TANGERINE
Sara Ellis had spent three months of her life chasing a missing Matisse through the streets and lofts and grey back alleys of London town.
Tonight, she felt certain she was going to find it. She could feel it in the way the world looked fierce and sharp to her eyes, how every step felt light and lucky.
It was April and wet and the streets were deeply unpleasant, but she soldiered through the muck and mire and went through the right door when she found it and crept up the whitewashed, hard-lit stairwell to the top floor of a rather decrepit apartment building. She could hear voices, and softened her footfalls even further. Her baton shifted comfortably against her side.
Backup would be smart. Going in without it would not be. She knew that, but she was so close. She might never be this close again.
Very, very cautiously, she nudged the door open a crack and peered in.
Most of what she saw was hair. A woman was standing with her back to the door, and her hair went all of the way down her back and it rippled and it shone and it was magnificent. Someone had performed a masterful ombre on it so that it started out in the shadows and swept down into the light. Sara liked her own hair, all right? It was very nice hair. She let herself have a moment of entirely appropriate envy anyway, because that was the kind of hair she mostly saw in artwork worth millions of dollars.
The woman turned around, looked suspiciously at the door with very dark, very lovely, very familiar eyes.
Sara Ellis swore very loudly inside the soundproof sanctity of her own mind and started making plans. Capture plans. Escape plans. All sorts of plans. One needed plans when going up against people like this.
Inside, the woman — who had been growing her hair out in the years since Sara had seen her last, to great effect — handed a suspiciously painting-shaped package to the man she'd been talking to, who promptly dove out the window with a great deal more agility than his bulk would have suggested he possessed.
"You might as well come in," the woman said then, facing the door with an expression that was half smirk and half exasperated scowl.
Sara cursed under her breath, felt a little better for doing it out loud, and let out the rest of the breath she'd been holding. Then she steeled her sharp, narrow shoulders and marched into the flat.
It was beautiful, if not exactly designed to be homelike. The southwards ceiling sloped down in a massive bank of windows, affording the occupant a dystopian industrial view of one of the less photogenic areas of the city. A long counter along the north wall contained the entire kitchen, laid out in a utilitarian and user-unfriendly straight line. In the center of the massive open room was a very nice mahogany table set with four matching chairs, and at the far end was a bed so massive Sara wasn't sure there was a monarch important enough to describe it.
Not very homey, all told, but it would be very hard to sneak up on anyone sleeping in that bed, and said sleeper would have a clean shot anywhere in the apartment if someone chanced to disturb them.
"Nice place," Sara said, meaning it on at least one level.
Alex Hunter smiled at her. It wasn't a very nice smile. "Thanks. I like it. That stairwell's acoustics are fantastic; if a rat sneezes on the second floor landing, I can hear it from here. You... you are much bigger than a rat, Sara Ellis."
"Listen," said Sara helplessly, "I don't want any trouble—"
Alex laughed. "You don't want any trouble? You're the one who showed up without an invite. You want lots of trouble, you just want it to be trouble for me, not you."
"I'd settle for trouble for the guy who went out the window," Sara said, by way of compromise. Not her strong suit, if she was honest with herself. "He has my Matisse. I want it back."
"Mm. No," replied Alex, holding a regretful expression for about half a second before dropping it. "Don't think so. It's long gone by now, just take the loss and go home. Isn't it past your bedtime?"
Sara reflexively checked her watch. Nearly one in the morning. It was, in fact, very much past her bedtime. "What am I, ten? I don't have a curfew," she said defensively, wincing at herself even as she did so. Petulant, and tennish. Not her preference.
She really didn't like Alex much.
Alex snorted. "Well, what about your beauty sleep, then? I'm sure you need it."
Sara raised an offended eyebrow. Looked down over herself, then back up. "Excuse you," she said, "I look great. I always look great. I do not need my beauty sleep, I need my Matisse. So if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go track down your window-jumping friend there before he gets too far."
"You're welcome to try," Alex said with a shrug. "He knows this city better than I do, and therefore much, much better than you do. He's a ghost. You're wasting your time."
