She fought the smile her lips attempted to twist into, forcing them down into an obedient frown. ‘Crystal Bearer to the core’ though he may be, there had never been any getting around the fact he was Clavat (a word too often interchanged with cowardly by her kind– but hey, if the proverbial shoe fit). It endeared him to her as much now, as ever. All the same, he had a lot of nerve showing up here if he had no plans to mend some singed bridges, and so she took the initiative, balled fists propped on her hips as she called out across the sand.
“Are you gonna come say hi to me, or what?”
He pressed his lips at the familiar shriek. The horizontal line, neither a smirk nor a frown, suggested both contentment and uneasiness at the same time. Even across the sand, in reality a few feet, her call seemed like the distance between them went on for days.
As any respectable and socially adept person would do, he walked to close the distance between them. In this instance, maybe Belle would have expected him to say “hi” or whatever poor Clavatian greeting he had prepared in the time it took him to walk.
Layle failed at two things in that moment. One, he was not a respectable Clavat anyone who didn’t know him would have pegged him for. Thus, two, he was not socially adept enough to even fake a sincere, “how do you do?” Instead he asked, “What are you doing here?”