Strike even (freewrite) #8

Luke sits on the wood bench outside their building. Their tall, gray building, full of rust and dead people, just like them. People who are running, cheaters hiding from their lawful spouses, runaways hiding from their families, or the law, and then, there's the people like them, who no one knows what they did, and yet everyone knows.
They get the feeling, the general idea, the why they shouldn't ask too many questions.
He has become an undesirable, he thinks bitterly, not that society wanted him much to begin with.
Knuckles rap gently on the wood he's sitting on. He doesn't look up, because he already knows her face so well. It's the only real face he's seen in months and that's what kills him – that he doesn't find any...real. That she's the only thing he tastes in his mouth, the only thought that runs through his head. She's the only important thing in his life. He chides himself for the cowardly things he does, for wanting maybe to run away. His own knuckles rap twice on the bench. Harder than hers, like small punches.
Miniatures of what he deserves.

'I'm sorry. I don't know why I do this, I don't know why I fuck up everything that works for me.'
'I know,' Cherry says. She's oh so forgiving, oh so kind. She is not what he deserves. He's never deserved a woman like her and one of the things that frightened him on that very first night was this – that they could never make it. He knows better than to hope.
She sits down beside him and puts a hand on his thigh.
'Look, the herbs were for the baby. I shouldn't have made you eat them.'
He could argue, because they both know that's not the real issue, yet he does not. She has given him a way out, a by-route for him not to face his demons. And he gladly takes it.
She takes his hand and leads him back inside their new house and for the first time, it feels like a proper home, as they hold each other.
He will fuck up eventually, he knows that. She does, too. But for a while, they allow themselves to pretend otherwise. After all, they are meant to be together. Or so they've been told.
The months pass and they're...uneventful. One day, looking back, after all this is over, Luke will say those were the happiest moments of his life, but at the time, they didn't quite seem so.

He tries to behave and she tries to keep him happy, but the old voices are rapping at his door and it sounds just like her fingers did on that wood bench. And even though he doesn't open up, they still find a way to slide in. Through the keyhole and under the door. They creep in through the walls and poison him from the inside, so that by the time the baby is born, they are hardly speaking to each other.

Luke wanders the hallways of the hospital, a thinly disguised bottle hanging in his coat pocket.
'I really tried,' he tells any nurse who stops to listen to him, or maybe to just tell him to put away the bottle.
And he did, he really tried, in his own way, to make it work. He loves Cherry and it frightens him half to death. It's not an easy feeling, because it feels like more than he ever was and no one wants to know there's more to life than just them. He cries, quietly, and nobody takes any note of him. There are so many crying, lost souls wandering the wards of the hospital that no one bats an eye.
And like all those souls,, Luke is crying for what could have been.
And for what will never be.
'I love her and I want to tell her that, but when I open my mouth, these mean things come out, you know?' he tells a kindly old man that stops to listen, because there's nothing better to do. The old man nods.
'I told her a really bad thing, something I shouldn't have ever said. And she just...she just hasn't talked much to me since.'
He hides his eyes, trying to drown away the tears. He is not proud of what he's done, of that one night when he got drunk and threw the pot plant after her, after his precious darling. After his perfect Cherry.
But what really guts him is what he said that awful, lonely night. He called her a whore and other terrible names, and he told her he wished he hadn't come along on that day to save her. He told the love of his life that she would've deserved to die at the hands of that man. That she deserved to die strangled and alone in a hotel room, with a closeted monster. Alone and afraid.

And he grits his teeth, wishing he could bite off his tongue, he'd do anything to push out the words, to expel them from his mind and their past, yet all he can see are her eyes when he said this, her eyes, broken and betrayed. She hasn't known what to say to him since.
He doesn't tell all this to the kindly old man. People like to hold up appearances and although he knows he doesn't have much of one, he doesn't want the old man to know just want kind of monster Luke really is.
'I'd do anything to take it back, anything,' he keeps muttering, as he leaves the old man and heads back to the maternity ward. He sees the disgust in the nurse's eyes and he wishes he could tell her if only his mother hadn't died, if only Cherry hadn't loved him quite so much, if only he hadn't been such a coward...then the nurse wouldn't be looking at him like that.
'Congratulations,' she says, her face all serious and her voice flat, 'you have a son.'
...and you don't deserve it.
She doesn't need to say the words. He already knows. He kneels on the floor and the nurse walks away.
Oh Mom, he thinks, you would've been a grandmother now. You would've had a baby boy to love and cherish and cuddle tight. Why didn't you stay alive a while longer? Just a little bit...oh Momma, I've failed you. What will come of our world now?
He stands up on wobbly legs and tries to follow the nurse, but stumbles. He props himself on a chair and decides to wait it out. There'll be time to see his son later on.
You know what? That's alright, Momma, 'cause you failed me too. Guess we're even now.