Sylvie was a bitch; go figure.
Alex had always been aware of her girlfriend's temperament, but had so far managed to ignore it, "for the sake of the business".
In her defence, Sylvie had always accomplished any task asked of her, and even though she was a little rough around the edges, Alex couldn't (and wouldn't) begrudge her that.
After all, it had been their similarities that had allowed her seduction of Sylvie to be so simple.
Sighing deeply as she finished her cigarette, Alex wondered how she might possibly spend her evening.
She had been home for a approximately twenty minutes before Sylvie had started complaining, slamming cupboard doors and throwing clothes around.
Alex had mastered the art of shutting people off - Sylvie specifically - and so she hadn't understood the root of the problem until her girlfriend had spelled it out for her, spraying her with half-masticated potato chips as she brandished some vaguely familiar footwear in Alex's face: "... And that fucking preppy bitch had the alacrity to leave her shoe here -"
"Audacity." Alex had corrected, quietly, Sylvie wheeling around to face her as she did so.
"What?" Sylvie was hissing at her, and Alex knew that she might as well be communing with cobras, deep in the dwelling of the cold-blooded predator she had once made the mistake of inviting into her own home.
If only she could get her to fucking leave.
"Not alacrity. Audacity. You meant to say audacity. Piper had the audacity to... Whatever you were saying." She ended lamely, already regretting having opened her mouth.
Alex loved words, but hated their misuse, and Sylvie was the biggest culprit Alex had ever encountered.
She returned her eyes to her lap, compulsively folding a single cigarette rolling paper over and over, teasing and tearing the thin skin to mirror her nerves.
Secretly, she hoped that if she remained very still, Sylvie might lose interest and move away, like the proverbial predator assuming her meal had died.
"You know what Alex?" Sylvie was furious now, fists clenched and brow furrowed, standing before the seated brunette and glaring down at her. "Fuck you. Fuck you and that Ivy League bitch. If her vocabulary is so much fucking better than mine, why don't you go out and talk to her instead of dumbing yourself down with me?"
Alex had drawn herself up to her full height then, discarding the worried Rizla and wrenching herself free of the sofa with such force that Sylvie nearly fell back, off-kilter and unbalanced. She stared at Sylvie with as much venom as she could muster, eyes blacker than coal, burning into her girlfriend.
"Watch your fucking mouth, Syl."
She didn't want to threaten or shout, but somehow she had ended up doing both. She didn't like so openly expressing her anger, but Sylvie had always been the exception to this rule, rubbing her up the wrong way (rather than the good way) at every available opportunity.
Alex gathered her jacket from the coffee table and shrugged the leather over her shoulders, an old familiar weight so readily resembling this ruin of a relationship. Cigarettes in one hand and house keys in the other, she reached for the door, the barest glance back as she flipped the latch. "I'm going out."
"Are you going to see her?"
Alex spun on her heel at that, catching a conflicted combination of hurt and anger flit across Sylvie's features.
"To quote Hamlet, act 3, scene 3, line 92... "No"."
She allowed herself a smirk, brushing away the familiar flicker of guilt at having put Sylvie down, again.
Most people sought solace in quiet, hidden places. Alex scoped out the loudest, rowdiest downtown bar within a mile of her home, only one sort of soothing in mind.
It didn't take her long to find Piper.
The girl seemed to frequent the same places with the same people, and true to her drinking traditions, Piper was predictably, perfectly in place, leaning against the bar.
Alex was immediately fascinated by the blonde's movements; the way she tipped her head back, exposing her throat as she laughed at a joke told by the sleazy bartender.
Piper was not a predator in this world, so far removed was she from people like Sylvie that she saw no danger in opening her jugular to corkscrew-carrying strangers in dark bars.
Alex waited until the blonde had ordered her drink before making a move, sliding $10 to cover the cost of the cocktail across to the barman, as Piper pried open her increasingly empty purse to pay.
Their eyes met then, Piper's full of surprise at the perceived generosity of a stranger.
"Hey."
Alex pushed for nonchalant, nudging her glasses with the tips of her fingers and bringing Piper into sharp focus.
It was the first time she had seen anything with clarity since their last meeting. Everything else had been blurry, irrelevant.
"Hey yourself." Following Alex's initial and unceremonious arrival into her evening, Piper seemed unfazed, collecting her candy-coloured drink and turning away from the bar. "You here alone?"
Girl Code 101, Alex mused, resisting a smirk. Piper wanted to know where Sylvie was, but she couldn't ask that outright. That wasn't a woman's way; there was no debutante's diplomacy in that dialogue.
"Yeah." Alex kept her answer ambiguous. "I needed to get out of the flat for a while."
It seemed that she wasn't the only one trying to be casual; Piper was playing at precocious, grinning at Alex's response but unable to hide her trembling hands.
Was that the alcohol or something else?
Alex wouldn't flatter herself by assuming it was nerves induced by her arrival.
She absently scoured the bar for any of Piper's friends that she might recognise before returning the query. "You here with anyone?"
"Oh, I'm just here with a girlfriend." Piper responded dismissively, oblivious to the sudden heat climbing Alex's neck at the term.
"Girlfriend?" The words were weight in her mouth.
"Yeah..." It was a moment before realisation dawned on Piper's face. "Oh! Not girlfriend! A friend who's a girl. A female friend."
The blonde scrambled to compensate, and Alex was eternally grateful that she hadn't picked up on the possessive edge to her voice. "We're not, um, involved."
Alex couldn't help but smirk, both at Piper's rambling and the relief saturating her senses.
"How would your not-girlfriend feel if I took you away for a little while?"
She stepped closer to Piper, invading her space without crowding her, and Piper responded in kind, pressing her lips to Alex's ear as she replied.
"I don't think she'd miss me." Piper gave a coy smile, slipping out of reach in the direction of her friend at a faraway table, to tell them that plans had changed.
The friend seemed uncaring; a boy of similar age draped across her, softening the blow of abandonment.
Alex had been unprepared to strike so lucky so soon, and regretted not at least having a beer first. She never faced a fuck without some sort of narcotics in her system, although with Piper perhaps it would be better to be stone-cold sober.
Their first few times had been reduced by her inebriation to a fuzz of fucking and bathroom graffiti, the minutiae morphing into inaccessible white noise, which she had regretted the morning after, waking up with a sledgehammer headache.
She had drowned her nerves with neat vodka, absolving herself of her sins with absinthe.
She wouldn't make the same mistake this time. She wanted a clear head and a picture-perfect recollection of Piper Chapman's orgasm face, or so help me God, she'd have another excuse to seek her out again.
Maybe she should have a drink after all.
She wasn't even sure how she was going to deal with Sylvie when she got back to the flat, but dismissed the thought.
At this moment in time, Alex was a still lake, and Sylvie was a barrage of boulders breaking the surface.
Fuck the business, fuck the flat, and fuck Sylvie: she was going to fuck Piper instead.
The blonde returned, setting her suddenly empty glass down on the bar counter.
"Ready kid?"
Piper's face blossomed and bloomed with a smile that could have sunk the good ship Sylvie a hundred times over, brushing away the names of every conquest this side of her twenties in a single stride. Alex was enamored.
"I've said goodbye to my friend." She linked her arms with Alex's, and Alex could feel her body heat through the leather, her own responding in kind. "My place isn't far from here."
That explained why this was Piper's bar of choice, Alex concluded, rather than her previous supposition that Piper was just a huge fan of substandard customer service and watered-down wine.
Leaning in the direction of the door, Alex winked.
"Take the lead, kid. I'm all yours."