Re: Ocean's Eleven: Sam & Cris
The pressure of her knees didn't bother him. The ring was slipped back into his pocket and Cris just ignored it. It was the clip of Sam's voice when she talked about Russ that had his attention. She was telling him not to be pissed, and he wasn't the kind of guy that worked on. The irritation came back, like the jump of a QRS complex on the EKG screen, his smile tight.
"You gotta be kidding me! He was upset? That, what? He got called out on being—on being a bad guy?" He laughed, cluttered disbelief as she looked down, the flood of excuses dying on her lips. Cris took off his cap and turned it over in his hands, the action jerky as he tried to focus on something other than the sear of anger low in his belly. He knew he shouldn't be fighting her on this. But, this Russ guy—¡qué idiota! He had the gall to go to the girl he assaulted and ask her about it. It didn't matter that he didn't get what he did wrong. The onus wasn't on Sam to explain anything, and the fact that he thought it was—just like he thought the onus of consent was on her too, her up against that wall, out of her mind—was more proof that he shouldn't have been around Sam—or anyone else—in the first place.
He tried hard to drop it.
His hands on Sam's blood-high cheeks, her knees digging into his chest. He didn't care about Neil's circumstances, but her whisper, the last thing she said, shivered and shuddering as if exhaled through ice—that smile of Cris', the tined, ticked-off tension caught between the corners of his mouth, remained. He blinked at Sam.
Yeah, he knew how messed up she was now, but he'd never thought much different. Even at the hotel, in those tendrils of what he thought was a dream, she wasn't right, pupils like lead balloons and too loose in the bones. ¿Y qué?—He opened his mouth to say something to her, but the scraped blue of her eyes held on his lips.
The distance between them, near nothing, was closed when Cris finished what he started. He did kiss Sam, moving more into her knees. Slow, without the hiss of her whisper behind it. Not exactly chaste, but nothing too heady. It was a kiss, with his fingers curling into the salted, sweat-damp blond that fringed her pallid face. It didn't go beyond that, because she was looped into a hospital bed with drugs flooding in and out of her veins, but he needed her to get he meant what he said, to get that he didn't care about what she thought he did. People seeing them was nothing. None of it. He knew too many girls like her—his sisters were women grown from girls like her—and maybe he didn't condone their lifestyle, maybe he judged it, but it didn't mean they weren't people, and it didn't mean he'd... that he'd care if he was seen with them.
Maybe she did—care—, or she thought he did. But he didn't.