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"I suppose I'll have, oh..." Daub trailed off and rolled his eyes skyward. He pursed his lips. He scrunched his eyes. He folded his hands and frowned and hummed and bit his lip. He did everything short of make a timely decision. "... Pasta. What was the pasta? Ah! Linguini. Yes, that'll do, and a pot of hot water if you please, and a tea cup, and a saucer. Yesss, I think that'll do quite nicely, thank you." He smiled broadly. The waiter went scurrying obediently off to drop the order off with the kitchen, just glad that Daub had managed to reach a conclusion before anyone present died of old age.

Then Daub asked something which was far more unsettling than any personality change: "What is it you do for a living? Something about antiques?"

"You did?" Daub seemed genuinely surprised. He scrunched up his face, trying to remember, but nothing came. At least, nothing relating to Georgina's business of antiques. Daub waved his hand in a circle through the air, trying to locate the right words. "It must be tha, ah... Temporal fracture symbio-- syndrome! Temporal fracture syndrome! Things don't always get recorded in the right order and all. It's really not so bad nowadays, just crops up now and again. Certain things trigger it. Technically it's a type of brain injury. Take it one day at a time and all."

If this was much better, it was frightening to think what the condition would have been at its peak. Daub merely seemed delighted to have remembered what it was called.

"Um," said Daub, feeling this was about as good a time to broach the subject as any, "I don't mean to alarm you, but, I think there might be a gas leak." He was looking straight at Georgina, having given up on both squinting and relaxing and instead settling with focusing on a kind of imaginary point in the air roughly where her head was.

There was a pause. Daub's blurred face held an expression of horrified shock. As hazy as Georgina was, he did have better than twenty-twenty vision, and the fact that she had a hole through her head did not escape him. "Uhmm," he said, frowning distressedly. He had a brain injury, but Georgina's was a brain injury on an entirely different level. "If it's, ah, uncomfortable for you..."

"It must have been quite a miracle that you survived something like that," Daub managed, his mind conjuring up all the ways in which deafness in one ear could completely ruin or completely save a situation. She might not hear if you accidentally called out the wrong name during sex, for example, which was resolutely a terrible thought but certainly conducive to all manner of bedroom antic. Cluck it, Daub! he thought furiously to himself, but he let his inner troublemaker continue to conjure up pranks and disasters to distract him from the fact she seemed to want to stress the hole in her head as some sort of a selling point.

Daub went very still, barely daring to breathe, the blood draining from his already pale skin. When he swallowed, the sound was like glass breaking in his ears. Very carefully, he bowed his head in thought, took a deep breath, and attempted to speak. He failed. His hands gripped the fabric of his pants tightly.

"Uhm," said Daub, and rose just as the waiter arrived with the beverages. It was not the motion of momentarily heading to the bathroom. "You seem nice. Very, um, nice."

The waiter, upon hearing these words, deposited the water and teapot and cup and saucer and got out of there quick as his legs could take him, beelining straight back to the kitchen to announce there might be a hold on the soup and the linguini. It was neve good to pry during those kinda of moments. Bad enough such things happened sometimes in public.

Daub continued, retreatign backwards as he did. "But, uh, I think maybe it would be better to see other people. I'm not-- that is, I don't think I'm in a place where I could--"

He backed straight into the chair of the table behind him, nearly falling and causing a loud clatter as the chair hit the other table and rattled the settings. Any eyes that had not already been on them were looking in their direction now.

"It's not you it's me!" Daub blurted, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at his forehead. He wasn't just nervous, he was terrified, and not of her. "I'm sorry, I just... You wouldn't want me, really, I'm not-- I'm not the kind of person who, uh, is, um-- I'm sorry!" Wide-eyed, he fled to the front entrance and the waiter immediately cancelled the order for linguini with a sigh. Daub did at least drop enough cash at the host's station to cover the meal (and tip about double) on his way out, but he did go out.