"I'll be the judge of that," Sara nearly hissed, and nearly stomped out in what was very nearly a fine temper. She had better control over herself than to let some two-bit thief-slash-fence get under her skin, but taking, say, a bit of sandpaper to one's skin has a very noticeable effect despite not getting under much of anything. Alex was a good eighty square inches of very pretty sandpaper and Sara was not at all happy about this turn of events.
For the next four hours, she stumbled fruitlessly through the miserable back alleys of the area, wasting her time and knowing it but being too proud and stubborn to give it up. One day, she thought, she'd find the maturity to let go of things when wisdom dictated. But... not today. Today, she was going to run after that freakishly agile wheat dumpling of a man who had vanished into the murk with her painting until her legs fell off.
Eventually, her legs did indeed give up on her, at which point she collapsed onto a rusty, gum-encrusted park bench and scowled at the sky. It was dawn. There were pastel shades creeping up over the squat, grouchy edifices of the buildings around her, but a few dim stars still glimmered in the blue dome directly overhead. The rainclouds had passed an hour ago and everything should have seemed a lot nicer after that, and might have if she hadn't been in such a foul, exhausted mood.
Sitting there, though, she did find a small measure of peace. She'd given it her best, and the moment she got another lead she would give it her best again, but right now she was out of options and out of strength so there wasn't really much left to do but breathe in the damp greenish-grey early morning air and watch the sky light up.
Many times, she had considered hating her job. The hours were ridiculous, the danger level was not always acceptable, and the pay was decent but not as much as it could be, all things considered. It wasn't a job most people would like.
Sara Ellis, however, was not most people. It was true that she didn't much care for the hours, but she liked the danger and the money wasn't the point.
Meeting Neal Caffrey had taught her something about herself, and she'd become even better at her job since then. The thing was, this job gave her every opportunity to be underhanded and sneaky and thieflike while miraculously staying right with the law. She got to have all the fun the thieves did, without the threat of jail. Granted, she didn't get to keep any of the things she stole back, but she didn't really want them anyway. They weren't the point any more than the money was.
She just loved the chase, the capture, exercising every skill she had to bring about a victory. It gave her a kind of euphoria that nothing else she'd ever tried could match.
It was the perfect job for her. She loved it.
She also had an unfortunate tendency to love the people who made it hardest for her. The very best of thieves and forgers and grifters and fences, if they were pretty enough, were her kryptonite. That was another thing she'd learned about herself from Neal Caffrey, though she'd only realized it some time after the fact.
She had, however, managed to keep herself out of that particular bog for the last two years despite being very tempted a couple of times, because she loved her job and her sanity enough to know that it wouldn't be worth it.
Sara Ellis had, therefore, been alone for quite some time by this point.
So, on the spot, she made up her mind to go to the pub. A pub. Any pub. There were hundreds of them, at least a dozen within easy stumbling distance of her apartment, she would just pick one and go. Most of them were terrible, loud and rancid and offensively decorated, but here and there she had seen a few that looked acceptable. Clean enough that she wouldn't come out with any new stains, reputable enough that whatever they put in her glass probably wouldn't kill her, but not so sterilized that they'd scare off all the interesting customers.
First, though, she was going home. She was going to take a shower, wash off the polluted witching-hour rain and sweat, do a load of laundry, and sleep for a few hours. She had an excellent metabolism and needed very little sleep to keep going, but 'very little' was not 'none' and she had been up for nearly thirty-six hours.
Taking a deep, sturdy breath, she pushed herself up off the bench and staggered towards the nearest major-looking street. She had no idea where she was, so catching a bus was out of the question. Walking: also very much out of the question. A taxi might cost her an arm and a leg, but at this point all her limbs were so sore that she wasn't sure she'd miss them much.
So much for her lucky night.
Alex Hunter paced the long, concrete floor of her loft and frowned at nothing.
She'd expected that to happen, sooner or later. She'd known Sara Ellis for years, and therefore known that Sara Ellis was very good at her job and freakishly persistent. It hadn't been much of a surprise to see her come through the door, eyes narrowed and pale fingers hovering near the handle of that trusty baton.
What did surprise Alex was her own reaction, and her reasons for it.
