f (foundling) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-05-26 23:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, cristián martin-argüelles, penny ross |
Doc, Marvel: Cris M/Penny R
Who: Cris Martin-Argüelles & Penny Ross
What: drinkin' & talkin'
Where: hole-in-the-wall bar in the Bronx
When: now
Warnings/Rating: language at least, some talk of assault
The bar was an armpit of a place. Predominantly white, instead of Puerto Rican, Levis, cowboy boots, and it was 2015. The junky jukebox played Bruce Springsteen over strung-out speakers, and Cris was at a booth facing the low-slung front door, his iPad stuck in condensation on the table in front of him. This little hole-in-the-wall used to be known for serving to minors—he'd come as a kid with his sisters, tagging along as they met boys under spangle of fairylights, like it was romantic, and they kissed slow to country music, while Cris was meant to distract himself with a pen knife and a tabletop, or a penny and a tabletop. Course, that was in a world without superheroes. But even here, 30 years down the line, it looked the same. Eerily. They didn't serve to kids so much anymore, but it was the same place, same owner. Same plastic jukebox, sticky with vomit at the bottom and scuffed by boots of men pissed they didn't get their dollar's wortha George Jones. Still too much denim, too little fringe covering bellies convex with drink, too much drugstore lipstick smeared outside linea lips, and onea the last places in the world you could smoke inside (in spitea the laws that said otherwise).—Maybe it was nostalgia that kept Cris coming back here. Maybe it was anonymity. The bartender called him Spaniard, the men looked at him like he'd literally stepped back into some Wild West saloon, and the women raked their eyes over him, lashes caked and heavy with mascara, like they wished he was on the menu too. Blast from the past, right? Unshaven, a little unkempt, in a black t-shirt and dark jeans, Cris bent over his shot of whiskey. A clove smoked sweet in the acrylic shella an ashtray in fronta him. His skin was still-wet with generic soap from the gym, his hair too, and he leaned into knuckles, elbow buckled down, naila the hand opposite tracing a heart someone had carved in glossy wood a long, long time ago. Spending the day making sense of dirty feet and tan skin lasted all of an hour and a half after cleaning herself up. She couldn’t wrap her head around it, she went for a run around midday but her head kept working it over and over in her mind. Things that shouldn’t have been real or open to just anyone, and they were. Things that were never tangible, things she banked on never being tangible she could still feel under finger tips and smell in her nose. None of it made any kind of sense to her as she pushed herself too far and wound up sitting on a bench in a park watching the sun go down while the dog slept at her feet, grateful for the rest. New York was having a spring time heat spell, not a bad one. But the sticky kind of warm that only came with spring rain and summer temperatures. It felt a little too real, too close to home. The only thing that reminded her that it wasn’t the hot sticky summer of Alabama was the smell and the noise. Thank God for the smell and the noise. She didn’t run back home, Scout at her side, appreciative. Stopping to get some water from the bowl outside of the bookstore. She showered again, looked at her tan lines, the kind of tan that didn’t come from sticky cloudy days in the city. The kind of tan that came from a few hours out in the Alabama sun. She wouldn’t complain. But it didn’t make no sense. Nothing God damn did. She changed into pajamas, it was almost 8 PM after all. She curled on the couch with the dog and started watching Dog Cops (which was apparently a thing here in this weird version of New York), and about five minutes in she found herself antsy. Again. Fidgety. Maybe a little ornery. “Wanna go for a walk?” Maggie just huffed at her. Penny watched television for another minute or two. Started a load of laundry. Loaded the dishwasher with all of four coffee mugs, two wine glasses, and a plate that had only been used as a vehicle for take out containers the last few nights. She took the garbage out back. She had a cigarette while she was out there. She went back inside and looked around for something to do. She flipped through a catalog. She picked up her phone to call someone. But didn’t. She didn’t really have a damn thing to say. She crushed some candy. She spent fifteen dollars in .99 cent increments in less than fifteen minutes and decided enough was enough. She went upstairs, got dressed, nothing real fancy, it was still kind of warm out, and she didn’t anticipate going to any coronations so she left her evening dress in the closet. Instead she went for simple blue tank top and a pair of blue jeans. She was already