6 / tables
She has dreams of tables turning. Of Kai knowing the secret retribution she's been tending in the back of her head, and retaliating. Of him fulfilling his own plans he's had all along.
Her dreams invent various ways for him to be her undoing.
One night, he guts her with the motel's branded pen, using the scar on her abdomen as the epicenter of his damage. Another night, he reveals that he was just trying to get her alone, isolate her from all her friends and trap her in some fucked up coven allyship marriage which, it turns out, she's already signed into without realizing. She wonders where this particular anxiety comes from. The worst of them all, however, is the one in which she wakes up in the morning and finds that neither he nor anyone else in the world is there—she's still alone in 1994.
Whenever she wakes from these nightmares, he's either fast asleep or sitting up in his bed and eating Hot Cheetos, glancing over at her obliviously with red lips and fingers, the TV still on.
Her caginess with him, obviously, remains unresolved.
Quick movements startle her. Loud sounds. Whenever she can't see him, he's as good as traitorous, until he comes back to the car, or returns from the vending machine, or she gets out of the shower to find that he is still there in his bed. Still with her. Still playing at whatever he's playing at. The more days that pass, it gets harder to disbelieve him. She isn't used to such devotion to her good graces.
How he makes the coffee doesn't go unnoticed. For a while, she's afraid to ingest anything he prepares. He drugged her once, after all, before he dragged her onto an amateur flight and stuffed her in a trunk. Who's to say he wouldn't do something so fucked up again? But grudges take time. They take energy. It's a hell-with-it attitude that finally lets her drink his coffee, eat the cup noodles he brings back from hotel lobbies spilling boiling water down his wrists because he's clumsy. Nothing terrible happens, no illness befalls her, unless one counts the stomach aches that could be expected from living on so much junk food. For the first time in her life, she really, really wants a salad.
Kai's other gestures keep her empathy on its toes. The one night they unlock their hotel room to find a single bed waiting for them, he sleeps on the floor, no questions, not even jokes. She is tempted to ask him if he's feeling alright. All through the night she hears him shifting around, takes comfort in his discomfort until she questions herself. If it were anyone else, would she feel so delighted, or ashamed of her delight? She justifies her indifference with some suspicion that he's certain she won't really let him sleep on the floor all night. He's fidgeting and shivering in his perfectly fine blanket just to make sure she hears him.
She's pretty sure he wants her for more than just to feel forgiven, to feel better about himself. She catches him looking at her sometimes, his face in a resting state of hunger. Hell knows he always wants to put something in his mouth.
He must think she'll pity him, invite him into the bed where nothing bites but her.
Well, she doesn't. She won't.
And while he twists and turns, she keeps dreaming he's got something up his sleeve. He's a terror. He's a tick.
Until something in her dream shifts, like a house by a fault line. One moment he is chasing her, and the next, by some miracle of dream convenience, the situation changes and they're chasing something else together like wolves, or hyenas, teeth bared and belly laughing, plundering predators, and she feels so fucking free.
What they're after, she never finds out, because she wakes and it's morning, his hair is tussled and he's making terrible coffee again, but it smells nice because it's familiar.