#/ idk the knee thing was a 'cai as a writer' issue not a 'moon as a muse' issue /

[menodoramoon]

Aha. So she's lost it. She's put meaning where there wasn't any and she's made it worse. Good to know! Excellent! Moon could just scream. She wouldn't, but she could. Perhaps. (If years of formal etiquette and judgement for showing emotion were stripped away.)

He looks confused for being asked. What did she mean? And now she feels properly bad for having mucked this up. He was being nice, she read too far into it. That's-- that was just Menodora. Worrisome and Worrying.

She smiles nervously in turn, trying to get some gauge of Oswald's intentions. He says it wasn't his intention to upset her. Had he upset her? She doesn't-- Had he?

Menodora, if you could focus for a single moment.

'What are you doing, Menodora?'

What?

But when her gaze follows where his had been and she shifts back, trying to undo -- or, if not that, at least correct -- what she'd done. The intimacy of the act? And it really was just a simple touch, but it was familiar. And that's what was wrong with it. A familiarity that, while Oswald had been friendly with her, he hadn't assumed.

Where had she picked that up from?

(Probably from calming River's thoughts. Or slowing his runaway ideas. He could be so excitable, and a simply grounding point was always a good way to get them back on the same page.)

It seems all Moon's done now is rifled the pages between herself and Oswald.

It doesn't take much now. She flushes. Her cheeks glow again with those heliotrope-pink diamonds. She feels... silly. Mortified, generally, by what she's done and the position she's put them in.

Menodora really has lost all sense of who she's meant to be.

"No, no. I misunderstood and over-reacted. I'm sorry," she says. And it's not like when she'd spiraled before, but she is apologetic for what she's done. "I just... I misread something." She laughs, a little less genuinely. That socially polite laugh of hers with the balanced sound to it. "Don't let me ruin your celebration. Did you... did you still want help with the-- with your coffee table? The aesthetics, like you said?"

@oswaldxmarks

Hey, Neighbor! || Shadow on the Moon