London was a long way from New York, across a lot of very deep water. She'd left most of her life behind when she'd crossed it. Though she'd done it very willingly, she did miss parts of it, and very prominent among those parts she missed most was Neal Caffrey.
She'd heard the news, of course, and believed it on some level, but not at all on most of the others. Alex knew Neal.
...Had known. She had known him better than most, and he hadn't changed as much as she'd originally thought when she'd found him working for the feds. His heart was still a thief's heart, he'd just found a way to live with it that didn't involve concrete and bars and an unflattering shade of orange.
The Neal she knew would not have died. Not because he was immortal or even very good at dodging bullets, but just because he was too slippery for death to catch. When he really set his mind to evading capture, the only thing on earth that could catch him was Peter Burke, and Alex was fairly certain that was because Neal didn't have the heart to run away from him. Neal should've been able to give the grim reaper the slip without breaking a sweat.
Neal shouldn't be dead, and so she couldn't seem to grieve. It didn't feel real enough to waste tears on. Not yet.
Seeing Sara, though, had made the world tilt a little. Sara was real. Sara had known Neal too, and Alex hadn't seen much during their brief conversation, but she'd seen enough to realize that Sara believed it. She had evidently thrown herself into her job with the narrow-eyed fervour of someone trying to outrun something they didn't want to look at. Alex wasn't an expert in psychology by any stretch of the imagination, but she knew people well enough and she knew what it was like to love Neal Caffrey and she was certain despite the lack of proof that she was right about this.
Sara believing it dealt a blow to Alex's determination not to. Sara had, after all, known Neal every bit as well as Alex had. She had also stayed longer, and seen more, and she... she believed it could be true.
Reaching the west end of the flat, Alex made a messy half-point turn and started wobbling back the other way.
She needed a drink, she decided, and some noise. Not... not a lot of noise. Just enough to make it a little hard to think.
But first, a few more laps.
Sara wandered into the pub around eight o'clock in the evening, feeling almost human again. Her hair was down, apricot curls brushing her shoulders. She was considering growing it out. It had been shoulder-length for nearly ten years, and it suited her, but she couldn't get Alex's gleaming tumble or her own envy of it out of her head, so she thought about it.
Beer, she thought next. Lots of beer. Usually she preferred wine, but this was definitely a beer night. They seemed to have some interesting local varieties on tap, so she started from the left and ordered whatever that was. Something ominously dark that barely foamed at all and smelled a bit like the underside of a barn.
She smiled at it grimly and set to.
About an hour later, she was on her way to a respectable state of intoxication, and had frightened off three hopeful boozy suitors. She was feeling simultaneously pleased with herself and uncomfortably lonely.
Someone sidled up and slunk into the seat next to her. She took a deep swig of the current experiment — something with tangerines, very strange but worth experiencing — and got ready to scare off a fourth.
"Look at you, living it up," said Alex Hunter, resting her lovely face on one hand and smiling at Sara in a rather patronizing manner. "Drowning your sorrows? How cliché."
Sara glared at her, feeling a number of things all at once and not liking any of them. "I am, I will have you know," she started. Briefly lost her train of thought, then managed to catch up with it and land on the roof after a daring mental cliff jump. "I am experiencing the city."
"You're experiencing the hell out of this pub, I'll give you that."
"Are you going to order something or did you just come here to sit there and, and mock me?" Sara asked, with less grace than she'd intended.
Alex grinned. "Fair enough. Hey, bartender, one of... whatever that is she's having."
"Tangerines," Sara muttered. "It's weird. I like it? Probably."
"You're a really cute drunk," Alex observed, accepting her own drink in short order and throwing down a good third of it. "Wow, that's... bizarre."
"But kind of good, right?"
"Something. I don't know about good."
Sara giggled. "Something. Yeah." She ordered whatever was next in line. It was so pale it barely looked like beer and tasted a bit like elderflowers. "I'm about six ahead of you," she pointed out, "you should maybe try and catch up a little faster."
Alex raised her eyebrows. "Are we getting drunk together? Like friends? I'm not sure we have a getting-drunk-together kind of relationship, Sara Ellis."
