He slides the goggles up and off, setting them down on the workbench next to the wishbone he'd been trimming before she came in, and runs a hand through his hair. This doesn't really achieve anything in the way of neatening it, but it does redistribute the grime and has it sticking up in new and interesting ways. His eyebrows go up at the aborted sentence. Huh. He'd assumed Clint would have filled her in. But then there's got to be a lot of ground to cover.

"Yep," he agrees without hesitation. He'd be the first to concede that he was being an asshole of truly epic proportions at that particular point in his life. He has absolutely no intention of apologizing for it, but he doesn't have any problem admitting it. Of course all that means nothing to her now; it's gone like everything else. In a strange way it's refreshing to have a blank slate. To be around her without that appallingly bad first impression coloring things.

For him, anyway. For her it's probably just one more thing to have to deal with; one more stranger who knows things about her that she doesn't. That has to suck. "Relax, I'm not holding out on you," he says candidly. "I don't know you all that well and I'm pretty sure you never liked me anyway." Not that he'd make any pretense at being able to read her in any way - people in general were very much not his thing, and she'd raised inscrutability to an art form - but he'd always received a distinct impression of being barely tolerated.