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It's been a few weeks since you've seen Spades Slick, and more than that since you've had the chance to spend any time with him of, you know, value. It can be hard to arrange, with the conflicting interests you two manage to collect.
You're waiting in the designated place, in front of a decrepit storefront. You've got your coat done up and your scarf on to ward off the chill of late November, but your breath puffs into the night as thickly as cigarette smoke all the same, and you can start to feel the cold pressing into your thighs. You shove your hands deeper into your pockets and wish for not the first time tonight that you'd been able to find your gloves on your scrambled rush for the door.
It took you maybe forty-five seconds to clear your apartment, and that isn't just a record for you, it's a goddamn miracle. As soon as you hung up, it was hat, coat, scarf, shoes, gone. You flung a hand back in the closing door for your keys. (Never a bad idea.) No unforeseen troubles popped up, nothing jumped into your way; you start to think the universe is as sick of your months alone as you are.
Seeing him is almost worse, sometimes, you think. When you pass in the street surrounded by your respective teams and you can feel them mantling around you to provide some kind of protection, and watching Boxcars crack his knuckles ominously and Droog's eyes narrow to lazy slits as you go by. You're glad enough to keep the team around you when the whole Crew is out. You're not entirely sure Slick would stop them from beating the shit out of you if they caught you alone; you're not sure he could.
Maybe the Crew just realize that something else entirely would happen if you were both alone and you passed on the street. Maybe they've finally clued in that they're the only thing stopping you from pulling him into your life entirely. The only things stopping you from getting to watch him try to con Ace at poker, from digging the stand-up piano out of your grandma's attic and setting it up in the living room where you would almost be able to curl around him sitting at the bench. Clear piano music filters through your dreams at night now.
The fog is thick on the streets, almost conceals the sounds of not-quite late night carousing streets away. You're not quite in the downtown, but close. The shabbier areas of Midnight City are the worst streets in the world and the best streets in the world. Along this one, yellow sodium lights cast spotlight cones on the sidewalk and do nothing to illuminate the pot holes. You wait silhoutted in one, clothes losing their colour and bleaching to white in the light. You're a beacon in this city, and you don't care who knows it. That's the thing about beacons. The more people who see them, the better. You clench fingers stiff from cold, and you keep dreaming.
In your head, at least, you're warm. In your head, though, you have the luxury of waking up next to Slick. He doesn't generate heat, but you do, and even if he complains ceaselessly about the cold you do just fine in your apartment. It might not be the ritzy place he got used to (even in his last life, Slick was high on the bureaucracy chain), but it suits you fine, and a towel under the door and window keep the worst of the chill out. Whenever he cooks (poorly, but entertainingly), he stands at the counter in your housecoat, and you can't help but wrap yourself around him too, arms around his slim waist and head on his shoulder. You know he'd threaten you with all manner of cooking implements. But in your head, at least, it's just threats.
Maybe he'd never really be a member of the team, but you'd work something out. You always do.
Something catches at your eye, a hint of motion, and you raise your head to see him materialize out of the fog. He stalks through, a slim figure avoiding the lights, entirely defined by his hat, his sharp-shouldered coat, the horse-head cane, and despite the intentional threat he projects, you're already smiling stupidly. You meet him at the edge of your streetlight, where the border of your pool of light melts into shadow.
"Let's go," he says. It's the first thing he's said to you in more than a month, aside from his brief call earlier tonight.
"My place this time," you say, which is close enough to what you really want to say that some of the desperation still seeps through.
"Too far, not enough time," he says. "Got a place nearby, come on."
That's okay, you think, better this than nothing, and you follow him back to his place, which is cold and empty and you think maybe Slick has never spent a night here before. This is just one of those places Diamonds Droog set up as Slick's, and Slick never bothered to check out. There's a bed, sure, and a kitchen, but the fridge is empty and the bed still smells new. And there's no piano.
It doesn't really stop you. It just makes the whole thing take place in a minor key, and gives you a wistful robbed feeling. You stifle it down and distract yourself in him, in warming him up until the heater kicks in, in scattering things across the barren flat and giving it the hint of lived-in, even if just for a few hours. And then, later, in curling around him in the bed (still new, but smelling a little more of sweat now than when you came in) and tangling your limbs with his bony ones.
Even you know you can't stay long, though, and you untangle around four to creep through the empty place and pull your clothes back together. You stand over him, asleep in the bed, oddly young and vulnerable with his features relaxed, and your heart gives a painful twang. It wasn't that tonight was bad. It's just that it wasn't enough.
You want him, terribly and entirely, and you want to bring him back with you. You want him to dissolve the Crew and put it behind him, to lighten his crime load and scout for you. You want warm mornings waking up in a bed like a nest where the springs creak, and nights in any room in your apartment. You want him to stand beside you, not lurk in the shadows, to wear your shirt when he pads barefoot around your apartment. You can see him wearing the white. You can.
You want him out of here. You want him out of his life.
You stand over him, and your heart convulses, and clear keys sound in your head. That endless regret pumps slowly through your veins, and, not really knowing why, you pull your scarf off and wrap it around him. "Come with me," you say, because you know he's sleeping and can't tell you why not. And, wanting to bundle him in the blankets and take him away, you let yourself out.
You already know why he won't come. Smart reasons, obvious reasons. You've never had to ask, because you both know the answer. But despite it, you retain the stupid desire to hold on to him, to drag him bodily into your life and to watch him strip his old one away. It's a lot to lose. But you'd be there to catch him. You've got to believe he'll realize that.
Your neck and hands are cold now, and you shiver in the foggy night, navigating unrecognizable streets; in the daytime, this place will look entirely different. You just have to believe he'll realize it. You just have to wait. It might be stupid. It might take a long time. But, mantling your coat against the cold, you have to believe it'll come true.