Sara pulled her face out of her pint and levelled as steady a glare as she could manage at Alex's face. Faces. There were at least two of them, and they were both very, very pretty. "If you're not going to drink with me and you're not going to return my goddamn Matisse, you should go away."
Alex heaved a slightly overdramatic sigh. "Fine! Fine. Don't ask me why I'm doing this, but I guess have nothing better to do."
"Why are you doing this?" Sara promptly asked.
Alex glared.
Sara half-shrugged. "I mean, I know why I'm not leaving or trying to make you leave. I'm just wondering if it's the same reason for you."
Biting her lip, Alex turned to her beer and downed half of it before answering. "It probably is," she said unhappily. "Nostalgia, I guess."
"That's one word for it," Sara said softly. "For me it's grief."
Alex winced. "You really... you really do think he's dead, don't you."
Sara abruptly wished she'd had either more or less to drink. She wasn't drunk enough for this to not hurt, but not sober enough to keep control over it like an adult, and so she was going to cry and there was nothing she could do about it. She buried her face in her palms, pressed them over her eyes and willed herself to keep it together. No such luck. "Dammit," she said, sniffling and hunching her shoulders. "Yeah, I think he's dead. I wouldn't have believed it, but I, uh, heard it from Peter, and Peter believed it, and if Peter believes it I kind of... don't have much room for hope."
Alex's eyes were suddenly very large and bright, and her lower lip was increasingly unsteady. "Peter told you? I... I heard from Mozzie, and he wasn't sure. He saw the body, but there are ways around that, and if anyone could pull that off it would be Neal."
"I had the same thought, but... Peter. Peter would never lie to me about this, and if he believed for even a moment Neal was still alive I feel like I would have heard that in his voice. He was just empty. Flat. It was so awful. I still hear it when things get too quiet." Sara drained the rest of her half-pint and considered ordering something stronger. She decided against it, if only because the hangover would be brutal enough as it was without pulverizing her liver with the all-stars in the last innings. "I didn't want to believe it, but I can't find a way not to."
Alex hesitantly reached out and put a hand on Sara's thigh. They were sitting very close now, so as to have their conversation without having to shout over the rest of the bar, so her hand didn't have very far to go. Sara stared down at it, puzzled and touched and trying to figure out what to do about it.
"I, um, didn't believe it until I realized you did," Alex said. "I had a bad few hours before I came down here. I didn't know you were going to be here, but I'm... I'm glad."
"Me too," said Sara, definitely touched and feeling all her animosity towards Alex drain away into the warped floorboards of the little pub. "I still want my Matisse back," she added, with a fierce little frown that immediately softened, "but I don't want you to go to jail, so maybe when we're sober we can work something out."
"Not likely," Alex said with a rakish grin, "but we can talk about it over coffee tomorrow, maybe."
"Okay," said Sara, very drunk and strangely elated. "Coffee. Cool."
"For tonight, though, we should probably get you home before you fall over and end up sleeping under one of the booth tables," Alex said. "Come on."
"You've had as much as I have," Sara pointed out, "how come you're all right?" It didn't seem very fair.
"I can hold my liquor better than you, obviously. Where's your house?"
Sara opened her mouth to answer, then paused. "I'm not sure I want you to know that," she said carefully. "I'll have to move. I hate moving."
Alex rolled her eyes. "You know where I live, too, we'll call it even."
"You're going to move anyway, though," Sara said slowly, working through it with the poured-honey mental acuity of the impressively intoxicated. "It's already a loss."
"So?"
"So, you have a bed the size of three beds. Let me borrow a corner of it. I'll go home in the morning and I'll give you a headstart and I won't have to move and you won't have to worry about where I am."
Alex stared at her. "You want to come home with me?"
The implications, such as they were, were very nearly lost on Sara, but she caught at least one of them as they flew over her head and had the grace to blush. "I'm just being practical," she muttered.
"Practical," Alex echoed. "Right." She paused to think for a long moment, polishing off what was left of her last drink. Then she sighed, rolled her eyes again, and leaned over to hook her shoulder under Sara's and drag her upright. "Don't ask me why I'm doing this, either," she said, so quietly that Sara almost didn't hear her.
"Why—"
"I said don't, didn't I?"
