kellan ziegmann/dean winchester (crossroaded) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-10-03 20:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | dean winchester, poison ivy |
Who: Cerise and Kellan
What: A conversation, without drinking or any pretense at pleasantness.
Where: Kellan's motel room
When: Shortly after this.
Warnings/Rating: Swearing?
Potential copycat or not -- which to be fair, Cerise barely even believed -- she was digging that scrap of napkin loose with the address on it and hitting the afternoon street by foot. It would be just like him, wouldn't it? To concoct some bullshit alibi about a mysterious copycat firebug. Really, was that a common occurrence, and if so.. why the fuck was he still hanging around town? Did high profile mean nothing to him? Cerise caught a cab here and there, although for only a couple blocks and a turn. When one was heading over to a criminal's secret den of iniquity, it was best to drop as many traveling connects as possible. She still paid for cash in everything. Cerise didn't even wait for Jack's confirmation on the similarities or differences between fires, she wanted her own answers.
Abandoned houses? Was he losing his fucking mind? Not that she gave a shit, but if the motherfucker was going senile, she wanted to make sure he wasn't gonna end up frothy at the mouth in the looney bin, spitting out the names of all his old connects. The longer she walked, the more she was getting pissed off. It probably had a lot to do with the heat, which her denim cut-offs and loose tee shirt of navy did little to combat against somehow. Maybe it was the hiking boots, which might not have been the best for running down sidewalks in escape, but they couldn't be beat for scaling fences, rooftops, and desert terrain. Wasn't it funny how all the old survival tactics came back with one familiar face.
One she was ready to see and spit at. It was early by Vegas standards, before noon by a good hour when her knuckles found his door in a bang, bang, bang. If he wanted to look in the peephole, he wouldn't see her. She'd learned long ago to step aside, made good for avoiding unexpected shotgun blasts. Not that Miles had been a man of guns, but he was Kellan now.. and things changed.
The sound of banging at his door pulled Kellan - not from sleep, exactly, but from dozing, because the heat and the late-morning sun and the lack of real sleep over the last few nights had all teamed up on him at once, leaving him slumped and probably snoring (nobody ever told him if he did or not) in the room’s single chair - into awakening like a fired shot. He almost scrambled to his feet to make a running dash for the window, but froze - waited. Listened for the inevitable this is the police open up he’d been expecting half his life. When it didn’t come, he crept to the door, listening hard. No footsteps, no shuffling, no errant clicks of guns being readied. It was all the sounds of Vegas out there, and nothing else.
With even more care he peered through the tiny peephole - and saw nothing. Which meant it could be a wrong room, or a prank, or a delivery (except he hadn’t ordered anything), or a very unwelcome and very smart enemy on the other side. It was all enough for him to hesitate a while before finally unlocking the door and carefully pulling it open a few scant inches to try and get a better look at who or what was trying to get hold of him.
He kept the chain on, though. No sense in being completely stupid.
The funny things about chain latches was that they could be kicked clear off of their flimsy, brass hinges. Cerise had to be in a certain mood to ask for polite little pig, little pig, let me come in. Needless to say, after watching the morning news over a cup of coffee, she wasn't in that kind of mood. Maybe she was being rash, she hadn't even waited on all of Jack's information on the recent fires in Las Vegas to make a solid decision. But if it wasn't Kellan acting, then it was this supposed copycat? She was beginning to buy that story less and less because guys like Kellan had their own itches to scratch and when the father time came crowding down on their thorny heads, they got greedy, desperate. She didn't doubt for a second that he was setting fires to kill time, to enjoy it, to draw attention to himself -- and what the fuck if she actually needed him, god forbid?
Kellan better watch it because if his reflexes weren't fast enough, he was going to catch the edge of that flying door right in the shoulder, or god forbid, his face. The door swung back on recoil from the kick of her boot heel, and Cerise caught it with a palm as she shoved her way forward, elegant as a blast of buckshot. "Morning, sunshine."
There was a second when the door probably would have slammed right into his face, if he hadn’t been so wary. As it was, Kellan jerked back at the sudden movement, and then the chain was shattered (they were going to make him pay for that, weren’t they?) and here was Cerise, stepping through the door like some sort of dustbowl avenging angel, except never in his life would he have described Cerise as even remotely angelic.
But to have enough driving force to kick in a door rather than knock and snark at him when he opened it two inches, there had to be some kind of avenging in there, or at least just anger. Kellan kept his distance, knowing there was a gun hidden somewhere alongside the bed, wondering if he was going to have to use it or if this was just her way of saying hi.
