In the Wilderness

by 5222008

A series of connected, but nonlinear, scenes exploring Alex and Piper's relationship from the beginning to post-s4. This piece is complete and owes a large debt of gratitude to the fantastic album Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. Canon-compliant, more or less. Vauseman. T for language, no smut

(1)

Alex had always divided her life into Before and After, but it seemed like the line kept moving. At first, it Before Kubra and After Kubra. Then Before Piper and After Piper. Then Before Diane died and After Diane died, which was also Before Piper left and After Piper left. Then it was Before prison and After prison. Now it was Before she walked out of Litchfield for the final time and saw Piper, leaning against a silver Volvo SUV with her arms crossed over her chest, a broad grin on her face and the breeze rustling her hair — shorter than Alex had last seen it and stick straight — and Everything After.

A key ring dangled from the blonde's index finger and she straightened up before calling to Alex. "Where do you want to go?"

Alex smiled and sped up, practically jogging to scoop Piper into her arms and spin her around before setting her down and kissing her deeply.

"Home?" she asked.

Piper shook her head. "No way," she said. "We have the rest of our lives for home. For today, we've got gas in the tank, clothes for the mountains and the beaches, a month before my semester starts, and the world at our feet."

Alex stared at the beautiful blue eyes that shined with pure joy. "Are you fucking serious, Piper?"

Piper nodded and pulled Alex closer against her. "One hundred percent," she said. "Anywhere you want. There's an atlas in the back. You can sleep while I drive. Want to leave the country? Passports are packed too. Cambodia? Free fall for a month? See the national parks with a case of that Reisling you like? That's packed too. Along with that dark roast coffee you like and a bottle of aspirin. You pick the adventure. All we have is time."

"Pipes," Alex said, running her thumb over the blonde's lower lips and gasping when Piper gently bit down before licking away the sting. "I don't have any money."

Piper laughed and Alex's skin felt hot in the cold air. She pulled the shorter woman's hips flush against her own and squeezed gently. Piper shivered beneath her fingers.

"I have money," she said. "Enough for both of us. Just until you get back on your feet. Just to get through this month."

Alex looked at her. They hadn't been this close in five months, since Piper had been released and Alex had had to stay behind. Their weekly visits, with hugs book ending their time in the visitation room, just hadn't compared. Piper had cut her hair, and it curled gently just above her shoulders. She looked tan and fit in her black jeans and v-neck cashmere sweater, a clunky silver watch her only jewelry.

"Anywhere?" she asked finally.

Piper nodded. "Whatever you want."

"I want to go home," Alex said, smiling broadly. "I want to go to our home. I've been a lot of places — all over the world, you know? The only place I want to go now is our home, with you."

Piper grinned and passed Alex the keys. "That sounds great, Al."

Alex took the keys and opened the passenger door. She kissed Piper a final time before helping her into the SUV, taking the opportunity to gently smack the blonde's ass. She heard Piper's laughter as she hoisted herself into the driver's seat. It had been almost three years since the last time she'd been behind the wheel. She pressed the ignition button and adjusted the mirrors, ran her hand over the dashboard, and grabbed Piper's hand. She put the car in drive and eased forward into Everything After.

(2)

Alex's favorite movie was Casablanca, and Piper didn't even know that until they had been living together for over a year. Somehow their relationship that first year never quite made it to favorite movies. It wasn't that they didn't know each other well, not that they didn't talk about their lives and their interests and even, when the situation called for it, their emotions, but somehow they never got to favorite movies. Piper was sure Alex didn't know her favorite movie was Clue, but that didn't make their relationship any less meaningful.

She believed that right up until Alex collapsed into her arms at the door to their apartment — she had been staying there for months, but officially living there for two weeks — late on a rainy Monday night in June. The brunette's hair was soaked, just from the run from cab to building. Her suitcase was dripping on the hardwood floor and Piper would have been worried about it if it weren't for the fact that Alex's arms were around her neck and her whole weight was resting on Piper's chest. She staggered backwards and dragged Alex to the couch.

"Alex, baby," she said, voice full of concern and the first shred of panic, "what's going on?"

Alex didn't answer. Piper scanned her face for any sign of injury, for blood or bruises or glazed- over eyes. She couldn't see anything, but that didn't relieve her anxiety in the slightest. Alex dropped her hands to Piper's waist and pulled the blonde closer.

"Al," Piper said, "you're really scaring me." She yanked a quilt she had made of Smith teeshirts off the back of the couch and wrapped it around her shivering girlfriend. She tried to get up, to shut the apartment door or call the paramedics or do something, but Alex grabbed her wrist and she stayed. She pushed the wet hair off of Alex's forehead and tried to dry her cheeks. Then she realized that Alex was crying.

"You're crying," she said, dismayed that that was all she could come up with to say in that moment. She had never seen Alex cry. She hadn't been entirely sure Alex could cry.

The observation just made Alex cry harder, and Piper cradled the brunette's head against her chest. She rubbed her back, making the soothing nothing sounds her nanny had made for her when she cried as a child. Alex keened, choking on the mucous dripping down her throat.

Piper started to sing without knowing where the song comes from. "One little elephant, went out to play, out on a spider's web one day." At the sound, Alex began to quiet. Her sobs lessened until she was just sniffling occasionally, wiping her nose on Piper's camisole.

"My mom used to sing that," she said, her voice hoarse and cracking.

Piper kissed the top of Alex's head and kept singing. She sang all the way to thirty elephants and she thought Alex was, finally, thankfully asleep. Her breathing was steady. Her hands relaxed their grip on Piper's wrists.

Piper slowly and carefully maneuvered Alex until she was on her back on the couch, the quilt wrapped around her. Piper eased off the brunette's shoes, followed by her wet black jeans and her favorite gray socks with the hole in the toe. She shut the apartment door and slid the doormat under the still-dripping suitcase.

She was still worried, out of her mind with disastrous possibilities, but she resisted waking Alex to find out what happened on her trip to San Juan. She wondered if something might be wrong with Diane. That was the only thing she could think of that might cause this completely out of character response. She sent a quick text, just letting her know that Alex made it home, hoping that Diane would respond quickly and she could at least check that fear off the list.

Piper ran out of things to do, so she grabbed a beer and settled into the corner of the couch next to Alex's feet. She gently ran her hand along one smooth, pale calf under the blanket, relieved that the skin against her palm was warm. She turned on the television, hoping it would distract her from the terrifying not knowing, and flipped through fifty channels of garbage before she hit TMC and the scene with Ugarte and Rick and she and Cal used to say "You despise me, don't you" to each other a hundred times a day the summer after her sophomore year at Deerfield so she put down the remote and kept watching.

Alex blinked awake slowly and grasped for Piper's hand. "Casablanca," she said.

Piper's heart raced at the sound of the brunette's rasp. "Alex," she said, trying hard not to sound panicked. "Baby, what's wrong?"

Alex sat up and edged closer to Piper, laying her head on her girlfriend's shoulder and wrapping the quilt around them both. "This is my favorite movie."

Piper didn't say anything. She still desperately wanted to know what was wrong, but Alex was awake and not crying and maybe the best thing to do was just to watch the movie. Piper leaned against the back of the couch and pulled Alex with her until the taller woman was curled in her lap. She absently ran her fingers up and down Alex's leg under the quilt, and didn't stop until the end credits rolled and Alex turned to face her. The brunette pressed a soft kiss to the underside of Piper's jaw.

"My mom and I used to watch this together," she said. "She loved Bogie."

Piper laughed. "I was always partial to Ingrid Bergman, myself."

Alex's smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "Yeah," she said, "me too." She took a deep breath. "There was a girl — a new girl — on the trip." She let her head fall against Piper's chest and the blonde instinctively pulled her closer. "Katie. I met her at NYU last month?"

Piper remembered hearing something about a girl from NYU and nodded, then realized Alex couldn't see her. "Okay."

"She was supposed to bring the money?"

Piper was suddenly uncomfortable and surprised. She didn't like talking about the specifics of Alex's work, and Alex knew that. She almost never brought up details.

"She was almost twenty k short." Her voice was muffled and quiet and Piper strained to hear her over the sound of her own heartbeat. "Kubra, he — " Alex started crying again, choking sobs.

"Baby, it's okay." Piper said it over and over until the words started to sound strange as she said them.

"He killed her," Alex choked out.

Piper couldn't breathe. She didn't know what to do. She couldn't keep telling Alex it would be okay because she was suddenly aware that it wasn't okay and maybe it wouldn't ever be okay again. Piper hated that she was in love with a drug dealer. She hated that this was the world Alex lived in, but Piper had known what Alex was from the minute they met and she told herself it was too late to back out.

The fact that Piper knew that Alex's favorite movie is Casablanca was her favorite thing about their relationship for the next two years. She kept it safe within her during all the fights, during all the time apart. Every time she worried that Alex might be getting too close to mules and using sex to seal deals. Casablanca was Alex's favorite movie, and no one else knew that. She couldn't be a ruthless criminal mastermind, not really, because she rooted for Rick and Ilsa and cried when Bogie told her to get on the plane.

And then, suddenly, Paris happened. Paris happened and it wasn't enough to know that Alex was a softie, deep down inside. Alex wanted to put her in danger; Alex had, once again, chosen Kubra over Piper.

When Piper got back to New York and tried to reboot her real life — tried to put her time with Alex in a neat little box in the corner of the attic in her mind — she couldn't watch Casablanca. She was overwhelmed by nausea if she even tried. Larry asked about it once, after a sour look crossed Piper's face when someone mentioned it at a dinner party. "I lost it in a breakup," she said, and he didn't ask any more questions. Piper loved Larry for that. Alex would have asked. Piper would have wanted to tell Alex. Piper didn't want to tell Larry. She didn't want him to know Alex's name or her favorite movie.

Alex's flight to Boston didn't leave for hours after Piper abandoned her in the Paris apartment, and she did the only thing she could think of to be close to the two women who just left her. She watched Casablanca. It was a pattern she would repeat innumerable times in the five years between Piper leaving and her arrest. Something would go wrong at work or in one of her ill-fated, short relationships, and she would turn on the movie. She wondered if Piper ever watched it. She wondered if Piper ever thought of her. She wondered if Piper ever thought about Bali, or New York, or any of their time together. She wonders if Piper even remembered how much she loved this movie.

It came on, one day, in Litchfield. After Polly called the parole officer and Alex got sent back, but before she killed Aydin and everything got even worse than it had been before. She was sitting in the rec room and Poussey had the remote and suddenly she heard Bogart say he came for the waters in his trademark gravelly drawl. She shuddered, tasted blood in her mouth, and practically ran out of the room.

She found Piper in the bathroom, checking her eyebrows in the mirror. She knew Piper could see her, felt the blonde become aware of her, but she didn't say anything.

"Do you know what my favorite movie is?" she asked. She didn't even know why she was asking but couldn't stop her lips from moving.

Piper didn't look at her. "Of course I do, Alex. Why?"

"What is it?"

Piper turned away from the mirror, finally, and leaned against the counter. She looked at Alex like she was a puzzle Piper needed to solve.

"The African Queen," she said finally, turning back to the mirror. "You always loved Katherine Hepburn in those old black and whites."

Alex clenched her jaw and walked away.

She was flicking through Netflix on the couch as Piper cleaned up from dinner. They settled into a routine, finally, on the nights when Alex didn't need to work on the book and Piper didn't have sessions. Alex cooked, Piper cleaned, and Alex picked the movie. She mostly picked comedies — they watched all of Monty Python and Mel Brooks — but that night she stumbled on Casablanca. She hadn't seen it since that day, years earlier, when Piper tore her heart out for the thirteenth time.

Piper had a bottle of wine, glasses, and a bowl of popcorn perched precariously in her arms, and she almost dropped them all when she saw Alex crying.

"Sweetie," she said, putting down the snacks and rushing to sit next to her, to take her in her arms, "what's wrong?"

Alex shook her head. She was crying too hard to respond. She wasn't sure what she would say, anyway, even if she could. It had been a long time since she'd said "Fuck you" to the blonde, even in jest, but she could hear those words and only those words echoing in her head.

