Who: Dylan and Max What: Beers and the talk. Where: The CIA home for the dead. When: Recently. Warnings: Nah. Bit of language.
Living in a crowded safehouse didn't actually bother Max. She was a terrible team player, but she'd spent most of her adult life living in some barracks or another. Or, even worse, living in squalor in some poor country, where she was risking her life just by using a communal bathroom. No, the safehouse wasn't a problem. The only thing that made her uncomfortable about the place was how opulent it was. Between the jacuzzi, the pool and the private sauna, she felt like she was back with Brandon, living some life that would never be hers. That bothered her, and she knew it had more to do with this new job dredging up old memories than anything else. It all felt like Seattle, with Brandon pulling their strings, though she knew that wasn't entirely true. As far as she knew, all their assignments went through HQ and Davis, so that made things a little different. But she'd refused to work with Brandon for years, since he'd cut the kid off for taking a handful of kill shots.
And Max? Max would have taken those kill shots without blinking. She still would, and she hoped that wouldn't turn into a problem. Brandon was opposed to lethal measures. Or, well, he always had been; she had no reason to think that had changed.
But she was shoving all of that aside for the night.
She had two beers in her, and her buzz was mildly pleasant. She probably wouldn't have bothered contacting Dylan had she been sober. She'd meant what she'd told Ella about things being done and over there, but that didn't mean she and McKendrick couldn't be friends. But she knew she'd started to reek of desperation about four invitations earlier, and she was insecure enough to want to bury her head in the sand because of it. So, it was the beers that had taken this leap, and she was alright with that. She was brave when she had a gun in her hand; no one had ever accused her of being brave when it came to matters of the heart.
And she hadn't forgotten Christmas, so when she stopped in front of his door, wifebeater and pajama pants low around her narrow hips, there were also galoshes on her feet and a pipe-cleaner tiara on her loose brown hair.
As for the lock? She shot the thing (silencer in place, thank you very much), and then she kicked the door in.
"Quick enough for you?" she asked as she entered the room, kicking the lockless door closed behind her and carrying the pack of beer that she'd left in the hallway earlier.
See, Dylan had forgotten about Christmas. There was a certain level of hard liquor that was required to make a tiara that poorly, and it was only upon seeing it on her head that Dylan recalled the thing back into existence. The galoshes were more familiar, they'd been purchased before the imbibing of holiday whiskey that day. The getting drunk that early morning had nothing to do with any uncertainty in his skills as a man of arts and crafts, and was rather a generalized reaction to some of the freelance work he'd resorted to taking on in light of having no legitimate job. He'd still had his cover gig at the Bellagio at the time, but now that he was dead, he didn't even have that. He couldn't be too sad about losing that, however. Security was all well and good, but Dylan found that things were just boring if he wasn't getting shot at or blown up. He knew that Main could relate, they'd had too many conversations about what she was going to do when she wasn't doing this. She at least had a reason to slow down, to step back and settle down. Amanda.
When the door flew open, it was a familiar spread for any of the rooms he'd stayed in since his apartment went kablooey. Technology strewn across most of the carpet. Dylan too sat on the floor, his back against the far wall, knees folded in. There was a tablet in his lap and a bottle of leftover Christmas scotch by one knee. The cap was off, but it looked scarcely touched. He was way too alert to be anything close to drunk, which was unfortunate because drunk might have explained his choice in wardrobe at least. There was some kind of anime character on his tee shirt. If and when she asked, he would regale her with the story of Rurouni Kenshin.
He blinked at the gun in her hand, followed by a slow pan to the broken door and lock. Then he smiled, and it was a good smile for a dead man. "Oh, Davis is going to be mad at yoooou."
Like any good spook, she surveyed the room before she did anything else. His clothes were noted. The state of the scotch bottle was noted. The amount of technology strewn about was noted. Noted. Noted. Noted. Even buzzed, noted. "I warned Rawlings," she said of the lock. As far as she was concerned, that covered all her bases. "And Davis and Reece are starting a collection to buy me a magic wand; they're not going to complain or be surprised," she said of the men who'd already had sex in a good fifty-percent of the house.
