trick of a place like Truce. Nobody held onto a moment longer than it was useful.

Nobody except, apparently, her.

He'd caught it mid-toast — one gaze that hadn't drifted back to its own conversation the way the rest had, hadn't done the polite half-second of acknowledgment and moved on. It just stayed. Isildor had spent enough of his life being looked at by women who mattered to know the difference between being seen and being appraised, and this was closer to the second. He didn't know why that made him cross the room instead of letting it go. Old habits rarely announced their reasons.

Reading a room full of women was not a skill anyone had sat him down and taught him. It just came instinctual to a boy raised in a house where the wrong glance from the wrong matriarch could end a life before it started. You learned to catalogue hands before faces, posture before words, because those were the parts nobody thought to perform. Hapes had failed to make him presentable, yet it had never once failed to make him watchful.

The short glance he repaid her in didn't resolve into anything he could name. No verdict, just data collecting itself whether he asked it to or not. The turtleneck doing its best impression of nobody. The hair that had clearly cost someone real time to look like it had cost no time at all. Contradiction dressed as invisibility. It was, if he was honest, a more interesting costume than half the ones in the room actually trying.

He'd already signaled the bartender before he'd finished crossing to her — habit, or maybe just an excuse to have a reason for the shadow he was about to cast.

"Shouldn't worry about what you can't control."

"Bold advice," Isildor said, "from someone who just got cut off."

He didn't wait for an invitation twice. The empty seat took him easily enough, angled just close enough to count as an answer to making things better.

"Worse tends to find me regardless," he said. "Figured I'd at least enjoy the company on the way there."

Amara Zambrano​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

If she had caught the appraising look he'd responded to her own with then she didn't show it, either it went unnoticed or she simply ignored it. Having eyes on her was part of the reason she'd sculpted the look she had now, so perhaps it was just noise to her at this point. A good deal of her interest had simply been in the way his attitude, or maybe his posture, and choice of clothing teased at something a little less refined for someone quite so put together. The slight dimming of the overhanging lights suggested he had taken her up on her offer, something his voice confirmed moments later, and she found herself chuckling while the bartender refilled the man's glass.

She was still a few years away from wrinkles but the way her cheeks pushed up against the sides of her eyes she could just tell they weren't quite so far away. It was a smile, if a small one, but in the way it just barely touched her eyes it was clear that it was genuine. A joke at her expense, something she wasn't quite used to taking; and something a little more comforting than the oft-empty glass had ever been followed. She glanced over towards him, the smile fading into something that was a little more obscure - searching, perhaps? - as bronze eyes swept over his features now that they were closer and clearer to her than before. "Usually waiting at the bottom of a bottle for me." She said, her words drawn a little slower and would've bordered on softer if her voice hadn't been quite so textured. Introspection didn't serve her quite as well as it probably should have, though, so she didn't elaborate and instead nodded at him.

"Amara, by the way."

It was a rather lame introduction but it seemed, at least to her, fitting given the circumstances. "Unless you'd rather company go unnamed." She added with a shrug. Some people she'd ran into were like that, usually with half a dozen different reasons they felt they needed things to stay so mysterious. Her eyes meandered away for a moment towards the bartender serving another guest, and she whistled for his attention. He glared at her. "I know his daughter." Amara noted quietly, as if that explained her cavalier attitude towards him, as the man made his way back over. "Whatever he wants, on me." She said, presenting Isildor Laskaris a searching look. "If he knew any better it would be walking in the opposite direction." The bartender grumbled under his breath, which earned him a glare of his own. "So.. what's got you so down?" She asked, as if the momentary distraction hadn't ever happened.

 

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

The lights had dimmed by the time he settled into the seat — one boot hooked loosely around the rung, an arm draped along the back of it like he'd already decided this was going to take a while. Isildor didn't flatter himself into believing the lighting was for his benefit. Mostly. He turned his glass a slow quarter-inch on the bar without lifting it, more habit than thirst.

