Reno just stared at him, running the other man's words back through his mind.
Do I want to leave? No, he never had, and he didn't now.
Am I really not willing to do my job? No, he liked his job. What he didn't like was one particular order.
Do I despise him? No, not that either. Though right now, he thought he'd be well within his rights if he did.
"You're not listening, dammit! We're standing here arguing about one point, one thing I disagree with you on, and you think it's the fucking end of the world. You want me to follow you and you don't give a rat's ass that I have followed you and that aside from that one point, I never had any intention of stopping. But if you're going to say that if I disagree with you in one case then nothing else matters, fine. If none of it matters, then I guess I don't need to waste the effort." He fixed Rufus with a solid stare.
"One point. Concede it, and everything else goes back to normal. But if that's not good enough for you, if you'd rather have nothing than someone who would follow you, well," he paused, turning as if to leave, tossing the last bit of his statement over his shoulder as he took a step away, "your loss."
It was a dangerous feint; he didn't want to leave and he even less wanted to get himself killed, but for the moment, it seemed the only way to knock some sense into Rufus' head. He could only hope that some of what he'd just said would sink in. I don't want to leave you and I don't want to leave her, either. Quit trying to make it mutually exclusive.
At the very least, he didn't think Rufus was likely to shoot him as he was walking away. As angry as the other man was, he still needed Reno too much. He was about 99% sure that this stunt wasn't actually going to result with a bullet in his back.
Well, maybe more like 90%, but even so. He'd gambled his life on worse odds than that before. And he'd long ago trained himself to not think about the possibility of him being wrong.