Sara giggled and let her face fall against the side of Alex's head. Her hair, in addition to being long and silky and a very beautiful number of colours, also smelled like some very nice-smelling things that Sara could not for the life of her remember the words for. Expensive, perfumey things.
"You smell really good," she informed Alex very seriously.
Alex tilted her face to look at Sara with mild incredulity, raised her eyebrows, then set to helping her out of the bar.
"Thanks," Sara mumbled.
She didn't like being this drunk, but she was glad, for the moment, that she'd let herself go this time. She never would have asked for this sober, but she needed it more than she'd realized until this moment. She didn't want to go home to her cozy little apartment. It was too quiet, too English, not nearly enough of the things she missed and wanted most right now. Alex's apartment was big and strange and uncomfortable, but at least it had Alex in it.
One familiar thing.
Alex woke up with a faceful of red hair and a mild hangover.
She felt all right about things, which was odd. Even with the hangover excluded, she had plenty of reasons to be unhappy and stressed and halfway through an impromptu cross-city move, but it was very hard to summon up the will to move.
The thing about Sara Ellis was that choice of career aside, and victory in love aside, and general everything aside, she was the kind of person Alex tended to like: competent, driven, innovative, deeply intelligent in a very slippery and dangerous way. Also, pretty. She'd leave that out if she could but her brain insisted on pointing it out at every opportunity. Sara Ellis was incredibly pretty. Somehow, despite her actual features — face like a weasel, hair like a very apathetic autumn burnoff, bones everywhere — she was one of the most beautiful people Alex had ever met.
That was a problem, because Alex liked beautiful. Alex had made a career out of liking beautiful. She stole beautiful, and sold beautiful, and was beautiful, and it meant things to her. She'd spent most of her life so far chasing beauty's tailcoats.
Beauty was why she'd kept looking at Neal long after it had become clear that he was never going to look back at her hard enough to see anything worthwhile. There was his face, yes, and his hands, but also the way he moved through society, the way he pulled together disparate elements of the world and turned them into ridiculous but somehow elegantly functional cons. Everything turned beautiful around Neal, and she'd loved that, despite herself.
The world without Neal in it was poorer for it.
Alex suddenly felt less all right about things, and drew up an armful of pillows to hug and/or bury her face in. Crying was useful, for catharsis, but she didn't enjoy it much and she definitely didn't want Sara Ellis to witness it or pity her for it.
As it turned out, she was out of luck in that regard, as Sara was already most of the way through the hypnopompic deserts and feeling the stupendous mattress tremble faintly as Alex shook.
"Hey," she said groggily. "Are you okay?"
"Fine," Alex answered shortly, "go back to sleep, or something."
"Or something," Sara echoed. "Okay, I like option B. What's the matter?"
Alex scowled into her hundred-dollar feather pillow and flopped over onto her other side, away from Sara's bleary but uncomfortably perceptive eyes. "Nothing."
"Oh, I doubt that," said Sara, being a deeply obnoxious person. She laid a gentle hand on Alex's upper arm, but didn't try to turn her over or get a look at her face. "Come on. I won't tell anyone. I'm good at secrets."
To her horror, Alex found herself swayed, just that easily. She turned halfway over to meet Sara's eyes, which were awfully hazel and luminous in the late-morning light streaming through the south wall.
"I'm okay," she insisted, but she said it through a curtain of tears so it wasn't very convincing.
"Neal?" Sara asked, soft and rueful and unfair.
Alex shrugged with the one shoulder she could move and averted her eyes. It didn't help much. "I guess it just kind of hit me," she said. "He's really gone, and I don't like the world as much without him in it."
"Me neither," admitted Sara.
Those words were, in some inexplicable and very inconvenient way, comparable to strategically placed dynamite. The dam blew to pieces and the river came down and the flood tore the world apart. Alex cried. Not like a child cries, but like an adult who has lost something very dear to them and can't comprehend their life without the possibility of that thing cries: in fits and starts, breaking down in slow motion, trying at every turn to hold it back, to stem the tide, failing and failing and hating herself for failing.
