In the days that followed, Jason gradually became a different person around Ning, though the change happened slowly enough that anyone who had not been paying close attention might have missed it entirely.
He no longer gathered his tray and left the cafeteria the moment Ning sat down across from him, and when Ning asked him something, he answered with full sentences rather than the single, clipped words he had relied on during their first week, occasionally even adding a remark of his own before falling quiet again.
He was friendly now, in his own way. Yet Ning could tell that the young man simply was not used to talking very much, and their conversations tended to drift into long pauses that had nothing to do with Jason trying to avoid him.