too warm, and switched the blue jeans out for a simple black maxi skirt that was soft and comfortable. She put on a pair of black sandals and took herself out for a walk. She didn’t expect to find herself anywhere near the subway. Further to that she didn’t think she’d get on two trains, one more bus, and go towards Cris’ house without calling first. She knew he wouldn’t mind, even though she didn’t have shit to say - maybe she just wanted to sit on his couch and watch Dog Cops. She didn’t know, didn’t care, but it had been an hour of wandering around Queens, an hour and twenty minutes of public transportation, her toes were pissed about the sandals, and she was walking by a bar and despite being on a mission now that she was tired and had made it all this way, her head turned and she looked in only because they were playing the Boss and lo and behold, who did she see? She was half tempted to carry on to his house and eat his food and watch his TV and take her shoes off, but just in case she had come all this way for the company she went inside and stood at his table, “I saw a rat the size of a Fiat on the R train from Rego Park to Times Square, wanna see a picture?” she said holding her phone up at him. The heart had initials inscribed as valves and as chambers, typical anatomy of emotion. GP + LK. Cris felt the letters like Braille, letting the meaning, the sentiments etched in a momenta heat bleed into his skin as he nursed his second shot. His third. He sucked on the ashing kretek, tobacco reeking in his nostrils, and he exhaled smoke that clouded the air in front of him like fog, like a blanket in a metaphor he didn't feel like deducing. His tongue tasting the sweet-stint of cloves on his bottom lip in pink, his mind wandering to Sam, the heady scent coiled in curls, cloying to her moon-blanched skin, to curves, and he didn't realize, for a good ten seconds or so, someone was standing in fronta him, trying to get his attention. Black-waxed eyes focused, and he smiled, clove crooked in the corner-a lips, hanging. Se fumó. "Did it pay its fare?" Cris grinned, like he thought he was really hilarious. He had a bottle on the table. One he'd purchased. Some swill a step above Wild Turkey, label obscured by sweat, and he shoved his squat little shot glass across the table toward Penny, urging her to sit, pouring her a couple inches-a steeped liquor, and keeping the bottle for himself. He wrinkled his nose, teasing. "What're you doing this sidea the tracks, gringa?" He took a swig from the bottle, heedless, like he'd been drinking alone for a while while the crowd around him swayed—como siempre—, half a step outta time, to steel guitars. He snatched the proffered phone, and began swiping through photos, just to be annoying. "Whadda we got, huh?" A serpent's grin curled like smoke around the butt of the kretek back between lips, and Cris laughed. Penny knew about drinking alone. Smoking alone. Sitting at a dive in the middle of the night doing both alone. Sometimes it was because she just damn well felt like it, other times it was because who else was she going to find to go with? And sometimes it was because it seemed like the best viable option. And as luck would have it she didn’t have to drink alone in this particular moment. “Nah, you know how rats are, always jumpin’ the turnstiles, checkin’ out dumpsters - tryin’ to get somethin’ for free,” she said sliding into the booth across from him and immediately putting her feet up on the bench he was sitting on. He was gonna have to deal for a bit. She took the drink, drank it quickly, and held her hand out for the bottle a bit impatiently before she poured herself a little more. Just to take the edge off. She reached into her clutch, her cigarettes, not as fancy or as sweet smelling as the smell currently hanging around her partner, but the Marlboro red tasted good with any brand of whiskey, and she lit that sucker right up and chuckled. “I came to hang out on your couch.” She admitted with a shrug and a bite to her lip for the slightest second before she took another drag of her cigarette. Bored. Lonely. Maybe both. She didn’t need to go into detail. She leaned back against the booth closing her eyes and exhaling a cloud of smoke up and away. The taste of the liquor still on her tongue lingered and mixed in a familiar way, almost comforting. Vice and unhealthy, and that shit will kill ya quick, but she smiled to herself and at him when he started going through her phone. “Dog bein’ cute, dog bein’ sleepy, baby bein’ cute, selfie with dog, dog bein’ silly, dog bein’ dog, selfie with baby, dog bein’ perfect, dog bein’ dog again, dog, dog, dog, lather, rinse, repeat, ” she said with a chuckle. There was nothing obscene to be found on the phone, and Cris faked annoyance as he skidded the device across the table, through bottle-bled condensation, over heart's desire, to Penny, but his