She barely registered it when Sara crossed the yards of 600-threadcount ivory comforter between them, but she did notice it when Sara reached out and took her hand. Sara had to be three times more hungover than Alex was, but she didn't show it. She looked beautiful. A little haggard around the eyes, maybe, but somehow that just made it worse.
Alex completely understood why Neal had fallen like a sack of bricks for this woman. She'd already known why Sara had stayed, because Alex had loved Neal too and knew all the reasons for doing that, but she was beginning to understand why Neal hadn't wanted to let go either.
White hat or no white hat, Sara was something worth looking at.
"I could," Alex said in carefully measured tones, "probably use a hug."
It was an unwise decision and she knew it when she made it. That said, there were times for wisdom, and times for insight, and this was neither of those. She was crying and she felt like shit and she wanted a hug and that was enough.
"Oh," said Sara, very softly. "Okay."
Her arms were very thin and she didn't give off much heat, but she committed to it, and Alex both respected and felt an appropriate level of gratitude for that. Sara put one hand into Alex's hair and set the other to rubbing soothing circles on her back, and that was nice. Alex dipped her face and rested her forehead on Sara's bony shoulder and dampened her thin ecru shirt, and Sara didn't complain.
If it hadn't been for her chosen line of work, Alex might have thought they could be friends. Good friends, even.
A thief and a bounty hunter were a bad match, though, so she thought it fairly unlikely beyond this morning and this one touching moment.
Then she thought — involuntarily — of Neal and Peter, and wondered if it was really such a foregone conclusion.
"Thanks," she mumbled into Sara's skin.
Sara ruffled her hair one last time and drew back with a rueful smile. "Hey, listen," she said, a little raspy. "I meant it when I said I didn't want you to go to jail. It's not just because you're Neal's friend, you know? It's because you're kind of... cut from the same cloth as him, if you know what I mean. There are thieves and there are thieves."
Alex looked at her, a look of deep consideration. "I only steal from those who can afford to lose," she said. "Neal was the same way. Is that what you mean?"
Sara nodded. "Yeah. You steal from those who can afford to lose, and treat it like a game. It wouldn't be fun for you if you were making life harder for people who already have it hard. You're a thief, and a fence, and you live outside the law, but you still have lines that you don't cross."
"Poor people don't have anything worth stealing anyway," Alex muttered, but she was a little discomfited.
It wasn't that Sara wasn't right. Well... it was that, but not in that way: Sara being right at all was the problem, not Alex's personality. The point was that Alex didn't think of herself as someone who was hard to understand, but when it was coming from someone on the other side, it made her feel uncomfortably exposed. She expected thieves to understand her. She didn't expect it from the people hunting her and hers.
"Even if they did, you wouldn't," Sara said confidently.
She was right. Again.
Alex felt like a better person than she was fairly sure she was, just being in Sara's presence. That was discomfiting too.
"No," she agreed, helplessly. "Probably not."
Sara smiled at her. It was like a sunrise. The whole thing. Radiance and warmth and new beginnings; all of it.
"I should head home," Sara said, self-consciously, looking down at the silk tide bunched up between her and Alex's thighs. "Sorry for imposing. I was, uh, really drunk."
Alex was not a risk-averse sort of person. She knew what risks were worth taking and which should be avoided, usually. She had no idea this time. "It's fine," she said softly, and took Sara's face between her hands. "You're a really cute drunk," she clarified, not at at all sure that she was actually clarifying anything for anyone but herself.
"Oh," said Sara. "Um, thanks?"
"I just couldn't bring myself to leave you there," Alex continued. That was also true. The best lies, as every con man and woman knew, were rooted in a grain of truth. "We're not friends, but you asked nicely, and I'm a nice person."
"When it suits you," Sara said wryly.
Alex scrunched her face up for a moment, then let it go. "Yeah," she said, "when it suits me. It suited me this time. Maybe, next time, it won't."
Sara raised her eyebrows. "Next time?"
"I... don't know many people in this town I'd trust far enough to have a drink with," Alex confessed.
"But you'd trust me? Even though we're on different sides?"
Alex grimaced and shook her head. "No, because we're on different sides," she said, then realized that didn't make much sense on its own. "There's honour among thieves," she explained, "of a kind, but if you want someone who will do the right thing just because it's the right thing, you need a white hat."