Piper rubbed her back and gently tucked strands of Alex's hair — still black, but now sprinkled with gray instead of blue — behind her ears. She hated when Alex cried, hated that things could be bad enough to pierce her tough skin. She kissed Alex's forehead, her hair, her shoulder, and murmured meaningless soothing phrases against her neck.

The brunette's hands were folded in her lap and she squeezed and released them, trying to decide whether she wanted to pull Piper closer or slap her. She thought of all the other times she dealt with these impulses, and wondered if Piper felt them too.

Piper looked around the living room, hoping to find a clue to what caused Alex's breakdown. She saw the television, the screen filled with Bogart's face, and her heart seized.

"Oh," she breathed, barely audible. She didn't know how she knew, but she had never been more sure of anything in her entire life. "Oh, Alex."

Just like that, the tears dried up, and Alex sniffled, trying to decide what to do with her hands.

"This used to be your favorite, Al. What happened?"

Alex shook her head but edged closer to the blonde. She stopped resisting the gentle hand against her back.

Piper cleared her throat. "I never apologized, did I?" It sounded like she was crying, and Alex looked up to see her face, flushed and blotchy.

Alex shrugged. She unclasped her hands and rubbed them on her jeans. Her palms were clammy and her fingers stiff.

"For what?" she asked.

"You probably don't even remember," Piper said. "Right after you came back to Litchfield."

Alex sat up and pulled away from Piper, but the blonde hardly seemed to notice. She stared intently at the edge of the coffee table.

"You were so angry with me, and I just missed you so much." She sighed. "You came into the bathroom and asked me what your favorite movie was."

"I remember," Alex said, her voice raspy and low.

Piper winced at the sound. "Of course you do," she said. "We've always been good at that, haven't we? Remembering the ways we wronged each other. Keeping score."

There was more truth to that than Alex wanted to admit.

"I hated how much of a hold you had on me," Piper said. "You didn't want anything to do with me except when you wanted to fuck, and I ached for you all the time." Tears streamed down her cheeks but she didn't wipe them away.

"So why did you..." Alex couldn't bring herself to finish the question.

Piper shrugged and looked at her, helpless. It was a look Alex had seen countless times before, and it took every ounce of her self-control not to pull the blonde against her and tell her to forget the whole thing.

"I wanted to hurt you," Piper finally said. Alex knew that. She knew that was the reason, the only possible reason, but the pain of hearing it out loud still took her breath away. "I wanted to hurt you like you hurt me."

Alex smiled wanly. "Well, it worked."

They sat, miles apart on their two-seat couch, for long enough that the television fell asleep and the screen saver came on. They watched the emblem bounce from corner to corner.

"I stopped keeping score a long time ago," Alex said eventually. Her voice was steady, her face dry. She was desperately tired. All she wanted was to sleep, Piper's head against her chest, one hand buried in soft blonde waves.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Piper start at the sound of her voice.

"Hmm?"

"Keeping score," Alex said again. "Tallying how many times you hurt me and I hurt you and who fucked up worse when. I stopped. A long time ago."

"Then why were you crying about Casablanca and the shitty things I said in Litchfield forever ago?" Piper asked, but she didn't sound like she's accusing Alex of anything. She just sounded genuinely curious. She had always been genuinely curious about Alex — she had always wanted to know what the brunette thought and felt and believed about the world around them.

"I don't know," Alex said.

"Do you — do you think I deserve to be loved?" Piper's voice was small and vulnerable and Alex flinched when she heard it.

She clenched her fists on her thighs. "What?"

Piper pulled her knees against her chest and laid her cheek on them, facing Alex. She blinked.

"Where is this coming from, Piper? Have I done something to make you think you don't deserve me? Are you still that divorced from reality that — " She saw the tears silently making their way down the blonde's face and onto her sweatpants.

"Doggett said it," Piper said, her voice unsteady, "that night when we…" She wiped her nose with her hand.

Alex ran her fingers through her hair, frustrated and tired and fighting the persistent throbbing ache from holding her body so rigid for so long. "You listened to anything that fucked up meth head had to say?"

Piper pulled her knees even tighter against her chest. "When she said it, I don't think she was wrong."

Alex sighed.

"But now" — Piper picked at the flaking peach polish on one toenail — "now I just wondered. It seems sometimes like I do deserve you, and like we're happy and have made it through to the other side, and then, then I find you crying on the couch over something I did back then, and I just wonder."

Alex shook her head. "You deserve love, Piper." She sighed again, feeling the weight of the younger woman's eyes on her. "I love you. Do you think so little of me that you think I would love someone who didn't deserve it?"

"You loved me when I left you. You loved me after I got you sent back to prison, Al. I definitely didn't deserve your love either of those times. Or the hundred other times I did something shitty to you."

Alex slumped back against the couch. "You did some fucked up shit, Piper, but I did too. I wouldn't waste my time with you if you didn't deserve my love. Sometimes I'm not sure I deserve your love, but — "

"Sometimes," Piper said, and stopped. She put her right hand on the couch between them, facing up, and waited for Alex to take it. "Sometimes I don't know how we ever managed to move past all the shit we've been through."

Alex squeezed her hand.

"I mean, just the math, like you said, it's — it's exhausting." She sighed and looked at her watch. "It's late, Al."

"Maybe we should skip the movie tonight," Alex said.

Piper looked away from the brunette's face and focused on Alex's thumb gently rubbing the back of her hand. She cleared her throat. "I thought it would get easier, to stop picking at these old scabs and rehashing all of this. I thought we could do easy."

Alex was suddenly aware of a dull, throbbing headache just behind her eyes. She tilted her head left, then right, trying to work out the stiffness. She dragged herself off the couch and felt every day of her forty-one years.

"We can try," she said, and tugged Piper behind her towards their bedroom. "We can keep trying."

(3)

They didn't meet in Northhampton. Piper always thought that was weird, in retrospect. Alex traveled all over the country recruiting college girls to work as mules, but they met in Manhattan. It was a better story if they met at an off-campus bar and Alex tried to recruit her before falling madly in love. She lied about it when people asked. Not, like, lied lied, but she would fudge the details, omit the name of the bar, make herself sound a little younger.

The truth was that Piper had graduated from Smith on a Saturday, and by Monday she was applying for waitressing and bartending gigs across New York. It was her seventeenth stop, the bar where Alex and her friends were talking about the upcoming election, and she was so frustrated by her seventeenth rejection that she needed a drink. She didn't care that it was 57 degrees the second week in June — "record-breaking cold!" shouted the weathermen — she liked margaritas because the salty tang reminded her of Ria, a girl she had briefly dated the summer before.

Piper's favorite drinking game in college was two truths and a lie. She was good at it — great at it — and it thrilled her no end to watch people take shots when they couldn't tell when she was being honest. The trick was to be entirely honest for the first fact, mostly honest for the second, and lie for the third. She majored in English literature because she loved the feeling of pulling one over on an audience. She didn't even mind when she was the butt end of the author's joke, because it meant that the premise and the writing were so solid.

Piper was trying to be a writer — she had aspirations of writing the next great American novel — but before she could do that she needed life experiences. She was technically proficient, her style was mature for her age. What she lacked was plots. She never had to work during her time at Smith, and she was grateful for that. Really, she was. But on the other hand, her unpaid summer internships at Goldman Sachs, and at the tiny boutique publishing house, and for Senator Dodd didn't give her the kind of experiences she felt like she needed. She needed to get in touch with the common man, to get her hands dirty. She needed to have a wildly inappropriate affair. So when Alex approached her at the bar — all bright-red lipstick and too much perfume and teasing smiles — Piper was all too eager to give in to temptation.

Piper was honest with Alex, that night, when she said she had done some boob-touching. Other than her own, she had touched exactly five boobs, but two of them were Polly's, and she didn't count those. She was mostly honest with Alex when she said she was a lesbian. She'd never really thought about actually sleeping with a woman, and certainly not sleeping with a woman sober. When Alex asked her if she wanted to move from the bar to someplace quieter, though, Piper didn't think about it at all before agreeing. When "someplace quieter" turned out to be Alex's apartment, Piper was pleased, but it wasn't until she found herself naked in the brunette's bed that she realized that this was her big lesbian life experience. She lied to Alex when she said she was ready to take the plunge. In fact, she was scared out of her mind. She wanted to be ready, but she was secretly, sort of, relieved when Sylvie interrupted them before she had the chance.

She was honest with Alex, three weeks later, when she saw her at the burlesque show. Getting punched in the face had been a good life experience. She was mostly honest with Alex when she said she hadn't been a very sexual person before the evening she spent with the brunette. She had always known she was missing something when it came to sex, but she'd always known she wanted to find it. She lied to Alex when she said that she'd come to the bar to see the show. She had come to the bar every night since that first night, hoping she'd see the striking brunette again. She wasn't sure if she believed Alex when she said she worked for an international drug cartel, but she might. Something in Alex's eyes hinted at danger that had been missing from Piper's life at Deerfield and Smith, at a risk which Piper wanted to take. Sure, it had taken her three shots of tequila to work up to approaching Alex outside the bathroom of the bar, but once she did, things started moving very quickly.

She didn't go home again for three days after that night, and she only left when she did because Alex was flying to the west coast for work. She was exhausted and sore and couldn't quite remember how to fit in to her daily life. She'd lost her job, which was unfortunate but so worth it. She checked her Chase account balance and was reassured to find a recent infusion from her parents. It wasn't that she didn't want to work, or that she felt like she'd gotten enough life experiences in her thirteen shifts as a waitress, she just — she stretched, leisurely, and poured herself another glass of wine — she just couldn't imagine doing anything other than think about Alex, for a little while. She couldn't even bring herself to write about it. She just wanted to hold those memories and not have to examine them, to edit them, to risk changing them.

Alex came straight to her apartment from the airport, six days later. Piper waited at the window, watching for her cab. She was aching with need and her body hummed with the excitement of seeing the other woman again. She had never felt this way about anyone. She had never been so totally absorbed by the very idea of another person. When the buzzer rang, she felt the sparks in her fingertips. Her mouth was dry and she felt her lips chap as she heard footsteps on the stairs. She couldn't breathe and pressed her forehead against the door to regain her balance.

The next weekend, Alex had to out of town and Piper had agreed to go to Nantucket with her parents and Cal for a long weekend. Piper was glad for the distraction; she had found herself entirely too focused on Alex and didn't want to get so wrapped up so quickly. A little fun in the sun would make a nice change of pace, she thought. Their summer home even had a computer, so she was able to check her email late at night after her parents' fifth cocktails carry them off to their room. Friday night, head buzzing with more wine than her doctor thought she should be drinking, she was delighted to find a quick note from Alex.

Miss me? it read.

She wrote back, a teasing smile playing at her lips while she typed. I really, really do.

In the morning, she found Alex's response, saying that she was in Portland and what if she swung by on Monday on her way back to the city. She could give Piper a ride home. Piper paused, considering her response. She wrote several drafts and deleted each before grabbing her cell phone from her nightstand.

It rang four times before cutting off — Alex's voicemail had to be full, she thought. She sighed. Alex's voicemail was never full.

She tried again after lunch and again after dinner, before finally giving up and sending the other woman an email before bed. She agonized over what exactly to say. I'd love to see you, she wrote, but my parents are taking me back to the city on Monday. They have to go anyway, so it's no inconvenience. I tried calling a couple times, but couldn't leave a message. How about I meet you at your place that night? You can see my new tan lines.

It was true that her parents were giving her a ride home. It was less true that they were going to the city anyway — the only reason they were going was to take Piper home, and she knew her dad would appreciate not having to make the drive. She hadn't exactly lied to Alex, but the idea of the brunette meeting her parents was terrifying. She would rather walk home from Massachusetts.

Monday morning dawned bright and hot, sticky with humidity, and not a moment too soon for Piper. She was quickly realizing that she didn't care about rushing things with Alex, didn't care about labeling things this early in their relationship, didn't care about anything other than wrapping herself around the tall brunette and spending hours, days, weeks in her bed. The sun drove Piper out of bed before six, and she showered, ate breakfast, and loaded her bag into her dad's car before the rest of her family had even had their first cups of coffee. She occupied herself by trying to call Alex, sighing when the phone didn't even ring before it indicated the voicemail was full, and checking her email.

