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Keith shifted in his home office chair, stretching a bit after a night of satisfying Twitter "Batting practice" Even expensive chairs weren't really designed with a body his height in mind, and he was beginning to suspect, in his eagerness as idiot slayer, he hunched, just enough to create aches in odd places. "At the risk of sounding like Danny Glover's Murtaugh," even in his mumbling careful to attribute, as well as select someone whose politics he could abide, "I'm getting kind of old for this shit."
He can hear her reaction to that as if he typed it rather than just mumbling. He supposed the sports gig came at the right moment if he was going to add such vivid fantasies to talking to himself. But he can still almost hear her voice saying "Lethal Weapon, really? No Churchill? No Disraeli or tidbits about Ty Cobb? You are *slipping*, my friend. Like butter on a slip and slide, or something." And then, almost as if he conjured her, a message from Rachel came on his screen. He almost said "A million dollars," to see if it would work, but he had that already.
"Broke the fatwa," she wrote. "Sue me."
"Was not a fatwa, Rach...it was..." And suddenly he was tongue-tied, like he hadn't been since he was a teenaged smarty-pants, instead, he supposed, of a smarty-pants of a certain age. "It seemed like the best idea at the time," he finished lamely, glad that the Comment-loving legions( he heard her voice again..."Legions! Oh, Keith!") were not around to witness the banality.
"You realize, "Sue Me," is just, like, an expression. Don't get your lawyer on speed-dial, dude."
"Never! You know that, right?" And the delicate pause went on too long for Keith's taste, even though he knew, as the song said, it was his own damned fault.
"Richard Engel called it a fatwa," she wrote, "But I think that's humor where he comes from."
"Screw Richard Engel...I mean, with all due respect."
"That, you'll have to ask him yourself. But, hey, you're free now and he is too, and you've both done worse."
"Um," he said, clearing his throat, and flushing "So, how are things?"
"Ok, you're clearly not into slash. It's been a while. I forget."
"That was like a drone of guilt, Rachel. A clean, surgical strike. Slash...that's that Kirk and Spock thing, right?"
"Kirk and Spock, Dan and Casey...Keith and Dan,"
"May we please talk about something else?"
" I don't read a lot of it, but I almost sent flowers to the woman who paired me with Scully."
"If you do, let me know so I can go in on it with you."
"Olbermann, you're such a GUY sometimes. And I think you owe me twenty dollars."
"What for? Excessive testosterone penalty?"
"That would fix the national debt. No, because I finally made you blush."
"Doesn't count," Keith wrote, despite flaming cheeks. "The deal was, if you produced a blush *on Camera*, like I did to you, then I'd pay. Like the kids say, pics or it didn't happen."
"How would you know what the kids say?"
"For a liberal pin-up, Dr. Maddow, you fight dirty."
"Speaking of kids, you know I lost my protege'. I mean, not lost, we still have lunch, sometimes, and he's thrilled not to get up that early on the weekends. But he's not just *around* all the time, asking me questions and stuff...it's weird."
"Believe me, I know. But if I had tried to tell you..."
"I'd have listened like you did about Current. But sometimes I feel like calling up my mother and apologizing for running in on the first day of school. He'll be fine. He's a real host. But I did what you did for me, buying him steaks, calling him kiddo. Vouching for him when he got carded..."
"I never did that."
"Chris has that baby face."
"Yeah. Please tell him not to grow a mustache...it creates more problem than it solves. The first day of school they were talking about Mr. A and Mrs. B and I decided they were all crazy and I knew better."
"So, nothing's changed, then?"
"Apparently not. Take care, kiddo."
And Keith felt a different kind of twinge from the one that told him to get a new desk chair.