smile, cocky and hitched to the side, nailed there with the filterless kretek, gave away the fact that he was teasing. He didn't mind the feet that perched next to him on pleather that peeled a forest green over foam. He smiled, eyes sweeping down, and he closed the cover over his iPad to lean forward toward his old partner. "You're getting old," he told her through smoke that flossed through teeth sweet and sticky. "Dogs and babies, huh? Dios." Cris' gaze settled on the cherrying end-a Penny's Marlboro, on the wrap of her lips, and the expulsion of smoke. It was an ugly habit, it was true, but one night? One night, getting drinks, smoking; one nighta vices. That was nothing. That was living life before you were through with it, and something shadowed behind dark eyes had reminded Cris he had maybe 30 years left, con suerte. "My couch, huh?" He got being bored and lonely. He didn't hold it against her. He dragged his thumb along his bottom lip, snatching up kretek between knuckles and ashing it. "What's up? Bad night?" Penny nodded, she was smiling, clearly amused but definitely getting old. She felt old. Not physically, but her brain felt like it was getting old. It had been aging on her for a while, but she assumed that came with settling down. Which was never something she was great at, but Olivia had come along and surprised her. And Olivia was a little older, and wiser, and the settling down type. It hadn’t been easy to do at first, and every bone in her body had resisted it. Of course once she’d embraced it and settled into a routine she’d wound up here, and her new routine left a little to be desired. Considering the most obscene things he’d find on that phone were bra shopping pictures. If she wanted to see herself naked she’d look in the mirror. “I’m a dog owner and an Obstetrician, of course dogs and babies,” she said with a roll of her eyes that said clearly out of the loop, and not her just being boring. And old. She thought over his question as turned the whiskey glass around in her hands and took a few drags on her cigarette, always two at a time - a trick she’d learned in the army when time was short and cigarette breaks weren’t always sanctioned. “Nah,” she answered with a head shake, blonde hair brushing over her shoulders. “Not bad at all, couldn’t sit still is all. My place is big and quiet. Figured yours might be a little noisier, I was right,” she grinned and looked around the bar, “I love what you’ve done with the place.” Maybe he was outta the loop. So what? Cris laughed at the rolla eyes, sending fingers of smoke roiling, just before he stuck the clove back between his lips. Course he didn't actually care much what was on Penny's phone, lewd or not, but he liked teasing her. She'd always come off like a wild child, for all her army discipline, but Cris knew he was worse than she was, by far. He wore his tie (a little too loose, but still) and he shined his shoes, but for as clean-shaven as he appeared, Cris Martin was nothing but litter, gutter-filth. He'd tried to work against it for a long time. He thought he had to, to earn a place. But these days, maybe he was old enough to know it didn't matter. He deserved the same as anybody, regardless-a where he came from. "Thanks, vieja. I got Teresita up there, servin' drinks," joked the guy, hook of thumb toward the bartender, an old white guy, balding, with a gut bulging beneath sweat-stained t-shirt. Perfect black eyebrows cropped, and Cris grinned. Thumb compressing a nostril as he settled weight against elbows that dampened on wet table, he looked at Penny, almost appraising over the mouth of the whiskey bottle. "Oye. You had dreams too?" Another swallow of oak-bellied burn, and Cris opened eyes in a splaya lashes, bursta black. In all honesty, Penny fit into this place better than he did, accent and all. He stubbed out the kretek in the tray. (Her Marlboro fit better too.) "Wanna talk about it?" He poured her another healthy shot. Sure Penny had been wild (had been could be still was who knew). Especially when she’d first met Cris. And no, she didn’t measure anything by worse or better, everyone had their garbage and she had hers. There was no worse, no better. She knew a lot about working hard to prove herself better though, better than everyone at home (which she wasn’t), better than everyone who grew up with stuff (which she wasn’t), better than everyone who didn’t get stuck with religious parents (which she wasn’t) better than the thises and the thats and everyone else (which she never was) but it was a fight, a battle, always trying to prove something. Until she’d just stopped when she realized it wasn’t working. Something was always going to color her to someone, no matter what, because people were all tryin’ to do the same thing. She knew about trying to be different than who she was. She knew about trying to meet them all in the middle. She knew