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The door was opened, and Petitcru was there to engage in her usual shivering excited greeting of Lulu (and more politely, of Mel herself), but Elaine was already turning back into the apartment without her usual warm welcome. Her face was smeared, not with tears but what was obviously makeup remover, as Mel had apparently arrived mid-routine.

"Make yourself at home," she said, already moving back through the bedroom towards the bathroom, although she left the door open so that they could chat uninterrupted. "There was a fender bender over on Poplar and hellacious traffic so I only made it home about ten minutes ago and barely had time to get my bra off before Petitcru wanted to go out."

And she was, in fact, not wearing her usual lazy shorts and cut-off T-shirt, or even her "dressed to go out" go-to of casual skirt and cute T-shirt. She was wearing - well, what you'd wear if you worked in hospitality, presumably, although disheveled and untucked: pencil skirt, blazer, her heels kicked off by the door, her hair scraped back in somewhat severe looking bun, wearing maybe a little more perfume than was strictly necessary but which smelled expensive, and less sugary than her usual.

She called back over the sound of water running, her words interrupted as she stripped the mascara and lipstick off her face: "Do I get a play-by-play or is it too humiliating to relive? I can't believe he even took the call, let alone ran off, but at least you can bank on that story to get you free drinks somewhere down the road, right?"

She leaned back around the door to look at Mel, her hands suspended in the act of applying moisturizer, her face having that particular pinkish glow of being freshly washed and slathered.

"Say the obscenity," she prompted. "You'll feel better. And he deserves it."

She gave her a thumbs up, vaguely smug, and retreated again, mostly closing the door behind her this time so she could change into something that wasn't work clothes.

"Was he hot?" she asked. In another person this might be a question designed to ascertain how bummed out Mel should be. From Elaine it was probably an assessment of how much Mel should have foreseen this behavior. Elaine had more than once warned her that a beautiful man was more likely to trifle with feelings than an ugly one, who would feel properly committed to recognizing his good fortune and striving to keep it.

"Nine times out of ten good teeth just mean good money," said Elaine dismissively as she emerged, fresh-faced as a milkmaid and looking decidedly more comfortable, although her hair remained in that severe bun, possibly because it was being restrained by hairspray that would require a shower to remove.

She would know about good teeth and money. Her own were almost certainly the product of excellent investment rather than excellent genetics, in much the same way that her hair, nails, and eyebrows were. Her tits, too, not that it had ever come up. She lived in this apartment that was almost spartan, in a cheapish complex with almost no personal decor, and she wore her cut-off t-shirts and cheap slides and had the lip blushing and microblading of a woman with much more disposable income than she apparently had.

And the teeth.

"But I guess it's even worse to let go of good money than good looks," she observed somewhat mournfully on Mel's behalf, as she stepped around the dogs to survey the ice cream process. "Doesn't sound like my type besides the money, but I don't think you and I have the same type even a little, so no surprises. Clearly his ex's type," she added drily.

"I mean," she said, indicating her preferred flavor with a silent point of a spoon, "I guess on the one hand he saved you some time. But on the other hand maybe if he'd stuck it out to the end he'd have realized what he was throwing away for the sake of someone he'd already gotten sick of once before."

This, taking the shape of a vague compliment, was one of Elaine's forays into casual praise that always came packaged in a by-the-way fashion that seemed intended to make it clear that she did not flatter, and only spoke the truth.

"I uninstalled Tinder," she added, somewhat abruptly, making a face. "I'll reinstall it when I'm out of town, but from now on if I'm desperate for attention I'll wear a bandage dress and go to a goth club and find some skinny little ratsnake bassist guy to dance a little too close to."

She paused.

It was a pause that went on longer than it ought to have, but only by a moment - not nearly long enough for the amount of thinking that tripped rapidly through her head during it, sped along by having been considered at length before and becoming familiar ground.

Mel was a friend. Elaine did not keep very many friends, and those that she did keep she was not very close to. This was more a product of her being difficult to manage in large doses - a fact that she was aware of and at peace with - than any specific act of avoidance. But it did mean that she was not sure how to divulge - well, much of anything beyond the trivialities of gossip.

But Mel was also Ekstrom, and what was Joy's situation if it was not the product of the expedited intimacy that came of that secret, do-or-die life that made each person who knew that name seem somehow nearer than anyone who knew Elaine's? Including that person who had never even called her by that name at all, and who, perhaps, even now considered it only some inferior corruption of his own.

