Jo half closed her eyes, just letting the gentle tension pull at her scalp. She'd actually been thinking about cutting it, again, before Thorfinn started down this path. The one that had started with him saying he needed somehow to practice before he could braid his own hair right, and somehow morphed into this still happened weeks and weeks much later. She couldn't help that it felt almost. . . calming, when nothing about this place made her feel calm.
His voice grew quieter, hushed, almost, and she could almost picture him looking down as he did, even while having to focus on whatever part of her hair was in his deft fingers then. If it wasn't for her eyes being mostly closed, she might have given a predictable eye roll. Jo Harvelle was the last person who gave a damn what people here thought about the fact she was living with two men, in a place where all three of them were hardly seen sometimes.
She'd grown up in a bar of rowdy, rough men, and she'd just come from owning a place where only one, and then two other girls lived. People could think whatever the fuck they wanted. They could think she had orgies every night. She'd stopped caring what the world at wide thought of her decades ago. They rarely knew a cent of truth about her or hers. Rarely had reason to, or for her to give any more than the acquiescence to using them for their own assumptions.
But his later words, made her shift a little. Turning her head to look back to her shoulder and him, even though she knew it would mean he might have to do a part again. "You owe me nothing. Do you understand? You're fine here because you made the choice to be. No one else did that for you."
no subject
His voice grew quieter, hushed, almost, and she could almost picture him looking down as he did, even while having to focus on whatever part of her hair was in his deft fingers then. If it wasn't for her eyes being mostly closed, she might have given a predictable eye roll. Jo Harvelle was the last person who gave a damn what people here thought about the fact she was living with two men, in a place where all three of them were hardly seen sometimes.
She'd grown up in a bar of rowdy, rough men, and she'd just come from owning a place where only one, and then two other girls lived. People could think whatever the fuck they wanted. They could think she had orgies every night. She'd stopped caring what the world at wide thought of her decades ago. They rarely knew a cent of truth about her or hers. Rarely had reason to, or for her to give any more than the acquiescence to using them for their own assumptions.
But his later words, made her shift a little. Turning her head to look back to her shoulder and him, even though she knew it would mean he might have to do a part again. "You owe me nothing. Do you understand? You're fine here because you made the choice to be. No one else did that for you."