She crossed the room, and she sat down beside him on the floor, knees up and six-pack between the colorful galoshes. She popped a beer, and she pulled the pipe-cleaner tiara off her head and plopped it onto his. "That's the shittiest tiara I've ever seen, in case you wondered, and I've been making craft tiaras for the past two years." She took another sip of her beer, the amber glass sweating between her long fingers. She was close enough to bump his shoulder, and she did. She was close enough to look at the tablet screen, and she did. She was going for platonic, one of the guys, not desperate or chasing or staring at him for too long. Though, possibly, she stared for too long, side-glance. She hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving, and even then he'd been intentionally avoiding her.
Her next drag was long. Head tipped back and she would have kept drinking until it was empty, just to keep from talking. But the need to take a breath got in the way, and she lowered the beer and let it hang between her knees, long fingers again, gun-calloused and bone, just like the rest of her. "You aren't the vigilante type." It wasn't a question, but maybe it would get him talking about what he was going to do with his life. "I wasn't at first, but enough fighting and you get there. I just don't like not having a system of checks and balances." She grinned, and she finished off the beer as she looked over at him. "What can I say? I'm a registered Republican."
Dylan's smile deteriorated into a wounded frown when she dropped the tiara onto his head with an unnecessary critique on his pipecleaner talents. "Okay, rude." Although he didn't remove the tiara, he did reach up to straighten it out where it rested crooked on the top of his head. "I put my heart into this damn thing. I might have been half blind on eggnog at the time, but I thought it turned out beautifully." He patted the pipe cleaners, as if he'd just given the tiara an affection pep talk. "Besides, you know I'm a perfectionist. You know I wouldn't have given you this fine article unless I believed it to be the absolute best." A moment's consideration had him pulling the thing from his head in order to give it a closer inspection. She was right of course, it was a really shitty tiara. "It looked much more artisanal when I was drunk," he said in his defense. Then the tiara went back on and Dylan made room for her beside him by straightening out one knee.
The tablet rested in his lap, and although the project he'd been working on was an extreme no-no, he was pretty sure even by Max's standards - maybe especially by - he made no move to conceal the screen. It was just row after row of letters and numbers, no words, no spaces, no sense. It made his eyes strain, reading the code, and he was grateful for the distraction really. Resting back and giving a slight stretch, Dylan reached for one of the beers she'd brought. "I've got the harder stuff," he said with a tilt of his head toward the bottle of liquor. "What's the point in being dead if you can't get drunk on a weekday?"
He figured that she wanted to talk about work. Honestly, there wasn't much else that they did talk about. As often as they bounced between entirely professional coworker relationship to entirely not, work was a constant. There was always a mission, a plan to be formulated, a bad guy to find. Dylan didn't agree or disagree with her on the vigilante thing, she'd pretty much called him out on it. He smirked when she made mention of being Republican. "Yes, but you don't vote." It was a stab in the dark. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. He'd left that part of her file alone.
She laughed when he lauded the tiara. "If that's perfection, you're going to have a hard time in the job market," she joked. And she could joke about anything. Growing up in the military, it was all about developing a thick skin. Or, at the very least pretending to. And certain things she really did have a thick skin about, like work. Emotional stuff? That was harder, but she didn't expect him to joke about that. He joked all the time, sure, but joking as a coping mechanism was more her speed, mocking herself and then laughing along. She'd learned that after falling on her ass a hundred times in ROTC, where she was always the only girl, and the smallest in the class. "You might drink more than I do," she added, letting the statement hang out there for a few seconds. She'd had a serious drinking problem in Seattle, when everything fell apart and she had no idea how to stitch what was left of her heart back onto her sleep. Amanda had solved that problem. Her kid had solved a lot of her problems, and she couldn't overstate how good it was to have something good, someone that would always be happy to see her face, if only a computer screen.
As for computer screens, she had no idea what was scrolling across his. She did know that they weren't on any active jobs yet, so she knew it had nothing to do with that. But it was definitely code, and she wondered why he was here, what he was up to. She didn't see him working for Brandon, not even when the dust settled. She would, because there wasn't much choice, but not him. She reached over, beer dangling from the fingers of her other hand, and she tapped his screen. "What is it?" she asked, though maybe she didn't want to know, and she handed one of the beers over a second later.