It was a bizarre thing to confess. But perhaps confessing it would rob it of its weight. She could joke about how stupid and awful it was to have a schoolgirl crush on a ghost, and how surreal it was that they lived a life in which that was a thing that could happen, and it would cease to feel like some humiliating and dangerous secret. It would be some trivial thing to laugh at.

But there was also her reluctance to own that said humiliating crush was the reason for uninstalling all her dating apps and going dark. It would give it some sort of legitimacy that she wished to smother out of it. Never mind that she knew part of the reason had been a commendable, levelheaded realization that she kept angling to snare middle aged brown haired men with lines under their eyes when they smiled and maybe a little grey in their beards if she was lucky, and deciding to squash even the possibility of indulging the habit.

And she considered that she didn't know how Mel would react. Perhaps with disgust that she would, of course, be polite enough to conceal. And while the outright approval of others - even Mel - meant little or nothing to her, the prospect of it being some unspoken and smothered source of distance was unsettling.

All this went through her head along with many other asides in the pause that was only barely too long, and which she excused with a mouthful of ice cream. She really ought to just tell her.

She approached as near as she was able to, inserting it at the beginning of a thought so that she could sail past it. “I've got a ******** crush on someone for the first real time since high school and I know it's transient but it's annoying as hell and just makes me impatient with a bunch of men who aren't doing anything to deserve me being impatient. And like - for what? You're looking for love. You've got motive to wade through the bullshit because you're looking for something worth having long term and that takes some exertion. But like - all this ******** effort just to get laid? If I need to get laid the bassist route is less work,” she said at last, sounding, for a moment, genuinely tired.

Her own evening was replaying in her head. Her job was just a job, despite everything, but even that had lost a little shine lately, with the artifice of devotion and idolatry feeling so incredibly exposed when contrasted to what she could - well.

“Maybe it'll be better if I'm out of town. You put that you're just coming through for a weekend and people get the message and it's easier and it's more honest. People don't bullshit you so much and they act faster.”

Elaine considered, with a sort of internal weariness, that this was also why she never bothered telling people about her job. The follow-up questions were always there like some sort of unsprung trap.

Well. She'd stuck her arm into the trap of her own volition this time.

She hated lying. She even hated lying by omission - wasn't that why she was pissed at Nail right now, his doing the same? - but she was also too cowardly to be quite honest here. This could probably be danced around, with some effort. She wished she was a little more like her sister - or maybe even more like Kay - and glib about bending the truth for the sake of her own comfort.

"Yes," she said, struggling to keep the exasperation out of her voice and mostly succeeding, apparently including all the questions in the answer. "I don't want it to develop. I like being single but even if I didn't it's - there's insuperable ******** obstacles," she said darkly, with an inward laugh at how true that was. "And it would be a bad idea if there weren't, anyway because we have to - to get along and be in the same places. And I know it'll pass, it's not that serious, it's just annoying to feel like some dumbass teenage girl kicking her feet and getting butterflies about a ******** man of all things, urgh." This sound was one of genuine disgust; generally speaking, Elaine did not feel that men were worth very much, and certainly not that kind of flattering emotional investment, even at the superficial level she was apparently at.

"And yeah, I get pissy at them for being slow and playing games and thinking they even need to play games when they don't because I just want something pretty ******** simple but they can't cognitively contain the idea of a woman just knowing what she wants and asking for it - it's like, like, like - like you just wanna play and your partner's got a chess clock and thinks they're Magnus Carlsen or some s**t and interprets everything you do as some sort of feint or tactic or, or, - and then I get mad at them for not being, you know, someone they aren't. Which is the pinnacle of shittiness," she finished, chasing a bit of ice cream around her bowl with the end of her spoon in a grim sort of way, "given how much I lecture people and s**t about not being anyone else. Then again, they're busy being someone they aren't all the time anyway because they're playing unnecessary ******** games, as mentioned, so they could at least pretend to be someone more worth my time."

She suddenly pointed the spoon at Mel, almost accusingly, although to be fair this was probably just her general aimless frustration taking a random direction, and not actually intentionally aggressive. "Surely you of all people can sympathize with me on this one given how it's been going for you lately on the 'be treated fairly' front."