“Oh right. Of course. Um, do you like the rain?”
Katie giggled. “Maybe we should try something else.”
When she let go, Bennett flexed his fingers. Touching was always awkward but it hadn’t felt that way when Katie touched him. He found he kind of liked the sensation. She had very warm hands.
“Let’s try casual conversations instead. Like things you might chat about at the grocery store or while in a waiting room.”
Bennett tugged at the collar of his shirt. He was afraid he was already failing this portion of the lesson because he couldn’t understand why anyone would even want to talk under those circumstances. When he was grocery shopping he preferred to concentrate on his list so he didn’t forget anything. He certainly didn’t want to talk while at the doctor’s office, otherwise he might not remember the list of concerns he needed to discuss with his physician.
Katie, however, didn’t seem to think there was anything at all odd about talking to perfect strangers while engaging in vital tasks.
“Let’s say I saw you in the grocery store. I might say ‘Hello, Bennett. Lovely weather we’re having today.’”
Bennett glanced outside. “Well, it’s spring time so the weather is generally between fifty and seventy degrees and we’re already past the rainy season—”
“Bennett.” Katie shook her head.
“Sorry. Yes, we are experiencing seasonally appropriate weather today.”
Katie covered her mouth with her hand. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
Bennett wasn’t sure what to say to that.
After a moment of silence, Katie sat up straight. “Maybe we should skip the general chatting and get down to more meaty conversations. That might work better.”
For the next hour, Katie led him through various social scenarios. She tried explaining how to gauge when people were interested in what he had to say by reading facial expressions. That was a bust. Every facial expression looked pretty much the same to Bennett. After all, how was he to know if a facial expression was a signal or the result of indigestion or something?
Polite conversation topics would have worked if they weren’t all so dull. Did people really care to discuss their children’s behavior, their lawn maintenance or whether the weatherman predicted a thunderstorm? He couldn’t understand how anyone could stand talking about such inconsequential things. He thought the point of conversing was to gain information. He didn’t gain any information at all by talking about what the weatherman had predicted especially since it was likely to be incorrect anyway.
It didn’t help that he’d found himself distracted so many times by Katie’s mouth. He found himself mentally tracing the little bow of her lips and imagining how soft her lips would be if he were to brush his mouth against hers. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d never been this distracted by a woman before.
Finally Katie turned the tablet off. “I don’t think this is working.”
He sighed. There was no way around it. Bennett was a bad student for the first time in his life.
He had to admit that he couldn’t fault Katie’s teaching. The things she’d tried to teach him, they were exactly the kinds of questions he heard on a regular basis so her research had been spot on. However, none of it addressed what he needed most, the why of it. Why did people have these conversations? It was difficult to participate in a situation when you didn’t understand the end objective for the other participant.
“Thank you for trying. Maybe I’m just not meant to gain mastery in this area. Perhaps I should stick to the lab.” He tried to smile to reassure her. After all it wasn’t her fault but his lips felt stiff.
How could he hope to convince Olivia that he’d changed when … well, he hadn’t?
Was he just doomed to be alone forever?
?
Katie looked around the lab, unsure of what to do. None of the examples she'd used seemed to mean anything to him and she was honestly at a loss for how to move forward. How did you teach someone who didn’t think the same way you did?
This reminds me of trying to deal with kids alone. She smiled. It often felt like her kids spoke another language and she was just doing her best to interpret it.
“What?” Bennett questioned when he saw her smiling. “I’d have thought you’d be running out of here by now.”
“I don’t give up that easily. I was just thinking this reminds me how I feel when my kids use some slang I’ve never heard of and I have to try to figure out the meaning. It’s like learning a new language.”
Bennett looked thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose it is. Perhaps that’s why I thought this would be easier. I’ve always had an affinity for languag
es.”
“Really? How many do you speak?” Katie had taken French in school but could only read some of it. She’d always been too self-conscious to practice speaking it the way she should have.