Re: Comic Book Heroes: Alex/Holly/Billy
Even with his face turned mostly parallel to the counter, Billy could feel more than see Holly’s glance in his direction because that was a universal subtlety of body language - like, are you seeing what I’m seeing right now? And oh, Billy saw. He wasn’t nearly as good at the whole inscrutable expression thing that Holly could do with his face, so he’d brought one hand up to block his mouth like he was scratching at his upper lip and at the same time his gaze slid kinda sideways to flick up and acknowledge Holly’s glance. It wasn’t meant to be a judge-y thing, for the record. To be honest it was pretty endearing on Alex’s end, and hilarious on Tandy’s just because Billy knew how oblivious the guy was when it came to, like, the emotional nuance required of successful flirtation on the forums (ie. not anon Grindr-esque posts for anon sex or just, like, ‘hey let’s fuck’.) And Tandy, as far as Billy could tell - and he would have put serious money on it, like, Super Bowl-odds money - was not the type to trend towards casual flirting. So the money was on Tandy having no idea what’d kind of effect he’d had on this kid just by being Tandy, and in Billy’s opinion that required some goodnatured giving of shit.
He hadn’t noticed Holly’s noticing beyond that, though. Billy was generally a fairly perceptive person, but his attention had been fully on Alex’s whole being taken aback by the gesture thing, and then on returning the warmth of his smile with ease. He’d already decided he liked Alex just from their interaction on the forum post, but if the guy was acting like Billy buying some comics was the epitome of kindness, that probably meant he had a significant dearth of it going on in his life. And now Billy was determined to change that. “Oh, you don’t even have to out-logic him,” he explained, breezily. He was totally here for more people optimizing their ability to aggravate Tandy. “He’s like, this linear sort of guy, right? So the more out of left field your rebuttals are, the harder time he’s going to have getting them. Or not accepting his logical arguments and responding with emotional-based reasoning? Makes his brain implode, like, under the surface.”
Having given away some truly invaluable pointers, Billy straightened from his lean against the counter and twisted around a little. He listened to Holly say the most words in a row that Billy had ever witnessed from him, ever, and tried not to look too surprised. “Totally. I was hoping for something in a medium-breed variety, but I hear that Great Danes are super into being, like, couch potatoes and that’s my jam,” he nodded, a quick grin with a flash of teeth. “Yeah, I tried to get him to go rage with me in the Capital after the night at the rec center, when people were dreaming?” His voice went up to match the expectant raise of his eyebrows, because he figured he didn’t need to explain that night to Holly beyond that, no matter what side of the slumber he’d been on. “But he was fixated on not being able to dance, like that matters when the whole point is getting drunk enough not to care about being judged while you're shaking your ass.”