Luck — oh, she wanted to laugh. Luck had little to do with what was happening at that particular moment. Theodora held her tongue and her primal reaction to be blunt to the point of actually telling a complete stranger what had happened to make her end up there. Hey, so, my father died and I completely broke down and then my husband killed himself and I just simply shut down from the world, now I live in the town he grew up in completely haunted by the ghost of his memories and my therapist said talking to new people would be a good way to bring myself out of the hole I dug. What an ice breaker, right? Maybe if she was indeed honest with the man, he would only see that luck didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she had ended up picking up his wallet from the floor, anyone could have done it if she had chosen to simply turn the other direction. Luck would be not having gone through anything she did. Luck would be not having people saying that suffer and hurt built were there for her to make them useful, that her experiences made her stronger, they were constructive. She didn’t see it— she refused to anyway.
The way she saw it this could develop in one of two ways: she could, on the flip of a dime, revert back to her old self, smile and pretend to have fun, engage in conversation that could be interesting and could also not be. Maybe flirt a little if she was feeling it, after all, Taylor was a good looking man, was he not? Or, she would introduce the person she was now. The shy and awkward, who was bad at making conversation because she much rather be left alone with her thoughts and maybe a bottle of tequila. There was the option of a middle ground. Something between her two personas, but that was rare to come by. It took a level of comfortability that this encounter would have to progress towards. Sucking in a breath, the blonde nodded in agreement. “Well, lucky me indeed,” she said, a small smile that didn’t reach the eyes, “you don’t have to pay for mine though, I, uh— anyone would have given you your wallet back, I’m pretty much sure of it,” was she? Definitely not, but paying for her coffee seemed like a stretch. “Taylor Johnathan…” Theo said his name again, more to herself than to him because it had a ring to it… almost familiar. “That’s quite a name… rich name too and I’m sorry if you’re not, I just spent enough time around rich people to kind of get caught on these expensive-sounding names. It’s a good one, too.” Her curse was internal, she couldn’t believe she was babbling about the man’s name, just downright shameful. “I’ll have a latte.”
Was it him or did she seem... off? The man knew that his presence unsettled the many rather than just a few without a clear divide between strangers or acquaintances in the target line, but it usually only did because he wanted it to do so. Theodora had caught him in about as good as a mood as one could given the circumstances of his state of life at the moment, and yet Taylor saw himself drawn to soften his voice forcibly in what edged into the unnatural to those who heard him speak in a rasp force when careless. “It’s nothing to me. Take it as a parting gift from a former resident here, and, by any means, you won’t have to sift through coffee shops to find another good one around after.” There was no telling if she did truly live somewhere around or just sauntered in the wrong neighborhood, but if were the former Taylor at least knew to a definite that she had not been there before. A near-perfect neighbor wouldn’t have missed a newcomer.
“Thank you?” Not a full statement nor question, the words mixed with the sound of his chuckle. He had never been too fond of being a two-name person; though he would often still introduce himself by full given name, his tongue wouldn’t wrap around the sound of his middle name quite the same. Oh, the irony that the less rich name was the generational commemoration, after all. “One could say the same about Theodora.” He narrowed his eyes at her in an almost playful manner as he shifted his body weight from one foot to the other where he stayed for a second or two, elongating the moment. “You’d have a field day with the relatives of mine that love to recycle their names enough to get out the roman numerals.” Neither confirming nor denying her suspicion (as he'd learned so well to do) Taylor gave a lax shrug of his shoulders before extending a hand to gesture towards their intended way. “Shall we, then?”