And no, she didn't want to talk about work. There wasn't work, not yet. Going out right then would be stupid, and they'd just need to bide their time to make this right. So, she took another swig, and she opened a fresh beer. And then she grinned when he said she didn't vote. "I vote every election. Even local ones. You think I want some liberal Democrat taking my firearms away?" she asked, her grin saying that was standard military protocol, and it was. Everyone got the day off to vote, everyone stateside, and she'd never missed. "I was the perfect soldier," she said, raising a beer in a toast and swallowing down a large gulp of beer.
He shrugged, as if mild inebriation instead of mindless was her prerogative, because it certainly was. There was a reason that the bottle of liquor had barely been touched, Dylan wasn't really in the mood for oblivion. He'd never been much of a drinker, although even he'd slipped into a good two day bender after having been fired. It wasn't really the getting fired part that had crippled him so significantly, though. He'd gotten fired plenty of times by his father, who was fond of employing child labor on his various artistic projects taken around the house. The first time Dylan had been fired was when he was four, and he'd dropped a bucket of yellow paint on the hardwood floor in the dining room. Years later, his father would drunkenly regale partygoers with the tale while pointing out the forever-yellow puddle by the china cabinet. Because the man naturally never wanted to paint over it or sand it away or put the china cabinet on top of it, then he'd have one less thing to criticize Dylan for endlessly. To this day, Dylan fucking hated yellow.
So he should have been accustomed to being terminated for reasons both real and imagined by the time he was an adult, it wasn't that. It was that, to Dylan, he'd done the right thing. He'd gone into it with honesty and not a shred of deception, and that's what fucked him in the end. It was twisted and backwards and maybe he shouldn't have been so damn naive, but the world loved to club the knees of dreamers. He hadn't been able to justify being too surprised. It still hurt, though. So yes, he'd gotten good and drunk. Dylan had told himself that he was entitled to that, but after the smoke cleared, he'd felt guilty for it. He had too many friends that drank themselves into chasms of darkness. Although those friends thought he was dead now, so maybe they didn't count anymore. Friends seemed like a perk for the living.
He supposed that his friends were other supposedly dead people now, although the only one he really spoke to was Max. She was good enough company to make up for the lack of anyone else in his life currently. Besides, he had his work, recently accumulated side projects that kept things interesting. Interesting because legality had never been something he exactly concerned himself with, and the concept of what was right or just 'right for him' was twisty like a corkscrew ever since the FBI had sang sayonara. He glanced down at the tablet when she brought his attention back to it, although all he said was, "Nothing important," as he nudged the gadget away.
"You wouldn't let some amended constitutional law let anyone take your firearms away," he said with a grin that welcomed the first long swig of beer. "Being a perfect anything must be nice, I'm not sure I ever found my niche."
She watched him shove the tablet away, though she didn't actually believe the words that came out of his mouth. "You even think StarFox is important," she reminded him. And at least that she was sure of. She had trouble making him out, and that was no secret. He wasn't like the men she'd grown up around; there wasn't a hint of Army in his veins. He wasn't a soldier, no yes, sir, and not enough deference to give a shit what he was told to do. She suspected he'd only lasted in the FBI because of that unspoken rule that existed when it came to technical people in a field made for bullets and body bags; they were necessary. So, the nerds got humored, and the rest of them died, but they weren't really government, not according to most spooks.
But Max had Gwen, and her feelings about tech were a little different because of it. Her best friend had saved her ass more times than she could count. And McKendrick was a damn fine hacker, no matter what he thought about himself right now. Because she couldn't make him out, and she assumed his mood was still related to the name sale, to failing. She didn't have a clue that it had to do with telling the truth. She would have told him, had she known, that telling the truth wasn't always the right thing to do. But, then, she killed people without blinking an eye. What did she know?
"Have you talked to people?" she asked, after another swallow of her beer. "Not these guys," she said, motioning to the house full of chaos that they'd signed up for, because she knew he hadn't talked to any of those guys. And that in itself was weird; she always thought of McKendrick as being a social guy. "Your wingman. Friends?" As far as she knew, he only talked to Daniel and Ella, but that was better than nothing. One thing growing up lonely had taught her was that friends were a good idea, even if she had trouble making them outside of the field, where no one gave a shit about being nice or soft. "Daniel probably thinks we're dead. You should check in," she suggested. She hadn't talked to Lin since he'd stood her up at Thanksgiving, and she'd gotten that picture loud and clear.