Just the sight of Alex's email address sent a thrill of excitement up her spine. She clicked the subject line, Miss you more, and rolled her eyes with impatience as the message loaded. Sure, kid, it read. Whatever you say. Sorry about the phone. You know I'm a little hard to reach when I'm working. Looking forward to seeing you tonight. I don't have to work all week, maybe we can spend some of it together? Let yourself in if you beat me back — the key is on top of the door frame.

Piper sighed impatiently the entire ride down the coast. Her phone died outside New Haven, so she couldn't even try to call Alex. Her parents insisted on stopping for lunch and gas and a stretch break and Piper wanted to crawl out of her own skin. Her heart was beating so fast that she was sure she could fly back to Alex's warm four-poster if given the opportunity. Her parents dropped her outside her apartment and she hugged them before she got out of the car, racing inside to shower and shave and make sure she was ready to spend the next four days tangled up in satin sheets that weren't hers.

She called Alex once more as she was getting ready to leave — was trying to leave a message when she saw the flaming bag of shit on her doorstop. Fuck. She knew Sylvie was crazy, but she hadn't known exactly how crazy until then. It took another hour for her to clean up and make her way, finally, out of the apartment.

Piper was honest with Alex that night when she said she had missed her. She had done little except miss her, the whole time she was gone. She was mostly honest with Alex when she said that she loved her, too. She was a little fuzzy on what that might mean, to love someone, but she probably did, and she didn't want to hurt her new girlfriend. She lied to Alex when she whispered "forever" against her flushed skin. At twenty-two, Piper didn't believe in forever. And besides, there were a whole lot of life lessons she had yet to learn, experiences she'd yet to have. She'd never broken anyone's heart before. How could she write the great American novel without having broken any hearts?

Piper prided herself on her story-telling skills, from college drinking games to fevered promises. She wondered if Alex could tell the difference between her truths and her lies. And if she could, she wondered, would that be so bad?

(4)

"You're going where?" Piper asked, turning from the mirror and looking at Alex in disbelief.

"Tucson."

"Where the fuck is Tucson?" Piper's annoyance was clear on her face. Alex didn't blame her — the blonde had invited her to a party at her friend Polly's house and this little trip would mean she would conveniently miss it. Not that Alex minded missing the party. They'd only been seeing each other for a month, and, although Alex was really enjoying her relationship with the temperamental blonde, she wasn't sure she was ready to commit to meeting a bunch of Piper's well-behaved friends.

"Tucson," Alex said, pulling the blonde by her hips out of the bathroom and towards the four-poster bed, "is a delightful town 90 miles south east of Phoenix in sunny Arizona. With over one million residents, it is also the home of the University of Arizona, one of the top party schools — and public academic institutions — in the country."

Piper snorted. "Are you the new PR director for this place? Are you moving there?"

Alex shook her head. "I have a meeting," she said. "You know I wouldn't miss Holly's party if it wasn't for work."

"Polly," Piper said. "Who are you meeting in Tucson. The Sinaloa Cartel?"

Alex pursed her lips to suppress a smirk but didn't respond. "Wanna come? It'll be warm. You can hang out at the pool. I have to spend a day in Phoenix, too. You could get some good Mexican food. We could even make a weekend of it and go to LA or San Diego after. Or see the Grand Canyon?"

Piper walked to the dresser and yanked the lower right-hand drawer open. It had been a gift — an appeasement, really — from Alex, after their first fight. Piper had wanted to spend a long weekend at her parents' summer place, enjoying the beach and some time away from the city, but Alex claimed to be too busy. Piper pulled out a long-sleeve Smith teeshirt and slipped it on, leaving Alex to mourn the loss of the view revealed by Piper's skimpy camisole.

"No," Piper said, walking to the bed and picking up her book before leaving the room, "I don't want to go to fucking Arizona with you. I'm not sure I even want to go to bed with you tonight."

Alex sighed. She liked Piper — she liked Piper a lot, if she was being honest with herself — but she hated the drama that came with a relationship. That was exactly why she avoided relationships. She rolled her shoulders and prepared herself to make amends. She followed the blonde into the living room, appreciating her long, tan legs.

"Babe," she said, collapsing on the couch and pulling a resistant Piper onto her lap, "it's just work. Another meeting. I didn't pick the day."

Piper opened her book and ignored Alex's hands kneading the muscles of her thighs.

"Pipes, this is my job."

Piper closed her book with a snap. "Well, maybe I'm tired of your job."

The brunette's hands stilled against Piper's legs. "You knew who I was — what I do — from the very beginning."

"Maybe I'm having second thoughts."

Alex stood up, roughly shoving Piper's legs off the couch. She was shaking as she stalked towards the bedroom. How dare Piper. She wanted to lash out, wanted to throw something, wanted to slap Piper across the face. Her fingers itched with the urge to take action.

"Maybe you should go, then" she said, slamming the door behind her as she retreated to the bathroom to cry.

When she came out, an hour later, ready with apologies and explanations, Piper was gone. So were her book and her purse, but she had left her Smith shirt hanging from the foot of the unmade bed. Alex didn't know what that meant. She sighed and dropped onto the sheets, pulling the shirt against her and inhaling the warm, slightly spicy smell of Piper.

Her flight the next morning left right on time, for once. Alex still hadn't gotten used to the post-9/11 security changes, even though it had been years, and she waited until the final boarding call before getting on the plane. She wrote it off as not wanting to sit in the recycled air for any longer than was absolutely necessary, but her shoulders sagged when she realized that Piper was not going to run to the gate and stop her from leaving. In the months they had been together, Piper had never stopped her from leaving.

She flew to Phoenix and rented a car because it was the only direct flight she could find, and the sunlight burned her eyes when she emerged into the crisp afternoon. She shivered. Even in the Valley of the Sun, it got chilly in December.

She drove straight from the airport to the Congress Hotel in the heart of the small but bustling downtown area. By the time she got there, it was raining steadily and she cursed her luck. She had sent Piper an email with flight and hotel information, offered to reimburse a plane ticket, if she changed her mind, but she wasn't surprised when she checked in and there were no messages.

There was just enough time for a shower and a quick scan of her email — nothing from Piper, and now Alex was getting angry — before she met Fahri, Carlos, and Luis in the bar next to the lobby. The meeting went well, Alex was charming and friendly and her light touches on Carlos' arm seemed to promise more. She would have been lying if she'd said they had her full attention, though. Instead, she was focused on the woman standing by the bar drinking tequila sunrises. Her long blonde hair hung in loose waves past her shoulders. The black shirt and jeans she was wearing looked cheap and worn even from across the bar, but the poor quality did little to obscure her slender frame and the gentle swell of her hips.

"That's kind of a serious drink for a Thursday night, isn't it?" She signaled the bartender to bring them two more and smirked at the girl standing next to her. It was almost midnight; Fahri and the others had finally left, agreeing to meet again around lunchtime to finalize the deal.

"It's Thirsty Thursday," the girl said, a smile on her face. "I was beginning to think you'd never come say hello."

Alex looked at the girl and sipped her drink. She was surprised by her boldness, wondered if she needed to reassess her potential as a mule.

"Alex," she said finally, lifting her glass in a toast.

"Thanks for the drink, Alex."

Alex smirked again. She was enjoying this, flirting for the sake of flirting, not trying to plan three steps ahead. She hadn't done that since the night she met Piper in that bar. Fuck. Just when she'd been doing so well not thinking about her girlfriend. Her ex-girlfriend. Her whatever. Her Piper.

She shook it off. "This is the part where you tell me your name, Tequila."

The girl laughed and Alex started calculating exactly how long it would take to get her up to the room and take off her boots and jeans. It seemed like an inevitability; she just hoped it wouldn't cost her too much.

"Tequila works," she said.

Alex laughed too and reached out to push a loose blonde curl behind Tequila's ear. It was so easy.

"You know," she said, a teasing grin firmly in place, "I feel like you owe me an apology."

Tequila signaled the bartender for another round. "Oh yeah? Why's that?"

"I expected to be able to swim here, but it's much too cold! And this rain? What the fuck?"

Tequila shook her head. "Well, at least you're sleeping inside. If you think it's too cold to swim, it's a hell of a lot colder to sleep down at the bus stop. We get three hundred and sixty days of sunshine a year, and you went and picked one of the five it rains."

"What brings you out in the rain tonight, Tequila?"

Tequila's smile faded and she shook her head. "That's not really important, is it, Alex?"

Alex gently rubbed circles Tequila's wrist, wondering whether her long-sleeved shirt was just in response to the cold. She felt the arm muscles of the other woman tense under her fingers. "Okay," she said. "So what is important?"

She finished her drink in one long swallow before slamming her glass on the bar. Her breath was sweet and hot against Alex's face when she whispered "What's important is your room number."

They fucked and it was nice, different than Piper. If Alex squinted, she couldn't even see Piper in Tequila's face. Alex had to do all the work, and it felt like work, but on a scale of terrible jobs Alex held before her time in the cartel, this didn't even make the list. Tequila wanted it rough, rougher than Piper ever did, and Alex's jaw and wrist were sore by the time she fell asleep just before four.

By the time she woke up it was almost eleven and her head pounded in time with her pulse. Her mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and she felt sick. She couldn't find her glasses. Her heart seized at the sight of blonde hair spread across the pillow next to her. "Piper?" she whispered.

The illusion shattered in an instant when Tequila turned over and looked at her quizzically. "My name is Lizzy," she rasped. "What's a 'Piper'?"

Alex willed her heart to stop beating so fast. "Lizzy," she said, trying desperately to breathe through the panic attack she could feel building. "That's my — that's Pipe — that's a pretty name." She kissed the blonde and ignored the taste of rancid tequila and oranges. She pulled herself out of bed and found her glasses on the desk. "I'm going to take a shower, and then I have a meeting. Make yourself comfortable, though."

Lizzy propped herself up against two pillows, the sheet pooling at her waist and revealing her breasts. They were too big. They weren't Piper's.

Alex didn't cry until the hot water had steamed up the bathroom and she didn't have to look at herself in the mirror, but then she let the tears flow, big, gulping sobs that wracked her whole body and left her shivering on the shower floor.

When she came back from her meeting, Lizzy was still in her bed, still naked, finishing the last few french fries on her plate.

"I ordered room service," she said. "I hope that's okay."

Alex shrugged. She didn't care about the expense, but was annoyed by the blonde's presumptuousness.

"Want to take me out tonight?" Lizzy asked. "I can show you the cool bars. We can go to IBTs."

Alex picked up her cell phone. No voice mails. She idly dialed Piper's number, but she wasn't surprised when it went straight to her outgoing message. She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. She had no interest in seeing what Tucson considered to be cool bars, no interest in Lizzy — no interest in anything, really, other than talking to Piper and trying to smooth things over.

"What do you do for a living?"

Lizzy loudly slurped the dregs of a milkshake.

"I do hair," she said, "but not, like, in a salon or anything."

Alex nodded, satisfied. Of fucking course this vagrant puppy who had attached herself to Alex was an amateur stylist. "Perfect," she said. "I've been thinking it's time for a change."

Alex went to the store to get the dye while Lizzy set up the bathroom. She had the bleach already, but didn't have any blue. "You sure you don't want red?" she offered. "I have red."

It had to be blue. Blue was Piper's favorite color.

They didn't talk much while Lizzy worked. Alex got drunk on vodka from the mini-bar, and, after four shots, Lizzy's fuzzy outline in the mirror started to look more like Piper.

"Do you want to go out tomorrow night?" Lizzy asked. "I really think you'll like some of the bars down here, and it's a shame to come all this way and only see Congress."

Alex shook her head. "I'm leaving tomorrow," she said, suddenly coming to a decision.

"How about tonight, then?" The blonde started rubbing her shoulders. "We can get super drunk and do cartwheels through the hotel. Do karaoke. Just, I don't know, have some fun. It seems like we both could use some fun."

