if you weren't so pent-up sexually, we'd be firing on all cylinders, i'd say.
the desk is littered with papers - offshoots of old notebooks and scribbles that have come together from months of workshopping and switching out this word for that word and does this make it funnier or crude? do you like the rhythm of this joke or do we need to slow it down? how do you pronounce isthmus? but through hours and from the day becoming darker until they're the only ones still busy in the neighbourhood, they pull it into a neat funny hour that would put deborah's last facelift to shame for how toit it is. ava is like three coffees-in-the-afternoon deep and deb keeps swatting her fingers away from her mouth because she has a hangnail on her index which she keeps trying to bite off.
if you weren't so pent-up sexually, we'd be firing on all cylinders, i'd say.
oh - is it that obvious? it's not - look, okay, listen, alright - it's not that she's pent up as much as it is the fact that it's just... not happening for her at the moment. she and ruby broke up long enough ago that it should've been happening for her (and she's pretty sure it is happening for her ex, but whatever), but it's kind of difficult to find anyone on hinge when your radius pretty much only just covers deborah's garden and the 7-11 a couple miles away. (the clerk there keeps trying to swipe on her but he has a picture of a fish as his photo and there's a harry potter joke that made her so icked that the only quiet time she'd had in this house was pretty much a non-starter).
"okay, first of all, you really need to hire an HR person because as as my employer, you can't be saying shit like that, okay, deb?"
it feels a lot like their first meeting but there's a lot less malice. deb makes a throwaway comment, probably because ava can't sit still and it feels as though nothing does get past her, but damn. harsh. (she says it's the caffeine but there have been... times... when her hand has slipped into her boxers and she tries to keep her mouth shut, but the whole idea of deborah - and the many deborah's staring back at her in the photos by her bed - walking in on her with a vibrator between her thighs has mortified her more than anything.)
"and second of all, i'm living in your guest suite, surrounded by photographs of you and literal war criminals. i can't crank one out without thinking about saddam hussein."
@hackhost.













