Aftermath (freewrite) #5

He watches her snake like a caterpillar in bed and he lies to himself that he doesn't want to crawl in beside her. But he cannot, she is so small and was so scared when he put her to bed. She must've been dead tired, 'cause she was asleep when he came back with the blanket.
She hadn't liked his blanket, too thick, she'd said. It was stifling her.
Who are you? He whispers in his mind. In a way, he misses the time he spent looking for her because in those weeks that seems so far away now, at least he had a clear enough vague picture of who he was after, but now that he'd actually found her, he no longer knew anything.
What she'd gotten out of her had been frightened, yet clear words.
'I think I've been waiting for you all my life,' she'd told him, as he unlocked the door. And although he'd pretended not to hear, he knew he thought the same.
Looking back, he'd always known that the dream about the red-haired woman – his mother – hadn't really been about her, or at least, not just about her. There was always something more. There was, it turned out, a different red-haired woman.
Or a girl, she was so small, so pathetically frail under the covers. Back in the kitchen, he considers having a glass of water, remembering the dull haze he'd had in his head only an hour ago. But he's wide awake now, sober as can be. He goes for the whiskey instead.
Glass in hand, he reaches down, to where she dropped her small backpack and goes through it. Maybe he shouldn't, but he doesn't care.

He wants to know who the hell this girl invading his life is. And not just his life, he could deal with that, because really, what life was it, before? Not much. But she was crawling through his mind. Just like a caterpillar, she's invading his head and it frustrates him.
All that he manages to find, in the form of ID, is an expired driver's license with a fake name, probably.
Cherry Monroe.
Only Marilyn never had that, beautiful though she was, she never possessed that unique shade of...wonder that seems to pour out of Cherry.
He looks at the girl in the picture – much younger, probably still in high school, with dark blonde hair – and he wonders how is he going to give this girl any answers when she wakes up. She seemed quite clueless when it came to why she was waiting for him.
He lays down on the couch and sees behind his closed eyes the hotel room, the dead body, how he'd picked the girl up and ran for it, slamming the door behind them. And he prays to God they don't have cameras in that shabby hotel. Not likely.
He hadn't dared call a cab, so they'd walked. First, to the small room she rented on the wrong side of town, where she'd gathered her few possessions and then, to his flat, where they were safe. For now.
And then the images in his head muddle and drift and he dreams.