A week had passed since it had first happened, and she still hadn't been able to decide whether she had actually lost her mind or if this was a way of preventing precisely that. She had certainly lost it when they'd locked her up in that windowless, hermetic cell - that prison within a prison. She had really believed that they had tossed away the key, that the earth would swallow her, and that the world would sooner or later forget about her. The fact that one could simply do such a thing, on a whim, without justification, had been the final straw on a rather long list of powerless situations, and she had snapped. Because what was the difference, really, between putting one's head down, doing one's best to follow every single rule in the book as well as all the additional unofficial ones, and getting away with doing whatever the hell one wanted, if the results could be equally random?
When she gave her mind free range to think about it, all she got was a twisted combination of facts one could turn into reasons: she'd had every scrap of control stolen from her; she'd been entirely isolated, with the exception of a perhaps imaginary neighbor, which wasn't at all reassuring; there was the matter of the consequences to one's actions being arbitrary - not even repenting made a difference; and finally, the desperation of needing to feel something close to alive. It hadn't taken her long to feel like she was fading away. When they'd released her from her confinement, there had been nothing remotely corporal about her. She'd felt dissolved, like a mist, with the fear of evaporating in thin air, understanding that one's greatest danger in such a place was to lose oneself, that everybody was fighting for their sense of self with themselves - as well as with countless others who were battling for the same thing. And that was very hard, since prison was a realm devoid of context, the opposite of the outside world. She guessed that that was why lots of those women appeared to be so extreme - were they just intense versions of themselves? Could that be a somewhat unconscious strategy?
What she knew for sure was that living without a context was turning out to be particularly difficult for her. She had started to realize how badly she needed one, how lost she felt without that safety net, and how much worse it would be without her people's visits. If her sense of normalcy depended on a life she had chosen for herself, how could she remain serene without it? How was she supposed to not start bouncing off corners?
That dissolving sensation had only intensified as she'd re-entered the prison building after being released from the SHU. It reinforced the idea that everything was arbitrary, and showed her that life, as it were, had continued as usual without her. And then everything that she'd been trying to balance between her hands since God knew when, had just collapsed and shattered like an internal, gigantic pile of plates.
Piper started walking faster down the corridor, in a determined, unstoppable way, both deaf and blind to everything and everyone around her. She was greeted by Nichols upon entering the block, but that had barely registered, not with her mind in such a disengaged state. She walked directly to Alex's bunk, ignored the woman's proclamations of joy, and told her "Let's get out of here" with a tone which called no bullshit because it came straight from within, unfiltered. Grasping the woman's hand to make sure that she'd been walking with her and to avoid having to deliver any explanation whatsoever, Piper led a somewhat worried and quite confused Alex to one of the very few places in Litchfield where one wasn't under the millimetric supervision of everyone's prying eyes and the guards' constant scolding.
Everybody knew about the chapel, there was a common, unspoken understanding about it, and if she had found somebody else already there, she wouldn't have had any qualms about running them off, such was the state she was in. Her mind, if it was at all functional, was completely focused and totally unreachable by tiny details like Alex's questions. It was all white noise to her anyway, because wasn't just that she wished to feel something real, but there was also the pressing necessity of feeling real herself.
The brunette hadn't yet understood, as proven by her uncertain smile and her questioning of what they were doing there. But Piper was dead serious, and God knew what she looked like, because she made Alex's smile fade without having to utter a damn word. In that moment, Alex seemed to understand, and looked deep into her eyes, answering a wordless question, or solving a lingering doubt, and Piper required no further encouragement. She lunged forward, seized the woman's head between her hands, and pulled her close. Alex echoed the gesture, cradling her head while their mouths crashed together, messily breaking through the years, bursting across the guilt, the things unsaid, and every single kind of distance. Their bodies collided into a feverish whirlwind of hair and want, both equally desperate to feel more, their hands stubbornly striving to take each other's shirts off at the same time.
