It was Tony's turn to keep his eyes down, studying the surface of his drink, the way the water seeping out of the ice made shimmering lines in the less dense liquid around it, inspecting a random pattern in the counter top, listening to the endless muffled jabber coming from the living room - anything but watching Jarvis. He was a little ashamed, cowed by the speed and obvious discomfort with which Jarvis had wriggled away from that reassurance. He'd never much cared for failure, considering it a personal affront - and it was always frustrating to be faced with circumstances in which trying again and trying harder was as likely to meet with mounting disaster as success. He chafed under the weight of not doing anything.
Which should have been his cue to go install himself back on the couch in the other room and wait for his dinner, but that was a kind of defeat, too.
So he sat there - drinking, stewing a little - and when the plate materialized, he hauled his head up (as much as he'd have liked to eliminate any possibility of eye contact from the menu for the foreseeable future), and looked him in the face. He didn't expect the same in return, but - well, he'd read once that people were remarkably sensitive to the movement and position of the sclera of people around them. Which was a fancy way of saying: a man knew when he was being watched. "Thank you." Those words had never been in his vocabulary, as far as Avoxes were concerned, but they came more easily than I'm sorry. "That's great. That's perfect." He picked up a piece of chicken with his fingers, bit a little dolefully into it, and tried to convince himself that he didn't have to retreat back to the mess spewing out of the television.
But he did, really. The tension was palpable. It was better just to go. He straightened suddenly, picked up his plate and his glass - and couldn't quite resist a bit more commentary, even as he was on the run. "If you get to urge to come watch the show, bring another fork," he said, steeling himself against the blast of noise. "They're doing a District Eleven style retrospective. I already kind of want to gouge my eyes out."