Opinions on this paragraph?

So I'm trying to figure out how I should write this paragraph.

At first, I had this;

"All they did was stare at Aske, which was something they did a lot, now that Aske thought about it. Aske couldn't figure out if they were in disbelief or had fallen asleep."

I thought it had too many "Aske's", and didn't flow well, so I changed it to this;

"They only stared, unreadable and awfully blank. Aske had begun to realize this was something they did a lot."

I decided to write it again, to see what else I could do with it;

"Aske couldn't figure out if they were in disbelief or had fallen asleep. They did this a lot, now that Aske thought about it."


Thoughts?

 

^^^ agree

 

Is it already known that the main character's name is Aske?

If so, my first thought would be this:

'All they did was stare at him. They did that a lot, now that he thought about it. He couldn't figure out if they were in disbelief or had fallen asleep.'

The last sentence bugs me a bit though. 'were in disbelief' sounds strange. And I can't picture a way people could be staring at him in such a way that it also looks like they're asleep. Sleeping means eyes closed, staring at someone is kind of the opposite.

For that last sentence I might try 'Were they staring in stunned disbelief, or just staring blankly?'

And I might cut the last 'staring'. Yeah, I probably would.

 

Actually I would also take out 'now that he thought about it'. It's unnecessary. Of course it's him thinking about it, that never needs to be said. Just like 'he saw, he felt, he heard, he smelled, he thought' etc. None of it needs to be said, unless it's the seeing, the smelling, or the thinking itself that's important. You can take out the filtering statements that only push the action farther away from the reader and just show the action itself.