The tiny, gleaming windows of the massive faraway buildings seemed but decorative lights sprinkled on a cluster of Christmas trees, and the realization that the holidays hadn't been that long ago tied a knot in the woman's throat, since to her, they were almost a lifetime away. Although she was finding it hard to swallow, she took big bites and chewed them mechanically, washing everything down with a bottle of malt. Her body accepted the commonplace sustenance like a grateful, salivating sponge, but her mind was restless, forcing her to detach her eyes from the impressive view, for the metal railing behind her made her feel as if she was looking at it from the inside of a cage. "You're not free," the slick, black and neon surroundings screamed at her sharply. Indeed this wasn't freedom, but the air was in her face and in her hair, soaking her in the scents and the humid freshness of the streets, so different to the stuffy ambiance of the greenhouse she'd been living in for months. And yet, having revisited most of her "common places" proved to her that she wasn't fit for them anymore. It had become increasingly clear to her that those things would no longer do, as if they'd grown out of one another.
Teary-eyed and spent, the blonde threw her head back and shook the bottle over her open mouth, capturing the last few drops. She couldn't help but recall a poem by Neruda, and the specific verse "pure heiress of the destroyed day", for she wasn't victorious but there was something triumphant about her present knowledge - a burning fire inside of her.
Most of her common places, yes - though not all of them. Scoffing at herself, the blonde clambered to her feet and stepped onto her high heels again. The shimmering waters spun before her eyes with the sudden change of position, reminding her of how drunk, how mushy her brain was - although apparently not enough to forget the address she had already committed to memory, despite not having read a single letter. She had stashed the letters together with her mixed up feelings about their sender, and thrown away the red envelope she'd received for Valentine's Day, the one branded with "AV" and a tiny heart. Beyond acknowledging to others and herself that it was fucked up and very complicated, Piper hadn't wished to touch the topic of Alex with a ten foot pole, but now she was very lightly leaning on the white frame of what was supposed to be the woman's door.
It felt weird, looking for Alex in that unknown place, believing that she was behind that door, but not the act of pursuing the woman per se, because they had indeed chased each other's tails quite a lot in the past. Piper pressed her ear against the door and heard nothing, so what if Alex wasn't in? What if she was out, enjoying her freedom (because Alex was actually free)? She felt irritated all of sudden, and wondered if seeing Alex was in fact a good idea. Loitering there surely wasn't, and so the blonde finally brought up her fist and softly knocked on the door.
Several seconds passed and nobody answered. The stubborn silence only increased Piper's annoyance, and she was about to speed off in a drunken fury when she thought she heard something, like a squeak from the floorboards.
"Alex?" With her face close to the peephole, Piper called her name gently, the way she always seemed to do. Her voice sounded tiny against the backdrop of the empty hallway, merely bruising the silence instead of breaking it, but it ended up being enough.
"Who is it?" asked a muffled voice from the other side of the wooden barrier. It was undoubtedly Alex, but there was also a palpable tinge of tension which was very un-Alex. "Step back from the door."
The blonde complied, albeit clumsily, stumbling backwards and losing a shoe in the process. "Alex, it's Piper."
When she bent down to recover it, she heard the jangle of the door being unlocked. The vertical strip of space which appeared wasn't illuminated, which she took to mean that Alex had been asleep. The first thing that Piper saw were a pair of naked feet, and then her eyes moved higher while she straightened her posture, finally reaching the face she knew so well.
"Piper…" the brunette breathed out her name weakly, but then seemed to gather her strength. "Piper? What the fuck? What the hell are you doing here?"
Before she could answer, Alex stepped out, glanced towards the other end of the hallway, and grabbed Piper by the lapels of her coat, dragging her into the apartment. The blonde suddenly found herself with her back against the wall of a very narrow entrance, with her head spinning and with the dark-haired woman leaning on the opposite wall. Her dark hair was messily held up by a sloppy ponytail, and she was wearing grey sweatpants and a black v-neck t-shirt. Only when Piper's eyes got more used to the semi-darkness, did she notice the gleam of the object in Alex's hand.
"Is that a knife?"
The brunette raised it briefly before tossing it away, clanking into a corner. She then returned her hand to her side, as if nothing had happened, but Piper detected a slight tremor in the woman's fingers. With her lips parted and her chest rising and falling agitatedly, the brunette was presently a very uncommon sight.
"What the fuck are you doing here, Piper?"
Swallowing the knot in her throat, the blonde looked at the dark-haired woman through half-closed eyelids. She really didn't have an answer for that question. Certainly Alex wanted to be told the essentials, not her own philosophical deductions about her life, but her mind felt very broad and slightly elevated, and she was about to embark in a lengthy drabble when she noticed that the brunette was scanning her from head to toe. Unable to tell if it was an involuntary or a totally deliberate action, Piper moved away from the wall and into the austere dwelling.
"How did they let you out?"
"Not thanks to you…" The blonde grinned and glanced around the dim living room. "You wanted to screw me over one last time. Am I right?"
"You're drunk." Alex's voice was loud and surprised, not judgmental. Still, Piper was suddenly angered by how the brunette had avoided the topic, the very clear causality of how one of them had magically gotten out while the other had been returned to her cage.
"Of course I'm drunk. More importantly, I'm not out."
"What? What do you mean you're not out?" Having reached the living room, the woman just stood there with her arms crossed, following Piper with her eyes while she circled the room.
