There was a long, weighted sort of pause, a pause of trying to figure out the right balance between plausible deniability and the blatant truth of her frequent optomological struggles. The urge to outright deny need for such a thing, in the face of such blatant accusations, was strong, but tempered, slightly, by the practicality of how exhausting it could be to keep up that sort of things around Irene and just the mere fact that it was Irene...

"To the eyeball?" she asked, sounding skeptical, but someone had probably brought up or mentioned contacts at some point in her life here on the island thus far, so it didn't sound too foreign, just something she never bothered to consider because, well, denial and all that. "As in directly?"