"Amara, by the way."

"Isildor." He let it sit there without decoration, which was, for him, its own kind of tell. No surnames, no deflection, no offered hand, no practiced charm behind it, just his eyes staying on hers a beat longer than the introduction strictly required.

It was only when she turned that searching look on him properly, closer now, unobstructed, that he felt it. His hand went still on the glass. Not seen, exactly. Not read, the way he read rooms out of old habit and older necessity. Something underneath that, wordless and unasked-for — a pressure, faint and specific, like standing too near a live wire without touching it. He covered the half-second of stillness by finally taking the drink, unhurried, eyes never quite leaving her over the rim of it. He had no name for what it meant on her. He wasn't sure he wanted one yet.

She whistled the bartender over without looking at him and he watched him fold like wet paper. Isildor let one corner of his mouth curl, leaning back just enough to watch the exchange play out like a man enjoying a show he hadn't paid for. Whatever he wants, on me. He filed that away with more interest than he probably should have. A woman who could bend a man twice her size with four words and a name-drop. He was aware, distantly, of the slow shift in his own posture toward her — weight coming forward off the seatback, elbow finding the bar — and found that considerably more attractive than he had any right to, this early, this sober.

"So.. what's got you so down?"

Down implies I started somewhere higher. The joke was already halfway to his mouth before something older got there first; a hall full of women in formal black, himself at sixteen, standing very still while his mother's peers inspected him the way buyers took inventory of cargo. His jaw tightened, almost nothing, gone before it could be called an expression. He rolled his shoulder instead, loosening it like a man shaking off a stretch rather than a memory, and let the grin do the rest of the work.

"Down's a strong word," he said instead, aloud, turning fully toward her now, one arm braced on the bar between them, closing the distance without quite closing it. He meant it as a deflection even as some part of him noted, with interest, that she'd have clocked the deflection immediately. "I'll trade you an answer. For one of your own."

Amara Zambrano​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

She nodded, then flinched at the sound of a full glass tapping against the counter so close to her arm. Water. She wasn't drunk, at least not anymore, and whether that was because she'd hardly been buzzed before or some quirk of her physicality remained to be seen, but the look she gave to the tall glass suggested it might've offended her. "If by one of mine you mean problems.. I'm not sure I'd know where to start to be honest." Amara said, her voice smoothing out and its rasp fading slightly. For a moment she seemed to think a bit on it, her left hand going for the glass but not to drink it - the tip of her index finger tracing the wet rim with an almost child-like daze. "At the beginning makes sense though, doesn't it?" She asked, though it was probably rhetorical.

Her eyes glanced back over to him, not quite out of interest this time and the way she turned her gaze towards his shoes it was clear there was something she was actually looking for. "You look like the type, I guess. Guy like you, someone who knows how to dress and has to for your.. work.. you probably have more shoes than those, right? Maybe a pair you prefer over the others. Or a jacket, I guess, given someone with the money to blow on shoes probably isn't going to entertain someone like me." It wasn't about the clothes, though she was making a strange point that currently didn't seem to be going anywhere.

"But let's say, for arguments sake, the first pair you've bought, or made, if you're into that sort of thing - but let's say the first pair get ruined, or maybe not quite ruined but you can't wear them for whatever reason. Maybe there's something wrong with the sole, or the laces even, but instead of fixing whatever it is that's making it hard to wear you just kind of.. buy another pair."

Okay, maybe she was drunk. Even the bartender was giving her an odd look, though he shuffled off to tend to another guest to leave them be the moment it was clear that this was going to be awkwardly personal. For her part Amara didn't seem quite so spirited now as she did maybe even five minutes ago, and she certainly seemed to be staring a hole through the glass that her finger was steadily tracing faster and faster. The tone of her voice took on something of a wistful note, maybe even nostalgic, but not the sort of thing you had remembering something from the past quite so much as it were recalling something you might remember wanting in the past.