She smiled a sad smile when he said she wouldn't let the law take her guns away, and she shook her head. "You know, the General had to go to extreme measures to make me shoot something the first time around." She shrugged. "It's like an extension of my arm now. And I never wanted to be a soldier, but I was good at it. Better than I am at this. Maybe he knew me better than I knew myself." She looked over at him again. "Hacking isn't your niche?"
"That's because Starfox is," he said. His eyebrows dipped for a cockeyed squint that was aimed right for her, as Dylan wasn't entirely sure how she could suggest his gaming high scores were anything but serious business. All kidding aside, the tablet wasn't really something that he was ready to explain completely, and he much preferred to ignore those kinds of situations entirely until they blew up in his face. It wasn't a method that had worked a whole lot in his life, but he was reluctant to try something new. Besides, they were shacking up in the super spy hideout, weren't secrets pretty much mandatory? He wasn't sure how it all worked, but he assumed everybody in the CIA had things hidden away in sock drawers and maybe plastic diaries with locks and keys. Not that he was hiding anything from her. No, he was just.. changing the subject with admirable finesse.
"My friends think I'm dead, Max." Dylan raised an eyebrow as he took another sip of beer. He knew that Ella knew Max was alive, which was fine. He understood people wanting their families to know. He'd certainly let his own know one day. But he couldn't really bring himself to tell anyone here that he was alive in case this whole thing wasn't over yet. He didn't know, though. Maybe that was the wrong call too. Both options felt impossibly selfish, and Dylan didn't like feeling that way. He shrugged a little at the mention of Daniel, and he nodded his head with a kind of begrudging agreement. She was right, he needed to at least tell Daniel that he was still alive. The man was a shut-in drunk with an abhorrence for social networking, who was he going to tell?
The heavy subject matter made Dylan smile in an effort to alleviate it, but he made a face a moment later when Max suggested that hacking was his niche. "What? No. That doesn't count." Like any inherently talented person, he had a difficult time believing that his life calling could be something that came to him so.. easily. It didn't really seem fair, he'd much prefer to take on a hobby that was discouraging in its challenges. "Maybe I'll become a choreographer," he said, resting his head back against the wall thoughtfully. He knew fuck all about choreography, so the stress level should be nice and steady at high-alert.
She quirked a brow when he emphasized the importance of StarFox, but she didn't argue with him. She didn't push him about that tablet anymore either. She'd already pushed plenty where he was concerned, and she was really going to make an effort not to be the psychotic stalking woman who didn't know when to give up. She was good at that particular role, and this was a reprise, but it was time to let old habits die hard. And she almost got a chuckle out of that; the hardened spook, having a hard time letting go of what? The promise of something? It reminded her of her pathetic days in Seattle, and she wondered why she'd ever given up the meaningless sex. This always happened when she did. So, no, she didn't push about the tablet. She popped a fresh beer, and she downed half of it, and she let him tell her that his friends thought he was dead. That got him another quirked brow. "The government thinks we're out of the picture McKendrick. Falsifying that DNA cost a lot of money. Getting us aliases cost a lot of money. No one's looking for us. This isn't an excuse to stay locked up forever. If you don't want to risk it and play hero, you can take your tablet and start over as Johnny Doe. Me?" she asked, pointing her beer at the door, "as much as I love the communal bliss, I'm not hiding here forever."
And as for hacking? She scoffed. "Of course it counts," she countered. "You're one of the best. Of course it counts." Killing people came easy to her. Sleeping easy after, that came easy to her too. She'd accepted the fact that was her niche ages ago, even though she'd never wanted it to be. She tapped the galoshes against the carpet, and she leaned her head back as she downed the rest of the beer. The buzz was back, and she liked it; she wasn't in the mood for sad realities. "You? A choreographer?" she asked, looking over at him with mirth in her brown eyes. "Do you even dance, McKendrick?" She doubted it. "I didn't think dancing was covered in geek school. It sure wasn't part of the Army." But she'd learned. She'd learned in bars with men wearing plaid and boots, and she grinned at the memory of being ungainly, braces and a dumb hat on her head.
"No hard feelings, right?" she asked out of the blue, once the memory faded. "Between us?"
