Re: AHS: Sam A & Cris M
She did get it, and Cris gave her a grateful sort of smile, one that slid sideways with radiation-sick residuum sadness, but was present all the same. He nodded at her before she said anything about the guy she was with.
"Not hoping," he clarified slowly, stretching his fingers out in a web. "Just—ah, hanging on."
It was pointless and he knew it, his smile said he did in a quicksand sort of disappearance, but it was the truth. It didn't occur to him to lie in that moment. It hadn't occurred to him to lie to her at all yet, and he knew that was him, his inexperience with the separation of emotion and physical closeness.—There came a black blink as she mentioned the man who was never coming back. He dipped his head to the side to look at her.
"Sounds like his loss," was all he said with a small brush of fingers to her bared knee, not wanting to give her the standard 'I'm sorry to hear that,' knowing himself how useless a thing it was to say. This was too, but it had to advantage of not being such a damn downer.
And as good as he'd done, he thought, ignoring the state of her skirt, when she tugged on his tie, laughed again, and came close enough to wedge her knee low against his belly—, well, él no podía ignorarlo. His eyebrows lifted and fell at the repetition of the name, catching it meant she knew the man before her next question.
"Yeah? That funny?" He smiled, but he listened, looking away only when Santa Barbara came over in a brief fissure of interruption that had him sitting away and back, not quite guiltily, but near enough. He remembered Sam in the chair, saying she wanted a smoke.—He took the offered cigarette, thanked the man who lit it, but didn't bother puffing on the thing. It settled in the old ruts of experience between his fingers, years undercover and characterization and he could fall back into it so easily. It was harder to get out of, he found, than into.
'No one in our heads, but no real world anymore.' Yeah, that was a trade-off. Finally, he took a drag, the end of el cigarrillo liado a mano burning an orange that bled out in a small shade of light. He held the thing between forefingers and turned it, licking the harsh taste off his bottom lip as he thought.
"If you could go back—no Twilight Zone shit, but no here‚" he picked up his glass to listen to the sounds of ice moving together. "—you'd do it?"