Here I am, saying things to you
I never thought that I'd say outside my head
Maybe Ben had had more to drink than he remembered; that would be one possible explanation for wandering away from his conversation with Ellory Pendergast wondering what the hell had just happened. Then again, maybe she was just crazy. It wasn't the first time that his interactions with her had left him confused, wondering if maybe he'd missed something. Maybe it was her, or maybe it was all of the Pendergasts (her sister, after all, had been the inspiration behind his exile to Canada). Maybe it was worse even than that: maybe it was all women. Except it couldn't be all women, because Ben had had plenty of experiences with women that had ended pleasantly enough.

Rich girls, he thought with no terribly small degree of bitterness. This was not the first time he had hypothesized that essentially every woman his brothers would have deemed to have been of an appropriate social station for him to associate with was batshit insane, but at the moment, in the heat of the conversation he'd just broken off with Ellory, it suddenly seemed as though the evidence in favor of this theory was growing insurmountable. He bought another drink, but decided he'd do best to drink it on his way back to Excalibur — he wasn't much in the mood for continuing to wander the street fair. Or he wasn't, anyway, until he spotted a familiar face. The face was all that was familiar, really, since Ben couldn't remember her name, but he knew they'd had a few conversations in the past, and suddenly some part of him decided he had a pressing need to talk to her.

"Oh, hey, it's you," he said in greeting, with a wide, jovial grin. "I'm sorry, I forgot your name. I forgot whether you ever even told me your name but I assume you must've." This, while true, was not usually the sort of thing that Ben would have admitted to if he could suavely avoided it. It certainly wasn't what he typically opened conversations with, but the words had spilled out of his mouth before he'd had a chance to think them through. Why was he even talking to her in the first place? He didn't really know, but now that he was, he apparently wasn't going to stop. The next words spilled out just as quickly and easily as their predecessors had, as though speech had become something slippery and quick that he had to consciously try to hold on to in order to keep it to himself. "You grew up with money, didn't you?"