I'm really pleased that people are interested in this pairing! I appreciate all your comments. I'm kind of annoyed with this chapter, though. Nothing really turned out the way I hoped it would.

After this chapter, I'm going to try to write shorter ones (by putting less sections in each chapter), because I find I get overwhelmed when it comes to editing longer chapters and put off doing it forever, especially when I'm worrying over whether or not people will like anything I write. (Yeah, that's what's been happening with my other fics..) Last Wednesday I actually wrote a pretty detailed outline of Life in Mono and came up with nine chapters, but that was when I was planning on writing these sort-of enormous ones. (Enormous for fanfic anyway.) I'm not sure how much the chapter count will actually increase after this, but it probably shouldn't more than double. I hope that doesn't freak anyone out.

So hopefully shortening the chapters will help me post better-quality chapters that will be up sooner. I'm going to try my best to get this updated at least once every week or two, especially since I have more of an emotional attachment to this fic than to my others right now for some reason. (It might be because I want to marry Demi Lovato. xD Okay, sorry. Totally trufax though.) Keep your fingers crossed that the time I spend hating school doesn't interfere with The Plan too much! Yeah, now that everyone knows my life story...

A Note on the Actual Chapter: If anyone has seen The L Word, you would probably know Lez Girls as Jenny's movie, but I used the title here as sort of a The L Word type show that will exist within this universe. So obviously, I don't own that. Or, as you know, the actual characters or setting in this fic.


chapter one:
bloodbeat

There's something in the way she moves now - something that makes Sonny think Portlyn's caught on to how many offhand glances she happens to throw her way.

When Portlyn bends over the table across the cafeteria to reach for the sugar bowl, she does it like it's a sport. Sonny's eyes automatically slip down the slope of Portlyn's shirt before she catches herself and lets them dart away, focusing instead on Portlyn's hands. Dainty wrists and slim fingers adorned with pink pearls. Reaching. Sonny feels a stare like a touch, and it doesn't take any thought to know where it's coming from.

Portlyn's eyes are very blue in this light, predatory as a cat's.

"You're staring over at those pouty-faced drama freaks again," Tawni says in Sonny's ear.

"Pfft." Sonny laughs and lets her eyes quickly dart away from the packed table across the cafeteria where the cast of Mackenzie Falls sits nobly, roped off in velvety blue. "Me staring? No way. You've got the wrong set of eyes." Sonny makes a wide V with two fingers and points to her own pupils, next thrusting her fingers down toward her slop-filled plate for emphasis. "These eyes're right here on my plate!"

Tawni's eyes are peering at Sonny's left hand accusingly, and the 'hmm' that rises from the back of her throat sounds like it'd be better suited as a yawn. When Sonny looks down, she realizes that in a hollow pursuit to look normal she had ended up absently buttering her own thumb.

The blood rushes to Sonny's ears like water from an open faucet. So maybe she stares a little. Sonny won't deny that, not to herself anyway, but as much as she likes Tawni, it's not like Sonny wants her to know.

Sonny nonchalantly ruffles her own hair, the result being butter-based highlights, and Sonny attempts to reach through the kaleidoscope montage of long legs and red lips that currently occupies her mind to come up with an explanation for the butter in her hair in relation to a sketch. Tawni bares her teeth between glossed, grinning lips. Sonny hates how she has this way of laughing in her face without making a sound.

"Wow," Tawni says jauntily. "It's almost endearing how you never get tired of this game. But okay! I'll play. Just one word of advice?" She flicks her braceleted wrist toward Sonny's thumb, which Sonny rubs anxiously. "You might wanna try that with toast instead, unless you enjoy pain with your breakfast. I know the food here is bad, but you don't have to go that far."

Sonny has random tufts of her hair pinched between her fingers and is rambling a contrived testimony about the miracles of conditioning with butter when Tawni's neon purple nails click against the plastic tray before she rises like a queen to toss the nutritionally-defunct sludge Brenda calls food into the trash bin. The damage is done; the incident is locked into Tawni's memory like gold. Tawni might think them something like friends now, but Tawni is still Tawni.

"See you on the set!" Tawni says jovially as she flounces away.

Sonny drops her cheek into her palm and sighs, her eyelids slipping downward. For the first time since the week she arrived in L.A., Sonny itches to run home and curl up on the couch with her mom, a movie, and a brimful carton of greasy Chinese take-out.

