Will wondered if he was talking too much. All through dinner, he felt like he was babbling incoherently. Whether Lena was being polite, or wasn’t much of a talker, Will appreciated that she didn’t make him feel stupid.
As they walked slowly through campus towards Julia and Spencer’s house, taking their time and waiting for the sun to go down, she even seemed to become comfortable.
He wasn’t sure how he knew it, but something about her became more accessible in a way.
The ground was damp and there was the smell of summer rain in the air. Will loved the smell, and he liked that Lena savored it also. She took deep breaths, and that tiny little flutter crossed her lips.
After Will had run out of stuff to babble about on his own, they remained quiet for awhile. It didn’t feel strange as they both watched the sun set over the school buildings.
Usually, Will didn’t like sitting quietly with anyone but his close friends. He needed to keep talking. Sitting quietly felt too intimate.
But it didn’t bother him at all with Lena.
“You mentioned your sisters before,” she said when the sky glowed pink and the sun had dipped below the buildings.
“Nikki and Katie, yeah,” Will said, wondering if he was sharing a few too many unnecessary details.
Sometimes a simple yes is an all right answer too, Will reminded himself.
“Are they older?” she whispered.
“Yeah, I’m the baby of the family,” he answered, giving more detail than she probably wanted to know again. “How about you?”
Lena said nothing for several paces, but finally replied, “I guess I was the baby too.”
There was sadness in her voice. And she spoke in past tense which made Will wonder if something bad had happened to her or to her family. But he wasn’t about to cross that line and ask.
“Does your family live close by?” Lena asked, stopping in the middle of the walkway. She stood rigid with her arms at her sides and her legs in perfectly straight parallel lines.
“My parents live about two thousand miles away, in Portland.”
“Why did you leave them?” she asked, leaning towards Will as if she was very interested in his story.
“My family. They aren’t exactly…um…accepting of my life choices.” Will was shocked he was being so honest to a complete stranger. Usually, he was evasive about his family and, really, about all of his life before he moved away from home.
But Lena didn’t seem to think it was weird, so he added, “They want me to be one way, and I’m just not.”
“I think I understand that,” Lena said quietly, and there was a peculiar sparkle in her strange eyes that made Will believe she really did understand. So many people said they did, but even though there was no real reason to think so, he felt Lena knew.
“They’re divorced, you know, and my father is way overprotective and controlling. He always wanted me to be an accountant. Like him. You know the story.”
Lena nodded, but Will wasn’t convinced she did know the story because of her evasive eyes.
Movies loved that angle. Sometimes it felt like Will’s life was straight out of one of those high school loser flicks, the ones where the football player really wanted to be an artist or something. And the father in the story wouldn’t have it.
Only Will’s life was way more boring than those cheesy films. And usually in those movies, the son goes off to do something great on his own, without his father’s help.
All Will had done was manage to finish college with a BA in Communications. Not exactly the stuff of summer blockbusters.
“What do you want to be?” Lena asked, pulling Will from his mental montage of high school movie scenes.
“Pretty much anything but an accountant. I think it’s more about me wanting to be trusted to go my own way. To make my own decisions.”
Will hadn’t thought about these things in years. When he decided to go to a college half a continent away from his family, his worry about what his father thought didn’t travel with him.
When he called home, he called his mom. She was remarried to a guy, Ray, Will liked well enough. He treated Will’s mom well and didn’t try to be best pals with him, which he appreciated. Things were weird. Change was always hard.
And Will’s father didn’t exactly try to get in touch with him either. Anymore.
“What about your family?” Will asked, trying not to stare into Lena’s eyes for too long. When he did, he got caught in them. They were just so strange.
“They—” she began, and ripped her eyes from Will’s. She seemed to think they were looking at each other longer than was normal. “They don’t understand me either.”
Staring at her while she looked at the ground, Will couldn’t help but grin. She did know what he was talking about.