He said she hadn't overstepped, but even with this reassurance she was still nervous as she listened to him respond. At his last sentence — bonds overgrowing the boundaries of researcher and subject — her heart skipped a beat. It was far from the condemnation or rejection she had expected. She would hesitate to call it acceptance, at least while they were speaking in code in this way, but it was... maybe close. An acknowledgement that there was a relationship the two of them had, outside of this table in this bar.
"Perhaps they do," she said, and she sort of wanted to smile but she was still too nervous to properly manage it. This had addressed, at least to an extent (perhaps to the greatest extent possible in a public setting) one of the two concerns that she'd had about revealing her identity to him. The first was that he would be angry with her in a personal capacity — that it would feel like a betrayal and he would never want to speak to her again. That seemed as though it wasn't going to be the case. The second was that this knowledge would lead him to discount her work, and that he might never want to participate in her research again because he might not think she was capable of effecting the sort of change she talked about, and that concern was still unresolved.
"— but hopefully not to a degree that would compromise the quality of the research," she added hesitantly, towards that second unspoken point.
She wanted to tell him I didn't mean to, because discovering his identity on accident seemed like less of a thing than having sought it out on purpose. It was only sort of true, though — she had pulled out all her research materials and compared handwriting, and then she'd written him purposefully to test the theory once she'd formed it. She could have ignored the familiarity of his handwriting entirely, but she'd been too curious to just let it go. And it wasn't as though she'd gone out of her way to find him out (not recently, anyway). She hadn't staked out his return address (this address, this bar), she hadn't tried to watch him the day before a full moon, she hadn't intentionally overstepped his boundaries. She wanted to tell him that, but she couldn't think of a way to bring it up — and since she was here anyway, maybe it didn't matter as much as she thought.
Jules
"Perhaps they do," she said, and she sort of wanted to smile but she was still too nervous to properly manage it. This had addressed, at least to an extent (perhaps to the greatest extent possible in a public setting) one of the two concerns that she'd had about revealing her identity to him. The first was that he would be angry with her in a personal capacity — that it would feel like a betrayal and he would never want to speak to her again. That seemed as though it wasn't going to be the case. The second was that this knowledge would lead him to discount her work, and that he might never want to participate in her research again because he might not think she was capable of effecting the sort of change she talked about, and that concern was still unresolved.
"— but hopefully not to a degree that would compromise the quality of the research," she added hesitantly, towards that second unspoken point.
She wanted to tell him I didn't mean to, because discovering his identity on accident seemed like less of a thing than having sought it out on purpose. It was only sort of true, though — she had pulled out all her research materials and compared handwriting, and then she'd written him purposefully to test the theory once she'd formed it. She could have ignored the familiarity of his handwriting entirely, but she'd been too curious to just let it go. And it wasn't as though she'd gone out of her way to find him out (not recently, anyway). She hadn't staked out his return address (this address, this bar), she hadn't tried to watch him the day before a full moon, she hadn't intentionally overstepped his boundaries. She wanted to tell him that, but she couldn't think of a way to bring it up — and since she was here anyway, maybe it didn't matter as much as she thought.
Prof. Marlowe Forfang
Jules