“Is making me pay for your shit just funny, or are you getting off on it?” he asked, more acid than humor in his tone. “You’d better have a damn good reason to be here. Especially like this.”
Only one person was really amused right now, and the smug nearly-laughing Kellan could hear at the back of his skull was enough to send the irritation at the interruption into outright angry territory. There was an itch for a cigarette in his throat and a lighter in his hands.
There was no gun in his hand, which was a good thing, since Cerise hadn't carried a firearm in years. They'd never been her strong suit anyway. She could hit a target generally enough, but the knack had always been for knives. Knives were simple, they were clean, untraceable. Guns were messy with serial numbers and far too much bang for one's buck. "Oh, grow up." Shifting on the soles of her sand-traveled soles, Cerise regarded the busted chain latch. It's not like she'd broken any of the molding. "Don't you know how to work a screw driver?" She turned on him with a pop of eyebrows and that same expression of makeup-less, couldn't care less. It had gotten easy to care about nothing at all with their shared boss.. maybe Sid brought it back, but he took it away just as easily. They always did, and Cerise was glad to free of sentiment for a change. More trouble than it was worth really.
"Was this you?" Reaching into the back pocket of frayed denim shorts, Cerise produced a newspaper clipping of the arson article of the day, which was folded down into a small square. Made good for tossing, which she did. Sailing his way, half expecting him to use it as tinder to light a cigarette. The man looked on edge, it made her smile a little. Not that her smiles were pleasant things, they hadn't been signs of happiness most of her life.. this smile was like the usual, thoughtful, planning, getting the edge on and enjoying it. Like ivy up her spine, she could feel it. Maybe she didn't hear the woman's voice, but there was the newer needs to push buttons when Cerise would have once just walked away. To linger when she should just fucking run. To play with fire.
Did he know, yes. Did he know how to repair this precise kind of break? Of course not. Basics of homeownership had never been part of Kellan’s life. He was destruction, or had been, anyway; maybe it was time he learned how to work this kind of thing. Seem a little less … well … old.
But the busted door chain was nothing in comparison to the little piece of paper Cerise tossed his way, which he caught with only a little fumble and unfolded. It was an article from that morning, about a set of housefires outside the city - possibly arson, possibly vandalism gone wrong, be careful, everyone, the teenagers are out and about. Was this you? And after he’d told her that he only did big work, things with decent payouts, people who had the ability to put fifty grand in an anonymous bank account for him to withdraw and send elsewhere later.
Housefires. Housefires.
“Are you serious?” Kellan asked, the acid in his tone burning through any pretenses of vague friendliness in light of what he took as an insult. He fixed her with a glare, a wrathful gleam in gray eyes. “You think I set a house on fire? I know we don’t like each other, but you could do a hell of a lot better than this.”
A dismissive flick of the wrist sent the paper back in her direction, and Kellan sat down heavily at the little table nearby, in the same chair he’d been dozing in earlier. He picked up the cigarettes off the heavy-looking leather journal lying on the table’s edge, a thing slightly mottled and busy and ashy and even a little burned, and lit up to pull smoke into his lungs to try and get a grip on the situation again.
The return fling of that incriminating article was ignored, it bounced off of the edge of her bare arm because Kellan's aim sucked if he was trying for anything more insulting. Like her chest, her face. "It was a question," she muttered with a tired lick of tongue against back molars. After all, if this was some copycat, what exactly was he copying? True teenagers acted out, she certainly had in her time, before she'd gone on to bigger and worse things. She nudged the fallen article aside with the toe of her boot when he took a seat and Cerise advanced further into his hovel of a motel home for curious inspection. Looked lonely and cheap, they always did. Reminded her of other things, and Cerise kept her back to Kellan when he lit up a cigarette. "I was just asking.."
“That wasn’t asking. That was demanding.” The evidence of the broken chain hung dangling at the side of the door. “Besides, why the hell do you even care? A house on fire doesn’t mean me, and even if it did, it was a house. Or a few houses, whatever. Not even when I was younger than you was I that kind of low-key.”
There were a few lies sifting through his words, but they were almost irrelevant. He set empty places on fire because murder for hire didn’t sit as well with him these days. And he’d done the same as a twenty-something because he hadn’t quite reached the point of moral depravity that had taken another person’s involvement to unleash.