The cafeteria is loud, and Sonny opens her eyes to invite in the other senses. Through fanned-out fingers adorning her face like a mask, she sees a pair of daintily-crossed legs.

Sonny knows her cast members would likely laugh in her face if they knew she was pining over the bombshell two tables over, especially since Portlyn belonged to The Falls. She can imagine the scene if she delves too deeply into her own humility: Grady and Nico gripping each other for support, Tawni hunched and pointing as Zora clenches her own stomach, her face the most twisted and expressive. It's the worst, though, that they'd probably even declare Sonny insane if she told them that sometimes when Sonny catches herself staring, Portlyn is looking right back.

That scene is usually so flat-out outrageous that the first time it happened - sometime after she ran into Portlyn in the girlsroom - it stuck Sonny dumb. The second time, and still to now, she just thinks Portlyn can't even be real, like she's a long-legged hallucination of a starving man, because no matter what you look like, nobody actually exists the way Portlyn does, not in real life.

Because when Portlyn's eyes touch you, it's not innocent longing or admiration. It's a stare like foreplay, and it's so intense that when Sonny thinks of Portlyn simply allowing her glances to slide away like water off of oiled feathers and casting Sonny off to be just another pair of pawing eyes among a million others - she thinks she might die, is all.

The world is upside-down, and all she sees is blue. Portlyn breaks their gaze and goes back to her plate so normally that Sonny feels her hopes crumble to dust. Every time.

She can withhold it from her friends, but there is no way to deny it to herself.

Portlyn's teasing her.

*

The sudden, cheery heat of L.A. in the springtime causes Nico and Grady's infamous immaturity to swell into something dangerous. They delightedly call their condition Prank Fever, "to focus on another type of heat," Grady had said as he tip-toed away with a suspicious-looking package cradled against his chest and Nico's hand flat against his back.

All along the halls is a wry expression of the cast and crew's concern represented by endless rows of locked doors lining stage three. Sonny, on the other hand, had a cozy spot on the other side of the spectrum, confident that Nico and Grady simply wouldn't dare prank her, a cast-mate. That is, until Grady and Nico leave Tawni and Sonny's dressing room a pink-and-green disaster.

After two hours of scraping ooze off of Tawni's vanity and plucking feathers from Zora's favorite vent, Sonny ends up in the parking lot clutching a gunk-filled garbage bag, the sun beating glass-shard heat into the back of Sonny's exposed neck. Sonny raises a hand to shield her squinting eyes from the sun and strides toward the giant dumpster directly outside the set of Mackenzie Falls. It's painted over in stunning blues to depict a frozen lake, as if even their garbage has to put on a show to mask what it is.

When Sonny nears, she drops her hand from her face and sees Portlyn, who Sonny had been blotting out with her palm and splayed fingers. She's tightroping the wall behind the dumpster, weaving herself into the sun more seamlessly than the sky is able to, and Sonny halts in her place, wondering if she should make a fast retreat back to stage three.

She doesn't. Sonny's not that kind of girl, never has been, and hiding didn't get her a spot on her favorite sketch comedy show.

"What're you doing up there?" Sonny yells.

Maybe assuming Portlyn had already been aware of her presence was being too presumptuous regarding Portlyn's Sonny-awareness skills, Sonny thinks, once Portlyn teeters like a windblown cherry tree and almost loses her footing. Her arms windmill out at her sides, and Sonny runs forward even though she doesn't think she'd make it in time to catch her, but Portlyn has already regained her balance like she was born to do it and barely flinches.

"Haven't you heard? Anymore screw-ups and I'll be off Mackenzie Falls and in there with the trash," Portlyn yells back nastily, every bit of drama her show is famous for. "I won't even be able to join the cast of your loser show."

Sonny's insides stings like a slap, and Sonny knows she shouldn't be tuned into those pangs of hurt; she could have been anybody, because Portlyn doesn't care who she's lashing out at right now. In a way, it's like dealing with Tawni. She's hurt, and she just needs to spit words like poison darts in this way that's like how fish need the water. Sonny still parts her lips to reassure her that her acting isn't that bad, only she just flounders like a deboned fish, because Portlyn's stare chills her like ice.

Her hair whips around her face as her eyes search for something in Sonny. Reaching. Sonny's feels herself blushing, is almost too fevered to think, but for a moment, she might see something real flicker in Portlyn.