about people trying to change her too. And she knew she wasn’t done cooking yet either, she didn’t know who she was gonna be when it was all said and done, because she sure as hell wasn’t who they thought she was gonna be when the Pastor’s daughter was born. Wasn’t damn close to it. She was glad she wasn’t done yet. And today was one of the days she was glad she was in this weird fucking place all on her fucking own. She knew it the way she sucked down whiskey and the speed with which the paper on her cigarette burned and the way the filter dented and warmed between her lips. Twice the cigarette in half the time. Someone at home would not approve. But to her these were just little things. Little remnants of a life she’d left behind just a couple of years earlier. 2 years BSD. Before.Settling.Down. And what was so bad about sucking down whiskey and having a smoke now and again anyway? She poured herself a little more. Her lips were wet with it, and a step or two above wild turkey was like Christmas. Her eyes moved toward the bar and she laughed, a laugh that erupted in her belly when she saw the bartender, “They grow up so fast, she’s lovely, Cris, really you should be so proud.” she said stamping the very tail end of the cigarette out and blowing the last of the smoke out from the corner of her mouth. “Dreams? Honey, that was like my normal dreams made real,” no sense in trying to make it anything other than it was. He could call her as crazy as he wanted. “And that ain’t supposed to happen. That’s the whole god damn point.” She hadn’t spent all that time after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Botswana being told how to tell the difference between sleep and awake and dreams and reality to wind up in a place where she could be dreaming and then wake up with a tan and dirty fuckin’ feet. Cris was turmoil and contradiction. He was responsible. He was a good dad, he got to work on time, he paid his bills, and he had a savings account that he scheduled deposits to. But, all coins had two sides, and he was no exception. Beneath the broil of brain, he was uncontrolled, chaotic, moody, with some bad habits and a nasty temper. The stuff sorta balanced out, but it was all still there, just under his skin, one fissure away from a fist flying and his ass ending back behind bars. That was what I meant by worse. Not baggage, not being the kinda person people expected or didn't, just that the guy was nothing short of a loose cannon, t-shirt or tie, and no amount of polishing his self-image was gonna change that. And here, where it was all white guys with scraggly beards, women in leather vests like it was still 1994, trucker hats, beer bellies, cheap domestic stuff, and Marlboros, Penny fit better than he did. 'Cause no matter what, Cris was always gonna be Spaniard to these people. They were always gonna ask him if he spoke English, they were gonna call him mi'jo and amigo—but he didn't let that bully him out. The junkie jukebox played, and he took the booth like it was his right as much as anybody else's. A little loose around the edges from his shots, stomach empty from stretcha gym, he snorted when Penny told him he should be proud. Era bonita, verdad, distended gut of gluttony and all. And Penny mighta leaned back, but he stayed forward, settling his chin on the wet mouth of the whiskey bottle like a prop, like a kid, and he thought about the dreams. Que sueñes con los angelitos. Whadda joke. "It was the hotel," he told his friend, fumes of alcohol spiriting up against the roof of his mouth as he breathed. His hands were folded at the base of the bottle, hot against glass, thumbs keeping everything steady. "What happened in yours? Anything good?" She let out a huff, of course it was the hotel. Wasn’t it always? She thought over his question, mulled it over. Anything good? Not really. Anything bad? Not really. She shook her head, shrugged a little. “It wasn’t really much of anything. Normal dream except there was someone I didn’t know there, which was the weird part I guess. That don’t usually happen.” There weren’t usually a lot of strangers in her dreams, and they didn’t usually approach her either. Her dreams just didn’t work that way. But her dreams weren’t supposed to be that tangible either. “I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t bad or good.” She shrugged again. “You?” "I was in some flophouse. Or maybe a drug den. Somewhere like home. I dunno. Wax on the window, shower goin' in the other room. But, I thought I was with, uh, Sam. It was like I came to 'n', like I was pickin' up where somethin' left off. It was hot, real, real hot, walls sweatin', alla that, and, y'know, I grab at her, and we're on the bed, when stuff starts to feel off. The words she's sayin' ain't right. The way she feels ain't right. So I pull back and it's some… some stranger." It was Cris' turn to shrug and he did, jolt of shoulders under black. He didn't know who the hotel had paired him with in that shrinking bedroom, but he had a couplea guesses—guesses that made his skin crawl un poco, that made him want to go and take his third showera the day, like the film of spit still slandered his cock, in spite of the soapings and scrubbing. But, he didn't wanna talk about that now. His jaw muscle twinged. "I dunno. It was messed up." Course, he didn't say the very first time he met Sam was onea those dreams. Or he thought it was a dream at the time too. And he'd fucked her.