“Sure looks like it pissed you off.” Kellan watched Cerise with a wary eye as she looked around his tiny room, which smelled of smoke and the last couple of visitors to live in its confines. There was nothing here to incriminate him toward anything, except the gun - and even then that was hardly illegal to own.
"Because I think you're fucking lying," she snapped back. Obviously. "You told me yourself that there wasn't much work for you in this city, and a guy like you can't keep your fucking fire in your pants, we both know that!" Look at him there, smoking away like a chimney with fresh logs and coal. Cerise made a scoffing sound, as she ventured a bit deeper into his abode before deciding that he had nothing worth looking over. If he was anything like her, the bare minimum kept him afloat. The fact that he really was anything like her was exhausting enough.
Turning on a hiking heel, she crammed her hands deep into faded, frayed pockets in the best sign of being weaponless that she knew of. "I don't have a fucking lot of options in this city, Miles!" In this room, she'd use his name. She'd use it like venom between her teeth because she knew how badly he wanted to escape it, but there was no escaping the things he'd done. Not while she was still around. "I just might.. I.. mean if I have to.." Grimacing, because she hadn't to admit to needing anything, Cerise turned toward the nightstand with a huff that brought her skinny shoulders up and down. It was what was on the dresser, however, that made her pause. An open journal, something that echoed with familiarity due to the electronic phone in her back pocket. Snatching it up, Cerise pivoted and raised the book in the air.
"What in the fuck is this?" What she really meant by the hostility in her voice and the narrowing of her eyes was why hadn't she known about it? Not that she was entitled to every little secret he had, but she now she felt a complete lack of justice and honor. That undeniable femininity bubbling like herbal soup in her veins.
“And you think I’d be stupid enough to do something like that, especially here? I’m a goddamned professional, Cerise.” Her anger was a sudden spike of hot fury, goading his own, making him grit his teeth around the cigarette and almost crush it in two when she used a dead man’s name. In private, yeah, sure, but he took it a lot more personally than he probably should have. Even if her words trailed off in what Kellan assumed was some kind of grudging, forced half-admittance of needing his help - his access to money and survivability - he was still angry. Why should he help her after this?
Then she grabbed the journal and turned around with all but an accusation, and he tensed. That journal was a sore point, something incredibly fucking unrealistic in a world so grounded. Not about to admit to its reality, Kellan half-shrugged, looking out the nearby window with narrowed eyes.
“It’s a damn book. Put it down.” No real wariness, no desperation. Nothing in his voice to indicate that he might find that ‘book’ more valuable or incriminating than any other. At least, he hoped there wasn’t, because she’d probably think he was insane if she looked inside.
Cerise was forced to roll her eyes at the thought of Kellan being a professional. A box of matches didn't give him a doctorate in anything. "You're a pyromaniac," she spit back while simultaneously laughing at the audacity of his pride to think that he should be pulling shit off in this city with some other headcase running around making a name for himself. House fires weren't necessarily competition for Kellan, they were just bad for business. "You're losing your market because of this asshole," she said with a tilt of her tousled hair toward the incriminating article. "What you need to do is find out who he is." Most arsonists were men, and Cerise made the sexist association solid as cement, easily.
Plopping back onto his bed, which it didn't seem like he'd spent much time sleeping in, Cerise got cozy propped back against the pillows. She drew her dusty boots up onto the generic bedspread and with bent knees, opened the journal against her bare thighs. She thumbed through quickly, skimming past portions of what she easily recognized to be conversations between others on the connect journals. There was one page that made her stop. Her eyebrows raised in a silent showcase of amusement, and an unglossed lip popped forward as she tried to suppress a grin. "This Dean guy doesn't like you at all.."
He wanted to say pyromaniac doesn’t mean unprofessional, and a lot of other things, mostly insulting. He wanted to roll his eyes and casually nudge Cerise out the door, taking the journal back on the way. Mostly he wanted to pick her up by the back of her shirt collar and fling her out the window and forget any of this had ever happened, but for all intents and purposes, Kellan was a man with a stranglehold on his impulses, which was impressive for someone with his kind of mania. The intent was evident, however - in the narrowing of his eyes and the tightness of his jaw and the way he grit his teeth against the cigarette as she flopped onto his bed and started paging through the journal.
Okay. Let her think he was getting senile and starting to write pointless rambles. That was the only possible conclusion she could come to, flipping through that, seeing a hundred voices all together --
“What?” he asked, momentarily blindsided by the comment. Dean snickered, and then came to a sudden conclusion that Kellan was a little slower to catch on to.