It's gone when Sonny lets out a breath, wiped blank like a dream on waking. Still, there's something in the set of Portlyn's mouth, something that screams how much she wants Sonny to - to something, but Sonny can't figure out what that is for the life of her.

Portlyn's poker face is back on the next instant, and Sonny knows it's not worth throwing the standard retort that slides between the shows like a rusted boomerang, so Sonny walks back across the uneven pavement to the heavy doors of the stage three entrance and goes inside, completely forgetting about the trash.

*

The next day she finds Portlyn smoking out in the same dirty parking lot in broad daylight. She's sitting along a low wall, folded into herself like a flower shutting itself to the night and wearing an uncharacteristic black t-shirt that hangs off her skinny shoulders and makes Sonny think she'd even looks good in rags.

Trying to keep her face angled in a direction that doesn't suggest she's looking, Sonny walks purposefully toward the dumpster and hefts the bag of trash Tawni and Zora commanded her to take out over the wall. The bag clangs loudly against the metal.

"I'm from Michigan," Portlyn says abruptly.

Sonny stops cold. There's a chipped section on the dumpster wall that sticks out like a jagged nail: Sonny feels just like that unpainted spot. After a deep breath, she turns to face Portlyn who is flicking ash the color of her eyes onto stone that matches the set of her mouth. Portlyn blows smoke out from her lungs and squints up against the sun.

Sonny looks around suspiciously before deciding this isn't some Mackenzie Falls trickery and then slowly steps out toward where Portlyn is slumped over, one foot moving out in front of her and then dragging the other to join it, the sole of her shoe grinding against the pavement. Her palms sweat, and her heart is drumming out something dangerous, and Sonny starts thinking it would be okay to crash and burn if she can just see where this leads.

"Uh," Sonny says, wiping sweat all down her jeans. "Yeah?"

Portlyn's glossed lips curl at the edge, and Sonny's heart makes an electric jolt thinking that it might be something like a smile. Something like it. The cigarette goes right back between her lips, and it's gone, leaving Sonny with a burnt-out spot in the center of her belly.

"Yeah."

"I always thought you were from here. Ya know, because you're so...high-maintenance." Sonny laughs goofily and makes a little swooping slope with her right hand before stiffly shutting her mouth and thrusting the hand in her pocket like it's being punished.

"You can be high-maintenance anywhere," Portlyn grins wryly. "You just can't be a TV star."

That smile again.

Portlyn takes another drag, and Sonny considers telling her it'll blacken her pretty lungs before opting for something funny, something witty that'll make Portlyn's lips curve into a crescent-moon smile so she'll have to beg Sonny for more to keep it shining, but the metal doors to the studio crash open around the corner, and Portlyn quickly kills the flame against the side of the dumpster.

Sonny peers around the corner and sees Chad Dylan Cooper, framed statuesque against the darkness of the indoors. Sonny rolls her eyes.

She's surprised when she turns back to see Portlyn shoving a stick of gum into her mouth and engulfing herself in a heavy fog of perfume.

"Shit," she hisses, fanning the air around her. "What do I smell like?"

She moves, her sudden closeness making Sonny feel a bit dizzy, and Sonny might be a hugger, but Portlyn's nose inches from her blushing cheek is just too into Sonny's personal space. Her arm brushes Sonny's elbow like something electric, melting her from the inside out.

"Uh—spearmint field outside a perfume factory?" Sonny gives as a breathy chuckle in answer.

"Sure?" Portlyn asks, moving closer and puckering her lips to breathe over Sonny's cheek. Her breath is like snow, and her arm is pressing third-degree burns into Sonny's shoulder.

Sonny nods fervently, so much she strikes Portlyn in the eye with a flyaway strand of hair.

Portlyn flinches back a bit and brings her ringed fingers to shield her eye, her eyebrows raised and her lip curled, but there's a reason she can't be as stupid as people say, because she seems to catch onto the source of Sonny's discomfort quickly. And then smiles slyly, slipping back into the role of a temptress like it's a new glove.

That unspoken teasing thing is between them now, spiraling in a way that's so out of control it makes Sonny's head spin. Or maybe that's Portlyn's perfume dissolving the blood in her veins. Either way, Portlyn is remarkably still on her high-heels while Sonny feels she might tumble over.

Chad Dylan Cooper actually saves her in the end. He calls out to Portlyn like she's a toy poodle that got out into the street, and Portlyn pushes past Sonny in a hurry.