—Lucky for him, he didn't make a mistake like that this time. Not that it was a mistake, with Sam, but he didn't want to fuck anyone else this time around. Anyway. His chin unsealed from the bottle with a small, wet pop, and Cris took a very generous slugga the stuff. It eased into him, splashing down in his stomach with yellow acid, and he sighed, cloves and astringency, a putter of lips, and the wedge of a grin along picket-straight teeth. "Now, gimme more than that non-answer, vaquera." He poured her a shot, and when she tipped that back, he poured her another. He busied himself lighting another kretek and soaking in the sweetness. He smiled at her, playful as anything. "Gotta catch you up." “A stranger but she was real? Like a real person? What?” She listened to him, and while she was focusing on his words and experience it was hard not to let her mind wander. She lit herself another cigarette while he spoke. It was painfully obvious that her world could have been much different if her dreams weren’t the way they were. If she didn’t know her way around her own compartmentalized mind. If she didn’t know what to find where, and what belonged in what spot. If she had wandered into someone else’s. It also occurred to her that the stranger from her mind was likely very real, not made up, and someone had actually been there. Despite the place being real the person suddenly felt real and she hated that. A person she’d never know or find and definitely never look for - it wasn’t like it was anything tawdry or even remotely damaging happened. It was a short walk, but still it had been a stranger’s footprints in her space, what if they were still there? What if that place wasn’t even there anymore now that it was real somewhere? She controlled access to that space. Not some magical hotel. She let her mind fret and bounce about some stranger seeing - without permission - anything about her. Even on the surface. Truthfully not one thing about her had been revealed. But it was the idea of it all that bothered her, and it bothered her even more that she was annoyed about it while Cris had clearly dealt with something much worse and much more invasive. She didn’t know what she could say that would convince him that she had given him pretty much all there was to give, unless she was forgetting something, she thought it over again. She finished both drinks he poured her while she did it. But now here he was expecting her to say something, give some kind of better answer and she didn’t have one to offer up. “I don’t think I would have done as well stuck some place I didn’t know my way around. And it wasn’t a bad dream, everything stayed where it was supposed to,” her recurring dreams were the same. Good or bad. When they were bad the path was gone and the barriers were down and finding her way home was impossible until she found familiar faces or heard voices she knew or found ways to wake herself up. “But that place ain’t supposed to have ever been real, that’s the whole point of dreamin’ it up in the first place. And people ain’t supposed to be there unless I say they can be.” "Someone from the hotel, yeah. Real. Someone else caught up in alla this." Cris' finger was in the air, drawing an O, a ring of Saturn's, as if to include the bar, everyone in it, and beyond, in his sentiment. His words were slanted Bronx-barrio, through the nose, an accent that placed him with a hard d in place of th's. The undersidea his tongue scraped his bottom lip, pulling it in in char and white oak, his new kretek sizzling between fingers. The smoke was blue-veined, uncurling between them, and rising to the stained ceiling. He sucked the sweetness of tobacco offa his lips, eyes on that declaration of love, the heart and initials, on the table. "Dunno who. But, I had 'em, Pen—I mean, I was on 'em, y'know?" Embarrassment leached into Cris' voice, whiskey-roughed. He cleared his throat, sucked on the kretek. Still bent forward, he braced himself with an elbow down and his palm to his forehead. "So stupid. I shoulda known." She'd said the words back—Cris traced that jagged, chipped heart with his nail—, and maybe it'd been his dream, so why shouldn't she? But. No estaba del todo bien. And he really shoulda known. If he'd just thought about it, insteada grabbing at her, … Course that was a useless linea thinking, 'cause