Re: Venetian penthouse: Sam & Cris
If they'd been arguing aloud, he woulda told her—this kinda thing was a part of life. Now, yeah, okay, this was extreme. But desolation like this came with the territory, came with having a heart. It wasn't absolution offered. It wasn't forgive me, Father, for I have sinned sluiced through lattice and isolation. It wasn't about getting her off the hook she insisted on hanging from. It was just life. Some psychiatrist might say that Cris was telling himself these things to make himself okay with it, so he could have that hope Sam saw as diminishing, but he knew it wasn't just perspective. Age, experience told him it was true. And like the quinceañeras he felt for but never could pity because what good did that do them?—like the poor girls traded like cattle by their families, like anyone not born on the right side of the tracks,—some people got it worse. They got luck with all the currency of a peso, and it was one thing after another after another. For others, maybe devastation looked like the wrong car for their 16th birthday.—But even still, even if it dogged the heels of some more than others, it came for everyone. Así es la vida. Cris woulda told the girl he'd just seen lying in front of that caravan in a splay of white limbs that she could feel as bad as she wanted, that he knew what he said didn't change anything, but even if that hour-long window of devastation came in her wake, he'd take it.
He would take life over death, and he would take his love as it always came, with loss.
But, there were no words, and all Cris did was give that slivered crescent of a smile and reach out with tenuous levity.—He went on his back at the insistence of hands, no care for the space he took up on that puffy, swollen bed. Sam's weight settled atop him warm and he played again with the black threads of her hair, silky over brown fingers—fingers he'd put against skull—
The little king stood on the white square of his shirt, a little unsteady, but present and stark. Cris' mind reeled back to the bed. The smile that had been waning grew, soft but surer.
"Mi corazón." He curled his hand around the chess piece and around Sam's hand that was there to pick it up when it fell, and he held both. "Eres tú."
Cris let go and, with gentle pressure of fingers, tipped Sam's chin, so she'd look at him. He didn't say anything when he did it, or even after, and the film of tears in his eyes now was different than before. It was something about gain, not loss.