Re: Train tracks: Oliver & Gwen
Maybe she should've experienced chagrin or embarrassment, because she did understand that she'd offended him somehow, but those sentiments were unknowns and, as a result, she stared at him in silence for a long span of seconds that was maybe totally awkward. She didn't have the conversational ease to smooth over the offense (or the subsequent silence), so she stared in a way that was kind of maybe a little (super) unnerving.
He smudged the track with the toe of his shoe, and her expression became something unguarded and sad when that worm disappeared in a smudge of color without definition. "I'm not sure it's supposed to work that way."
But his information about dreams was something she couldn't obtain from any other source. She could read about dreams, but his personal experience was something no one else could provide her, and her curiosity led her to listen closely and step closer. "But the bad places aren't real. Don't you understand that during the sleep process, and don't you react accordingly?" She'd clearly done most of her reading on lucid dreaming. Or, maybe, that was simply the only kind of dreaming she could understand, without having experienced the phenomenon herself.
But he said she wasn't shy, and she smiled. She was mercurial there, standing beneath the moon and at that smudged bower. She should be going soon, because her absences really couldn't be super long, or else she'd be found out, and then she'd be trapped. But talking with him was interesting, educational, and she didn't see how it could possibly be bad or go wrong.