"Well, my hat is the whitest," Sara agreed, but she didn't look very comfortable in it, and Alex knew why.
That baton had broken bones. Sara's fists had broken noses. Alex was willing to bet it took her a long time to fall asleep at night, and that she had nightmares about the things she'd done sometimes, if not often.
Alex raised her eyebrows. Sara raised hers back.
"Okay," Sara relented after a momentary standoff, "maybe not the whitest, but still definitely a paler shade of grey."
Alex tilted her head in concession. "I'll believe that," she said with a crooked smile.
Sara pressed her lips together in the way that meant she was trying to suppress a smile. Alex didn't know her that well, but Sara wasn't trying to lie to her so she was easy enough to read.
"I'll see you around, then," she said, and broke out into a real smile, white teeth and freckled skin and high cheekbones.
Alex kissed her.
She hadn't meant to. She hadn't thought about it. It was almost automatic, leftover habit from waking up with one-night stands on their way out.
It occurred to her just as her mouth found Sara's that Sara probably wasn't expecting this and might not react well. She told herself to pull back, and then didn't do that or anything like it.
Sara kissed her back.
Sara kissed her back, and threaded the long, graceful fingers of one hand into Alex's hair and brushed the nape of Alex's neck with the other. Sara was a very good kisser. Sara was beautiful and a great kisser and Alex was very weak to people touching her hair. She didn't tell people about that, usually, because the ones who weren't worth it didn't care and the ones who were tended figure it out on their own.
"God, I'm so hungover," Sara moaned, then, pulling away. "I'm sorry, I need to—" The rest of the sentence was not necessary, so she skipped it and stumbled off towards the bathroom.
Alex drew in a very, very long breath, and let it out even slower. "Ohh, that was a bad idea," she murmured to herself, but her chest felt all light and fluffy, which wasn't helpful.
Several minutes later, Sara emerged looking faintly green. "I'm," she said, with clear effort. "I'm going home. To puke in my own toilet. But if you feel like drinking again some time — some time at least a week from now — send word and I'll meet you at that pub. I kind of liked their weird hipster beer."
"Me too," Alex said after a moment of processing. "I'll... be in touch."
Sara smiled at her, and even hungover and dishevelled and green she was radiant and Alex was deeply, deeply resentful of everything that was happening inside of her as a direct result of that green, dishevelled, hungover smile. Neal was dead and she was sick about it and full to the brim with reasonable grief but she couldn't bring herself to wallow properly when Sara was smiling like that. Awful. Just awful.
Alex bit her lip to suppress her own answering grin and tilted her head. "Sounds good," she said softly.
Sara left at a pained shuffle and Alex watched her go and thought about moving.
Sara spent a long time looking for Alex's new place, devoting almost as much time to it as she devoted to finding and recovering the Matisse. Of course, the latter she did on company time and the former on her own, but it was still worrisome. To her, if no one else.
Of course it couldn't really worry anyone else if no one else was close enough to know. She'd been here a year and change but she still hadn't really made any friends, and she knew why. Making friends would mean she was serious about being here, about making a life here, and she felt like she was betraying New York and her former self whenever she considered it.
Also, she was just kind of bad at it, if she was honest with herself. She wasn't all that extroverted. Dealing with people in a professional capacity was one thing; there were clearly defined — if unspoken — rules about how that sort of thing was supposed to go, and it wasn't really personal, even if she was pretending it was to make the client feel more confident in her and in Sterling-Bosch as a whole. Clients didn't tend to ask intrusive personal questions, and if they did she was well within her rights if she chose to dodge or deflect.
She hadn't really had any friends in New York, either. A great number of good acquaintances, and despite her better judgement, one lover, but not really any friends. Leaving would have been easy if not for Neal.
The smart thing to do would be to catch Alex doing something illegal and call in backup and get her arrested, along with her associates, and stay remote and unentangled. The smart thing to do would be avoid any bar Alex might frequent like the worst of plagues. The smart thing to do would be stay aloof and alone and desperately, painfully lonely.
Sara was a little tired of being smart.
