An abrasive personality aside, Letha is not high maintenance — something it seems Beau have mistaken her for. Suppose you could still be choosy, living in a home that’s housed generations of blue collars. And you could still be difficult to please, despite expectations of people and things snug tight against the ground. But that’s not her.
It’s almost a tag line then, for her life and how she’s lived it. You get what you get, and you don’t get upset… She never did. If only the former. Single exception found with the company she keeps. If her father had asked her to put her best foot forward (He had, instructing she stay polite and out of the Rochester’s hair. And she’d agreed. Of course, back then, she hadn’t known just how god awful their son could be.) she had most certainly failed.
Circumflexed brows, a twinge of amusement trails after Beau’s words. It was almost… nice, and he seemed embarrassed by it. Like being kind to Letha Newman was a particularly challenging hardship, most certainly his only. And while it should act an insult, late nights and early mornings disorients her in the direction of delight.
“ Thanks. ” A murmur of gratitude that was sure to be unexpected, and she reaches into the paper bag; fishing out the sugar and leaving the milk. Old habit, mirroring her father’s — sans the Red Bull to wash it all down. Sugar packet in between teeth, she continues. “ Didn’t take you for an early worm, Rochester. ”
Not that she knew what she took him for. Not someone that would come when she called. Not someone that would bring her coffee in the morning. Yet… Lid opened, sugar poured, and she reaches for another.
“ Before I saw your place, I used to think you slept in a coffin. Or upside down, you know… like a bat. But then I realised, ” She pauses, not for the sake of dramatics but rather a yawn, and a shake of her head follows. “ No moats. ”
The truth is — he doesn’t know her. It’s assumptions and half - truths loosely tied together with the red string that seems to tug him back at her time and time again ( he knots it around the bullshit he comes up with out of resentment that it’s there at all. ) It’s jabs thrown like darts, hoping to stick somewhere that hurts. She seems unaffected, and it almost adds to the frustration. He’s easy to read on the surface level, and that’s what counts. What matters isn’t the depths of someone’s personal traumas and secrets and desires, what matters is what they see when they look at you. She looks at him, and she sees a spoiled rich kid incapable of being kind to her, or more than likely, to anyone but other stuck up snot nosed men like him.
He looks at her, and he doesn’t know what he sees.
For now, he learns something new: packs of sugar dumped into coffee, the little white cups of creamer gone abandoned. It’s a small fact, the kind you only know about a friend, and it’s a strange sensation to know it when they decidedly aren’t. Little facts pieced together, like favorite Disney movies and sugars in her coffee and an affinity for baby alligators work to paint the picture that is Letha Newman, and it’s unnerving that he can see the picture forming in his mind as something real and concrete. As a person. It’s easier to hate someone when you know nothing about them.
“ I’m not. ” He is. Instilled in him from an early age — sleeping in is for the lazy, and Rochesters aren’t lazy. Rochesters work; Rochesters thrive. “ I didn’t take you for an aspiring diabetic. ” Eyes flit to the next pack of sugar poured in.
Jaw squares. It’s a joke. He knows it’s a joke, and still, within him, there’s a bias stirring, an immediate rejection. Family lore had been long diverted in his mind from what he presumed reality was, and he flitted back and forth between belief and disbelief — the idea of monster-hunting as family trade felt like a pipe dream. It feels silly to say, so he doesn’t. If I were half-dead I’d drive a stake through my own heart. “ I’m sure you expect me to say I believe you sleep in a field of wildflowers with little birds bringing you your clothes instead of on your grandpa’s shitty futon, but ... ” Black coffee, two sugars. He doesn’t know why he commits it to memory. “ I’m a realist. ”