Lucy understands better than she'd like to admit, but Dustin is Dustin, and that makes it easy to pretend she doesn't. So she laughs at him: a grim bell of mirth over the pulse of something warmer, more accepting. Not unkind. A private sound.

"Oh no," she teases, and, self-indulgent to ruin, allows herself a glance in his direction. He's smiling to himself like a sad icon, which makes her mouth curl and her hands itch to pinch or caress. She slides them under her legs instead.

"Perhaps they loom larger unacknowledged," Lucy adds, a sage devil. "I dare you to speak one out loud, into the shadows. Right now. The first thing that comes to mind."