Tattoo

Normally Mr. White was a voyeur. He liked to watch people rather than participate in their discussions; he thinks it's better this way. Like listening to children play, just far enough not to make out the words.

Emily is different, in oh so many ways, some she doesn’t even know. Emily watches people too, with a catlike vigilance that Mr. White couldn’t have hoped to possess at her age. Emily, beautiful, live Emily, looks through dead eyes because she knows … she sees the petty little people, going about their business not a thought for the world around them or the people beside them, and she’s learning, learning quickly, that no one really gives a damn about her and her family. They’re sympathetic, so sympathetic - that’s all. She tells her story anyone who’ll listen now, but soon she’ll start to realise it makes no difference. Eventually she’ll stop telling it at all.

She doesn’t think of them as petty just yet - but soon. Mr. White hopes he’ll be there when she does, he hopes he’ll be the one she turns to, explains it all to.

To touch and be touched, that’s what Mr. White hates. He has no problem with his fingers over dead skin, looking into dead eyes and seeing the absolutely nothing. It's emotion and warmth that hates, sympathy too - the most useless emotion of them all.

Maybe he’ll teach her that too.

Emily’s skittish and not at all confidant in her abilities, she sits with her back to the wall in restaurants and always spots the exits, he finds it endearing and almost wishes he could tell her so.

Mr. White is not attractive and he knows it, pale skin and nearly red eyes aren’t the most attractive of features. Emily is beautiful, even if she blushes when someone tells her so, far too beautiful for him. She cares nothing of physical beauty and tells him so, and Mr. White wants to believe her, but he’s more of the stuff of little girl’s nightmares than dreams. She still insists those with physical beauty usually lack in other departments, Mr. White remembers his mother saying that too.

Emily doesn’t have a last name and he doesn’t have a first, she calls him David - the name of Mr. White’s father - and thinks White is a nickname. He never asks about her last name, not that he doesn’t know it.

She stays in an old run-down motel, the room closest to the exit with a fire escape in jumping distance from her window. It’s not much, she says, flopping down on the bed, and gesturing to the browning floral wallpaper, the worn bedspread and the stained floor. David smiles and she smiles too.

They spend hours talking, about people and things, both carefully steering away from their childhood and Mr. White wonders if this is what couples do when they’re in love. He would ask her, but he knows she wouldn’t know either.

It’s nearly two am and she starts talking about her frustrations, the problems she’s having finding her family because people just don’t care. David smiles and kisses her. I care, he says and knows that David really does. Emily kisses him back and he stops talking.

The dawn light spills through the rustic curtains, it's only five am but the light is already enough to wake White, carefully he extracts himself from the muddle of ‘linen’ and gathers his things. Emily rolls over on her back, the sheets tangling themselves more than ever, leaving her chest uncovered. Just above the sheet is a tattoo, White pauses to examine it more closely - a black snake, coiled tightly, ready to spring at any moment.

Whatever meaning it has to Emily is lost upon Mr White, he drops a kiss on it and covers her with the sheet; he quickly scrawls a note and places it on top of a manila folder he meant for Lyle, not her.

They’re coming. Leave now.

- David

Inside, a photo of Ethan.

He pauses at the door but kissing her goodbye seems like … well kissing her goodbye.