Re: log: dylan & max
She was an expert at taking things badly, but she was sufficiently wasted that she listened this time, instead of immediately thinking about all the ways in which his words meant rejection. She didn't even bother pretending to look at the blurred-word menu, and her own sheet of sticky laminate fell onto the table and slid, unaided. She watched his thumb, because it was the kind of repetitive movement that sung to drunken eyes, easy to follow and no pressure if she fucked it up.
Trying to work out the morse-code tap of his fingers was harder. She'd never been good at tiny details, military or not. She'd memorized morse code for an Army test, relearned it for the CIA, and lost it during those years in a Dhaka prison. She closed her hand around his, and she tried to make him do it slower.
"Me too," she admitted, and it didn't cost her anything to do that. Normally, it would require a heavy dose of swallowed pride, but not at the moment. She leaned back against the booth more heavily, her shoulder abutting his in defiance of personal space or anything that resembled that bullshit. "But thinking of home made it easy to hope, and hope made shit worse. Better to leave it dead," she said, and she looked over at his menu and pointed at something random with a finger that was calloused and rough enough to almost knock the sheet of laminate out of his hand. "That."