Alex shrugged Lizzy off and walked across the room to her laptop, trying to avoid dripping on the worn carpet. It only took a couple minutes to find a flight that gave her enough time to get to Tempe, do what she needed to do, and get to the airport. She would be back in New York by eight. She read the email confirmation twice, the cursor poised over the forward button. She bit her lower lip nervously. She knew what she needed to do.

Piper, she wrote, this is my flight information for tomorrow. I'll be back in time for Polly's party. Will you wait for me? I've missed you.

She hit send and swallowed hard against the sudden lump in her throat.

"Time to rinse," Lizzy said.

Kicking Lizzy out in the morning proved surprisingly easy. The blonde seemed grateful for two nights in a warm bed and for the hundred dollar bill Alex pressed into her hand as she left. "I'd give you my number," she said, "but I don't exactly have one. And besides, you wouldn't call anyway, would you?"

Alex smiled as she closed the door.

The drive to Tempe was fine, and her meetings went well, and Godzilla and Mothra could have trampled over Sun Devil Stadium and Alex still wouldn't have noticed. All she could think about was Piper. She wasn't even sure why, really. The hadn't been dating very long. They had nothing in common. The sex was good but it wasn't the best she'd ever had, or anything. (It was totally the best she'd ever had.) And then she'd gone and fucked it up and she still didn't exactly know what she'd done other than say she was going to miss Polly's party. For work. Her job that predated Piper, and that Piper had known about the very first time they met.

At the airport, she checked her emails and sighed when there was nothing from Piper. She wandered around the little shops until she found a stuffed saguaro cactus with a smiley face stitched on it. She wondered if Piper would like it, and bought it just in case, along with a handful of magazines and a bottle of water.

Alex had always prided herself on sleeping through flights, but she couldn't even close her eyes on this one. Every time she tried, she saw Piper's face, tight and angry, spoiling for a fight. She tried to read the magazines, but kept seeing Piper in the advertisements. She focused on how, exactly, she intended to make things better with the girl she — she grudgingly said the word to herself, testing how it felt — loved.

By the time the plane landed at JFK, Alex was exhausted and frustrated and had nothing even close to a plan. She scanned the crowd when she got to the arrivals area, hoping to recognize a flash of blonde hair or ocean-blue eyes. She was disappointed, but not surprised, that Piper wasn't there. The cab to her apartment was interminably long, made even longer by Alex's cursing at every red light. She could see her living room window from the street, and her mood soared when she realized that the light was on. Piper. She raced up the stairs, fumbled over the lock, and dropped her bags in a heap when she finally shoved the door open.

"Piper?" she called. The word echoed down the hall. She checked the kitchen. The bedroom. The bathroom. All empty.

She collapsed on the couch, blind behind tears. She wanted to scream but couldn't manage more than a quiet, high-pitched whine. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and turned it on. No messages.

There was a weird noise coming from the hall, but Alex didn't move. Maybe one of the neighbors had gotten a new dog, or something. She didn't hear the door open, didn't look up until a muttered "Jesus fuck, Alex," got her attention, and she saw the door hitting her suitcase.

"Can I get some help here, Al?" Piper said, sounding annoyed. It was the sweetest sound Alex had ever heard. She pulled herself off the couch and dried her eyes with the hem of her teeshirt as she hauled the bags out of the way and grabbed the pizza out of the shorter woman's hand.

Piper pushed her hair out of her face and looked at Alex for the first time, her frustration falling away instantly.

"What's wrong?" she asked, her voice warm and full of concern.

Alex shook her head. "I missed you," she said. Her voice sounded wet and heavy and more vulnerable than Piper had ever heard it. "The light was on. I thought you — I thought maybe — maybe you'd be here."

Piper sighed. "Sorry," she said. "I must have left it on when I went for the pizza. You didn't get my note?" She took Alex by the hand and pulled her to the kitchen counter. Al, the sheet of plain paper read in Piper's neat black letters, I was starving and couldn't wait. I'll be right back. I missed you. Love, Pipes.

Alex was crying again and pulled Piper tight against her, the pizza forgotten on the counter. Piper ran her hands through blue-black hair.

"This is new," she said. "I like it."

"Oh, shit, Piper," Alex said. "I think I fucked up. I thought — when you left the other night — I didn't know what the rules were — I think I fucked everything up — "

Piper shut her up with a gentle but firm kiss. "Rules are no fun," she said when they pulled away. "I don't want to know what you did in Tucson, okay?"

Alex nodded and pulled the blonde even tighter against her. "Are we okay?" she asked, her voice muffled against Piper's shoulder.

"Yeah," Piper said. "I'm sorry — about that night, I mean, about storming out — and I'm sorry for not calling. I guess maybe I don't know the rules either."

"Maybe" — Alex swallowed hard— "maybe we could come up with some rules together? Like not storming out and not — " she gestured at her hair.

Piper's eyes sparkled with sudden understanding. "Not fucking hairdressers in Arizona?" she asked.

Alex blushed.

"Yeah," Piper said, pulling out of Alex's arms but keeping hold of her hand as she started walking towards the bedroom. "Yeah, we can do that."

(5)

In the Before, Piper was always shocked at how, despite her profession, Alex always seemed so square when it came to drugs.

"I'm an importer," she would say, a smug smirk firmly in place and a single eyebrow raised for emphasis, "not some asshole junkie."

Alex would drink, occasionally, like she had on the night she and Piper met, but she disapproved of drinking to excess, of losing control.

"A buzz can be hot," she said in Barcelona, holding back Piper's hair as she dry-heaved, "but this is just sloppy. Not hot."

It wasn't that Piper was some sort of druggie, but you couldn't grow up as Cal's sister and not have tried weed... a few dozen times. And at Smith, well, you couldn't go to a NESCAC school and not try coke. That would be a waste of her Park Slope roommate's great connections. And, sure, yeah, sometimes once she graduated Cal would give her a sample of whatever new strain he was working on, and apple bongs were just environmentally friendly, and it seemed like sacrilege to never try Molly at a concert.

So that's why Alex came home from a trip one night and found Piper lighting up a Red Delicious on the fire escape. "Pipes," she said, leaning on her elbows on the window sill, "that shit will fuck you up. It's totally a gateway drug, you know."

Piper exhaled and watched the thick smoke get swept away on a chill fall breeze. "Alex, you're a fucking drug dealer. You know that's not true."

Alex smirked and took the lighter from her girlfriend and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. She ignored Piper's squeal of protest.

"Exactly. I'm a drug dealer, so I know it's true from experience. I can't even tell you how many of my clients started with a joint on Saturday night and ended up shooting meth on Tuesday morning."

Piper laughed, a thick, slow rumble that reminded Alex of distant thunder on a humid summer night.

"Do we have any Cheetos?" the blonde asked. "Or, ooooh, kettle corn!"

Alex shook her head. "Come on, Pipes," she said, helping the blonde through the window and grabbing the apple off the fire escape. "It's time for bed." She turned around after drawing the curtains, but Piper was already asleep, face-down and snoring gently into the comforter.

In the morning, they fought about it. Alex said some things she didn't mean, and some she did. She meant it when she said she didn't want that shit in her house any more. She meant it less when she said she was less attracted to Piper after seeing it. Didn't mean it at all when she said if she caught Piper with it again they were done. She knew that was an empty threat and wondered if Piper knew it, too, but she never saw Piper smoke pot again. Every once in a while, she'd come home with red eyes and walk directly into the shower, but she never asked about it and Piper never said anything.

Piper wasn't there for the During — the days and nights that melted together in a cloud of alcohol, heroin, and whatever else anyone handed Alex, pierced by trysts against bathroom stalls and alley walls. If she had been, she would have been shocked to see how little control Alex had, and even more shocked by how little Alex seemed to care. She was late for meetings, if she went at all. She was disheveled, her clothes ripped and usually dirty. The near endless string of women she brought to her hotel rooms started high class and got worse as Alex herself did. She lost her glasses in Ibiza, and for the last six months until the Feds caught up with her she squinted at the world through a myopic, opioid haze.

The first time, it was ecstasy in a hotel room in Amsterdam, after a long day smoking pot in various cafés. She hung the do not disturb sign on the door, arraigned six bottles of water in a line on the desk, and stared at the pill in her hand. She'd gotten it from a client as a tip. She snorted laughing just thinking about it. She wasn't even sure why she wanted to try it — it had never appealed to her before, despite its availability. She missed Piper; she missed her mom. She missed how much her mom loved Piper. They had only met a handful of times, but Diane asked about Piper every week and delighted in telling Alex how perfect they were together.

She'd read, extensively, about the effects of the drug she was about to take. She knew hallucinations were possible, maybe even likely. She read one vivid account from someone who had seen themselves in space orbiting the earth and claimed to suddenly understand the entirety of human existence. Alex wondered what she'd see, and half-hoped it would be bright blue eyes and a wide, even smile. Of course, she also hoped she'd never see that face again. She'd rather fly.

She took the pill and slumped against the covers, waiting for the walls to move. By the time she had decided that it must have been a bad pill, because nothing had happened, three hours had passed. She couldn't decide if she was disappointed or thrilled, but then the ceiling fan started dancing with the wallpaper and she didn't even think about Piper for a whole six hours. It was a new record.

Alex smoked black tar heroin, a gift from a new friend of Fahri's, in Biarritz with an Italian girl named Isabella early on a Thursday morning. At least, she thought it was Thursday morning. It might have been Sunday afternoon for all she knew, but she thought she could see the stars through the hotel window if she craned her neck just enough to the left, and she was pretty sure she had eaten a sandwich the day before, which she remembered being Wednesday. Maybe. She liked to smoke it because it worked faster, and, although she didn't have much vanity left, in the During, she didn't want track marks.

In spite of the way it looked, Alex told herself that she wasn't an addict, not really. She could go as long as she wanted without using, and she was always fine. She never got dope sick, not like the junkies she knew who had to use to keep from throwing up. Alex used because she just never really wanted to be sober for very long. When she was sober, all she could see was Piper leaving her in Paris, all she could hear was the sound of her shoes clicking on the tile and her suitcase rolling behind her. She could taste the snot in the back of her throat and feel the weight of her cellphone in her hand, the scratch of her sweater on the back of her shoulders.

When she was high, she was happy. Her brain was quiet. She could see how beautiful the world was, appreciate the sounds of waves against the shore. She could see Piper's face the way it looked when she came, the way it looked when she laughed, the way it looked when she loved Alex and Alex had a reason not to use in the first place. When she was high, if she squinted, she could see Piper in Isabella's face, hear Piper in Isabella's laugh. She knew, somewhere, deep inside, that Isabella was using her for cheap drugs and a place to stay. She knew that if she looked between Isabella's toes she'd find scabs. But she was using Isabella for a look at Piper, and if Isabella looked too closely at her, she wouldn't like what she found either.

The day before her arrest, she ran into Christopher, a friend she'd first met through Fahri and shared some good times with in Tokyo. She'd come up for air between benders and was trying to get some work done while she was lucid enough. It had only been a couple of years since Alex had seen him last, but he looked eons older than she remembered. She remembered him being thin in Japan, but in Vegas he was skinny to the point of being emaciated. His skin looked leathery from too much time in the sun, and he needed a shave — and probably a shower. In spite of his appearance, however, he was as warm-hearted as she remembered.

"Whatever happened with your band?" Alex asked. They had been ensconced in a booth in one of the many bars at New York, New York for the better part of two hours, catching up on mutual friends and Alex's life.

Christopher shrugged and Alex immediately regretted asking. "It never — we never — it never quite panned out, I guess. I got occupied with other things."

Alex picked at the label on the beer bottle in front of her. "Things that Fahri gave you?"

"Yeah." He sighed and signaled the bartender to bring another round.

"I'm sorry. You guys were really good."

He shrugged again and ran his fingers through his greasy shoulder-length hair. "Yeah, well. I just got out of rehab. Three months residential, then two more in a halfway house in Sedona."

"You still clean?" Alex drained the last of her beer in one long swallow and picked up the next bottle.

