[ For better or worse, Astarion recognizes that impulse — the desire to be wanted, the mental contortions required to expect and accept a refusal. He doesn't like seeing it in someone so young. (The possibility exists that she only looks young, vampirism being what it is, but it seems like an odd, nigh useless thing to lie about, especially given that she's presenting it as a negative.)

In some other life, it's an offer he would balk at, especially as presented by someone so sprightly, but enough things have changed that he's not so instantly opposed to a tentative trust anymore. ]

"Weird," perhaps, but no more or less so than anything else in this place.

[ Then, in case that wasn't clear enough: ] Friends. Let that little bracelet be a marker of it.