"Yeah, don't worry," Tony shot back, clipped and raw. The delicacy in her voice wasn't lost on him - it was impossible not to hear the difference between that fine and the preceding fuck you, and he wanted to cover it over as quickly as possible, to bury it under his own displeasure. What he'd expected, he didn't really know - he hadn't thought that far ahead, of course - but it wasn't that he'd make her sound that way, that he'd push her back to arm's length when they hadn't been operating that way, not really, for a while. Maybe that would have been smarter. Maybe that's what he should have been trying to do.
Well, it wouldn't be the first thing he'd engineered to perfection more or less by accident.
And it took a lot for Tony to pass up an obvious retort. Most of the sticky situations he got himself into on a day-to-day basis were the result of hurling back the first thing he thought of, particularly if it made it very clear how wide the cleverness gap was between himself and his conversation partner. But here, the easy rejoinder - don't worry, I can see how much you don't fucking care - would just have underlined his own weakness, highlighted the similarities between them that would be much better erased. It was a little late to start worrying about making intelligent choices, about being safe, but stepping back and throwing up a wall was better and easier - and so he just ripped his gaze away from her, glaring instead at the hollow, jagged remnant of that vase like he'd have liked nothing better than to turn it into porcelain fucking dust. After a moment, he reached up to chafe his hand quickly, violently through the hair at the back of his head. "Don't worry. I know my way out of town."
It wasn't much of an exit that he made, starting toward her and then - presented with a field of broken champagne glass - rerouting to pick his way around the other side of the table, slowed and confined to an awkward zig-zag path by the shambles of plates and glasses and serving dishes. Despite his best efforts, a piece of something sharp and fine lodged in the arch of his foot, and that was enough - his frustration burst out of him and he kicked a salt cellar, the only intact article in sight, viciously against the wall with a loud, sharp son of a bitch before storming past the rest of the mess to the stairs. He felt very keenly that he was leaving her behind and that he didn't want to, it was that same feeling of surprise and regret that had broken over him when she'd come to see him that night not so long ago; when he'd realized that he hadn't known how integral her presence was to him until for a moment it had disappeared. He kept finding the surprising places inside him where, in one way or another, she'd become lodged - and it was starting to make him wonder how fucking smart he really was. How smart either of them were.