Christopher shook his head. "If I were, would I have called you?"

Alex didn't respond.

"It's the only thing I regret, you know?"

She finished shredding the label of her second Stella and reached for the napkin underneath. "What is?"

"Giving up the music for this shit. It's like it's the same rush, playing music and this, but this works so much faster."

Alex nodded. She knew exactly what he meant and she hated that she knew. Heroin was the same rush as seeing Piper, as touching Piper, as letting Piper touch her. And heroin never got mad if she was late or busy. It was all the good and none of the bad and she still missed Piper so fucking much. She had to get out of the bar, had to get away from Christopher and his twitchy junkie insight. She slipped a small baggie out of her pocket and pressed it into his hand as she left.

"What if I need more?" he asked, sounding desperate in spite of himself. "This isn't even enough to get through the week."

"Call someone else," she said.

She showered for an hour when she got back to her room, letting the hot water and steam clean out her pores and wash off Christopher and the bar. She vowed to stop using, to stop dealing, to leave the cartel and make a fresh start. The next morning the Feds came.

In the After, she had been sober for two years, seven months, and fourteen days when she did crack with Nicky and Piper in the cornfield. It wasn't like she was counting because she missed it, she just happened to know how long it had been since the Feds busted in her hotel room door. If she'd been offered heroin, she might have said yes, she might have said no. It would have depended on how her relationship with Piper was that day. But crack? Crack might make for a nice change, she thought. It might break up the fear that was ever-present since her run-in with Aydin. It might smooth over some of the rough edges left from Piper's betrayal with Stella.

She couldn't decide which part of the cornfield experience was the worst — Piper seeing her do drugs for the first time, or watching Piper sink so low. She had smoked crack before, just occasionally, just when there was nothing else available. She wasn't lying when she told Piper that people didn't die from crack. She'd seen lots of people die, from lots of different drugs, but never crack. She just didn't like the feeling crack gave her — confessional and paranoid and lord knew she didn't need either of those feelings in Litchfield.

Her tongue was thick, her mouth sticky, when she woke up. Her head hurt. Fuck Nicky, she thought, and fuck crack, and fuck Piper, and fuck me. She decided then and there that she wouldn't do it again, but she was honest when she told Piper that crack was like potato chips. Yeah, it's not healthy, but it wasn't going to kill her and Nicky was much too good at being a heroin addict to let something like crack fuck her up. She felt worse about having let Piper do it. She knew Piper liked to smoke pot — had never approved of it when they were together the first time — but had never imagined that her well-behaved girlfriend would resort to street drugs.

She promised herself, that morning when she woke up with her mouth glued shut, that she was done. Not just with crack, but with heroin, too. And alcohol, and cigarettes, and weed, and anything else that took any of her control away. Because she needed that control, she realized. She needed it, desperately, because it was the one thing that might help her get Piper back for good. In spite of everything, she needed to get Piper back. They could work out the details later.

In the After-After, Piper drinks some, because that's what writers' wives do at parties. It's never to excess. Alex never says anything, doesn't want to accuse Piper of misbehavior, not now, not after the Before and the During and the After. Alex never says anything but Piper feels her eyes on her with each glass. Piper knows that, if she asked her, Alex could tell her exactly how many drinks she's had since getting out of Litchfield.

Alex has a meeting with her publisher in Providence on an unseasonably chilly November afternoon and takes Amtrak from New Haven. It's not the fastest way, but she has a deadline creeping up and just wants to listen to music and not worry about traffic.

On the way home, she throws herself in a backward-facing seat and drops her laptop bag onto the blue leather next to her. She sighs. The meeting didn't go as well as she'd hoped it would. She worries maybe she just had one good book in her and now she's done. She bites her bottom lip and wonders if Piper will be waiting for her when she gets home. That's her favorite part about leaving — it doesn't matter if she's going out of town or going out for groceries — she loves coming home to find Piper bathed in golden light from the lamp next to the couch, reading a book, waiting just for her.

She texts Piper and asks if there's anything in the house for dinner or if she should stop at Pepe's for a white clams and garlic on her way out of New Haven. She puts on her headphones and flips idly through playlists until she finds the one she's looking for. Nick Drake and Cat Stevens, perfect as she watches the sun set over quaint New England towns that rush by outside the window.

She wishes she had a drink. It's not that she wants to get drunk, she never wants to get drunk in the After-After, but she'd like to let go a little bit. She would never admit it to herself (or to Piper) but she actually likes when Piper drinks a little bit. Just enough that the smiles come easily and she's willing to rub the back of Alex's neck without regard for who might be watching. She likes that Piper is willing to loosen up sometimes, that Piper doesn't have the same need for total control that she has.

She doesn't hear from Piper and doesn't have anything to drink, so she dozes off, resting her head against the cool glass and waking up with a pain in her neck. They're just pulling into the station on Union Street and she's grateful she woke up in time — once she slept all the way to Grand Central and it took hours to get back home. She doesn't bother with a pizza, figures they can make do with sandwiches or cereal or microwave popcorn. She checks her watch and realizes that Piper might have even eaten dinner already, because it's after eight and Piper likes to eat at seven. She sighs. She hopes that, if nothing else, she can swing a hot bath and maybe even a back rub out of this.

It takes almost twenty minutes for the car to heat up enough that her exhales don't form little clouds. She shivers. It's hard to focus on the road because she's tired and still kind of upset by the meeting and also distracted by the beauty of the clear sky filled with stars. One thing she loves about where they live is how many stars she can see at night. More than anyplace else she's ever lived. More than some of the beaches she visited during her time with Kubra, even.

She eases the car into the garage and slams the door behind her. The air is crisp and she can smell wood smoke. She walks into the house calling Piper's name, concerned by the lack of light in the living room. She wanders into the kitchen and the lights are off there, too, but the SUV is in the driveway so the blonde must be home somewhere. She grabs a glass and fills it with lukewarm tap water and drinks it in three long swallows. There's a light in the backyard, near the pool. A red light that flares and diminishes and she knows what it is before she can think of the words for it.

Alex pushes open the sliding glass door to the deck and peers into the darkness. The light surges and fades.

"Pipes?" she says.

She walks onto the varnished wood and shivers.

"Piper?"

There's no response, but her eyes adjust and she can see the outline of the blonde laying on the diving board, her toes dangling just above the water. She picks her way closer to the pool, trying not to trip on any of the stone planters that line the walkway. Piper turns her head and sees her, finally. Her eyes are open and gray in the moonlight. Alex misses the blue. A broad, lazy smile splits her face and she holds out one hand towards the brunette.

"Hey, baby," she says. "Cal brought me a present at lunch today. Do you want some?"

Alex can smell it now and feels stupid for not realizing what the red light was earlier. She climbs up the ladder of the diving board and sits, straddling the board with Piper's head between her knees. The blonde pulls off her earphones and grins at Alex upside down.

"Are you stoned, Piper?" She's not frustrated, exactly, but not quite amused, either. She doesn't know what to call it.

Piper thinks about the question. "No," she says finally. "Pebbled."

Alex smiles before she can stop herself and bites her lip. She reaches out and takes the joint, considering it. "I really wanted a drink on the train," she says.

"I think I have a bottle of tequila stashed under the sink," Piper says, her eyes on Alex. "But this is really good stuff. It just kind of... smoothed out the rough edges of the day."

Alex shrugs. She's tired and frustrated and keeping control all the time is just so much work. She raises the joint to her lips and inhales. She feels the smoke fill her lungs and it's warm and bitter and better than any drink she's ever had. She can feel the tightness in her chest start to ease. She passes the joint back to Piper and they finish smoking it together. Alex leans on her elbows and stares at the sky. She can't remember ever seeing so many millions of stars all shining so brightly.

"The meeting didn't go well," she says, when she's sure she can keep her voice even.

Piper squeezes her knee. "One of my patients relapsed. She ODed last night."

"Well, fuck."

"Yeah."

They watch the stars and Alex loses track of how long she's been sitting there, feeling the slight bounce of the diving board as they breathe. In the Before, Alex never had the patience to star-gaze. There was always something else she needed to do — someplace else she needed to do. In the After-After, Alex can stare at the stars all night, so long as Piper is there. There is no place she'd rather be than appreciating the vastness of the universe with her guiding light by her side. Piper gets up, and Alex looks away from Orion to see tears shining on the blonde's face.

The blonde starts to dance, eyes closed. Alex realizes that she must have turned her music back on, because she soon picks up on the rhythm as she watches. It's a slow song. Alex has seen a lot of beautiful women dance in her life, but the best, by far, is Piper. Even in sweatpants and an old rugby shirt, she is gorgeous. Alex could watch this all night. Piper's hair practically glows in the moonlight, wild and messy and beautiful. "Join me?" she asks, holding out a hand.

Alex shakes her head. "I like watching you."

Piper stops dancing and holds out her headphones. "We can share them," she says. "Come on. Please, Al?"

Alex is helpless when Piper uses that voice and that face, lower lip jutting out and entreating. She clambers to her feet. "This seems unreasonably dangerous." She shivers when the cold air hits her back.

Piper shakes her head and puts one earbud into Alex's ear, pulling her close. "It's fine," she says. "I do this a lot."

Alex is surprised when she hears the song, and then realizes she shouldn't be. It had been their first dance — Piper had insisted on it.

"I love it," she'd said. "It's so us."

Alex wraps her arms more fully around Piper, pulling the blonde flush against her. She's still worried about falling into the pool, would still rather be watching the other woman dance, but this isn't so bad. She can feel the warmth of the pot and understands what Piper meant by it smoothing the rough edges.

"She says that people stare 'cause we look so good together," Alex sings, her voice low and raspy. Her mouth is very close to Piper's ear and she can feel the blonde shiver at her words.

Piper has the song on repeat and they sway gently through it four times. Her meeting sucked, and Alex may only have one great book in her, and Piper's patient ODed. But this is the After-After, the Ever After, and Alex has everything she needs right there in front of her.

(6)

Alex drove and Piper navigated with the help of her phone. They hadn't been to the city together in years, not since Nicky was released from Litchfield and they met her for coffee in midtown. They lived so close, but it just never seemed like the right time. They didn't even talk about it, they had just decided not to bother, opting for Boston when the need for a bustling metropolis drove them from Guilford. But that night they'd made the drive in spite of the snow.

"Take a left... now!" Piper said. Alex swerved the Volvo but couldn't get over in time.

"Fuck. Sorry, Pipes."

The blonde just smiled and held the phone closer to the windshield, impervious to her girlfriend's questioning gaze. "It's recalculating."

Alex checked the rear-view. "I think if I just — " she turned left at the next intersection. "— I can take this over and..." She blinked as she looked at the row of brownstones lining the street. She tugged on Piper's jacket. "Pipes, look where we are."

Piper looked up from her phone and ducked her head to follow Alex's pointed finger.

"Oh," she said quietly. Alex wasn't sure if she'd even meant to say it out loud.

"I haven't been here since — "

" — Paris?" Alex asked.

Piper nodded. "I used to go to that Thai place around the corner sometimes, you know? But I never came down here. I didn't want..."

Alex swallowed against the lump in her throat. The car was cold and she took her time adjusting the vents and turning on the heat. "Didn't want to risk running into me?"

"I didn't even know if you still lived here," Piper said. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and tucked her phone between her knees. "But I felt so guilty, from the very minute the door closed that afternoon, and I couldn't handle the idea of seeing you. What if I saw you and you were with someone else?" She shook her head and hunched forward in her seat. "I wanted you to be happy, Al, but I didn't want to see it. What if you'd forgotten all about me?"

Alex laughed and shook her head. "I gave it up the day after the funeral. Haven't been back since." Her hands itched. She wanted to reach out, to touch Piper's knee or thigh or shoulder, but she couldn't bring herself to bridge the endless gap and gripped the steering wheel tighter instead. She cleared her throat. "I went by your old place one time, though. Did I ever tell you that?"

Piper glanced at her and looked away.

"It was maybe two years after you left. Around then, anyway. I was in the city for, like, a night, and wanted pizza. I thought of that little place by you and after a couple slices and a couple beers, I wondered if you still lived there. So I went."