The fact that Piper didn't want to break the kiss was only making matters more complicated technically, but she didn't care. All that mattered was that she had found a long lost sensation of abandon, a floating sensation in the mouth of her stomach, a flood of desire rushing through her veins.
They lost their footing sometime during their aggressive tug-o-war with their clothes, collapsing on the wooden floor with a couple of dull thuds. Alex raised her head to check up on her, but Piper hadn't felt a thing; she was too focused on crawling over the woman's body. She climbed the mountains of Alex's curves, dragging her lips and tongue over her skin, with all her senses sharp as knives, updating the maps that were still stored somewhere inside her brain. She swallowed the taste of Alex like a returning addict and buried her nose between her breasts, breathing in the recognizable scent she had merely sampled when she had furtively smelled her pillow. Now it intoxicated her, as she pushed away Alex's bra and dove into her breasts, making the woman under her gasp and squirm.
The blonde needed more, however, and, incapable as she was of wasting any time with subtleties, she pulled down Alex's pants and underwear just enough to give her hand easy access. However, she had to pause as soon as her fingertips pressed on the woman's damp lips; for a moment, all she could do was grunt against Alex's neck. She was amazed by how well she remembered that body, how good it felt, and how it awakened her own body. When she tilted her head upwards to look into Alex's gleaming eyes, the brunette cupped her face and kissed her, sucking and biting on her lower lip like she used to do whenever she wished to drive her insane.
But Piper already felt insane. She was fighting to control just one goddamn thing in her life, so she shoved her tongue into Alex's mouth and sunk her fingers between the woman's folds, overpowering her. It stunned her how hot her center was, how welcoming, her fingers becoming instantly coated with a layer of slick wetness.
Using her own thigh to push her fingers inside the woman, Piper then reached for Alex's hand and guided it under the hem of her pants, unceremoniously shoving it between her own legs and being very obvious about what she desired. The blonde acknowledged that she too was very wet, judging by the ease with which Alex's fingers were moving against her, and how badly she wanted them inside her. With their moans blending halfway between their joined mouths, she then allowed herself to get lost in the sensations brought on by that pure pleasure, with the instinctual bucking of her hips freely dictating the duration and depth of the contact.
Her free hand closed around a bunch of black hair, eliminating her support and causing her to collapse on top of the woman with her entire weight. She suddenly became more aware of the brunette's fluid movements underneath her, and so increased her speed, eliciting an immediate response in the form of a muffled cry. The brunette broke the kiss roughly, bringing a hand up to her hair much like Piper had done and muttering several incoherencies, of which the only comprehensible word was "fucking". Piper gathered that the woman didn't want her to stop, and she really had no intention of doing such a thing, not yet. Finding Alex's lips with her own again, she felt her body starting to grow faint, dangerously light, as she began to escalate the steep curve she used to know so well, slowly at first, but then urgently, eager to get to its ridge and make the instant last for an eternity.
Feeling like she was about to burst over the brunette like a water balloon, Piper released Alex's hair and grasped her hand tightly, entwining their fingers. It seemed to be precisely what the woman needed at that exact moment, for she came abruptly, shaking frantically and whimpering into her mouth. And the bare expression of Alex's release seemed to be just what Piper needed, because she came barely seconds later, and came hard, ripped in half by a lightning-shaped current.
The brunette surrounded her waist with one arm, while the other stroked her cheek, her temple, combing a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. Piper remained motionless, with her eyes firmly shut and her breath still ragged, counting down from ten while pretending that they didn't need to move sooner rather than later, that Alex could indeed hold her perpetually. Overcome as she was by the crisscrossing currents of the past and the present, she felt as if she was floating in limbo; they had indeed managed to get out of prison for a short while.
"We should go," Alex said, placing her finger under Piper's chin and kissing her gently.
Nodding, the blonde sat up and then stood shakily, trying to rearrange her clothes with unresponsive hands. Her eyes were cloudy, as if everything was surrounded by fog, and she realized that she hadn't yet come down completely from that mind-blowing high.