"Is it?" There is a hint of bemusement in his smile, and of amusement too: truthful enough to say she doesn't believe in waiting. It does not seem to him an unpleasant thing. It reminds him more than anything of Boromir, if he is honest - of how he would barrel through doubt and over-weighty thought and cut direct to what he wanted - and that makes her forthrightness oddly, comfortingly familiar. Just because he may at times be more a dreamer than a man of action, it does not mean he fails to appreciate bold and decisive certainty in others. In fact, he realises, it is quite attractive in itself, aside from her beauty.

There is a great deal that is attractive in her, now that he allows himself to look.

So he will gladly walk with her to the gallery, and while the exhibit itself turns out to be one which does not hold all that much interest for him, still it is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. He had not expected any such thing, and it is a nice surprise to return home that night with the sense of something beginning, in a life that for so many years has seemed to hold only endings. Truthfully, little of import has happened - company over coffee, a stroll through a gallery - and yet he finds that he is smiling, that he hums as he makes himself dinner, and that when he does retrieve his phone to find her text waiting for him, there is a strange excitement that it sparks in him. He takes a few minutes to text her back - thanking her for a lovely afternoon, and letting her know that he looks forwards to their dinner - and then adds her to a contacts list that still holds the numbers of too many dead men. There is, in all of this, an unfamiliar joy that bubbles beneath the surface; he cannot quite shake the sense that this is the best thing to happen to him in some time.

When the evening they have arranged does come, he meets it with enthusiasm. A suit seems like overkill, but he does arrive at the restaurant looking a good deal sharper than he did at the café, in a freshly pressed shirt and waistcoat, with his hair combed back into a much neater bun. He even brings flowers, a small bouquet of wildflowers picked in the woods, carefully wrapped so that she can put them into her bag if she wants. He is early, of course; it has been so long since he did anything like this that he is not entirely sure what to do with himself, but he does disguise that fact well, and as the date continues on, so he begins to relax, to smile and to be more readily himself. And it is... nice. It is so very, very nice.