Dylan didn't like the idea of hiding out in some bunker forever either. That certainly wasn't in the cards for him, and he was a bit surprised that he'd lasted this long. He'd never done particularly well within close quarters, the military would have never worked for him. It probably had more to do with being the byproduct of his parents, much more than he'd ever want to admit, but he'd always operated best on his own timeline with his own destination in mind. Paint by numbers and standing in line looked good on paper, but he was pretty sure that not being even remotely capable of doing that stuff looked a whole hell of a lot worse than not trying at all would. The fact that that mindset could be extended to his dating life went blissfully over his head.
"I took some lessons," he murmured. The words tried to get lost in the opening of his beer, and he chased them down with the kind of lengthy swig that emptied domestic glass. He didn't bother to explain the lessons, but he knew that if she started in with the jokes, he'd ultimately have to. When somebody needed contact with informants and said informants were fond of swing dancing classes, certain arrangements were made.
He had to blink when she rapidly veered off the subject of dancing, and he glanced at her with a mixed look of charmed amusement and mild concern. "Hard feelings? Tons. You made fun of my tiara." He hoped that she knew that he didn't hold anything against her or blame her for anything, not the explosion at his apartment or their more recent untimely deaths, not losing his job, not her aversion to intimacy that extended beyond the physical. His smile perked a little, reassuring. "We're cool, Max."
She knew he wasn't going to stay. From the beginning, she knew he wouldn't be around for long, and it wasn't just his lack of hero complex that made her so certain. Whatever McKendrick said about emotions, feelings and love of the FBI, the man was temporary. Working for the government was a series of temporary assignments. It was perfect for the commitment-phobes of the world, because it didn't require the kind of adoring dedication that the military did. The military was hell; you had to enjoy being a soldier, or you had to believe in a flag. But the government? Spooks were all narcissists, and most of them hated Uncle Sam. She was a terrible spook, and he was a perfect government man. She'd known that from the beginning, when breaking into her files had been a challenge because of her clearance level. She'd been a challenge then, but she wasn't anymore. She should have just told Ella that when they talked about McKendrick. Why not? It wasn't like either of them worked for the good old U.S.A. anymore.
But she didn't say any of that. She popped a fresh beer, and half of it went down. She was moving beyond buzzed, and she didn't care. She shook her head, and she chuckled. "I can see you in a tux, on a dance floor." She could. She chuckled again, and she took another the swig, the visual an easy one to produce in her mind. Maybe it was because he felt like wealth - and as a spook she was used to finding the richest man in the room. Wealth and tuxedos and formal dances went together. That made her think of Brandon, and she finished her beer in an attempt to keep from drawing parallels.
And she was almost glad he joked about her question. She could have taken that moment to start a conversation; Ella would have approved of that. But what was the point? She kept finding reasons to see him, to talk to him, and nothing ever came of it. She knew she was wading further and further into pathetic territory. She'd told him how she felt, and he'd told her he'd tried, and she thought maybe she'd had enough of that for one lifetime. Why hear it again? No point. She finished her beer, and she pushed to her feet, slightly uneven on her galoshes. She looked down at him, once she was steady, and she tried to forget all the times he told her he wasn't like Brandon. She should have known better; she turned all men into Brandon, which was the part that Ella just didn't understand. She pointed at the remaining beer with her empty. "You can keep that, you know, since we're cool." Her grin was practiced and casual, because she was good at hiding the fact that she felt anything. She'd learned that when she shooting small animals in her backyard at the age of eight; the General had been so proud.
She almost asked him to let her know when he bailed, but she refrained. "You can keep the impressive tiara too, McKendrick. You might need it out there on the dance floor." She refused to think about what she'd gotten him for Christmas; that would just open the embarrassment floodgates again.
He wasn't nearly buzzed enough for time to get distorted and weird, so he could barely account for the way she drained her beer in a handful of seconds and went to stand with a sway that betrayed her blood alcohol. Dylan frowned like she was a test question that he had gotten wrong, but maybe couldn't figure out the answer to before the timer went off. And now it was pencils down. Damn. "Hey, wait a second," he frowned even harder, nose scrunched and childish because her grin was easy and light but she was preparing to leave like something was seriously wrong. It did not compute, but Dylan had been recently forced to accept that he was an idiot, so that was unsurprising. He lit briefly back onto the conversation he'd had with her sister, and tongued the inside of his cheek. "Will you sit down, drunky?"