Unfazed by Kellan's sour disposition, mostly because she wasn't paying any attention to him, Cerise continued to read. Digging up dirt had always been her forte, but this need to pry at the carefully constructed bricks of rigid, surly men was something new. Ivy didn't speak to her - couldn't actually, which the venomous goddess found absolutely infuriating. Cerise was nothing like the brittle, easily swayed and so very doomed swan that Brielle had been.. there was just no getting through to this one. Maybe Cerise was too human, there was too much emotion that clouded up all of Ivy's very inhuman methods and thought processes. Cerise was a creature of passion, but it was all wrong and wound up in more cold anger than anything living, Ivy gave up on controlling this wildchild about three days into their shackled situation. There was too much trauma there, and Cerise had been fooled once by the snake oil whispers of a magic man. The past did not repeat itself.
"Mhm," she purred thoughtfully... and maybe Ivy did get through a little after all, because that kind of sound didn't come such a dare-eyed, stab-happy woman. "Here he calls you an.. asshat." Licking the edge of her thumb, Cerise turned a page, ".. and he thinks you'd have less issues with fire if you.." Pausing to choose her own wording, Cerise smirked, continuing. ".. slept around more." Squinting, she quirked a brow before finally adding, "He also says that he thinks you're illiterate.. but he spelled it wrong." Closing the journal at last, Cerise folded it in her arms against her chest, and smiled up at Kellan. "Friend of yours?"
The smoke from the end of the cigarette drifted up toward the ceiling, but Kellan didn’t take a drag, a little too frozen to so much as twitch. It wasn’t what she was saying - because he knew Dean didn’t like him and would happily throw him under the nearest available bus just for kicks - but rather the fact that she was saying it like it was normal. She didn’t seem bothered at all that she was reading conversations that might as well be developing right in front of her eyes. Someone talking about him with someone else.
So, maybe it hasn’t occurred to you yet, but …
Slowly, Kellan reached up and pulled away his cigarette, staring at Cerise with an expression somewhere between surprise and this-calls-for-an-arson.
“You’re not looking for anybody here, are you,” he asked. His voice was steady, if suspicious.
She tilted her head, not expecting his question because he never gave her an answer. Not that it mattered, she could infer well enough that Dean was his other, and after her conversation with Jack, she failed to believe in coincidences when it came to this city. Everybody, it seemed, was headfucked. "I found him," she said coolly. Arms still wound around his journal like it was a shield from whatever he was implying. Not that it mattered if they were all going crazy, but it would have been nice for such an old acquaintance to have mentioned something as monumental as this. "You just love your secrets, so I'm not surprised," she said with a bit of nonchalance. The tone was a decoy because Cerise flung the journal at him a moment later, aiming for his head. "I'm not the fucking liar, you're probably not even here really working!"
He ducked to avoid the flying journal and when he looked up again, there was the hate, the real anger, in his eyes - the assurance that despite the age and the poor attitude and the even poorer secret-keeping, he was still death walking. No name he’d ever carried had seen more than six months in jail at a time even though, at this point, he was guaranteed a life sentence on death row.
“It wasn’t a secret because nobody in their right mind, meeting someone who thought they were dead, is going to admit to hearing voices,” Kellan said, low and quiet, “and besides - you kept the same thing to yourself, right? So we’re both liars.” Which was not exactly untrue. “I work when I find work. Right now there’s enough mafia crawling through the sewers to do more than enough of their own dirty business, which means I’m out of a job until they lose interest and go back east.”
He took another drag without looking away from Cerise.
“But hey. If you’re so dedicated to truth and goodness now, why don’t you tell me about your secret world of headcases? See if it matches up to mine.”
When the flying journal failed to clobber him in his smug face(in that it wasn't scarred up enough for as much damage as he'd caused), Cerise scoffed. She wasn't naturally petulant, but she did sank down against his bedspread in a moment's claim, because living most of her life in motels gave very little sense to actually belonging anywhere, so she chose her own thrones at will. His eyes were angry, and hers scraped him in contemplative etchings for a gun. He may have had one at the small of his back, but considering the way he'd seemed barely awake when she'd come a'knockin', who could say. And would he really shoot her? Mentally she dared him to, and her eyes conveyed that come on then even if there was no way for him to follow her train of thought.
"First of all, I don't hear voices. That sounds like a personal problem, Miles."
That name again. There was a twitch at the corner of his eye that betold a number of little threats waiting to break free, but Kellan bypassed them - it was deliberate, she was goading him, if he wanted to be a less easily-manipulated person then he had to ignore it and let it go by. Focus on other things, he told himself, like the revelation that they were both in Vegas because their skulls had double residency.
