"Oh, no?" His eyebrow rose; his smile spread a little further across his face. Was that a correction? He hadn't expected to find this quite so amusing - there was a perversity to it, of course, to compelling someone to engage in conversation when they couldn't, that might have been appealing to some people, but that wasn't the sort of thing he'd ever enjoyed. Maybe it was the novelty; maybe it was something genuinely altruistic, the unexpected pleasure of watching someone come out of his shell. Maybe it was just loneliness. "All right. I'm already crazy?" A quick, manic grin for emphasis; then he laughed, shoving himself up on one elbow to drink. "No. Let's see."
It was just charades. There were only so many ideas associated with any given gesture. "I think." Which had what, exactly, to do with his career trajectory? His ego supplied a bridge: "I think too much to spend my time punching someone else's ideas into a computer for ten years before they even look at me."
Alternative interpretations might have included hard-headed or thick-skulled, but he'd have been more than a little surprised if his Avox had grown that much of a backbone in the past twenty minutes. As he was hashing through a couple alternatives, he reached idly over the arm of the sofa for the little glass remote on the table, and ran his finger down the length of it in one quick, unconcerned stroke. The television's volume dipped a bit - not quite enough to be inoffensive, but he'd never needed peace or silence to concentrate. "I think you're right."