He dropped his empty bottle back into the papered box with the others she apparently wanted to leave with him, and he gave her a flat look like her attempt at a parting gift was actually more of a slap in the face. Of course, it was really Ella that had been the slap in the face, and Dylan tried to navigate a way to breach the subject. He thought just diving in might work, but he didn't like the cold. Still, he took a deep breath and went for it anyway.
"Look, its been brought to my attention that I'm an asshole. Am I am asshole? God, you probably wouldn't even tell me. Alright, I'll take it." He rambled onward because it seemed like the only way to get the words out before he climbed back into his self-contained mole hill where everything was cool and they could pretend to be friends like nothing ever happened. "The truth is, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. I don't know what you want me to do. I thought you wanted me to back off and give you space, and then I thought maybe you didn't know what you wanted me to do either, then everything happened and it felt like.. maybe nothing was supposed to happen, you know?"
Had he just talked himself in a circle? It felt like he'd gotten nowhere further than where he'd started, which was essentially, I don't know what's wrong or how to fix it so I give up because I suck. Dylan knew he sounded like an ambivalent douche, god he must have finally turned into his father. He groaned, dropping his head back against the wall. Maybe Max had the right idea, maybe the only thing to do in these kinds of situations was get drunk.
She wasn't expecting him to stop her, and her feet came to a standstill instinctively, before her brain even processed his request. She looked at him, and she had to chuckle at how young he looked with that scrunched nose and frown. She wondered what he'd been like when he was a kid, and she considered pestering Luke for more information, now that she knew he and McKendrick had been matched up in the hotel's idea of memory lane. "I'm not drunk," she corrected, just a hint of a sway of her narrow hips with the assertion. "And I don't know if I want to sit," she added, and she sounded petulant. Max didn't try much, but she'd tried with him. God and all the Republicans knew she'd tried, and she'd still ended up standing in this same place. The only difference was that he looked adorable and lost, instead of disgusted. Maybe that should have lit up some lightbulb in her head, but it didn't. Her hands went to her hips in a gesture of old, teenage defiance, and looking down at him was hard when keeping her balance was important.
Finally, she sat on the edge of the bed, which was kind of like agreeing, but while still stubbornly not agreeing. Triumph! Until he started rambling, and then triumph didn't matter in face of the memory of Ella's embarrassing conversation with him. "You told my sister to take a Midol. That was sexist, McKendrick." She managed not to laugh. She managed not to smile. It was impressive, how disapproving she managed to look. "You're not an asshole," she continued, the words overlapping his comment that she wouldn't tell him if he was an asshole. And around that time it registered that they were really going to have this conversation. "I know she told you to tell me why you aren't interested," she continued. Words? Was he saying words? She talked over them in her own drunken version of lalala. "Ella's used to a man that thought her nipples tasted better than beer. Some of us don't want to hear how we aren't attractive, or how our personality is impossible. I know those things, and you don't need to make excuses for me. I told Ella, and I told my stupid cupid person, that not being interested isn't a crime. We slept together, and you decided I wasn't your thing. That's your right, and I'm trying not to be obsessive about it." God, she wanted another beer. "I warned you I was obsessive." She had. She was sure she had, hadn't she?
Then he was saying nothing was supposed to happen, because there wasn't any overlap there, and she shrugged narrow shoulders. "I get it, McKendrick."
When she told him that he'd been sexist in his conversation with her sister, Dylan made another annoyed face. He didn't think of himself as sexist as all. He would easily concede to the fact that Max was better at him than just about anything that didn't involve a game controller.. but maybe that wasn't the same thing as not being sexist. He was sober, but not quite even-headed enough to really think about it at length. Mostly because he was still fairly certain that Ella just might have benefited from some kind of menstrual medication. She'd never seemed like the type to go off the handle like that before, and he still wasn't convinced that Max and his non-relationship was any of her business, anyway. Dylan, like many people who spent their life hiding in one way or another, took personal prodding.. personally.
