Re: Venetian penthouse: Sam & Cris
She didn't really understand why she was crying. Joey? The shit at the facility? The straitjacket? The memories that were starting to seep through the cracks in her willpower? She didn't want to know, but she knew now that wasn't going to happen, that wasn't going to work. She'd known as she stared into the golden red of dancing flames in the fireplace, and it was only the sedatives in her blood that kept her in one piece. She didn't fly apart, not in the recesses of her mind, but her body reacted to all of it with shake and shudder, like a car that was about to fall the fuck to pieces as it idled at a red-light.
He closed his hand over hers before she managed to close calloused fingers around the inoffensive blue of the shirt, and his voice was hoarse in a way she didn't recognize. Yeah, ok, he'd cried before. Broken fucking lamps and kicked doors, and he'd cried then, but this shit was different, and she remembered how Neil had sounded on the phone, how fucked-up he'd been. This was more of that, she knew, and the kiss to her hair felt like desperation against fading black, and she didn't get his apology, and she'd wondered why he hadn't stayed behind, yeah? But that shit wasn't important now.
And she was good at other people's problems. It was always easier than dealing with her own, and numb panic was replaced with numb worry. He'd worn the vest, and there was blood, but she didn't think any of it was his, yeah? But she realized she hadn't checked, and she realized it in the way traffic slows to a sluggish halt in Jersey boroughs on snowy days, once the snow turned piss yellow. Slow and screeching brakes, and she pulled back enough to run her calloused fingers over the snowy white of his undershirt. Arms, shoulders, belly, and a glance at the vest to see if it looked damaged. It would look damaged, yeah?
She crawled off his lap to finish the trace of fingers along his back, shoulders, down, up, and if he tried to stop her she would be flailing arms and fucking let me through tears that wouldn't stop falling. She talked from over his shoulder, because it was easier to hide the puzzle pieces falling into place with frightening fucking precision that way. "I talked to Neil. He said someone named Micah was dead. He said he killed him, but he wouldn't say how, and he wouldn't say why. He was all fucked-up. He was going to get something to drink, but I got him to go back to Lou." She said it like it was all no big fucking deal. Like seven years of sobriety nearly ruined in one afternoon didn't give her some inkling of how bad shit went down. "You're fucked-up too."