As much as she wished it didn't, what Rona now knew about Eric - or assumed she knew, anyway, though it occasionally occurred to her in a heart-quickening flash that she didn't actually know for sure, nothing had been confirmed - changed how she looked at him.

She did her very best not to act any different around him, and she was helped in this endeavour by the fact that they were still going through the awkward early phase of a new sharehouse configuration in which people were often avoiding each other, getting comfortable in themselves in the arrangement of personalities in the house, and so she didn't interact with him very much. But still, when she thought of him it was with an added spike of curiosity, and she wasn't sure that that was appropriate. She didn't think it was necessarily fair on him.

Not to mention the fact that she spent a lot of time wondering how he kept his sexuality hidden from his bandmates. Especially now that Eric was gearing up for a gig: she'd never before had the chance to see him preparing before a performance and it was striking how wholly focussed he became on it. When she did actually talk with him, asking him a question or making a making an observation, it seemed to take him longer than usual to respond, and when he did it was often cursory and he never really looked at her. Always, he was drumming out rhythms and patterns with his fingers. Miranda said to Rona that she thought it was a bit over the top, a bit too much of a performance: she didn't believe it could be real. Rona was inclined to give Eric the benefit of the doubt, but that was mainly out of penance.

But despite herself she kind of enjoyed it. She kind of liked the glamour of living with a musician. She'd met plenty of musicians in the past and had never been greatly enamoured of them, but she also knew what she'd lost from the way she'd used to live and she found herself, to her surprise if not necessarily displeasure, pinning her hopes on Eric to help bring her back to it. That was unfair on him, too, she realised: but at least it was treating him as the person he was obviously desperate to be, it was acting in accordance with the person he chose to present to the world: the musician. If ever Eric was clear about anything, it was that that was how he thought of himself, that and nothing else; and so Rona tried to oblige him by thinking of him in exactly those terms. She was looking forward to the gig.