EVIE
I want your midnights
Evie only holds back her snort at Sam's jumpiness with the strength of years of repeated mantras about propriety. As if it mattered in this day and age. Still, she does roll her eyes slightly, even if it's more listless than mocking. Of the three in Sam's life, Evie had always been a cruel viper, but she had never gone as far as their parents had. Nobody could, she personally believed. They tried so hard to force their children into molds, only for both to helplessly break them despite all their best efforts. Bitter irony. The question he poses is a trick question. One that clogs her throat and freezes her tongue. Evie stares forward, her gaze hard and strained as her mind frantically flits through the different answers she could give. Some more revealing and suspicious than others. This was why she avoided Sam most days. His ignorance was a source of constant anxiety for Evie. Dancing around the topic of her Abandoned state was more exhausting than anything she'd ever experienced in the Wordsworth household.
"Of course we're alone," she states tersely. "If they were here, I'm sure we would know pretty immediately." It's dismissive, wanting to move on quickly from the topic of the Gods and their questionable presence in the temple. Evie had spent so many years of her life lying. In time she found that less was more, and fewer details meant fewer things that could trip her up in the future or reveal her hand.
Sam shuffles to look at her better, and Evie clenches the hand furthers from him to keep herself still and unreactive. She's aware of how she must look even without a mirror, and while part of her is surprised he's brave enough to ask her when he knows the lash of her tongue so well, the other part - lonely, lost, yearning for a bridge to cross this gap between them - is grateful.
"Not too gentlemanly, asking about a lady's hysteria Sam," she points out with her familiar teasing sharpness. This, at least, she can always fall back on. More of a defensive maneuver, a shield, than anything else. A moment goes by where her heart pounds against her breast, her breaths a little too short, before she concedes. "You're not the only one who needs a place to hide." The wretchedness of her tone is a little too bare, too blatant. But what does it matter? She has lost so much already. Sam's esteem is the last on her list to care about losing now.
