The motions of it are second nature by now, repeated over and over again in the handful of months that the two of them have spent together.
She nudges the pack of cigarettes closer to him with her fingertips, then does the same with the silver lighter. Robin then settles back again lazily in the chair, not shying her form away when she feels his touch on her leg.
It’s grounding, comforting — even if it would be like pulling teeth to get her to admit it out loud, it brings a half smile to her lips that she manages to hide by taking another inhale from her cigarette.
“I think usually I’ve been the family drama,” she muses, self-aware. “Maybe that’s why it feels so jarring when it’s coming from someone else.”
Her eating disorder, the severity to which is reached, had taken up more than its fair share of air time for about three years. She’d always carried guilt about that.
“Who is the main culprit in your family?”
It is still a feeling he is getting used to. Hugo has always been nomadic, drifting from place to place, from person to person, leaving so light a footprint it was almost as if he was never there at all. Sure, he had friends all over the globe, and he still kept in contact with them, but his imprint on their lives was minimal at best. He liked it that way; there was such little responsibility, very few opportunities to hurt people in ways he never intended.
If there was one thing he’d learned from his parents, it was that relationships – and people in particular – could be so very fragile.
At her words, he does not react; at least, not outwardly. It tugs at his heart, every time she makes those kinds of statements. And maybe, at least to some degree, it’s true. She had her issues, her struggles, and it very likely did cause her family worry, and probably kept them up at night on more than one occasion. But he hated how that hung on her shoulders. This girl who took no shit from anybody, was so incredibly hard on herself.
It was no wonder she needed some kind of escape from that life.
“My mother.” The words tumbled from his lips before he could really even think about it. Maybe it was this moment of vulnerability between them, maybe it was his tiredness from being woken so unexpectedly from such a deep sleep.
Hugo hated talking about his mother. He wasn’t the type to hold a grudge, not easy to offend in the least. But his mother was always an exception. Her selfishness had done a number on him, on all of his sisters, and most especially to his father. Most days, he liked to forget she even existed; which was easy to do, since she was out of his life significantly more often than she was in it.
There was part of him that wants to ask if this is the kind of drama that will take her back to California, but he is not ready to know the answer to that yet. So he settles for, “I bet I can guess who is the center of this particular act of the Shore Family Drama.”