Noise

"I swear, Nick..."

Her co-worker whistles along to an irritatingly upbeat tune as Nick's car speaker belts one of its usual tasteless indie songs over the radio. Katherine scowls sullenly at the traffic outside the passenger window as the car slows, the red of the traffic light glinting off the windscreen. "Can we please turn that off?" she requests for what might be the third or fourth time since they had set off merely twenty minutes ago from her apartment building in the town centre.

Nick stares innocently at the car in front, tapping out an accompanying rhythm on the steering wheel with a finger. "I like it."

"I don't."

Nick shrugs with a vaguely cheerful smile. "My car, my radio. Therefore - my choice of what station. Sorry, Katherine, but you have no power to make me change my mind."

"I never saw you as a fan of indie music, Nick," she muses grouchily, slumping lower in the car seat, resting her chin on a fist. "Still, I guess I should have seen it coming. The cardigans were the obvious hint. And the hair."

"Hey!" Nick fingers the wispy hair at his chin that just about passes for a weak excuse of a beard, in Katherine's brutal opinion. "What's wrong with my clothing style?"

"The same thing that's wrong with your taste in music."

"Which you still haven't explained to me."

"It's just –" Katherine pulls a face, trying to find an apt enough description. "Noise," she concludes.

He chuckles with raised eyebrows, turning the car left onto a slightly less busy road. "My music is noise?"

"That pretty much sums it up, yes," she decides.

Nick grins as the tune comes to an end, replaced by another, even more annoying song, if that was possible. Katherine sighs, the temptation to hit and deactivate the car radio growing tenfold. "Remind me again why I'm in this car three times a week?"

"It saves us both money," notes Nick.

"Oh yeah, and we're definitely short of that right now. CEO."

Nick pulls awkwardly at his tie at his collar. "Honestly, I miss my comfortable jumpers. And even the lab coat, sometimes. Is there actually a rule saying that the CEO has to wear suits?"

"I miss my business suits," comments Katherine wistfully.

"And that is where you and I definitely differ." Nick twists the wheel right, veering the car into Calimov's familiar carpark and scanning it for parking spaces. "There you go: another work journey where you haven't killed me or my radio."

"Though it's my turn tomorrow, and then woe betide you," threatens Katherine. "I will put Carly Rae Jepson on until 'Call Me Maybe' drives us both to insanity or possibly tears."

"Good thing it's Saturday tomorrow then, right?"

Katherine growls under her breath as Nick swings his legs out of the driver's door and begins to head across the carpark, whistling cheerfully under his breath as she's forced to break into a strange heeled scuttle to follow him.