Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Girl Who Keeps Breaking Genre
She had hair the colour of an espresso martini and legs all the way to the floor, and you could tell she was carrying a load of trouble; she had a couple of buttons at the top of her shirt undone to make sure everyone could tell properly.
"Drinking on the job?" she said, sharp as a pistol shot.
"Job," I said. "As if there's any money in being the last honest joe in this lousy town. Landlord's turfing me into the street at the end of the week; just another turd floating down the gutter. Mind your shoes, sweetheart."
She frowned. It didn't suit her; she was too expensive to look that way. "If you need rent money—"
"Maybe I don't like the strings that rich girl charity comes wrapped in," I said in a tough-guy way that rich girls like, and signalled Chuck at the bar for another wine cooler.
She looked at me like I'd smeared on her shoes already. "Christ," she said, in the direction of the wall, hard like dried-out dreams. "If you have to transform right now, you're going to come out looking like Drunk Dyke Columbo again, aren't you?"
"Wrong decade," I snapped, needled. She'd done it on purpose, I knew. I knew her type—
"Stop muttering," she snapped back. "And what do you mean, type, you know me! For two years now!"
No self-respecting society dame would stroll into a dive like this and cop to that. All that trouble must really be troubling her.
"Thanks for calling me, Chuck," she said over my head. "No, it's fine, I can get her into my car—" and before I could think anything pithy and cynical about that, about girls like her wanting to get me into their cars; just every so often when their friends won't see, and I can be packed off back to my cockroach-ridden nowhere to exist out of sight when her itch is scratched, she had me by the scruff of the neck.
"I am starting to suspect that trouble is a euphemism," she said in my ear, slithering with menace. "You get in the damn car and do up your seatbelt and sober the fuck up, Pastiche Marlowe, or so help me when a kaiju turns up and you're still pulling this shit I'll punt you into a sewer."
I opened my mouth.
"I swear to god if you say anything about it being where you belong—"