When she's gone, Sonny glances over at where she carelessly tossed the limp cigarette. There is no lipstick at the edges to indicate where her lips were pressed, but in a strange impulse, Sonny takes it between her fingertips. There's almost something poetic about a discarded cigarette butt, the way it holds onto the last dirty air Portlyn drew into her throat like a gasp.

*

Sonny is on the bright pink sofa in her dressing room brushing a line of black polish onto her big toe when Tawni breezes into the room, waving something flimsy around in her right hand.

"Wait'll you see this!" She angrily bunches shoulders like a surly cat and takes a moment to glare at the cover of a magazine before tossing it so it lands like an ungainly bird next to Sonny's bended knee. Sonny expects an article criticizing Tawni's shiny wardrobe until she sees a printed version of Portlyn glancing up at her and accidentally brushes polish onto her cuticles.

It turns out the magazine is one of the gossipy tabloids that lines the checkout lane of every supermarket – whether you're in Wisconsin or California - and the headline makes Sonny realizes that when Portlyn said the show wouldn't brook anymore of her screw-ups, she wasn't making a self-deprecating remark about the quality of her acting. Sonny quickly shoves the black polish off to the side.

The glossy front cover of the slim magazine reads a lot of things, but loudest of all, it reads "Mackenzie Falls' Portlyn Ross Takes Fall for Cast Member of The Lesbian Drama Lez Girls: find about about their on-set affair here."

Sonny thinks she might explode.

"Nobody would even care about these little on-set excursions if it wasn't for that undeserved movie deal she got," Tawni pouts, completely unbothered by the way Sonny can feel her jaw hanging loose as a swinging trapdoor. "When does my life get invasively plastered all over newsstands for the world to see?"

Tawni pouts like it would be a huge honor for her privacy to be invaded. She's wrapped her robe now, filing her nails angrily, most likely imagining tiny versions of Portlyn's head packed onto each of her fingertips like olives, but all Sonny really knows right now is that there might be a lump made of lead lodged in her throat.

"But - Portlyn's...?"

"Who cares what she is besides a moviedeal-stealing upstart," Tawni snarls dramatically. "She's taking up magazine space that could be used for my pretty!"

But Sonny does care. She stares down at the headlines, and Tawni must read her like she reads these trashy magazines, because she gasps. This is probably what she was hoping for when she walked in the door.

"Oh god. You're not going to freak, are you?"

"Huh?"

"Let me explain how love works outside of the cheese factories," Tawni grins as she sits very close to Sonny, giving a martyred sigh and turning to her smugly. "I'm sure your mommy told you about how the stork comes when a mommy and daddy loves each other very much." Sonny's head is still spinning like an out-of-control top, and she nods dazedly. "But here in the real world, sometimes a mommy can love a mommy, or a daddy -"

"Oh my god, you are not giving me The Talk!" Sonny yells, breaking back into reality through the sheer horror of it all. "I know! God, I – I have friends, I've watched Lez Girls before! I -" She clamps her mouth shut there, before she gives herself away to Tawni. She doesn't know why she doesn't want her to know just yet, but then again, it might have something to do with Portlyn glancing sullenly up from the magazine. Sonny pointedly doesn't look at either of them. "It's just - Portlyn seemed so - "

Portlyn seemed so much less daunting when she was on a high shelf Sonny knew she could never reach for, because, forget not being tall enough, Sonny wasn't even in the same room.

"Puh-lease, sweetie!" Tawni bounces up like a spring, flipping her hair over her shoulders with both hands. She drops her voice a pitch, speaking seriously in a rare instant. "You can't tell anything about anybody just by looking at them." She stops and considers. "Well. Except that they're pretty. Like me!" With that, she grins beatifically and flounces over to her vanity.

Sonny goes through the rest of the day as if it's happening underwater and she forgot her snorkel, and when rehearsals are over, she takes the tabloid magazine home and places it in a small spot under her bed. When she goes to sleep, she feels it there like the heroine did in The Princess and the Pea, dreaming some absurd dream about her and Portlyn working in a cheese factory as characters on Lez Girls, watching storks graze in the distances through the sooty windows.

