Tris might not know all of what Blue’s thinking, but that she knows well enough to know to give her hand that extra, solid squeeze — and wants to — is both comforting and one of the reasons all this felt so inexorable in the first place.

Some people, Blue is almost sure, have a distinct difference between the way they feel about the friends they love and the people they want to kiss. For Blue it’s all woven in together like the threads of a bracelet: not everyone falls in both categories, maybe hardly anyone, but one is very much a part of the other.

She smiles, glancing down, shyly selfaware of the new, niceness of that particular little intimacy from Tris, and takes the clothes gratefully. Being fussed over feels really relieving right now in a way she doesn’t often let people. “Um. Something sweet, maybe? Fruit?”