he chouldn't change it now. The guilt curdled some of the alcohol in his stomach, squeezing queasy, and the drags he took on the clove were too hard, burning through wood pulp inna blitz. "Don't matter, right?" He laughed to himself, quiet-like, sitting up better, halfway 'cross that table, knees gaping, and the bottle being nudged around to distract himself, like he was nothing but a fidgety kid. Cris drew dark eyes to Penny, like beads of condensation on sulfur'd glass. His smile looked new-foliage fragile. He took a deep breath. Someone kicked the jukebox across the room, stuttering the record on track in a static blare. La música era demasiado fuerte. "You control your dreams or somethin'? What's it called? Lucid dreamin'?" He puffed on his clove, brows drawn down in concentration. "I don't usually dream. Or, like Teresita tells me, don't remember 'em, anyway. Guess I should be thankful for that, huh?" She didn’t have a damn idea what the situation was when you thought you were dreaming, if the other person thought they were dreaming, and she was suddenly real glad she wasn’t having a random sex dream. Which she was normally quite fond of. And told everyone about. At great length. Despite their horror. Especially if they starred in them. She also wasn’t real sure what the right words were, because this was sixty ways to fucked up and there wasn’t no way in hell she had words to make any of this feel okay. There weren’t magic, ‘oh it was just a thing’ because no, it wasn’t a thing, it was a thing that happened, and it she felt gross enough wandering around with a stranger. This was bigger than that. Couple that with feelings. And emotions. About someone she didn’t know, and a relationship she knew nothing about. Well except for words that had been spat and hissed angrily in her face the last time they were sitting in a bar together. “You ain’t stupid, this whole thing is stupid,” she said refilling her glass herself and flicking the ash of her cigarette into the ashtray in between them staring as the smoke disrupted, then righted itself with the motion. The short straight line that stretched then curled into the air as the paper burned. She lifted the filter toward her lips and before taking a drag she shook her head, “It matters,” as far as she was concerned if it was eating at him, bothering him, even mildly annoying him it mattered. She puffed on the cigarette exhaled and drank the whiskey quickly, licking the taste from her lips. She nodded at his question, then paused. That was a broad answer. “Sorta. I try to anyway, don’t always work. But I try to keep a general awareness at the very least when I’m dreaming something, especially if it’s shitty. Sometimes all hell breaks loose, but I’ve got safe places to go if I can’t wake up. Sometimes that don’t always work either. It ain’t perfect. But it helps.” Of course you tell someone that’s your coping mechanism is shortly before the minute you have a rando sex dream about someone else. No one liked that. No matter how hilarious Penny found it. But for someone who had been inside her own head enough, and read enough books, and learned enough, and tried to make bad dreams go away, she took random sex dreams with a grain of salt, sent thank you notes and had a good laugh. But those were random sex dreams. Actual dreams. She didn’t imagine taking kindly to them suddenly being real. And with strangers rather than random people she knew. Or people she was with and loved. Or people she wasn’t with and loved. Or Beyonce. Or who the hell ever. There was something invasive about the hotel penetrating even their sleeping hours with its bullshit, like they always hadta be examining themselves, their motives, that kinda stuff—like it wanted them to. Like it had complete control over alla them and their minds. And that didn't sit good with Cris. Nah. It made that muscle come out in his jaw when he clenched teeth together over slate of whiskey, and it made him doubt too many other things. Chief among them: reality. And Cris wasn't an existential crisis kinda guy. But it shook him—this kinda stuff—, just like it had last time, it quaked from his core, taking out every longstanding belief from tracksa assumption and shattering them on the floora his gut in a fit of triumph. He was disturbed, yeah, by his guesses, by his actions, by alla it, and it ate at him from the inside with tiny, gnawing teeth, nothing gnashing, and nothing that'd get the job done quick. His morals were kinda… unique, right? He had no problem with himself, not really, after he got with Sam in his last dream. There was some flasha guilt, but it died out under Florida sun. But, that was when he was separated from his wife, six months out and on his way to a divorce. It wouldn'tna been okay, if he hadn't thought it was a dream, but… the circumstances were extenuating, different. This time, he was in deep with Sam, and he'd thought it was her he was putting his hands all over. Turned out it wasn't and that turned his stomach, 'cause how could he not know? If he loved this girl, how could he not know? Yeah, okay, eventually, he'd gotten there, but not 'til his fingers were wet with her and not 'til her lips were wrapped around his cock. Dios. He felt so bad about it. He felt like he failed. 