“But you know what that is.” He gestured to the journal while somewhere in his mind he swore over the outright unfairness of Cerise being lucky enough to not have someone’s voice constantly judging her and her actions. Were they really incapable of telling her what they thought, or were they just waiting in silence, biding their time, ready to strike when she least expected it? God, he hoped so. Otherwise Dean was going to laugh himself sick. “And let me guess, there’s a hotel you know about that you’ve got a key to the front door of.”
"I do," she admittedly with slow caution as the journal was brought up. Cerise'd always had a way of doing that, admitting to secrets by pretending they'd never been secrets at all. Oh, didn't everyone know about the journal? She thought that was obvious. "I've got a key, and I go to hotel.. don't you?" Stretching out like a languid lily on the comfort she found in his cheap, rust springed mattress, Cerise watched him. She'd always been the most at ease in these shitty little motel spots.. easy escapes made by the back bathroom window. "I mean, a man like yourself doesn't seem to have a whole hell of a lot going on for him right now in this city." Seemed to her that the hotel would be an escape, like those cigarettes he sucked down to calm his nerves. Or was it his temper he was curbing? There were hints of both in his eyes, she could see it from here.
“I try not to.” For so many reasons. Kellan watched as Cerise stretched out, claiming his bed for her own. “You saw what he thinks about me, and it’s mutual. I don’t give him shit unless there’s no other choice.” Like nonstop talking, constant innuendo, moral commentary … all of which Dean seemed almost specially trained in. “It’s all bullshit, and I avoid it. Why the hell do you go through? Because there’s nothing for you, here? I take it you didn’t find your boyfriend.”
Even though he was fairly certain there was no such thing as a boyfriend in Cerise’s life, and never would be, he didn’t hesitate to use the word. If she was going to deride him, he’d do just the same. Either that or she’d take it all in stride and make him look like an idiot, but - wasn’t like that had never happened before.
Cerise said nothing for a long moment, just let those midori eyes weigh him in the kind of uneasy silence that said he'd crossed a line. Not because he actually had crossed a line, but because that seemed to be his intention. She'd forgotten he was such a fucking grouch. "I found him," she finally said without any real need to clarify that Jack wasn't her boyfriend. Even Sid hadn't ever been her boyfriend and she'd spent most of her youth giving him the bruising bedsheet control over her body when he needed it because she'd never figured out how to fix him. It took her awhile to learn that some people were just never to be put back together again. Her. Miles. Relationships didn't work out for people like junkies and firestarters. It was more Hamlet than fairytale, everyone just fucking died in the end.
"No lady for you, Miles?" Cerise glanced around the room for any hint of a feminine touch and decided that no, there wasn't. As for why Cerise went to the hotel, it was personal and therefore went unspoken in favor of this conversation. Smalltalk that was more like teetering on a razor's edge than anything truly friendly. Of course, they weren't friends, so that explained it.
She ignored the question completely - which, if it hadn’t been for the way the topic had come up in the first place, he’d planned to do himself - and countered with one of her own. Great, she found the boy she was looking for, the not-like-us. What about him?
Kellan was silent - for too long, he realized, but maybe it was too long out of incredulity, and not the still-stinging memory of seeing a girl bleed out in the floor from someone else’s eyes, at least he hoped it was just the incredulous reaction to the idea that he might have a woman in his life. Him, the man who was practically in a long-term relationship with fire.
“You seriously think I’d find someone?” he finally asked, with a glance skyward (ceilingward, to the stains that didn’t quite look like the pipes had burst). “Not even strippers want to talk to me.” Not that he’d tried. The anger was still there, building and burning and pulling him back toward why Cerise was here, why she even gave a shit that he had one of those damned journals. “Besides, who the hell cares? Are you going to come knocking down my door every time there’s a fire in the paper?”
"Strippers want to talk to everyone," she replied with bland boredom and a sideways lean toward the nightstand so that she could dig through the drawer for anything else exciting to stumbleupon. "They must just be able to tell that you're a cheap asshole." If Cerise sensed the irony in this statement, seeing as how she'd been the one to leave him with the bill when they'd gotten drinks, she didn't seem to react to it. The drawer offered little sigh and dug an elbow back against the pillows so that she could give him a contemplative squint. "You know, for such a narcissistic psychopath, you've got some shaky as fuck confidence. Not that you need to be screwing a librarian, but.. I'm sure there's some demented housewife trying to off her husband in an accidental house fire that you could get along with." She tongued the edge of her teeth, considering that for a moment further, "Until you started talking.."