"Oh, I'm not really here. This is… this is just a fugue state, you know? In reality, I'm still in prison."
"Piper, what the fuck's wrong with you? Tell me." Alex approached her and grasped her face, trying to look into her eyes, but the blonde spun away from her and landed heavily on the small sofa. She kicked at the checkered blanket that was there until it tumbled to the floor and curled up in its place.
"I got furlough."
"You got furloughed?" With her eyebrows almost reaching her hairline, Alex did a double take of surprise. "What happened?"
"Grandmother died. Hence the dress," the blonde sniffed and gestured towards her attire, leaving her hand hanging in midair, forgetting about it. "I couldn't even… say goodbye to her. She died just before I got out."
"Shit. I'm sorry, Pipes." Alex approached her and sat on the other arm of the sofa.
"Do not call me that. I don't even know why I came here."
"Because I'm your default option when you feel shitty - it's not rocket science." The brunette's quick rejoinder was followed by a self-deprecating chuckle, and it almost made Piper feel guilty. Almost. But she shouldn't be feeling "almost" anything for Alex, should she? She'd just been softened by all that drinking. How could anyone not become an alcoholic upon being released from prison? Although she'd never had the stomach to be a heavy drinker, she was surprised by how much she'd missed it - hooch didn't really count as a substitute, not with that taste and its horrible aftermath.
"But I really, really hate you," Piper said, spacing the words out to make them less whiny and clearer in her mind.
"No, you don't." Alex sat down next to her, picked up the blanket from the floor, and folded it in half. Then, she cautiously placed it over Piper's legs. "Have you even read my letters?"
"No. Will I find an explanation for that 'step away from the door' bullshit you just pulled off?" she asked, deepening her voice to imitate the other woman's. "What was that? And the knife?"
"It's complicated…"
"Really?" Piper's tone perked up, full of false incredulity. "And I should just accept that, because that's how it always is."
"No, you should let me explain everything. You're going back to Litchfield tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Read the fucking letters and get me on your visitation list. I really don't feel like talking about it right now."
With her bunched up knees against her chest, Piper huddled under the blanket, all but her head. It smelled of Alex, but it wasn't the exact scent she remembered from prison. Prison was, after all, very restricted on the smells front - like on every other front.
She didn't want to talk about it either; it had been one of the longer days she could remember, but a big part of her didn't wish it to end. This was the opposite concept of going to bed early the night before Christmas (the sooner you went to sleep, the sooner it would be Christmas morning); maybe if she refused to call it a day, the night would just stretch ad infinitum.
Alex had curled up on her side of the sofa as well, with one of her arms cushioning her head and the other grasping her own bent knee. She was looking at her with an unbearably tender expression in her eyes and an almost imperceptible smirk on her lips. It was irritating how she always ended up here, on her side, gazing at Alex's stupid, appealing face, falling for her stupid charm.
"I hate that you have this hold over me," Piper blurted out, because she was too tired to speak from behind the safety of the carefully placed layers of appropriateness.
"I missed you a lot. You know it's true."
Nodding, because she was too far gone to pretend she didn't know even though there were things she didn't understand, Piper slipped her hand out from under the blanket. The brunette wasted no time in covering that hand with her own and giving it a squeeze.
"C'mon." Standing up, Alex pulled at her hand so that she would do the same. "Last chance to sleep on a real bed. It's not like our old one, but it'll do."
The bedroom was unexpectedly illuminated -not by the table lamp, but by the ceiling light-, and the bed was rumpled and not very big, but it looked absolutely heavenly to her. She watched the brunette busy herself with finding her a t-shirt to wear, but Piper didn't want one. She wanted to feel the sheets against her skin. Without detaching her eyes from the bed, she stripped hurriedly, underwear and all, and dove in face-first. She buried her nose in those Alex-scented sheets and rubbed her face against the pillow.
Her hands moved along the bed until one of them bumped against something. She let her fingers explore it without raising her head, and concluded that it was Alex's foot and Alex's ankle. The woman had to be sitting on the bed and leaning against the bed frame, with her legs crossed. Piper didn't let go of her ankle, but started stroking it with her thumb. She then felt Alex's hand on her tangled hair, raking it with her fingers.
"It's like I've drifted apart from them," she muttered.
"The family?"
"Uh-huh." Piper jerked her head towards Alex. "It's like I was already a peninsula, but now I've definitely broken off the mainland."
Raising her eyebrows, the brunette let out a string of laughter. "What are you, a poet now?"
"I'm serious."
Sliding down so that she was now next to the blonde, Alex turned on her side and brought a soothing hand down her naked back. "Do you feel like a peninsula here?"
Piper felt many things here, with the brunette, both good and verging on irritating, but not the sensation of not belonging where she was. Her sensitive skin sung with Alex's touch and Alex's proximity, and her heart seemed to settle against the sound of the woman's voice, the vibration of her laughter. She tilted her head up and brushed her lips against Alex's, slowly but eagerly wrapping herself around their burning softness. She wanted to swallow every breath, and show Alex those lives of the fire inside her, surpassing the solitude of the day, speechless, because there would be time for words, but not now. Now, grabbing fistfuls of hair and digging their fingers into each other's skins -both rough and tender like a beautiful shipwreck-, it was about claiming her own life and her inheritance of the shattered day, finding completeness in her very imperfect incompleteness. And the future would tell.