REI:“You've been looking at me all afternoon
because you wanted to ask me that?”
SHINJI:“When we were cleaning today,
you were wringing out the cloth, remember?
The way you did it was like a mother.”
UrsusArctos: Even though Rei knows Shinji a lot better now, she doesn't care much in the way of social interaction, or asking Shinji why he kept looking at her oddly. I don't understand what it was about wringing the cloth that made Shinji think of a mother, but whatever the association was, it seems to have hit a nerve here.