He stood there a while after she'd gone, in the same spot the whole encounter had left him standing in, blood drying slow at his lip, the alley settling back into whatever ordinary quiet it kept for itself once every voice in it had finally gone still. Nobody came to check on him. Nobody expected anyone to. He wiped his mouth once against the back of his sleeve, the way he wiped most things away, and went on with the rest of the morning the same as he'd have gone on with it if none of it had happened at all.
The day carried him the way most days did, one errand folding into the next without any of them asking his opinion on the order — a stretch of scavenged hours before the gate shift, a few coins scraped together doing work nobody else wanted their hands on, the long walk back toward the brothel once the light outside had turned the particular grey that meant evening wasn't far off. His body ached in places it hadn't earned an ache from, a tiredness that sat heavier in him than the day's actual labour should have accounted for, and he put it down to the obvious things, the cold, the thin meals, the standing — the same explanations he'd been giving his own tiredness for months now, each one reasonable enough on its own to keep him from looking any further than the reason in front of him.
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He stood his shift the way he stood every shift, upright, unmoving, the cars coming and going the same as they always did, and by the time the next guard came to relieve him the ache had worked its way into something deeper, a heaviness behind his eyes that made the walk back to the alley feel longer than it usually did, each step landing a fraction slower than the one before it.
He didn't make it all the way back behind the tin panel. His legs gave out somewhere in the narrow stretch of alley just past the ladder, the ground rising up to meet him faster than he'd registered falling, and he went down into a gap between two crates where the dark sat thick enough that nobody passing the mouth of the alley would have any reason to look twice. Nobody did. The city moved on around him the way it always moved on, indifferent, unbothered, the same as it had been indifferent to every other thing that had ever happened to him in it, and he lay there half-hidden in the dark with his own tiredness pulling him under, thinking, in the last clear thought he had before the dark took the rest of him too, that he must simply be getting sick.