Re: Motel 77: Cris & Sam
She didn't look at the driver, and her consumed-ink gaze didn't slide toward the mirror that pointed into the back of the cab. The distortion might be living in there, in the pane of glass, and then she wouldn't be safe in this smoke-stink warmth of humidity and Cris and old jackets as safety blankets. It was like the driver didn't exist, and the deluge of words that spilled past lighthouse-lips, they weren't measured. Choppy, yeah? Like seas that were rough, but not hesitant. She was too white-powder for hesitant, and that blow had about two hours left the ride, and that was without taking all the fucking meds in her system into consideration.
Okay.
That was all he said, yeah?
Okay.
And she was bordering on panicked paranoia, sure she was going to jail, to Bellevue, to worse, sure Meredith was going to spin herself a martyr on a cross, nailed there by a junkie with seizure-shakes. She was sure everyone was going to hate her, because she wasn't good enough at spinning tales to make it sound like anything but an attack on the redhead. And it had been, yeah? Yanked hair and mean words, but that didn't justify swinging fists, even if it had started as a way to get away. And so, she took his silence as judgement, and the blonde girl in the leather and wet, she was quiet as graves as she was tucked against Cris' side and led inside and led into the elevator.
He swooped her up. He put her down.
Inside the room, which she barely looked at, she stopped, stood in her one boot, and looked at him. He offered things, but all that was brushed away with a wave of purpled knuckles that bore the scrapes of brick beneath exposed wallpaper.
"I was wrong, yeah? I shouldn't have done it. I know. I'm sorry," she said, apologetic in that rushed coke-staccato. And she was pale in the brighter light of the new room, yeah? She was the pallid blue of veins through too-thin skin, and she wandered away from the arm around her waist with a hallucination dreaminess that led to unfocused eyes. She turned the television on, and she pushed at remote buttons until she found something Spanish, loud, blaring and carrying through the walls, like sound would help cover her own thoughts.
She walked to the window, and she looked down at the world.
"I'm not doing very good," she said, the clarity strange amid all that seeming confusion, and she sounded slums when she said it. "Meredith said I was putting on a show. I wasn't. I didn't mean to." But maybe that was just what trash did, yeah? "Dirty little drug addict." It was a whisper of repetition, rote emblazoned on her brain. "When she stumbled, she started pulling her hair out and crying, and I was so mad. She'd said horrible things, and then she acted like she was fragile. Like teacups. Just like teacups." She knew about teacups. Lou, Lou loved tea, and she knew teacups.