This was starting to get too much. He didn't care that all the blood in his body had pooled somewhere south-- that was true most of the time. This guy, this utterly bizarre and incomprehensible human man, was currently asking him if he'd ever felt like his insides had been transported to his outsides. It wasn't a conversation Charlie could honestly say he was drunk enough to be having. Maybe they both needed another drink. Though how many more he could afford... He glanced into his wallet and sighed in a bit of desperation. There wasn't much left. It was good he'd left the money he needed for rent and food at home, or he'd probably be in a spot of trouble.

"I can't... I can't say that I have." He tried to smile pleasantly and simultaneously back up a little bit. More drinks. Definitely more drinks.

“N-nah. Tha's not what I meant. I mean – spit up your guts in your head. Not for real. Sometimes it just hurts. Like strawberries. It's sweet but then it's gone and it all spills out yer mouth. An' it hurts.”

His grip was like a vise. Carmine's eyes were hard beneath their meek veil of lashes, like two pale metal crescents. Fingers crawled up Charlie's hand, along his wrist, and grasped his forearm. He leaned close across the slim space of the table.

“When somebody hurts ye, but not really. Not like cutting ye open with a knife of anythin'. Just. It just feels tha' way. And the way ye feel is like blood and gets all over everythin' and it sticks and it won't come off not ever, no seh.”

He dragged the slick blade of his tongue across his teeth, his lips. Once, twice. The rain continued to pour. The hole in the ceiling above them was leaking like a sieve. The whiskey glass was filled to the brim with little drops, each signifying little touches.

Carmine elbowed it off the table. It shattered on the floorboards. A puddle at their feet of glass and rain water.

“Y'know, Chuck?” he breathed, nails clenching into skin.

There wasn't enough alcohol or denial in the world to make this seem normal. The nails digging into his arm were filthy, the eyes that stared at him menacing. Charlie was afraid, and when the glass shattered on the floor he flinched. This-- even he had limits, and he was pushing up against them now with broken glass and that dangerous tilt to Carmine's glance.

"Look, Ginger," he tried to sound pleasant but it was quite likely that he failed, completely and utterly. His muscles bunched, kinked, tensed, he was looking for a way out. "Looks like I'm out of coin, y'see? So it's time I leave then."

“Well that ent polite. Ye didn’t even check.”

He tilted his head, child-like, voice a slurred simper. Warm and distant and not really there. Carmine was floating, a scrap (ha!) of silk to the wind. All tossed and turned. His hand slipped down Charlie’s, nails scraping and all, lingering over the knuckle bones like molasses. The slightest pulses in him still ached to break those fingers, but he didn’t really have the mind for it anymore.

His boot hooked the spindly leg of Charlie’s seat from under the table, and jerked it forward. If it left a long lick of bruises on the other man’s stomach, he’d be all the happier for it. He slid up from his chair, slow and unfolding and shaking up his roots from the floorboards.

Quiet feet on the floorboards, but the floorboards squealed beneath him anyway. A stride or two, and he was looming behind Charlie’s chair. A ropy arm wreathed around his shoulders, crossing his clavicles.

His words came soft as a sigh, thick with resignation.

“We goin’ or not?”

There was a short, strong exhalation of his breath when his stomach collided with the table. It hurt, and not for the first time in his exchange he questioned his sense of self-preservation for having let this go on so long. The words to excuse himself, to slip away into the night and forget this ever happened, were there on the edge of his tongue when Carmine got up and curled around him in the most uninviting of invitations.

For the first in a long time, Charlie found himself hesitating to take someone to bed. The arm across his chest and over his shoulders felt so heavy. There was nothing in that voice that was reassuring, nothing there that made this sound like a better idea. His tongue darted over cracked, salty lips in a bid for time.

Well. What did he really have to lose?

Other than his life.

Charlie smiled, curling from ear to ear wild and lazy. A devouring smile. If it wasn't quite as whole-hearted as usual, well. It wasn't like this guy cared, did he?

"Let's go."