her multisyllabic mewing sounds were stagy, meretricious
i thought it meant fake/lying. close enough
Then Nate looked at her face and saw that she'd been crying. She had tried to cover it up. No, that wasn't quite right. She looked as if she'd made a halfhearted attempt to cover it up but what she really wanted was for him to know that she was upset and ask what was wrong.
She made a sarcastic comment about Nate's "artfully crafted sentences," which, she said, mimicked true feeling without knowing what it was. He imitated the stylistic devices of writers he admired without realizing that for those writers these weren't mere devices but means of expressing something t…
"It's fine," he said in the kind of cold, flat voice that only someone with serious Asperger's would take at face value.
Hannah's expression indicated to Nate that she did not suffer from Asperger's syndrome.
Nate looked away, a little repelled by the near panic he'd seen on her face. He wa…
The issue seemed, to him, to be have been resolved, but they continued to talk for a while longer. This didn't really surprise him. In his experience, women, once they got started, exhibited a rather insatiable desire to confess, elaborate, iron out, reveal, and so on and so forth. [...]
