CHAPTER 2: Our poor neighbours
"You talked to my MOTHER about my SEX LIFE!?" Karen hears Matt yelling. His voice carries all the way down the hallway despite the fact he's standing in Foggy's office.
"It wasn't like that…" Foggy says, volume about half of Matt's.
Karen enters the office, wisely closing the door to the shared hallway for the neighbour's sake. It's not the first time the boys have gotten loud at the office but it is the first time it's been over something so personal. She's pretty sure the accountant next door does not want to hear this.
"Well what was it like then? HUH?" Matt's still yelling. Karen starts counting down the minutes before Matt chucks something off the desk. Nowadays when he gets upset Matt seems to channel his inner house cat and bat random office supplies off desks in fits of anger. It would almost be funny if it wasn't such an expensive and destructive habit. He's certainly never thrown anything AT Foggy or herself, in fact he seems to restrict his meltdowns to hurling objects AWAY from them. Still, its not exactly an encouraging sign that what was once his tightly controlled temper is now let loose on an increasingly frequent basis.
Karen sits down at her desk in the other room, subconsciously shifts her laptop closer to herself and away from Matt.
"MATT! We just want you to be happy, okay?" Foggy says pleadingly. "You're so damned tense ALL THE TIME! I was just trying to figure how we could get you to unwind a bit, okay?"
"So what, you and my mom think you're going to hire me a prostitute?"
Karen immediately wishes she'd arrived five minutes earlier so she could have caught the beginnings of this argument.
"I didn't say that! And obviously I wouldn't need to. I watched you screw your way through half of Columbia!"
Karen's eyebrows shoot up. Foggy is rapidly losing control of the situation and his own temper.
"I did NOT sleep with half of Columbia!" Matt says, sounding completely indignant.
"A quarter then!"
There's silence for a moment. Karen thinks for a second how she probably shouldn't be hearing any of this. Its clearly a personal conversation. But damn, Matt isn't even objecting to Foggy's revised claim. Karen is the first to admit she likes to get all the facts and if listening in is how she gets that information she really isn't terribly bothered by any ethics surrounding that, never has been. Plus, its hardly listening in when its her office too and Foggy and Matt are not exactly keeping their argument quiet.
"You egged me on! How can you possibly be acting like you don't agree with it now? I mean what the hell? Are you yelling at me because I'm not sleeping around enough or cause I did it too much years ago?"
"I'm not the one yelling," Foggy says, voice now down to a normal volume. He certainly had been a moment ago but Karen is willing to bet he didn't start that way.
'3...2…1,' Karen silently counts in her head, awaiting the crash of some random object about to get chucked across the room. Somewhat surprisingly Matt stomps out of Foggy's office instead. He starts, twitchs, as he apparently just now notices Karen is at her desk. But he doesn't say a word to her, just slams the door on his way out of the office heading for the lobby.
Karen waits about a minute before heading into Foggy's office. He's seated at his desk, head in his hands, elbows on the desktop. If she had to come up with one adjective to describe him right now it would be defeated. She walks over to him and puts a hand on his shoulder, rubs gently.
"You need to fix this," she says simply, surprising herself at how much less than comforting that comes out.
"Why are you saying that to me?" Foggy says, head still in his hands, sounding like he very much doesn't want to take any responsibility for what just went down.
"Because you're the one here," Karen says, assigning no blame. 'And because I don't think Matt is capable right now,' she adds in her head.
TBC...