For a moment, it felt like they were just talking at eachother. Ultimately, he forced himself to shut up and listen to what she had to say, though. "Okay, time out," he said when she'd finished. His hands even came up, palms steepled perpendicular to symbolize. "I'm not talking to you right now because your sister told me to, and I didn't start ignoring you because you're obsessive. I didn't even mean to ignore you, if that's what you feel like happened. I knew you wanted space, and thats what I intended to give you, but I guess I just never was very good at doing anything halfway."
He took another drink. "So if I'm supposed to just sit over here and drink beer with you and pretend everything's cool, I don't know how. I'm trying, but I suck at it, obviously. And if I'm supposed to be the guy that never asks anything more from you than occasional sex, I'm not sure I know how to do that either."
Max was used to men. She understood them better than she did women, as long as it didn't have anything to do with a relationship. She wouldn't classify McKendrick as a misogynist. No, men like Reed got that label, not men like McKendrick. And it almost made her smile to think of Ella making enough of a racket that he felt the need to tell her to take a pill. She should probably try to figure out what was behind her sister's recent vocalness, but she wasn't in the mood. Ella's completely shitty choice of friends was rubbing her the wrong way lately, and with her sister it was better to shut up than rock a boat that would never understand that it was being rocked in the first place. As far as Max could tell, Ella hadn't learned a thing from Ian, but she was too drunk for that right now. And Ella was old enough to live her own life full of assholes.
His perpendicular hand gesture made her shut up for a second, and she had a hard time keeping quiet the longer he talked. "Who said I wanted space? Where the hell did you even get that?" she finally blurted, because she thought she'd been pretty obvious with the whole chasing him like a kicked puppy thing. "I never asked you for space, McKendrick. I never said I needed any. I tried to tell you that I was interested, and you kept telling me we'd tried, and that it didn't work. Which is fine, but don't tell me I wanted space." She stood, wobble and sway, and then straight spine and determination. "I keep contacting you. I keep chasing you down. Why would I do that if all I wanted from you was a fuck? We've had sex once, and I'm still here," she said, motioning to the room around. "I'm drunk, but I'm not drunk enough to forget that I just shot your fucking door in, just so I could see you." Which was up there on the scale of pathetic; she knew that. "I researched video games for you, for fuck's sake. I don't need to do all that legwork to get laid. All I need to do is walk into a bar and order a beer."
She pointed behind her, to the door. "I'm walking out that door, and I'm going to sleep this off. But this ball's in your court. Don't blame me for whatever's going on in your head. I like you. I like you more than I've liked anyone since before Brandon. What you do with that? It's up to you." And with that, she turned unsteadily on her galoshes.
The first thing he did was frown. Like many smart people who knew they were smart, Dylan wasn't especially familiar with being told that he was wrong. Getting told that he was wrong by drunk people wasn't necessarily anything new, he'd spent an estimated sixth of his life online, but Max wasn't your average college blogger with an abstract(and fucking wrong) method for beating Link's shadow temple. Because it was Max, he was immediately forced to consider that he was wrong, which accounted for the faint curl of his lip in that moment.
Under other circumstances, he might have even argued with her about the reasons that provided him with assuming she wanted space. He didn't need to ask her or anyone if she needed space, he'd worked it out completely on his own despite any conflicting stimuli from her. Right now, however, Dylan was realizing that what he'd done was the courtship equivalent of refusing to stop and ask for directions when lost. He could have easily continued to stew on all of that, but was forced into a smile when Max made mention of the way she'd shot in his door. The possibility of getting chastised for it wasn't worrying, it'd been worth it.
It was only after she turned to go that he realized his cue for interruption. He didn't want to get into the conversation any deeper really, not tonight while she was swaying in her rain boots. "Alright, ball is in my court," he agreed. That was fair, and there didn't seem to be any pressure attached to it. He thought he knew where she stood now, and it wasn't like a little alcohol had much to do with it. He didn't see her as needing to drink to get things off her chest. Besides, he'd been the one that brought it all up.
"And hey.. Main.." He'd managed to get to his feet before she could slip off completely. When Dylan closed in on her, she was almost out the wounded door. "Don't leave me with this sad thing," he said as he deposited the tiara back onto her head. His fingers nudged a dark lock of hair behind her ear before he drew back to hold the door open for her departure. "Sweet dreams, okay?" And if that was a little too serious, he broke with a dimpled grin. "Try not to shoot anything else between here and there, some of these ugly bastards need their beauty rest."