"Did you ring the bell?"

"Thought about it. But" — Alex cleared her throat again, frustrated by the thickness in her voice — "I could see you through the window. You were, uh, with him."

"Larry?"

Alex nodded. "You guys were — you were dancing, it looked like."

She could hear Piper inhale sharply.

"You were dancing and laughing and looked — you looked beautiful — and really, really happy. And I was using a lot then and looked like shit and so I just — I just walked away."

Piper bit the cuticle on her right thumb. Normally, Alex would stop her, but she couldn't trust her hand not to shake if she moved.

"For the first year, I thought about you every day. Every day I thought about how much I hated you and how angry and lonely I was and how it was all your fault."

Piper flinched beside her and a single tear slipped from her left eye.

"And then after a year, I stopped thinking 'Fuck you, Piper,' and started thinking about how I drove you away."

Piper looked at her curiously, not wiping away the wet track down her face.

"I started thinking about how I let heroin get between who I was and who I wanted to be. Get between me and you."

"Alex, I still shouldn't have — "

" — no, you shouldn't. But I shouldn't have asked you to go to Istanbul."

The car was silent but for gentle breathing from both women, lost in their own thoughts.

"It was that one, right?" Piper asked finally. "The one with the light on to the left there?"

Alex nodded.

"Do you think" — Piper cleared her throat — "Do you think the people who live there now fight like we do?"

Alex gripped the wheel even tighter before dropping her hands to her lap. "I don't think anyone fought the way we used to. Jesus, Piper, we haven't even fought like that in years. When was the last time you said 'Fuck you'?"

Piper laughed shakily. "It's amazing, isn't it? I felt guilty for running away from you every day from Paris to Litchfield. And, after a while, I — I hated you for doing that to me. And somehow, after all of that, we found our way back to each other." She ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head. "Somehow you're still right here beside me." She unbuckled her seatbelt, ignoring the car's insistent beeping protest, and leaned across the center console. She raised a warm hand to Alex's cheek and turned her head before pressing a gentle kiss to the lips she knew better than anything else in the world.

"It was inevitable, kid," Alex whispered against closed lips. "We were always going to end up right here in this car. And I'm so fucking glad."

Piper's eyes closed and Alex took the opportunity to study the outline of the woman in front of her in the glow of the streetlights. She remembered doing something similar when Piper was just 22 and was asleep in Alex's bed in the apartment they were parked outside. That time she had traced the lines of the blonde's face with her finger tips, trying hard not to wake Piper, but desperate to memorize the sight before her. Alex had known even then that the relationship was doomed. She had known even then that she wasn't built for long-term, but she never wanted to forget the curve of Piper's cheek, the line of her jaw, the way her lips parted while she slept.

Litchfield had taken a toll on Piper. Fine lines had formed around her eyes and mouth. She covered the gray in her hair with regular trips to the salon. Underneath the changes, though, Alex still saw the vibrant young woman she had fallen in love with all those years ago.

Alex cleared her throat and Piper's eyes fluttered open. She blushed.

"We should go," Alex said, her voice raspy.

Piper nodded. She didn't move her hand from Alex's cheek, just rubbed the pad of her thumb softly against pale skin.

"Cal and Neri will be waiting."

Piper nodded again and pressed a gentle kiss to Alex's smile. She sat back and pulled her phone out from under the seat where it had fallen.

Alex shifted into drive.

"Wait," Piper said.

Alex looked across the car.

"Just" — Piper reached over and placed her hand on Alex's knee — "do you think they're as happy as we are?"

Alex cleared her throat and felt a sudden rush of tears. She blinked until the danger passed.

"I hope so, kid. I hope they are."

Piper squeezed her knee gently. "Me too," she said. She smiled and it lit up the dim car. "Okay. We can go now."

Alex eased the SUV away from the curb and urged it ahead, eager to get away from the lump in her throat, eager to keep moving forward with the woman beside her into the snowy night.

(7)

Alex started keeping lists when she was eight, shaky cursive sprawling across the tops of pages in her spiral-bound Lisa Frank notebook. "My Best Friends" was the very first page, followed by "Books I've Read," "Places I Want to See," and "Christmas Presents." Under "My Best Friends," Alex carefully wrote "Mom" and "Jessica."

When Alex was nine, she angrily crossed out Jessica's name with a black marker. She stared at her hands in the dim early morning light that seeped around her curtains. Her knuckles were bloody and swollen from punching Jessica and it ached to bend her fingers. Her mom had been on the phone since she'd gotten home just after midnight. Alex could hear the soft murmuring drifting through her otherwise silent room, but she couldn't make out the words. She couldn't bring herself to eavesdrop, didn't want to know what her mother was saying about her.

Alex didn't write another name down until her sophomore year of high school and even then putting Jennifer felt dishonest. They weren't really that close. She couldn't wait to write something there and really mean it, to hear the name of her real best friend — the best best friend that she just hadn't found yet. She yearned for another name to put on that list even more than she wanted a girlfriend. She wanted someone who would go with her everywhere she went. Someone whose name would infinitely echo in Alex's brain. She wanted people to say "Oh, Alex, you never see her without…" She wanted to know the name.

Diane taught Alex to drive in her 1976 AMC Gremlin starting the day she got her learner's permit at fifteen. The blue leather was cracked, and Diane had long ago fashioned seat covers out of old beach towels. Alex hated the rusted car, hated the clutch that stuck, and hated the looks she got from her classmates as she hesitantly drove to the grocery store.

"This thing is older than I am," she whined one day as she stalled the car in the mall parking lot for the thirtieth time that afternoon.

Diane laughed. "Don't I know it, kiddo!"

Alex rolled her eyes. Her mother never took her complaints seriously.

"But think of the story you'll have!"

Alex rolled her eyes again. That was her mother's default response to anything that sucked, from Alex's unfashionable shoes in fourth grade to her job at the local drug store. Somehow, it never made Alex feel any better about the situation.

It didn't take long before Alex got comfortable behind the wheel. She learned which stations on the old AM/FM radio she could reliably tune in, she figured out how to avoid the one spring in the driver's seat that seemed to find the most sensitive part of her thigh to park, and she and her mom slipped into a rhythm of who had the car when.

Alex had just picked up Diane from her late shift at the diner and gratefully accepted the chocolate milkshake she was handed in return. She was seventeen — newly seventeen, just a week past her birthday, spent alone with her mother — and she was itching to get out of Paterson. She dreamed of life across the bridge in Manhattan, but would settle for Fort Lee. She'd settle for anything, so long as it was different from Paterson. Anything would be better than Paterson.

Alex fiddled with the radio as she listened to her mom recount her evening filled with demanding customers and bad tippers. The next turn led to their apartment complex, and Alex was checking her rear-view mirror before carefully easing the old hatchback into the turn lane. She never saw the eighteen-wheeler as it t-boned the driver's side, crumbling the rusted door into her.

"Alex, baby, look at me."

She could hear her mother's voice but it seemed to be coming from a long way away. There was pressure, lots of pressure, on her left shoulder, and she couldn't quite figure out what it was. She slowly opened her eyes and blinked. Her glasses were gone, but she could just make out Diane's face, blurred at the edges, next to her. Diane's hair was sticking straight up from her head. Alex had never seen her mother look more frightened.

"Oh, thank god, Alley Cat. I thought I'd lost you!"

In that instant, two things happened: Alex realized that she was upside down, held in place by her seatbelt, and she reached for the safety release.

"No!" Diane said, loudly. "Baby, you've gotta wait. If you let go, you'll fall." She gestured at the roof of the car, a foot below Alex's head, covered in broken glass. She winced as she moved her arm. "You'll get all cut up. You've just got to stay right there until someone comes."

Alex whimpered. There was a trickle of blood flowing down from Diane's nose over her forehead. She felt her mother's hand squeeze her arm.

"You're hurt," Alex said.

Diane shook her head. "It's okay, baby. Just stay with me."

It seemed like hours before the paramedics came, and Alex's legs went numb from their cramped position against the crumpled door. Diane insisted that they free Alex first, and she felt their warm, strong hands cradling her as they eased her out through the shattered windshield.

"Mamma!" she yelled. "Mamma!" Jesus, she hadn't called Diane that since preschool. The paramedics bundled her into an ambulance as soon as she was whisked out of the wreckage. She couldn't understand their muttered comments about stitches or contusions and didn't realize how badly her arm was bleeding until pressure was applied.

"I need my mom," she said, to anyone who came near her. "I need my mom and my glasses, please."

They rode to the hospital in separate ambulances, but at least someone had returned Alex's glasses — now with only the left lens intact. The right lens was cracked and blood-stained from where it had cut Alex just above the eye.

After six stitches, x-rays of her ribs and arms, and a neuro consult, Alex was finally released with after-care instructions and a splitting headache. Diane was less fortunate, and it took three days before she was cleared. Alex never left her side, sleeping in her bloody sweats until a nurse took pity on her and gave her a pair of scrubs.

"No one who can take over for a while?" she asked on the third day, slipping Alex a pudding cup and a cardboard container of milk.

Alex shook her head. "Just me," she said.

Alex crossed "Buy a better car" off her Goals list as soon as they got home from the hospital. She vowed not to drive again.

As Alex got older, she moved on from Lisa Frank notebooks to Mead, and eventually to Moleskine. She never showed anyone the lists, never indicated that she kept them. Even once she got her first Blackberry, though, she kept meticulous paper lists governing every aspect of her life. She couldn't help herself. There were lists for everything, including her job, and when the Feds raided her hotel room and executed the search warrant they found that she had done their job for them. She had made their case against her; it was right there in her own handwriting.

In her early twenties, Alex stopped writing down the titles of her lists, but she knew which was which. She knew that the list at the front of the notebook, the one with only Diane's name on it, was "People I Would Take A Bullet For," and the one in the middle filled with cities and countries was "Places I Would Go If I Could Only Have Two Consecutive Weeks Free." The list of names at the end was "People Who ODed." The last list was long — two pages, single-spaced, of clients and friends and colleagues.

The very second she met Piper, she started making a list in her head and her fingers itched to commit it to paper. She wasn't sure what it was a list of, at first, but she knew it was things she wanted to remember. Piper's horrible dress at the bar that night, and how unselfconscious she was about it. The way Piper smiled when she asked who Alex was. The way Piper looked in the seconds after Alex went down on her the first time. After the night at the burlesque show, she thought maybe the title of the list was "Reasons It Might Be Okay to Learn The Rules."

She added to the list throughout their time together. Piper's fish tattoo after their trip to Bali. The way the skin over Piper's hipbones would bruise under the slightest pressure from her fingertips. The way it felt when Piper ran her fingers through the fine hairs at the base of Alex's neck. She thought maybe it was "Reasons Piper Is Great." Or maybe "Things I Never Want To Forget."

After Paris, stupid fucking Paris, Alex tore the list out of her notebook. All seven pages, single-spaced, front and back. Tearing it up wasn't enough and she set fire to the scraps in her hotel room in Fort Lee. She sat at the bar and drank shot after shot of tequila and retitled the list, which she could still see perfectly in her mind, "To Delete."

When she was released from Litchfield, she made Piper drive her to a storage unit out in Paterson, where the last of Diane's things had been sitting since her death, joined by her own personal possessions after her arrest. It was a brisk October evening, and her breath fogged in the fading twilight. Piper stood silently by the door, shivering in her Patagonia fleece and wool beanie, watching, but not wanting to intrude.

"Fuck," Alex said, looking around. "I didn't realize how much shit there was."

Piper shrugged. "You don't need to make any decisions tonight, Al," she said. "We can always come back another time."

Alex shook her head. "We drove four hours to get here. We're not coming back. We'll figure out what we can take in the car and then — and then we'll deal with whatever — whatever's left."

They worked in silence, sorting boxes into "keep," "maybe," and "discard" piles, until Piper's laugh broke the rhythm they'd fallen into.

"Al, what's this?" She pulled a tattered notebook out of a box, its cover resplendent with two kissing dolphins. She opened it and laughed. "You kept a list of your best friends?"

