Motel 77: Cris & Sam
Sam chanced upon the shitty motel. Blue and white, the neon on the sign busted and letters shorting and flickering, and she had no real understanding of how long she'd been out when she called Cris. But she was aftershocks, small tremors that carried after a seizure, so it wasn't like she didn't get what had happened. She understood, just like she knew Meredith might press charges.
Her conversation with Neil, that was a fresh fucking thing in her head. Hospital. That meant she'd really hurt her, yeah? Hurt Meredith, and maybe it was like the talking woman on the television? Maybe the shit that she remembered from the bar wasn't right. Maybe she'd done more than she fucking realized, and that fucking terrified her.
She paced on the grimy tan carpet, a roach climbing over her red boot, and she didn't worry about Cris coming to this shithole, which probably said a fucking lot about her mental state, yeah? But she wasn't thinking good, and it was always hard after a seizure. She wanted to sleep, but she knew she couldn't, not without meds, not until she'd shot herself with something to counter the coke-adrenaline in her system. And, yeah, the coke shooter had been a really bad fucking idea, yeah? But she'd thought it would give her strength, make her stronger, and that was fucking stupid. Coke and her head, they didn't do good together. But she never jonsed for it like she did tar or xannies, so that was a positive, yeah?
She turned the television on, and she found some Spanish soap opera that sounded nothing like the taunting news commentator with the overlapped mouth. It was too loud, uncomfortably fucking blaring, and she propped the door with one of her boots, which was fucking stupid in this town, but she was just thinking about Cris needing to get in, yeah? She was stupidly fucking trusting, even with all the shit that had gone wrong in her life, and she wasn't thinking about someone slipping in after the gringita in the Little Havana dive. She didn't even bother taking her other boot off, because seizures and forgetfulness went hand in fucking hand, and her new treatment just made that shit worse.
Neon trails stringing from the corners of her eyes, she went into the grimy bathroom and turned on the shower. The water wouldn't get fucking hot, but she didn't notice. She looked in the mirror, and everything in the pane of crack-rust glass looked distorted to her, so she turned off the fucking lights entirely. In the windowless black, she climbed into the shower. Dirty boxers, dirty wifebeater and one red boot, and she sat on the avocado tiles and let the water pound.