Poker Face
For a woman with highly expressive eyebrows (which are always immaculately drawn), Alex Vause is a master of the poker face. If the lack of people who understand her is not an adequate indication of that, then her sure-win sessions at the poker table are. In her thirty-odd years of life, never has she been bested consistently by another in the art of concealed motives and hidden thoughts (excluding her mother, of course, for mothers always know best).
That is not to say she can never be understood, no. On the contrary, if she wants people to comprehend her wishes, it takes only one utterance and a figurative snap of her fingers to convince people to do as she so desires. Smirking lips and raised eyebrows are the two tools of her trade of persuasion and charm, and they are usually enough to make women swoon, be made pliable to her commands (and men too, but unfortunately or not, she has little use for them).
However, with her feelings, it is a completely different story. Few have managed to scale the walls of Alex's ivory-trellised heart, and those who did usually fell down from sky high and never attempted to do so again for fear of hurting themselves once more. Her black-rimmed glasses shield her from exposure to too much feelings and irrelevant, impractical human emotions from the people around her (usually whiny mules and partners who always want more than she wants to give). Her stormy grey eyes that tell so much (and yet nothing at all) incapacitate before she gets wounded, although she might sometimes get damaged from the recoil. In short, nothing can penetrate the ironclad defenses she built.
Or so she thought.
She does not know when it was that a pair of ivy eyes invaded her every thought. She cannot figure out when it was that Martin and Tolkien joined Plath and Tolstoy, slid surreptitiously into her already full shelves.
And she sure as hell cannot pinpoint the exact moment that her poker face failed her for the first time in her life.
But as she waves her lousy cards in Piper's face in a last ditch attempt to salvage her game, hoping in vain that Piper has not yet called her bluff, she guesses that perhaps she should have figured out from the first meeting that Piper is the one castle crasher she can never keep out (and not for lack of trying). Not with her puppy eyes, not with her tendencies to screw up in the process of trying not to, and certainly not with the inescapable, unfathomable pull that the blonde woman has over her heart.
And of course, the sex does not help matters (not that she will ever complain about that).