Snippet from W.S. 4:
"Simon had a sense of humor, certainly. It was just very deadpan and dark. If it wasn’t grim, it was so terribly goofy it fell flat every time. She had told him once, when he finally became comfortable enough to joke around with some of his classmates, that his sense of humor was like that of a dad, which was an interesting feat at the ripe age of nineteen. But she still teased him and begged him to tell his bad jokes and join in on fun conversations because it had taken nearly until his sophomore year of college was ending to even open up that far. Most people around him found him to be somewhat of an enigma his whole life. When he was a child, he was smaller and louder than most kids his age, but the older he got, the quieter and more watchful he became. Once he reached adulthood, most people tended to give him a wide berth because he could be considered intimidating. He’d taken up working out as a hobby that helped him think, and he liked thinking a lot. Therefore he could lift a lot. But despite his wide frame and thick ropes of muscle, he was soft-spoken by nature, kind and curious and honest.
He’d been called naive more times than he appreciated, but he supposed it had to be true. If not "brooding" or "blunt" or "jackass", the next most used words to describe Simon were "innocent" and "childish". He guessed that was what happened when you grew up on a metronome bouncing back and forth between being a sinner burdened by the weight of mortal desires, and a child too young to possibly understand how the world worked, even if you were already fifteen years old. As he tapped his cigarette out, he chuckled slightly. The world hadn’t changed much, despite being on the other side of the country from what was. It was starting to hurt less, at least. Simon hadn’t spoken to his parents in years, and he didn’t know of any other family to talk to, so as time wore on, the therapy sessions had become a “family gathering” of sorts, to him. Each Friday he could sit down and eat cookies and sip coffee while he listened to his familiar group talk about their annoyances of the week- whether it was on the topic of their loss or not. More than once he had to politely refuse an offer to date an elderly woman’s granddaughter here and there, too. It was flattering, in its own way."
