"She just really prefers living in large cities. Married Chalan - that's my dad - before she was aware enough of this to notice that they were not things she could do at the same time."

"That sounds somewhat awkward. Are they otherwise still on good terms?" 

"They get along fine. He's just extremely attached to his town and she was bored to tears."

"How did they meet?" 

"She was born there too. Everybody there knows each other. I went there to visit and nobody in town had seen me in more than a decade and they all still knew who I was."

"That must be quite something." 

"How noncommittal of you. Yes, it's something, I mostly agree with Rana but I can see Chalan's perspective."

"I do not have any memories of growing up in a small town where everyone knew me, and so I genuinely have no idea what the experience would be like. I suspect I would mostly dislike it but there might be some good parts that I am currently missing for lack of having experienced it." 

She goes a little pensive at the not having memories part. Squeezes his hand.

"That's the restaurant over there." She points.

Leareth heads in that direction. He pulls out a chair for her. 

That's adorable.

The restaurant mostly has fish, pulled out of the river and served with various combinations of garlic, herbs, butter, and lemons, but they also have bread and various fishy soups.

Leareth will try a fishy soup, then. 

Belrun decides against a garlicky trout in favor of a lemony trout and also hooks her ankle around his under the table.

This is giving Leareth feelings. Mostly very confusing feelings about how he wants to touch more parts of her. He asks what her childhood in Haven was like instead. "Other than the nightmare horses," he specifies. 

"Honestly even setting aside the nightmare horses there was a lot I didn't like about it. Bards everywhere, a lot of people my age couldn't read, the winters were frigid and our house was drafty and for some reason there were not a normal number of contractors around and they were hard to hire so we couldn't get it fixed, and there's this hideously loud bell that goes off whenever a Herald dies, which you'd think would encourage them to find some way to get them killed less often and did not. It wasn't tortuous but I didn't exactly miss it but for the threat of getting Chosen."

"Huh, does Haven have a shortage of contractors?" I should tell Vanyel, is the thing he's thinking, but - that is a very high context conversation and not one to have in a public restaurant. 

"I don't know if it's actually a problem to do with how many of them there are, I wasn't mostly the one trying to hire them. It's possible they merely have a byzantine permitting process, or something, and Rana wasn't sufficiently on top of things to manage it - she's a scatterbrain sometimes."

"I suppose that is less of a difficulty when one teaches small children, since they are probably even more scatterbrained." Leareth is trying to listen but keeps getting distracted by the fact that Belrun's face is pretty. Probably he'll get used to it at some point? Right? 

She thinks this is funny. She thinks he is also very nice to look at but has more practice thinking people are nice to look at.

They can eat the rest of their dinner and talk about various random things and then - Leareth isn't actually sure what the plan is next. 

The plan is she takes his hand again, and they go out into the street where it's getting on sunset, and she puts her arms around his neck and stands up on tiptoes and kisses him.

...So many feelings SO MANY FEELINGS and one of them is that Leareth wants to pick her up and twirl her around for some reason so he does. So this is why people like kissing so much. He had honestly never bothered to wonder about it that hard. 

She wasn't expecting that but it's fun! She expects that she is not an especially good kisser but someone who discovered what it was like to have a crush on somebody yesterday cannot reasonably be disappointed so she is attempting not to dwell on it.

Leareth is definitely not disappointed! At all! He's probably also a bad kisser but honestly even if both of them are bad kissers he's not sure this is making the experience worse for either of them. It seems kind of maximally good. 

...Is standing around kissing outside a restaurant a done thing? Leareth realizes he's paid very little attention to whether this gets people frowned at. 

They should probably tone it down a little.

"Uh," she says, pausing to catch her breath, "my dorm has the single bed but the guest room at Rana's I used to live in has a double - she'll tease but she won't mind -"