"But still the shoes are yours, right? You aren't just going to.. throw them away, so you put them away, not quite in your closet - they're ruined after all.. so you buy a second house. You put them there." She paused; swallowed. Her eyelids were a bit heavier now, pupils drifting steadily down. Her shoulders dipped a little, like she was pulling all of herself in. "Then you forget about them.. for twenty years." Her tone, then, sounded oddly.. amused? Bittersweet, perhaps, but it was like she found the idea funny, the sort of amusement you had watching a child do something silly so you just had to laugh along because it was just something you did.

She glanced over to him, unsure if she wanted to - or even how to - explain how this strange metaphor applied to her. "Then one day, after your new shoes finally get worn out, you find your old pair waiting for you at home. They fixed themselves, but they don't hold it against you - they're just shoes - but maybe you ought to own up to twenty years of neglect, y'know? Just.. you don't. It's like twenty - thirty? - years never happened, or at least you act like it."

She sighs.

"Parents, right?" She said with a sagging smile. "I'm shoes, in case that wasn't glaringly obvious." Another pause that lasted for about as long as she could hold her breath. "So, hot stuff, I've shown you mine, what's yours?" The shift in tone back to her usual self might've been jarring to some but it was obvious she was armed with a shovel and ready to dig up for whatever it was that was bothering Isildor Laskaris . Internally she was still just Amara for the night, nothing more, and her toxic trait for the night was thinking she could be nice for as long as that lasted. "Promise I'll be a good girl and listen."

 

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

She was three sentences into shoes before he stopped tracking the words and started tracking her. His elbow found the bar, weight shifting forward off the seatback he'd been sprawled against a minute earlier, glass held loosely and forgotten somewhere around his knee.

It was easier that way. The metaphor didn't need him — she was clearly going to finish it whether or not anyone kept up — but the tells underneath it were the actual story. Her index finger kept time against the rim of the glass, slow at first, then faster as the shoes got older. Her voice smoothed out the longer she talked, rasp sanding down into something almost soft, until the word twenty came out of her like she'd practiced saying it in a mirror and never quite gotten it to sound casual. And her eyes — heavy now, pupils sinking — did the thing eyes did right before someone decided they'd said too much and reached for the nearest joke to drag themselves back.

He watched her find that joke. I'm shoes, in case that wasn't glaringly obvious. Watched her shoulders come back up half a second after the rest of her had already sagged, the recovery just slightly too quick to be anything but rehearsed. One corner of his mouth moved, small, more acknowledgment than amusement, and he finally let himself take the drink he'd been holding hostage, eyes staying on her over the rim the whole time.

"Careful," he said, setting the glass down and leaning into the space between them like the words needed the distance closed to land properly. "Calling others hot stuff's usually my job."

That got him nowhere close to the last word, not with her already leaning in for his end of the bargain. He let her have the silence for a beat, chin dipping, voice dropping to match it. "A good girl who listens," he said it low, considering it, weight settling further onto the elbow braced against the bar, close enough now that the space between them had stopped being incidental. "We'll see how long that lasts."

His posture didn't change so much as still after — the easy sprawl folding into something more composed, more contained, shoulders squaring the way they might have at a hundred formal functions he'd rather not remember standing through. His shoes took a different shape; a mother who'd looked at him the way a control freak looks at a plan that stopped going according to itself, who'd found increasingly creative places to put him where he couldn't embarrass anyone by being seen. Dangerous places, usually. The kind you don't send someone you intend on getting back. He'd come home anyway, every time, which he understood was its own kind of insult.

"Different closet," he said, turning the glass a slow quarter-turn without drinking from it, eyes dropping to it rather than her for exactly as long as the sentence took. "Fifteen years, give or take. The kind you take out when there's dirty work that needs doing, and put back before anyone respectable has to see it's been used. Sent off to the worst rooms in the galaxy so the family name never has to walk through them itself. Dust the boots off after, no questions asked about where the mud came from, so long as it never tracks back to the house." A short huff, more breath than laugh, his gaze finally lifting to the room around them rather than her. "This moon's the first place that ever let me track mud wherever I wanted. Didn't take long to figure out a hellhole's an easier place to live than a house that doesn't want you around. At least on a semi-permanent basis." His eyes came back to her.