Alex blushed. She was grateful for her scarf and hat. She grabbed the notebook. "I was lonely as a kid. It was just my mom, really. I don't even know why I still have this."

Piper hugged the brunette from behind, putting her chin on Alex's shoulder and reading the notebook along with her. "Is that Jessica Wedge?" she asked, pointing at the angrily-crossed out name below Diane.

"Yeah," Alex said.

"Fucking bitch."

"Yeah."

Piper kissed Alex on the cheek and grabbed the notebook again.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked.

Piper ignored her and reached into her purse, fishing through its depths until she emerged, victorious. She leaned over the notebook.

"Fixing it," she said.

Alex pulled the notebook back and ran her fingertips over its new addition. Piper, it read, in her girlfriend's neat block lettering. Alex felt the sting of tears in her eyes and sniffed.

"Yeah?" she asked.

Piper nodded. "You were right, when you said we were never friends the first time. But we are now, I think, don't you?"

Alex didn't trust herself to speak, afraid her voice would shake and give her away.

"You're my best friend at least," Piper said. She rubbed the back of Alex's neck with one gloved hand. "My best friend and the person I love most in the whole world. It's a lucky combination."

Alex pressed a gentle kiss against Piper's smile and hoped Piper could feel her agreement through the contact.

"Are the rest of these notebooks more lists?" the blonde asked, digging through the box.

"Yeah," Alex said. "But they can all go in the 'discard' pile." She grinned at Piper as she carefully placed the Lisa Frank notebook, complete with its new and most accurate entry, at the very top of the "keep" pile. "I don't need them anymore."

In the car, on their way home, Alex thought about the list she had burned a decade before. Despite her best efforts, she still knew every line by heart. At the bottom of the seventh page, right after Looks amazing in that new striped shirt, she saw She's my best friend. She knew the title of the list — had always known it, she thought, somehow. "Reasons I Love Piper."

(8)

At nine, Piper was all skinned knees and tangled blonde curls, and her parents took her to an educational psychologist. It wasn't that Piper was bad at school, exactly. School was easy, and she got bored, and when she got bored she looked for more interesting things to do. Like convince other kids to run safety pins under the top layer of skin on their fingertips. Or stand on top of the monkey bars and jump to the ground. Nothing dangerous, Piper thought, she'd never really gotten hurt, so she didn't know why her teachers got so mad about all of it.

She spent an hour a day for three consecutive Tuesdays sitting in Dr. Greg's office in a converted old one-story house, filling out worksheets, coloring, and answering questions about things she liked to do for fun. She was careful, even at nine, in how she answered. She told him about liking to ride her bike, but she didn't mention the flutter in her chest when she rode down steep hills and took her hands off the brakes. She told him about liking to read, but glossed over that, when she looked at the shelves at the library, there was a faint whisper that led her towards the books about Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

The fourth Tuesday, only her parents went into the office, and she was left in the waiting room to listlessly page through an old Highlights magazine and eavesdrop.

"Piper is clearly extremely bright," Dr. Greg said in his faint Boston accent, "but she shows a markedly high level of sensation-seeking behavior. It's a dangerous combination." Piper didn't know what that meant, but it didn't seem so bad.

"Is there anything you can… you know, give her?" Carol asked.

Piper could just picture the way Dr. Greg probably scratched his beard as he responded. "No, no, nothing like that. It's just something she needs to be aware of as she gets older. An instinct she'll need to temper."

Piper saw Dr. Greg once a week for six months, and sometimes she went to a playgroup at his office, if Carol wasn't busy on Wednesday evenings. They talked a lot about "making positive choices," and "keeping control," and other things that didn't really seem important because Piper was more interested in building a block tower taller than she was and she felt the same flutter in her chest that she felt on her bike when it fell.

At fifteen, Piper wore mostly black, dyed her hair a dark brown, and intentionally distressed the cuffs of her uniform pants. She started going to Caroline, a therapist whose office was only five minutes off the Deerfield campus.

"Do you know why you're here?" Caroline asked during their first session. Her voice was infinitely patient, and it sounded almost like a parody of itself.

Piper rolled her eyes and sighed, anxious to get this over with. "Because I got caught at a day student's house where people were drinking and my parents made a deal that I come see you instead of getting expelled?"

Caroline just smiled, an expectant look on her face.

"Look, whatever," Piper said. "This is boring. I was just having a little fun. What's so wrong with that? No one got hurt."

"I understand you were hospitalized." Caroline pushed a lock of long, gray hair behind one ear. It caught on her dangling dream-catcher earring and Piper snorted. Typical psycho bullshit.

Piper crossed her legs and picked at her flaking black nail polish. The hospitalization was stupid, unnecessary, more about Chloe's mom assuaging her own guilt than any real medical emergency. Piper had thrown up three times, she was going to be fine. No one else at the party had gotten in any trouble, because she was the only boarder and boarders always got the worst of it.

"Let's talk about other times you've just had a little fun, then."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Piper said flatly. "I know all about the sensation seeking stuff. I looked it up a couple years ago. It's nonsense. I'm fine."

Caroline smiled again, patiently. "What's your plan for college, Piper?"

Piper rolled her eyes. "I don't have a plan. I don't really like plans. I like feelings."

Caroline waited.

"I'm going to college, alright? It's not like I'm not going. It's fine."

Neither of them spoke again until the session was over.

Piper hated going back to her, because it was boring. Caroline was boring, therapy was boring, and there was no greater sin to teenage Piper than being boring. Boring person or boring situation, it was all the same to her and she couldn't stand it.

At twenty-two, Piper was trying on "hippy" for size, just for a change of pace, and it coincided nicely with her move to New York and sudden decrease in her financial resources. She set fire to her parents' map of what twenty-two would look like — declined the reader position at the publishing company, opted out of grad school. She listened to "My Little Town" on repeat because she'd never seen herself so clearly in lyrics as she did when Paul Simon talked about twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun. Piper didn't think she was on the trigger — she was the bullet inside. She was hot and fast, powder burns and ricochets and who knew where she would land.

She loved the adventures waiting around every corner, loved living in the city that never slept. She loved the feeling in her chest when she walked into the night not knowing where it would lead her. It was like a bird unfolding its wings, stretching before flight. She felt strong and excited and ready to soar. There were some hairy situations, sure, and she'd gone home with a few guys that, in retrospect, might have been a little bit rapey, but that happened to everyone. It was the price she paid for the excitement, the fun she was having. She went to Planned Parenthood, got STD panels and emergency contraception, and moved on, vowing to be more careful until the next Saturday night and the itch returned.

When she met Alex, she couldn't decide if she was more attracted to the brunette physically or to her off-hand comment about working for a cartel. Either way, it was a golden opportunity, and one that Piper seized with abandon. She wasn't gay, but she might be a little gayish, and since when did labels stand in the way of an enjoyable evening? An enjoyable week? An enjoyable… life?

Their first summer together passed in a blur of clubs and pool bars and making out in alleys like teenagers because they just couldn't wait until Alex's apartment. Alex traveled some, and Piper never minded. She would go out with Polly or her other friends and flirt just enough that her bar tab was covered, but not enough that she had to go home with anyone. Alex would send her postcards from wherever she went and Piper collected them all on her bedroom wall. They made her itch to tag along, but Alex didn't ask her and she didn't want to push. It was better that way, she reasoned. If they traveled together, they would have to define what exactly they were doing, and Piper worried that defining it, examining it too closely, would make it disappear.

It rained through September and they spent long, warm nights wrapped around each other in Alex's bed, listening to the steady drops on the awning below. Alex traveled some, but Piper found herself at the brunette's apartment alone, enjoying the record player and the liquor cabinet and Alex's exquisite taste in American Literature. She emailed Alex long, breathless descriptions of what she was doing and thinking and feeling and hoped that reading them made Alex ache for her the way she ached for Alex.

October was cold, and the sun started setting early enough that it was dark when Piper got to work for her shift. Alex was leaving for Bali the next day and Piper desperately wanted to go with her. She was bored with New York, bored with waiting tables, bored of her tiny fourth floor walkup and the roommate that came with it.

"I'm filled with ennui," she said to Polly, fallen leaves crunching underfoot as she walked into the restaurant.

"You're filled with what?" Polly asked.

"Ennui, Pol. It means I'm bored."

"You're boring," Polly said, and Piper could hear the smile in her voice. "Look, Miss Writer Chick, you only have time for me when Alex goes out of town, and even then she's all you can talk about. Your excessive orgasms are no longer interesting to me."

Piper rolled her eyes. "I've gotta go, but I'll see you tomorrow. Maybe if you're tired of talking about my excessive orgasms, we can talk about your lack of orgasms."

Polly laughed and Piper ended the call, sticking her little Nokia back into the pocket of her coat.

The first time Piper was ever scared of Alex was in Brussels. She had been angry at Alex, disappointed in Alex, sad about Alex, but she never thought she could ever be scared of her girlfriend. It wasn't even her words, although being threatened with murder-by-drug-lord was frightening enough, it was the laugh in Alex's voice when she said it. That was how it worked in her world, Piper thought, her heart still racing hours after peeling off the wig and the horrible outfit. That was the consequence for screwing up, and it was entirely out of Piper's control. She jolted awake in the middle of the night with a second, even worse, realization. Alex wouldn't have stopped him. She knew it with absolute certainty. Alex would have let Kubra kill her.

Piper vowed that she would never, ever be directly involved in Alex's business again. She would make one of those positive choices Dr. Greg had taught her about so many years before. She informed Alex of this in Brussels, the very next morning, and at the start of every trip after that. Each time, Alex nodded and told her that it was fine and Piper almost believed her, but there was a flash of something behind the words and Piper knew she needed to be wary. "Wary" didn't come naturally to Piper, though, and it was easy to ignore her misgivings in favor of the lifestyle she had recently adopted.

They lasted another year, she added thirteen more stamps to her tattered passport, and then they were in Paris — stupid fucking Paris, she couldn't help calling it, even years later. She hadn't been planning to leave. There was no strategy at play. When Alex brought up Istanbul, Piper could just see Dr. Greg and Caroline shaking their heads and she followed their old advice almost without thinking about it. Leaving Alex was the right choice, the safe choice, the choice she should have made years earlier. The thrill she felt rush through her veins as she walked away had nothing to do with it. Almost.

Piper slept on Polly's couch for a week and then moved to Los Angeles for six months. She was restless in New York, constantly reminded of Alex and the adventures they had shared. Los Angeles would be a fresh start, a chance to make a clean break. A responsible decision, she told her parents.

She rented a little studio in Echo Park and got a job in a coffee shop while she looked for a writing gig. She wasn't looking that hard — didn't care enough to really buckle down. She dated a string of WeHo dykes until she ended up going home with a guy named River (River? Really?) and decided that she needed to be more equal opportunity in her choice of companions. She went to Death Valley for a weekend with a woman named James and borrowed her worn-out hiking boots to traipse into the desert and sled down sand dunes. She took a lot of pictures on the tiny digital camera her parents bought her for Christmas and printed them to hang as a collage on her living room wall.

Piper was tired of LA after three months. Everyone loved the beach and hung out at juice bars and it turned out that all the stereotypes about Angelenos that Piper had learned in New York were true. One night she swore she saw Alex in the Eveleigh Bar on Sunset, and immediately found the blandest looking man in the place to take her home. She started dating the guy, Kevin, who was so nice and so sweet and so… boring. She couldn't even bring herself to notice what color his hair was. Her camera broke on the Santa Monica pier, and her cheap Walgreens prints started to fade and yellow.

She stuck it out another season because she was learning to surf, and she loved the feeling of walking into the water in her wetsuit at dawn, dodging the ashes of old bonfires that tourists had left on the shore. The sky would still be dark, the air cool, and she would shiver deliciously when the cold seeped through her neoprene. When it started getting cold, when her shivers were painful and wouldn't fade after a few waves, she packed her old Saab and drove back to Polly's couch. Her parents sent her money for hotels on her way, but she kept it and slept in rest station parking lots in Amarillo and Indianapolis instead. She didn't even tell Kevin she was leaving, ignored his texts and calls, and she was grateful when they faded away like the desert in her rear-view mirror.

