’m afraid not, he thought to say; politics is a whole hell of a lot more about eggs than you’d think it’d be. But it was the grin that made him hesitate, splitting lopsided across Charlie’s face, and then the laugh that made him forget. He choked on a little snort himself, clearing his throat and turning as if to look back at the bottle. But he didn’t want to look there, either, and Charlie’d turned round to dig back through his dresser, and he’d the sneaking impression that looking more wasn’t going to hurt anything.
The lesser, he reckoned, of two evils.
So he watched, snorting again – loudly – at that. “I can’t say I’ve heard that,” he said, “but, uh, you see some strange regimens these days. Maybe I’ll try to make a daily dose of whisky and grease the new fad among the ladies and gentlemen.”
Charlie was swearing and wrangling with the drawer, but he got it in the end, fumbling out a pair of work trousers to toss on the bed in a heavy rumple of denim. He scratched the back of his neck, idly watching the slim muscles of his calves flicker against the sock garters as he bent to fish out a shirt. His headache slammed against his skull, relentless.
His clothes were folded up in the bathroom, still: the shirt he’d got from that Ten kov, mismatched with those expensive trousers and those once-polished, now-misshapen shoes. He could, he supposed, put them back on. He glanced dubiously at the work trousers from last night, still in a heap on the floor.
Then he saw a flash of dark grey, and just managed to catch a shirt Charlie threw at him with fumbling hands. “Ah,” he said, and then almost winced as it was followed by braces.
Charlie was pulling on an undershirt now, neat and matter-of-fact. He tried – and failed – not to look. The eight, he didn’t want to say. He wasn’t ready for it to be the eight.
He watched Charlie pull his shirt round his shoulders a little ruefully, then caught his sharp, coy blue glance with another clear of his throat. His long pale fingers were working their way up the buttons of his shirt, and his eyes were flicking over him, and his lips were curled in a smile. And he – smiled, just a little, just a little twitch at his lips.
He scuttled back to the washroom posthaste, grabbing the trousers as he went. He was dizzy-headed, so he almost stumbled on the doorframe.
The drawers from last night weren’t so bad, all told; leastways, they weren’t so bad as the trousers, which were still damp at the hems. He threw off the robe without looking too close and pulled them on, then his undershirt, then his shirt, buttoning it up with some relief. The trousers fit decently, if they were a little short in the hem, and there was something comfortingly familiar about buckling the braces.
He rose up, caught the mirror in the corner of his eye, and found himself looking at Anatole in work clothes, straight-backed underneath his suspenders, an old spot of a grease stain by the breast pocket. He was tousle-headed and raw-eyed, like he’d just come from the factory. He looked – he felt, in the suspenders and the roughspun –
Shit.
Too hungover for that by half. He turned, fleeting the mirror almost as quickly as he’d fled for the washroom.
“To grease, then,” he offered cheerfully and matter-of-factly. Charlie was already mostly dressed, and he caught the sight of him with something like surprise on his face, glancing over the narrow line of his shoulders underneath the work shirt and braces. Not, he thought, a bad sight. He tried to put it out of his aching head.
He got Anatole’s coat off the radiator. It wasn’t in such good shape, either, but he’d had worse – much worse – drycleaned off of it. He threw it round his shoulders. “Like hell am I looking forward to going out in the sun,” he muttered, buttoning his coat and checking the pockets. He cursed. “I don’t have a single ha’penny…”
He froze with his hand in an inside pocket, with a few fluttering blinks.
He took out a small paper bag, marked and a little mottled. “It’s Ten’s shit,” he said. “They didn’t – well, what do you know.”