"Your turn. What about the gloves?"

Amara Zambrano​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

She perked up for him, lips curling upwards into a bit of a grin, as a bit of a joke to demonstrate she could be exactly what she said she would be. The act fell away quickly though, not because it wasn't genuine but because the nature of their conversation was something which held quite a bit of weight was soon to follow and she knew better than most how best to respect it when it came. So she listened, nodding whenever it seemed appropriate to suggest that she understood - or at least followed - what it was he was saying. It was easier to watch now that it was her turn to just listen, to trace over the contours of his face with her eyes and wonder if every wrinkle, line, and blemish came from the sorts of things his story suggested might have happened with him. For someone in the sort of world she lived in the kind of life he was describing was normal, not right but normal; for anyone else it was downright cruel. She knew that, her father and even her cousins knew that - but even in their case it was usually reserved as a means to grow.

What Isildor Laskaris was describing was exclusion.

Then the conversation turned back to her and it wasn't quite clear, at least in her mind, where she was supposed to take it. 'Gloves?' She thought, wondering if maybe it was another metaphor that followed the theme she must've set for them with talk of shoes. Her eyes narrowed slightly, an apparent look of confusion on her face as she tried to juggle with the options as best and as quickly as she could without making a fool out of herself. "I, uh, I don't quite follow." She said at last, shifting uncomfortably in her seat and unintentionally making herself seem somewhat smaller. The hand she'd held her glass with moved to her face, fingers toying at locks of hair that framed it, while the other played at her knee and calf. Gloves were something people used in conversation to talk like they were showing restraint, she supposed it could go one step further and imply she wasn't really showing her hand, but she hardly knew him enough to guess at what his true intentions were.

And, as far as she knew, he didn't know her well enough either, nor had she really paid much mind to him to ascertain if maybe she'd given something away. There might've been other problems that sometimes weighed on her, she supposed, and maybe he suspected something more - or hadn't quite grasped what exactly she had meant with her story by what had happened to her.

"I'm afraid I was being a little more.." Her voice trailed off as she searched for the word, which seemed to be at the tip of her tongue. "Clever?" She questioned, though the subtle nod that followed with a brief pause suggested that was right. "I'm afraid I was a bit more clever than normal, with the metaphors I mean." She said, somewhat repeating herself to keep her thoughts together. "I don't normally do well keeping up when things aren't kept rather blunt." Amara explained, which wasn't entirely true but it was easier for her to come up with flower and indirect language than it was for her to decipher it.

 

[Isildor Laskaris]

THE END OF A NEW BEGINNING
"Don’t get any big ideas — they’re not gonna happen"

TRUCE, NAR SHADDAA

She was already smaller in the seat before she finished the sentence — shoulders drawing in, one hand abandoning her glass for her knee like it needed somewhere safer to be. He recognized every piece of it. The furrow, the borrowed word she'd had to go fish for, the sentence that trailed off rather than landed. He'd spent a lifetime learning to read exactly that kind of unraveling in a room. He'd never once used it to make someone innocent feel worse before, and found, watching her now, that he had absolutely no interest in starting.

"Fair," he said, before she could dig herself in any further, waving it off easy, unbothered. The arm he'd had braced toward her eased back onto the seat instead, giving the space between them room to just be space again. "That one was on me, not you."

He turned the glass slow in his hand, eyes dropping to it rather than her, voice settling into something quieter than the one he'd been using all night. "Say a man spends most of his life around things that leave marks if he handles them wrong. Blades, mostly, in his case. Say somewhere early on he learns the trick isn't strength — it's distance. Thin leather between his palm and whatever he's holding. Enough that he still feels the weight of it, the heat, the give. Just enough. Never all of it."

