Re: The Schoolboy/The Witch
There was a tendency among the young scholars that he studied with to believe that girls spoke of nothing of any particular importance: fashion and gossip and perhaps some of the music and the arts. And when you were with them, you must humor at best, and flat out endure at worst this tendency, but Morgaine was proving not a thing like this perception, nor honestly like any experience he'd had thus far. Perhaps it wasn't strictly explicable, what she was saying and he couldn't be sure what she was talking about with the laws of the universe or things in the air, and the ground - gravity, surely, but what that had to do with law he wasn't certain, but this was certainly not gossip, or fashion, or the arts.
Oliver stared slightly, and then shifted, straightening his shoulders just perceptibly when she questioned him. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'yes, of course', but then it paused, caught on his tongue as if it had gathered weight. And perhaps it had, because when he answered, it was with the seriousness of a vow.
"Yes. Or I should choose to be if the circumstances asked for it."
For he was not certain he'd ever had such a thing required, not unless one counted duty to one's family, or one's schooling. Friendships perhaps, there were those in his house at the school, although Head boy had set him apart from the others and this year those relationships felt more strained. And it was this fact perhaps that made something inside him clinch up with something that might have been jealousy. Not because he wanted siblings, or a shopkeep's son to try to kiss him constantly, but it glimpsed at a freedom he did not think he'd ever had. And socializing among the boys at the house was not the same.
"It's not so very… dusty." He had been about to protest all of it, but really it was horrible. He'd been saying it to himself, and what was he defending? The book might contain something valuable, but it was dull, and he did not want to read it. His lips turned up, and for an instant he was shy and then he shifted the book to the side, sat on the seat between him and the side of the car, and he shifted slightly so that he was turning towards her. "It is horrible," he admitted. "It's terribly dull. Tell me about your socializing, instead."