they have to learn each other's works to answer fan questions.
"Okay. Pause. Hold it." he pauses her headphones with a double tap to the ear. "Why are you cringing?"
"I've hit sex scene number four and I'm being inundated with the word tummy." She wrinkles her nose high.
"That's the word you have a problem with? Tummy?"
"It's childish!" she says. "Her cunt is squelching or whatever and then you drop tummy?"
"Whoa, cunt is only used in dirty talk."
She groans and sinks deeper into the bus seat. "I don't know how you do this."
"Write a concise story? Because your ramblings-"
"-Are on the best sellers list." she snips. "No, write porn. It's just sex. Why are you fixated on it?"
He throws hos hands up in offense.
"It's not just sex. Sex is never just sex; it exists in a context. Sex isn't the important part of this at all. Sure, fine, it's a fun little treat for the reader and it's hot. But sex is telling the reader something too."
For a moment, he thinks she understands, but then she sneers.
"They're having sex four times before the halfway mark. Maybe they're going to be hurt by the frivolous way they're treating each other? Maybe this act -which they both claim means nothing- is starting to mean something?" He whips out the massive tome of a book he's been reading: all 900 pages of a Falling Court.
"You, on the other hand, love to drop things that don't mean anything at all. Just to waste time." he picks a passage from earlier. "'The swooping cliffs of Lfi are streaked with rivulets of water, the fresh water of Amort, the tears of the Nourishing God, that fall miles down to sharp, cragen cliffs. Only once a year does the sunlight hit the waterfalls at such an angle to paint them red, the same violent crimson of the Lost family crest, and that is during Winter's End.'"
He looks up and mimics her sneer. "That's so many words for 'there's waterfalls.'"
"Maybe I'm putting chess pieces in play."
"Let me know when you get there."
It's two hours later when he sits up and pauses her music again, this time more angrily.
"Did you get there?" she asks, but he's already bowling over her.
"They toss Kryven Lost's head over the fucking cliff?" he says, eyes wide. "How is he going to get buried intact?"
"But then his soul will never be able to reunite with his wife's." He realizes he's too attached and calms down. "Or whatever."
Again, he reads the passage that bothers him. "Pluvi realizes then: she will never again be able to look upon the cliffsides she grew up under, for, when she looks upon the micah steaked marble, she can't see anything but the last rivulets of blood that poured from her father's head as they lorded him above the crowd. She will never drink from the Nourishing God again without knowing that her father's soul had been swallowed by him, the man's bloated, crow picked tongue-- what is wrong with you? Clinically?"
She moves an invisible item in the air.
