He walks into the library and sees her immediately, as she knew he would. He smiles his nice open friendly smile and approaches her.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," she says. Ordinarily she would greet him with more enthusiasm, but she's just suffered a crushing disappointment and is engaged in an effort to pick up the pieces.
He notices this. "Are you okay?"
She hates lying, but her mind is elsewhere, and her lips say, "Yes."
"No?" he asks. Damn, he is perceptive.
She allows herself to admit that she isn't okay. This is only her second time spending time with him, but she feels comfortable enough to cry a little (albeit while hiding her face behind her hands). She wonders briefly why she wasn't honest, and comes to the conclusion that she wants so badly to be okay that she's denying the fact that she isn't.
He is supportive, confirming her instinct when she first met him that here was someone who would make a fantastic friend. He cracks a joke that somehow is the funniest joke in the world. She laughs, perhaps a little too loudly for a library, and a mildly officious woman appears. "I just wanted to let you know that we can hear you from over there."
She doesn't really know what to say, so she says, "Thank you." The woman walks away.
"My laugh carries," she says. "I like my laugh. I have a good laugh."
"It's the first floor, we're allowed to be slightly louder," he says.
She nods. "But it is a library."
By mutual consent, they move to another communal lounge area where they can talk and laugh more freely.
As they talk, she notices a few things. He makes it very easy for her to be natural in his company; she never has trouble being herself anymore, but she feels much less awkward in this situation. At the same time, though, she senses that their minds are operating on a similar wavelength, and this scares her just a little, because she isn't used to it, nor is she used to the fact that he is apparently just as genuine as her (and he's the first person she's met at college to be that genuine in her presence).
All this she notices but can't put into words yet.
Eventually the building closes and they walk outside. She asks which way he is going, and because their dorms are in opposite directions, she walks with him casually. He notices this after a few minutes and is rather impressed, she thinks, with her willingness (possibly even deliberate effort) to abandon gender stereotypes.
Her mind is still reeling, so when he hugs her before going inside his dorm, her reaction is the opposite of what it would normally be. She loves hugs, but this entire night he's been catching her off guard, and she's very confused by that.
"No hugs?" he asks, pulling back.
She stammers something slightly incoherent and turns the conversation to something else. After they've said good night and he's gone, she has the walk back to her dorm to mull things over and process everything that just happened.
When she first met him, she admits to herself, she did have a little crush on him; but that vanished, not because of anything he did at all, but because she doesn't want to lose their intellectual connection for a sexual one, which always seems to happen to her with boys. She has a smile on her face, though, as she unlocks her door, and it has nothing to do with the earlier portions of her day.