'Cause he knew what he felt, but he'd messed up so much. And that was obvious on his face, his expressions innate betrayal in animated blotta eyebrows and frown that clamped down on smoke-spout kretek. His lungs burned. "Sounds like a lotta work," he joked with half a smile behind smokescreen. "Me? I just wanna sleep." Maybe it wasn't imaginative of him, but he didn't have fantasies he wanted to live out, not really, and, by now, experience told him not dreaming was preferable to some intrusion somewhere in the nexus of his mind. And black let him rest. It didn't take him after he said no, grubby-palmed and desperate. Cris sniffed, finally sitting back in a sprawla knees. He leaned his head back against sticky pleather and breathed smoke in rings, something learned long ago, on some cracked stoop where the porch light was burnt filament behind glass. The whiskey pooled, tingling where his spine met his skull, and he smiled thoughtless. "Maybe I need to start tryin' to dream 'bout somethin' other than sex." He snorted. Sí, cierto. Penny knew he felt bad, of course he did, she knew everything. She was a god damn genius. But she wasn’t willing to risk another argument with him when she was trying to make him feel better. His couch had her name on it. She was not taking a bus and two trains back home until the sun was up. Besides, again, what words were there? None that’s what. At his comment that it sounded like work she nodded once. It was. And he’d rather sleep, “Well no shit, that’s the whole point,” she smiled back at him, “Sleep.” What a world not to dream, she’d take it over having to bribe herself. A list of questions to check off, and the same scenes replayed. In the waking hours, accusations if she talked in her sleep just because she was capable of knowing she was dreaming. People didn’t understand the whys and hows and ins and outs. Even she didn’t most of the time. She just knew that sometimes she didn’t want to wake up drenched in sweat thinking about piles of women burning or beaten to death in jungles far away, best friends dying on her table in war torn hellholes, rotten husbands, complicated women, and now weird hotels. Yeah. She just wanted to sleep too. She had her way. She wondered now if she could even trust it. “You know you’re talking to the wrong girl about how to do that,” she said giving him a pointed look. Cris wasn't drunk yet, but he prolly needed to slow down. He lolled his head to his shoulder when Penny smiled at him, chiding him about sleep, and he shrugged, bouncing his shoulder into his own ear, and cursing. He sat up straight again, shuttling the bottle outta the way, and he hadn't mentioned yet he was waiting for Sam, that he'd kinda made a messa that too—that he made a messa alla it. He wasn't one to avoid taking responsibility, but... for now, he was just trying to taste the whiskey as it seared through him like a matchhead struck, as it mingled good with cloves and seasalt that still coated him on the inside, brining him, fermenting him slow. He shifted, weight back on his elbows, kretek puffed on with a seal of lips that popped around filter and black paper with spit. "I'm stupid," he said like it was an announcement, and he exhaled. He didn't move past that thought, not aloud, not in his head. He slid his teeth over each other in perfect enamel, work of jaw, and he filched the shotglass from Penny. He rolled it cool across his forehead, eyes closing, enjoying the sensation of glass hard on bone. "I should probably believe it when people tell me that." It occurred to him then, he should tell Penny about the statea his couch. "Oh, 'bout the couch, I'm, ah, meetin' Sam—here. In a bit. Sorry." He wet his lips with his tongue, whiskey-whip, but he opened his eyes with a smile. He scooted the glass back to Penny and he returned his chin to its perch on the bottle, dragging it back, clove between his lips. "Least you got Franny to cuddle on a regular basis, right?" He grinned. "Me, I gotta put three pillows together in a nightshirt and some lipstick. It's real sad." An alert pinged on his iPad. He dragged it over, unthinking, and he saw Meredith's new message. He almost knocked the bottle over in his haste to stand. But, he managed to catch it, fingers wringing its neck, and he stared at Penny. "I—I gotta go. I'll pay you back. I just—" Cris looked pale, stricken, and when he turned to leave, it was like he kinda forgot anything else 'cept for whatever was in his head. He didn't even notice he took the bottle with him as he ran. |