As she sat on Polly's couch and considered what to do next, she thought about Dr. Greg and Caroline, and what they would think of her recent choices. She knew what their advice would be — make responsible, grown up decisions. Stop chasing adventure. Relax. She decided to give it a try and wound up following their advice for almost five years. She started seeing a nice psychiatrist in Brooklyn who prescribed some Zoloft and some Xanax and told her when to use each. She met Larry, a nice young man, someone she could take back to Greenwich with her for a nice weekend. She worked with Polly, her nice friend, in their nice business. Everything about Piper 2.0 was nice, and she had never been so fucking bored in her entire life.

Piper at thirty was on auto-pilot. She had a solid job, a solid relationship, and a solid upper-middle-class life. She was so used to being bored by then that she'd almost forgotten what it was like to be passionate and adventurous and free. And then it all crashed around her, burying her under memories of Alex and their life together. In spite of her fear as she and Larry negotiated the reality that she was going to have to do prison time, she felt that old familiar warmth start to spread through her chest, licking at the corners of her brain.

Litchfield was terrible — Piper would never deny that — but in those fifteen months, something inside her that had been long dormant started to awaken and stretch its leathery wings. It felt like reuniting with an old friend and picking up right where they had left off. She eased into her old self like falling asleep, gradually and then all at once, the same way that stupid YA book described falling in love.

She explained how it felt to Alex, on an even-numbered day when they were dating and didn't hate each other, and the brunette snorted in response.

"You sound like fucking Dexter," she said, scooting her chair away from the rec-room table where they were playing gin. "What did he call it? His dark passenger?"

Piper bristled at the comparison. "Fuck you, I'm not a serial killer."

"Yet." Alex smirked and folded her arms across her chest. "That we know of, anyway."

Piper threw her cards down and stalked out of the room.

At thirty, Piper could see the immediate, disastrous consequences of the choices her old friend encouraged her to make. She saw Maria's sentence get extended, saw Stella go to max, saw Alex — Alex, who both original Piper and Piper 3.0 (the new and improved, post-galvanized-lunatic version) agreed was the love of her life — deal with the aftermath of her fatal encounter with Aydin. As she felt Red sear the window into her arm, there was no excitement in her. No undercurrent of thrill, only red hot pain. For the first time, Piper started to believe that maybe Dr. Greg and Carolina had had a point. Maybe she needed to choose the thrills of card games and having sex surrounded by meth heads instead of bungee jumping and running a prison gang.

It took almost a year — she had served most of her sentence — but Piper finally realized that it was easier to make those good choices when Alex was there. If it came down to playing cards with Alex or threatening the Dominicans over her panty empire, she knew which one she'd choose, every time. In the beginning, choosing Alex had meant reckless disregard for doing the right thing. It meant choosing to free fall through life. After Alex's brief taste of freedom — the freedom that Piper had snatched away so selfishly — and the chaos that resulted, the brunette had tried to avoid any impulsivity whatsoever. Piper stuck with Alex and followed her lead. She kept her head down. She looked before she leapt.

She even slept better when Alex was nearby. She slept best when Alex was awake and her head was tucked securely against the brunette's neck.

"I feel safe like this," she mumbled, tightening her grip on Alex's hand.

Alex rolled her eyes. Between Aydin and Stella and everything else they had gone through — not to mention Paris and the rest of the ancient history and the calculus of who had wronged whom and when — she wasn't sure how much she cared about Piper getting a good night's sleep. She sighed, though, because she did care about Piper's safety. She wanted to be the one to keep Piper safe and warm and dry, and the blonde felt so fragile in her arms. She resigned herself to the inevitable, and tried to adjust her position so that maybe her back, at least, wouldn't be sore the next morning.

"You seem different," Alex said one afternoon. They were on Alex's bunk, a deck of cards forgotten on the floor, Piper's head tucked against Alex's neck and the brunette's arms warm and tight around her.

Piper was almost asleep, lulled into deep relaxation by her proximity to Alex.

"Hmm?"

Alex shifted slightly, pulling back so she could look at the blonde and push her hair out of her face. "Different. More, I don't know, relaxed, or something."

Piper groaned at the change in position. She pressed a kiss to the shoulder under her head. "Is that a good thing?"

Alex grinned. "Yeah, Pipes. I like the new you. Love it."

The thrill of those words spread through Piper's body like tequila, warm in her throat and stomach and out to her fingertips and toes. The wings inside her folded with a rustle. She felt like she had just caught something she'd been chasing for a very, very long time.

(9)

Alex pushed harder on the accelerator, urging the car just a little bit faster. She sighed. She hated this car. Piper had insisted on the Toyota.

"It's safe," she said, her hands warm against Alex's cheeks, bright blue eyes filled with concern and locked on Alex's.

Alex sighed. "BMWs are safe, too."

Piper shook her head. "Nope," she said. "I did my research. Consumer Reports was very clear. No room for interpretation." She swallowed, and Alex saw the shimmer of unshed tears. "No more BMW. No more motorbike. No more living in the city. No more wondering what you're doing. No more wondering if you're okay. No more wondering if the phone ringing means you're saying you miss me or a doctor is saying you're dead."

Alex wrapped her arms against the blonde in her arms and held her close until whatever danger Piper was imagining had passed

"Okay," she finally said. "Toyota it is. Can I get the red one, at least?"

She laughed when Piper scowled, kissing the slightly shorter woman to prevent another lesson on car color and safety.

So that's why she edged the car up to 85 as she rushed home towards Guilford. Guilford, she thought, with mingled disgust and amusement. She couldn't believe it. Piper had loved living in New York, in Paris, she had even loved the six months she'd spent in Sydney as an exchange student her junior year, but when it came time to pick a place to live in the Everything After, Alex's suggestions had all been met with pursed lips and a disbelieving smirk.

"Boston?" she had scoffed, crossing khaki-clad arms over her chest. "Alex, do you even know the murder rate in Boston?"

"Right," Alex said, with a slow nod, "of course. Silly of me to suggest Murder Town. What about Chicago?"

"I didn't think your suggestions could get worse," Piper said. "I was thinking more like New Canaan."

Alex pulled Piper closer to her across the thin mattress, careful not to bump either of their heads on the upper bunk. "Pipes," she said, rubbing the window-shaped burn on her girlfriend's forearm with her thumb, "I love you, but I will not ever, ever, ever move to New Canaan. It's a real hard no."

"Fairfield County is one of the safest places in the country — " Piper started.

Alex interrupted her with a soft kiss.

" — and with the money from my grandmother — "

Alex kissed her again.

"What about Greenwich?"

Alex grinned. "Still a hard no."

Piper rolled her eyes. "Where in Connecticut would you be willing to live, then?"

"New Haven?" Alex suggested. "I always liked my trips to Yale. Good pizza. Pretty coeds."

Piper pulled away from her spot wrapped in Alex's arms. The older woman laughed and tightened her grasp.

"Fine," she said. "Not New Haven."

Alex idly stroked Piper's arm as they sat quietly. The blonde's breathing evened out, and Alex wondered if, the next time they had this conversation, she could re-urge Boston without a lecture.

Piper jerked upright. "Al!" she said, "I know the perfect place!"

Alex smiled. "Where, baby?"

"Guilford!"

Alex knew the confusion was clear on her face. "Where?"

Piper got off the bunk and started pacing the room, her shirt riding up with her excitement. "Guilford," she said again. "It's like thirty minutes from New Haven. You can take the train to New York, or Boston. It's right off 95 on the water. My gramma had a house there when I was a kid and we — Cal and I, at least — loved those trips."

Alex watched her, trying to assess whether this was a battle she could win. The first time they were together, Alex always won those arguments. They lived where Alex wanted to live, traveled where Alex wanted to travel, when Alex wanted to travel there. She saw the gleam in Piper's eyes.

"Okay," Alex said, and the pure joy on Piper's face as she threaded her hands through Alex's hair and kissed her was worth it.

Alex tilted her head side to side, trying to work out the ache in her neck. She had been driving almost two hours — the traffic getting out of Boston was terrible and she was supposed to be home almost half an hour ago. She glanced at the speedometer — 80. She knew she should slow down, the speed limit was only 45 from the exit off 95 to the turn onto Hartford Road, but she was in a hurry. She just couldn't wait to get home. It had been three days since she'd seen Piper, and she missed her wife deep in her bones. She felt the blonde's absence in every inch of her skin, with every breath she took. It was the longest they'd been apart since her release from Litchfield four years earlier, but the opportunity had been too good. In three days she'd spoken at Brown, Harvard, MIT, Bowdoin, Bates, two bookshops, and the Boston Public Library. Her second book had really taken off, and she'd even sold a couple dozen copies of the first one, too.

Alex braked and heard the tires squeal as she took the turn onto Hartford just a little too fast. Fucking Toyota.

Three minutes and she would be home. She breathed deeply, taking in the scent of woodsmoke in the air. From late September clear through to March, the neighborhood always smelled that way at night. Piper loved it, dragging Alex out onto the deck and wrapping them both in a fleece throw on a chair by the pool. "Isn't it great?" she asked, wonder in her voice. "It's so clean smelling. I feel like I smell clean when I smell it. Not like..." her voice trailed off and Alex pressed a kiss against her temple, not needing her to finish her thought.

Two. She wondered if Piper was waiting up for her or has gone to bed. When they'd talked that morning, Piper planned to rake the front lawn and get some work done and then light a fire and relax. Alex smiled, picturing Piper with a rake in her hands. The blonde had developed a real talent for gardening during their time in Litchfield and had kept it up after they got out.

One. Her mouth was dry. She could taste the yearning, thick and syrupy in the back of her throat. Her calves were tense with longing. She felt hungry for Piper. She could feel it deep in the pit of her stomach. The urge was worse than any she'd experienced with heroin, and she knew the heaven at the end of the drive would be a million times better than any drug.

The porch light was on, as well as all the lights on the first floor. She threw the car into park the second she hit the driveway, jerking to a stop and vowing to unpack once she'd seen Piper. She raced out of the car, tripping in her haste. She could hardly get the door open, her hands shaking. Her breaths came fast and shallow.

Alex burst through the front door. She was immediately engulfed in heat and light, the sound of some new indie band wafting through the air. Her jacket was suddenly too warm, and she pulled it off as she moved through the hall, discarding it on the floor. She could still smell the woodsmoke, but now it was joined by Piper's favorite amber and mahogany candle, Downy fabric softener, and the indescribable, familiar scent of home.

She stopped short at the door to the kitchen, her breath caught in her throat. Piper was bent over the stove, blond hair in a messy ponytail, in a pair of Alex's old track pants and a frayed gray Smith shirt. She looked up from the pot she was stirring at the sound of Alex's footsteps and smiled.

"Hey, baby."

Suddenly she could breathe and move and she was sweeping Piper in a crushing hug, pressing her lips firmly against the shorter woman's and ignoring the spoon she was still holding.

"Hi," she said, minutes later, when she finally pulled away from the searing kiss. "I missed you."

Piper laughed and kissed her again. "You were only gone three days," she said.

Alex shook her head. "It seemed like forever."

She released her wife and leaned one hip against the counter as she watched Piper stir.

"I love you, you know?"

Piper smiled. She adjusted her ponytail and pulled two bowls out of the cupboard next to the stove. "I do know. But I never get tired of hearing it. I love you too. Let's eat some dinner and then go upstairs. In some ways, three days is a very long time to be away."

Alex blushed and bit her lower lip. She idly thought about Piper's comment, all those years before, about love being like coming home from a long trip. She thought about sleeping on a prison cot and unfamiliar hotel room beds. She thought about Piper's coconut shampoo and almond soap. She accepted the bowl of soup Piper offered with a smile and followed her wife to the dining room table.

It was good to be home.

A/N One thing I love about Alex and Piper is that they are written broadly enough that there are plenty of gaps left to fill. That's what I've tried to do in this piece — fill in some of the gaps. I hope you enjoyed! If you do, please review!