"And no," Cerise said while abruptly sitting up and kicking her legs from the edge of his bed. "I already told you what to do. Find the asshole that's fucking up this city's game for you." Seeing as how Cerise didn't have a job just yet, getting into other people's business as inconveniently and therefore frequently as possible seemed like as good a way as any to pass the time.
“My confidence is fine.” He all but stabbed the cigarette into the table’s ashtray, almost forcibly avoiding lighting up again no matter how badly most of him wanted to. “I don’t need to be fucking someone to keep that going, unlike everyone else, it sounds like.” Not that it didn’t sting a little, but … well. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. Kellan saw the bigger picture. Or was very good at telling himself that. Since there was nothing in the bedside drawer, he let Cerise rifle through it, wondered briefly if she’d take a few seconds to skim the everyman’s bible jammed in a corner.
Find the asshole? Sure, easy to say. But if the police in their impeccable skills hadn’t figured it out, then Kellan, who had never been incredible at investigation and who had always gotten names and locations ahead of time, was probably SOL. If it was some punk just trying to leech off fame, it was likely that he wasn’t even in the big leagues, or the minor leagues, or any league at all. Just a shithead, trying to look impressive. Which didn’t leave much evidence, except in fingerprints at the crime scene, and what the hell could he do with those?
“Already been on it. I don’t need you telling me what to do.” And inside his head Dean laughed at him, enjoying every second of this, almost guaranteeing his own metaphorical demise the next time Kellan bothered to go through the door.
Cerise made a little hmm kind of sound that might have been an agreement - and it might have not - when Kellan argued that his confidence was fine. Not that she was one to talk, considering her vast array of fucked up choices when it came to falling for the wrong person over and over. It was just part of that new fever itch that she felt like scratching, to fuck with him. She wasn't sure what he meant about everyone else needing to fuck somebody to keep their confidence going. Then again, this was Vegas.. he could have meant the city at large, because Cerise was pretty sure that Kellan had no friends. Just as few associates. Then her, kicking her dusty heels across his bedspread and digging her thorns into his private affairs. If she was the only one to irritate him, he had quite the long haul before him.
"I know you don't," she said with a mock apologetic twitch to her freckled shoulders. "I just imagined you would have come up with something by now." Her tone said it all, to be so empty handed at this point was a fucking embarrassment. To their training if not his manhood.
Partly riled by her insults and partly already sick of the conversation at hand (and so many other things, too), Kellan just snorted and snatched up the cigarettes again, lighter and all, to hold onto like they were a momentary anchor in a sea of shit.
“Go fuck yourself, would you?” he said casually, except for the way the cigarette pack bent under his grip. “I’m not a cop. Whoever this is, they’ll fuck up eventually, and everything I’ve done gets blamed on them if it wasn’t already blamed on a building. I don’t play the vigilante game just to stop someone from trying to take the credit and the blame.” As if Seattle hadn’t been evidence enough of why vigilante justice didn’t work. If someone wanted the world to think he was the new arsonist-on-high, fine. Let them try. And let them enjoy his multiple life sentences when they got caught, because they hadn’t had the lifetime of experience and training he did.
Even if half that training was a giant ball of unpleasant memories. Kellan watched Cerise with a wary eye and waited for her to either keep mocking him or finally get pissed off enough to leave the way she’d arrived. Though ideally without anymore damage to the goddamn room.
"Fucking God you're exhausting," Cerise heaved while making her way up from the mattress, all frayed hemlines and age-weathered cotton. She was already making for the door, no problem. There wasn't even a conversation to be had here. Although she did turn to him with a pop of brows and those wide green eyes. "Excuse me while I go fuck myself and actually get something accomplished.." She assessed the motel room with a inhale that bordered on something tired and sad. "You let the walls fall down around you, Miles... because you're not the kind of person that anybody wants to work with right now." Not her, and certainly not the big dogs. Brushing past him on her way out the door, there was something different about her shampoo or her soap.. was it even perfume? For fuck's sake had she started wearing that kind of girly shit? Grapefruit rind and gardenia in a passing cloud while she hit the door. "Get your shit together," she said before vanishing.
And then, at the last moment, before he could have his precious time alone to shut the door behind her and lament his lousy locale, Cerise peeked her head back in for one final quip. "And get a fucking screwdriver."