Tony smiled a little in satisfied anticipation as that next drink started flowing - and then grinned, perfectly happy to watch and see how this story ended, when it kept on coming. "Hey, you're a natural," he said, lifting up the glass in a mockery of a toast (for his own benefit, since of course no one else was looking), regarding it in the overly bright light of the kitchen - honestly amused, and not at all displeased. "Maybe about - half this much, next time. For future reference. But your instincts are spot-on."
And tonight, he definitely wasn't going to complain. He caught that glance toward the mess of lemon peel, and it felt - strange, this incredibly indirect sequence of communication. It had never really occurred to him before how inefficient it was, but he'd never actually had to communicate before, either; he hadn't had much of a hand in the running of his own home, and had almost never been interested in changing the default settings that seemed to have been handed down from his parents' home when he'd moved, with much of the same help, to this place. Things had carried on the way they had since he could remember, until this year. And now, all of a sudden - all that history and accumulated knowledge was gone, aside from what pieces Jarvis had managed to pick up. Tony certainly hadn't been paying attention.
They were going to have to meet in the middle, he supposed. He could actually make an effort to identify what he wanted, and attempt to express it, and Jarvis could ...
... Well, Jarvis could do the rest. Maybe it wasn't meeting in the middle, exactly.
But it felt good, somehow, to know there was someone else who was at least a little lost - even if he only showed it through looks (and not even eye contact, at that), through an unpracticed and heavy hand at bartending, through the few free movements that were available to him in the narrow margins of obedience. And at least Tony, for his part, could keep on babbling straight at him. "This is for what I was drinking before," he said, pulling one end of his ridiculously long ribbon of lemon, letting it dangle down over the counter. "You don't use it when you're drinking this stuff straight, but when you mix in other things sometimes you add a piece of this. Obviously this is too much. I was just - you know." He paused, not quite sure how to explain himself, or how much he wanted to. He wasn't obliged to do so at all, but that's what he was doing, wasn't he? Explaining. "... Bored. I guess."
A highly incomplete explanation, but not entirely inaccurate.