Re: Log, Ocean's Eleven, Seven Hills: Sam A & Cris M
Cris wasn't a thinker either, not really. He was a doer. And maybe it was semantics, but it felt different to him, artifice and presentation. If he conflated the definitions, even unconsciously, he'd be left questioning too much, and he didn't need that. So they were different. It was an extension of him, whatever it was, like Sam in the black skirt and red lipstick. It was just something less dimensional, but it wasn't fake. It didn't mean Cris didn't get Sam was more than the loops of terror. He got the curiosity loud and clear, he thought. He figured it for an artist's disposition. He was less interesting by nature of the fact that he wasn't like her. He would be happy throwing a ball in the park with his daughter and going home and braiding her hair, making food. That hunger for knowledge only sliced through the walls of his stomach at work, or when he saw something he didn't understand—and it had to do with people he cared about, or people who needed help. He wasn't the kinda guy to get lost on Wikipedia. He'd hike the rim of the Grand Canyon and bask in that kind of bigness, lie on his back on sun-hot metal and watch imaginary stars with a girl he loved next to him, telling him the stories behind them, but that was personal to him. Maybe that was semantics too.
Cris smiled at pink tongue on rouged lips, waiting to see what Sam would do with his words in the pool of polite, dull white people with enough money that it clogged their arteries with a certain sedentary sluggishness endemic to Old Money. He waited, patience worn temporary, as she came forward, to look at the pieces in his palm, apparently very interested in them.
"Él es," he corrected, plucking the king between forefinger and thumb and standing it up on the plane of his hand. He wet his lips and stood the queen too, flat-bottom on life lines straying across warm skin like train tracks. Cris dipped in closer, like it was a secret. His eyes went once to her lips and then back up, and he smiled, inches away. "She's not so innocent though. Not like you'd think. Look at her—"
He pretended to consider the queen, black-brown eyes roving talc craftsmanship and lids low, fringed in lead lashes. Idly, he offered the piece to Sam, level with the bloom of her lips. He made no untoward movements, not under the table where his knees were wide parentheses around Sam's, and not above where they leaned toward one another. No. He was on his best behavior, even if there was something insidious in his smile.