"You don't mean that, do you?" she asked meaningfully.
"I say what I mean and I mean what I say!" he hollered redundantly.
"Do you mean that, too?" she asked repetitively.
"We need to talk," Gunn said talkatively.
"Isn't that what we're doing?" she asked questioningly.
"Yes, we are talking, but that's not what I thought I was saying when I said, 'We need to talk,'" he said thoughtfully.
"So it's really, really serious," she said really, really seriously. Her voice caught like a sleeve on a rusty hangnail.
"Yes, it's serious, so very, very, very, very, very serious," he said very often.
"Oh." Her voice caught again, but this time it caught like a knitted scarf thrown carelessly into the spokes of a speeding 1959 FLH Custom Harley Davidson motorcycle, unseating the rider, and creating a human skid mark 1,034 feet long in the far left lane of Interstate 81.
"Is that all you can say? Oh? Oh?" he echoed.
She nodded and shivered as if the Ice Age had returned, T-Rexes and flying dinosaurs with huge wings and long beaks and goofily spelled names trudging and soaring around in her head, her thoughts a murky tar pit full of maggot-infested saber-toothed tiger carcasses.
"Huh?" Gunn asked with a grunt.
Cat hadn't been paying attention. "What?" she asked, as if she had ADHD, which, indeed, she had. She had never outgrown her hyperactivity, and because her parents had seriously overmedicated her as a child, Cat wept herself to sleep every night thinking of all the other overly overmedicated children of the world with cruel parents who believed hyperactivity to be a sin punishable by military school, spankings, Ritalin, and membership in the Republican Party.
"I said, 'Huh,'" Gunn said with another grunt.
"Huh?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
"Is that all you can say? Oh? Oh?" Gunn suddenly had that strange feeling of deja vu and knew he had lived before as a praying mantis, even though he didn't believe in reincarnation or particularly like praying mantises because of their close biological relationship to termites and cockroaches.
The T-Rexes and flying dinosaurs had returned to befuddle Cat's mind. They mistook her singed red hair for a nice geranium to munch upon.
"Huh?" Gunn, the incorrigible rogue, said for the umpteenth time.
"We need to talk," Cat said.
"We are talking."
"Oh. Yeah. Sorry about saying 'oh' so often."
"Huh?"
"What?" Cat was flusterated.
Gunn was flusterated, too, and without another "huh," he stormed out, got in Cat's new Geo Storm, went to the last Blockbuster on earth that still rented movies and didn't have a Starbucks attached to it, rented Storm of the Century, and spent a stormy night a-low-un in his secret crash pad across town.
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