A pause, a breath only slightly hitched, yet his body remained relaxed and still.

"Say the first time he goes in without them, it isn't his hand that gets hurt. It's whoever's standing close enough to him when it happens. Maybe more than once, before he's smart enough to notice the pattern." A short, humorless breath, almost a laugh. "Say a man learns fast which mistake he's allowed to make twice. So he keeps them on — filters how much of anything actually reaches him, or reaches back out from him."

He'd worn a pair into Truce the night they'd met, hadn't taken them off until he was three drinks deep into being someone easier.

He turned the glass another slow quarter-turn, still not looking at her. "Funny part is, enough years of that, and a man starts forgetting he's even got hands underneath. Just gloves, all the way down."

He didn't go bare-handed with much of anything. Not blades, not rooms, not people. Some distance always stayed between him and whatever he was reaching for. He'd decided a long time ago which side of that he actually had control over, and it wasn't the world.

He finally looked up, settling back into the seat properly, unhurried, glass resting loose against his knee again. No lean this time, not yet, just enough stillness to make it clear there was nowhere he needed to be but here.

"So," he said, quieter still, the cleverness he'd been leaning on all night set down for a moment. "When's the last time you let something actually get through?"

Amara Zambrano​

 

[Amara Zambrano]

Her shoulders rose a little, something of a shrug to a discern eye, and her head tilted marginally to the side. She didn't say anything but there certainly wasn't anything like blame being assigned in her mind, just a slight bit of embarrassment at not being quite as sharp as the picture she must've painted for him in his head had been. Her eyes followed the glass in his hand when Isildor Laskaris started to talk, her own hand moving away from the edge of her face and back towards the glass of water she had been neglecting. Hardly a couple dozen words in and she already understood what he was getting at, a few more and she understood he must've thought they were, in far fewer words, the same in that regard.

For a moment she glanced down at the hand she had fidgeting against her leg, a little more self aware how her body language was reflecting on herself but not quite self aware enough to know what to do to really change his view of her.

But her eyes quickly swept back up to him, not trying to look him in the eyes so much as following the movement of his lips. The creases that surrounded them when he spoke, the sort of subtle shift in shape when he didn't. The discomfort in reciting what she was sure was a reality for him that maybe he knew just as much as she did of her own circumstance, enough to grasp the issue but not enough to recognize how to address it - or maybe just unwilling. There were a lot of judgements being made, silently, as she listened, most of them the kind people liked to make about strangers they never had to interact with - a bit like people-watching, only the person she had her eyes on was currently spinning her a story that told her as much about him as it did how much he thought he knew about her.

"It's easier to make things into a story, I guess." She said noncommittally, finally drawing the glass to her lips to sip at its contents. "I'm a bit like a book in that way, I guess. It makes the what happened.. happens.. a bit more palatable when there is at least a pretense that it never, y'know.." A familiar rasp crept back in as her voice trailed off, her gaze elsewhere, another time even, before she followed it all with a sigh. "Bit cruel of you to pull off the mask so early, though." She chided, looking a little irritated with herself rather than seeming nearly as offended as the phrasing might've made it seem. "I let in people all the time.. too often.. just.." Her voice trailed off mid-sentence, her bright eyes settling on his as best she could, and she paused - she was studying him, perhaps questioning what had been meant to come next.

"Probably not the people I should."

Another sip and then she cleared her throat.

"I think.. setting metaphors aside for now.. I think you probably wouldn't like me very much if you knew me more for who I am." Amara explained slowly, carefully selecting her words in a manner that did how she felt the most justice without being too revealing. "We're alike for different reasons, if that isn't too blunt." She continued, leaning forward in her seat while she set her glass back down. The hand at her leg found its place at her chin, her knee sliding up a little to catch her elbow while her foot rested against the top rung of the chair beneath her. "I'm not afraid of giving up a little bit of space, if that's what you're asking, but I don't quite think that's what you want to know, is it?"