On another note, I find it interesting that the folk song was originally song from a female perspective. Makes much more sense, unless you consider that the House of the Rising Sun was actually House of the Rising Son, a brothel of male prostitutes.
Keep in mind, though - that's just the oldest
surviving written version, not necessarily the
original version. There's evidence (as mentioned in the same Wikipedia article) that there were earlier versions of the song in the UK, and also clues that could point to the origin of the name of the place straight up being a brothel.
And being from the female perspective doesn't even necessarily change the context. If you assume the "ruin of many a poor girl" isn't that they were customers at a brothel, but the ones working there...
I've always assumed it was pretty clear that the song started out being about prostitution and later got a bit sanitized into something else (ie, the gambler element).
I think her deal is that she remembers MC (she touches on it and he remembers too) and always crushed on him, and she's very submissive in the first place, so she's trying to show him how she feels, but she's going to bitch about it the whole time because MC doesn't quite get where she's coming from completely yet. Then add in her responsibilities to his family and that she's watching him run through it like a fox in a henhouse, and now she's super duper conflicted lol
There's also the fact that her crush was on her idealized and imaginary version of who you were. When you saved her she has no idea who you were, and as she says when she's telling you the story, part of her perception has been that you were just another thug or drug-dealer/user who acted out of character that day (not realizing that you weren't one of the usual crowd that hung out in that alley either).
Her becoming Ellie's therapist may have been tied to her finally having an opportunity to potentially get to know you. She could have asked Rachel what sort of person you were (and justified it by saying she needed to know about Ellie's sibling and what effect they might have had on Ellie's problem, especially since it was your leaving that helped trigger it in the first place). But even then, she's getting info about you second-hand. Maybe even supplemented by finding out you were constantly getting in trouble as a kid. Her view of you as a delinquent seems supported by a lot of evidence, but then Rachel may be painting a different view of you in her descriptions (Victim? Protector?).
Then she meets you and you're just so radically different from anything she could have imagined. She's struggling trying to reconcile who she's always assumed you were in her head with who you actually are in real life. And at the same time you're clearing showing sexual interest in her (even if it's conflicting with your reacting negatively to her being a bitch). She knows she can provoke you into giving her the attention she wants deep down, but at the same time she's not sure how you'd react if she ever showed you the real her. All compounded by the fact that she's coming from a mostly loveless family that wasn't good at showing affection, so she doesn't really know how herself.
Basically, she's got a lot of issues to work out.
