A small flash of emotion crossed over his features for the shortest moment. Had Jia not been looking at him, she would have missed it. Was that worry he had displayed for such a short time? Perhaps she was mistaken? He was sitting and smiling, revealing his pearly whites to her. It made him look younger, more innocent. The dryad wondered if he knew what his smile did to his face, but she quickly shoved the thought away. She was overly suspicious of others’ motivations at times.
Before she’d made a bad choice in boyfriends, she had been naïve and trusting. She had been a social butterfly, flitting from one person to the next in the hopes that she could make new friends from all walks of life. Human friends were the hardest to make because of the social stigmas humans attached to other species of humanoids. She didn’t entirely blame them, but it had always made her a little sad when she’d meet a really nice human and their parents would find some way to deter them from seeing her.
It didn’t make sense. Dryads weren’t inherently evil just like humans weren’t. How could an adult not understand that when a child could? Her father had said that humans were always finding one thing or another to hate about other beings whether they were other humans or supernatural ones. The crimes of one outweigh the goodness of many… She thought idly to herself. Her father had told her that on more than a couple of occasions. It was something like a mantra for him, and she couldn’t deny its truth.
These thoughts led her to doubt Xan’s mortality. Of course there were a few humans at Alden, but the vast majority weren’t, so why should he be human? What if he was very old and he lived in a time when customs such as pulling a chair for a lady were the norm?
Intense green eyes studied his face, looking for answers, but she couldn’t find any. One moment he looked a little older than her, and the next his boyish appeal almost made him seem younger. Was this a gift, part of his nature, or just an accident?
He sort of answered her quest a moment later. He’d taken a couple of years to himself after high school. If he wasn’t lying, that would make him her age as long as he hadn’t been held back a grade or as long as he hadn’t skipped a grade.
“You’re not alone. A lot of people take a year or two to themselves. One of my friends from high school did the same thing, but she’s sort of stuck in a rut, now. I was afraid if I waited, I would never come, so I had applied for this school before I had even graduated.”
A smile turned the corners of lips when he joked about the unlikelihood of his finding his way to Caribou Coffee even tomorrow. “It is pretty big. It takes time to get used to it. It felt like it took me almost half of last year before I could leave my dorm without a map.” Of course she was exaggerating, but it was only meant to make him feel more at ease. She noticed a little of the tension that was beginning to seep into him though she couldn’t read why he reacted that way. Maybe he was nervous? Maybe he wished he could go back to his coffee in peace?
No, maybe not. Unless he was just being polite in asking her questions, he didn’t seem to want to her suddenly disappear. He was new to the school as he’d said, and he wasn’t used to the environment. He would in time, but being new could be a pain.