She spent her off hours looking for Alex's new place for two months. A week after she finally gave up, she went to the pub again — the same pub, because she'd meant what she'd said about the weird hipster beer — and Alex was there.
"We might have a getting-drunk-together relationship," Alex admitted with a rueful grin.
Sara sat down beside her and ordered the beer after the one she'd left off at last time. "Is there going to be more kissing?" she asked. "Just curious."
"If there were, would you follow me home again?"
Alex wasn't looking at her. She was studiously concentrating on her beer, which was a lot redder than beer was supposed to be.
Sara raised an eyebrow. "I might," she said, then laughed at herself. "God, I really might. I really do have a type, don't I."
"I'm going to assume that was rhetorical," Alex said. "For what it's worth, apparently I do too."
The bartender pushed a mug of something that might have been beer in another life across the bar to Sara. She knocked half of it back, feeling the burn of spice and carbonization scrape her throat raw. Black pepper, or something that tasted a lot like it. A disgrace to beer's good name. A scourge to tastebuds everywhere. She gave herself a moment to recuperate, then drank the rest.
"Give me some of that tangerine stuff," she said to the bartender.
Alex laughed. "You actually did like it? I thought you were just too drunk to be discerning."
"I was," Sara said, "but it was interesting enough that I'd like to experience it again sober. Or at least closer to it."
"All right, then," Alex said, and turned to the bartender. "What's the weirdest thing you've got on tap? In your esteemed professional opinion."
The rest of the evening passed in a haze of companionable drunkenness and gustatory experimentation.
At the end, when they stumbled out together after last call into a claustrophobic world of low black clouds and squat industrial buildings, Sara caught Alex's arm.
"Look," she slurred, "I don't wanna move, so if I show you my place, you gotta promise not to take advantage."
Alex put a hand to her heart. "Hope to die," she said solemnly. "Besides, it's only fair."
That was true enough to make Sara scowl, but she didn't change her mind. She seized Alex's hand and led her through a maze of London streets, secretly impressed at her own comfort with the layout of a city that still felt foreign to her more days than not.
"Promise not to laugh," Sara said as they drew close. "It was supposed to be a temporary rental. Came furnished."
"Haha, well," said Alex, "no promises."
But when they squeezed through the door two abreast and Sara turned the lights on, Alex didn't laugh. She looked around at all the paisley and velvet and bric-and-brac with an expression on her face that was about eight things at once, then said "It doesn't suit you."
Sara grimaced. "I know. Like I said, it was supposed to be temporary. I'm not — I didn't mean to make a life here. I'm still not sure I want to stay. I just."
"You couldn't go back," Alex finished for her. "I get it. But you should definitely get a new place. I can hook you up, if you want."
"I am definitely taking you up on that," Sara said fervently. "Not tonight, though."
"Hah, no," Alex said. "You've only got two options for tonight."
Sara furrowed her brow. "Two?" she asked.
"One," said Alex, "I pass out on your couch and leave in the morning and nothing much happens. Two," she continued, then hesitated.
"Two?" Sara prompted, raising an eyebrow.
"Two, I pass out on your bed and we see how tomorrow goes."
Reaching out a hand without hesitation, Sara grinned. "I vote for door number three."
"Which is?"
"You come to bed, but hold off on passing out for a bit."
"Oh," said Alex. "If I'd known that was an option I'd have voted for that too. You sure you're okay with this?"
Sara thought about it. She thought about that first glimpse of Alex's back through the cracked door, the confident cast of her hips when she knew someone was watching and didn't care. She thought about the bitter-sour taste of tangerine beer and Alex's hand on her thigh and Alex grinning, and about commiseration and grief and her thing for thieves. She thought about morning sunlight on Alex's sheets and Alex's hair and Alex's mouth.
"Yeah," she said. "I'm okay with it. Are you gonna take my hand or what?"
Alex did, and Sara led her through the low-ceilinged hallway, past the bookshelves full of Herriot and Frost, past the bathroom with its paisley shower curtain, past the tacky dime store paintings of autumnal countryside landscapes and all the other trappings of someone else's life.
Sara led her into the dark, where they belonged, and in the shadows they found solace.
END