"And to me." He watched him for a moment - because of course he was the cause célèbre for the evening, not to say the show - but glanced back down, not long after, at the rumpled front of his own shirt, and drank with a smile that was probably about as contemplative as they ever got, with him. He had the strangest feeling, entirely unfamiliar, that he shouldn't intrude.
But that was stupid; stepping back was the kind of thing you tried to do when things were going wrong. Right? Not when everything was slipping along far more smoothly than it had any right to, considering how little time he'd spent actively imagining any of the many potential problems he seemed to have avoided - as always - by luck or some kind of subconscious intuition. (Really, most of that was probably down to Jarvis, who'd never seemed to run into much trouble expressing his exact shade of meaning even without an audible outlet.) No moping.
Stopping himself fretting wasn't that difficult, as it turned out. He was used to it: he had plenty of practice not-worrying about the work he was supposed to be doing, even literally surrounded by the unfinished bits and pieces and the steadily growing piles of paper. This was just an extension of that - fling every doubt and hesitation out the window, don't try to think of whether it's funny, or frightening, or just appropriate that now, when someone else finally had a voice, was the time (the first in forever) he couldn't think of something to say.
"So if you don't want a lemon tree," he mused, drumming his fingers on the table in an exaggerated gesture at deliberation, "what - aviary? Artfully empty space? Rock garden? Those are supposed to be good. Calming. Right? You could stand some calming. You get like a - a vein going. Sometimes." He lifted his hand to rub at his forehead, biting back a smile. "It's a mystery to me."