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The day after, the Midnight Crew gives you a wide berth, assuming (with, you guess, some precedent) that you and Snowman were screwing around somewhere, Felt Manor or wherever you got your hands on her. It's not like it doesn't happen, it's just that it didn't, this time. They all avoid you because they know when you get together with Snowman you become this fuelled font of rage for weeks afterwards and tend to take off people's heads when they try to talk to you.
That's just as well. It means they won't realize how inexplicably, floatingly happy you are.
You really don't know what to do with this emotion. It's not one you could ever get, you suspect, with anyone else. But Problem Sleuth isn't just anyone. Last night the two of you stood on the bridge and looked over the river to the city. He lit up a smoke and it dulled your reflection in the rippling water below. You just stood together there, lit by the city nightlife and the orange glow from his cigarette, and that was that. You didn't need to say anything, because he got it anyhow.
Later, you both went back to your place, interspersed whiskey with tearing each other's clothes off. You took a swig of it and kissed him, rough and open and honest. You let him push you down and you let him lead, because you were trying to tell him something with every single action. Did he get it? You have to think so. You've never let him get away with any of this before.
But he didn't say it, he didn't acknowledge it, so when he collapsed on top of you and your sweat mixed together, you just said it, the thing you were trying to say before by leaving whiskey-flavoured kisses down his chest, by silence on the bridge.
He didn't say anything for a minute. But then he said, "I know."
So you go through the day with something unfurling in your chest. Hours stretch out, but the sun finally sets, and you go to find him. He's not at his place, though, or his office, or his crappy favourite bar. That thing in your chest falters a little. You know where he is. You just thought- you just hoped that after last night, he wouldn't go. Maybe this is it, you think. Maybe he's calling it off. After tonight, he'll never go back.
You can hear them, and you stop out of sight, you stop short and don't go further. Hearing them is enough. You don't know what you'd do if you saw them together, and if one thing seems likely to drive Problem Sleuth away entirely, it might be murdering his girlfriend in front of him in a jealous rage. It doesn't make the idea any less appealing, but you can't stand the idea of him leaving, either. So you stay where you are, a couple houses down, and you hear them laughing together, and goddammit, you never want to hear him sounding so fond of anybody but you. He's yours, dammit, he's yours.
You pace in a circle, then again, ramming the heel of your palms into your eyes, against your forehead, to block out the sound of them happy together. You're shaking, and that thing in your chest feels like it's curled into a ball from someone kicking it.
You are still shaking when you walk into the nearest bar (not his, because you drank there with him a few nights ago and it hurts to think about going back) and throw back whatever you told the bartender you wanted. You don't care what it is, and you have no way of knowing, but it tastes like fire and starts dulling the pain that thing in your chest is radiating into you.
It's then, or a couple blind and footless drinks after, that her hand trails across your shoulder and her voice comes in your ear. "What are you doing in a place like this, Slick?" Her voice is like dark honey, the thrum of a cello string, and it of all things makes you feel like the old you, the one that didn't lose himself when Problem Sleuth came along. You miss the old you, even as you feel like you don't want him back, but she pulls him out of you.
"What's it matter to you?" you growl, and your voice is wrecked, you can't even hide the devastation. You're instantly furious, and that thing in your chest opens enough to let flaming rage out of your heart. It pulses through your veins and sets your body on fire. For the first time since you walked away, you want to take action, to move, to destroy. Hate fills you up. Hate fills the holes.
And oh boy, do you ever hate her.
You don't let another snarky fucking word out of her mouth, you just grab her hair and pull her to you, knock her stupid hat away, teeth scrabbling and leaving marks in each other's lips. The patrons of the bar, wisely, flee. They know who you two are. They know to stay the hell away.
You don't care. You'd fuck her right here on the bar. All you want is to drown out that feeling, that stupid fragile thing in your chest that keens after him and knows this is just an empty substitute. That's okay. Tonight the only thing you've had for dinner is absinthe and misery, but for now, at least, you won't notice your empty stomach.
You just want to shut that thing up. You don't need some warm flickering thing to tell you what you feel about Problem Sleuth, and what you feel about his girlfriend and the fact that, even though he fucks around with you for months on end, even if he's more real with you than he is anywhere else, even if he keeps coming back to you night after night, he still goes back to her. And it's not ruined. He's still happy with her.
You don't need it to tell you. You already know.
So you leap on Snowman, when she gives you the chance, making your head spin more than the absinthe, because if you're a wreck and half a man right now, well, she never saw you as any more than that anyhow, and she's no better than you are, the pretentious bitch. She's worse, because she likes to pretend she's better, she's something special. She's not. That's why you go back to her; you'll show her you're better than the grounded standards she holds you to, you'll show her she isn't.
Whatever. It doesn't matter why you go back. You close your eyes and drive the wrecked-up thoughts out of your brain, burn them out with the booze she's got in the cheap hotel she rents to get you out of the bar. She takes a long pull from the bottle and her shoulders shiver with the kick, and you put your mouth where hers was and take a swig yourself. Then you throw her on the bed and she sets her claws into your shoulders and you let her eradicate all those thoughts that'd destroy you, if you had more time to contemplate them.
Somewhere, with your elbows hooked under her knees, sometime as you slam into her and her long body snakes below you, you meet her eyes and forget, for a second, you're not looking in a mirror. She's miserable, you think, and for the first time, you don't get a rush at the thought of it. You just wonder for a second what made her like you, and then you shove that aside and ignore it.
She smokes, afterwards, and even through the haze of endorphins and the release, even through the buzzed exhaustion, you grab the cigarette and extinguish it. You don't want to be lit by that orange glow. She doesn't care, just slides onto the balcony and smokes there. After a minute alone, you join her, and the two of you stand in silence, a different kind and emptier, looking out over the city, lit by the cheap lights in this crap part of town and her cigarette's glow, and you think, maybe this all you're going to get.
She's gone when you wake up, and she leaves you with the bill. You take people's heads off and you ruin people's day. Droog won't forgive you for weeks, and you don't care, because that night, Problem Sleuth shows up. And even if you'd thought that was it, that you weren't going to sit back and wait any longer, even if you thought your old self had it right, even if you'd decided that hating was just a lot easier, you can't stop yourself when he leans in to kiss you.
He kisses you, and you drink, and you tear each other's clothes off. The thing in your heart had crumpled into a little black ball, but it takes no time at all to blossom back into shivering delicate life when it's Sleuth you're beside, Sleuth with his hands on you, his lips on yours, beard grating against your scruff. It's different then, with his big hands clasped around you and pulling you close like he needs you for air, different with his fingers woven in your hair at the back of your neck.
You fall to pieces, and curl close to him like you need him for air. You both need to breathe, after all.
"She doesn't deserve you," you mutter to him in the dark, long after.
"That's not true," says Problem Sleuth. "And stop it."
"Fine," you say. "Then you don't deserve her. Tell her that. Tell her something."
"Shut up," he says. "I'm not telling her anything, Slick."
And, you know, he won't. But you can pretend.