*

Sonny thinks there is a very simple equation concerning numerous times she unnecessarily ends up at that dumpster outside stage two: once is an accident; twice is a coincidence - but three times? - Sonny's just praying to find something there then. Sonny's bad enough at math to wonder if that's really an equation at all, but anything is better than contemplating why seeking out Portlyn doesn't actually take any hard deliberation on her part. It's nothing more than a nerve-and-bone, flesh-and-blood reaction at this point, which means Sonny probably shouldn't feel that disappointment coiling in her belly when she doesn't find Portlyn there.

She does feel it.

Walking over to the low wall tucked behind the dumpster where Portlyn usually smokes reveals only a tiny, burt-out circle of cigarette ash that won't withstand the next rain. Around it are two diamond eyes and heart-shaped lips drawn in felt pen, making up a pouting face.

"Looking for me?"

"Uh - " Sonny whirls around fast on her clunky cowboy-boot heels. She throws a hand behind her head and then sticks it straight out in the air like her arm means to be flicking out a wave. She mostly just ends up ruffling her own hair. "Hey! And...no. Why?"

Portlyn's hands are tucked behind her back, and she glides over to Sonny, peering at her smugly. In fact, there's no way she can possibly look any more smug.

"You were looking at my art," Portlyn states surely. The bracelets circling her wrists jangle in agreement when she points.

Sonny just laughs. "Art?"

Portlyn nods severely, walking closer.

Sonny's never actually been kissed, but she watches a lot of Lez Girls. This is the type of heated part where the internally-closeted main character gets pushed up against a wall to get a face full of the bad girl. The thought alone makes her heart pump like a heaving locomotive. With Portlyn coming closer, Sonny thinks – louder than she has thought before – of what it could be like.

Then Portlyn walks past Sonny and plops herself down onto the low wall.

Oh.

"So," Sonny says, fanning herself. "I'm from Wisconsin. West of Michigan - or, you know, south, depending on what part you're in." After the tangled statement flees her lips, Sonny thinks of how much more relevant it had sounded when Portlyn had said it.

"I know." Portlyn takes out a crinkling pack of cigarettes with a puckered pair of red lips on it and flips open the flap before resting her elbows in her lap. "It's one of Chad's favorite jokes."

"Oh." Sonny watches the way she puts a cigarette between her lips; she should probably find smoking less attractive. "Are you—are you gonna, you know..." With that Sonny makes a gesture with her hand, two fingers made into a V pressed to her lips as she sucks in a large, hissing breath and then laughs. "My Nana always used always tell me never to start smoking like she did, because it leaves stains all over your teeth. But she told me like this." The 'like this' was formed in her throat like the words were choking her as they bubbled toward the tip of her tongue for lift-off.

Portlyn just rolls her eyes and thumbs an orange flame from a silver lighter.

Maybe crash and burn wasn't so far off.

"So you're gonna be all Hollywood today, miss former Michigan?" Sonny tries.

Chin resting in her palm, Portlyn puffs a lissome stream of smoke from her lips.

"Well!" Sonny coughs, fanning her face with her hand. "Moody! Or well, I would be moo-dy, because, you know. Wisconsin and the cheese thing. Hey! That'd be a great sketch for the show. The Moooody Blues," Sonny laughs. "You know, like the rock band, but better, because they'll all be cows."

She is about to start singing I'll Go Grazing, but the way Portlyn is squinting at Sonny isn't exactly filling her with encouragement. Her eyes are shadowed with scrutiny, or just bewilderment, and just after Sonny becomes sure she might explode from the suspense, Portlyn speaks.

"I don't watch your show."

I. Don't. Watch. Your. Show. It's liking expecting daisies and coming up against barbed wire.

Seagulls overhead belt out scraggly lampoons passing for birdsong, and all Sonny musters at this point is a low hum of annoyance; she crosses her arms and shifts her muscles in irritation. Maybe it was just really stupid of her to think she would have more in common with Portlyn on the basis of them being from neighboring states when it was hard enough finding anything in common with her stuffy, doily-collecting neighbors back in Wisconsin. There's no telltale in her mind of what exactly she was expecting, and instead of internally reaching for one, Sonny straightens her back and sighs.

"I'm just gonna..." she says, gesturing over her shoulder and in the direction of stage three. Without any more ado, Sonny turns to go back to her set, where they at least understand her jokes.

Sonny thinks she's going to get away from the humiliation clean, and she's striding past the dumpster when, without any prelude, Portlyn yells after her.

"You wanna get out of here?"