Several minutes after the takeoff, she had dozed off, and at some point, she had woken up with her head resting on Alex's shoulder, a whisking strand of hair tickling her forehead. She kept completely still, with her eyes shut, to relish on the familiar warmth emanating from the other woman's skin, and her alluring scent. Since everything else was an ever-changing merry-go-round, this was what her senses automatically recognized as home now, so she tried to hold onto it for as long as her fidgety mind allowed her.
Through half-closed eyelids, Piper identified the pulled-down tray table, the cold drinks hazing up the plastic cups, the assortment of newspapers and magazines, and Alex's legs crossed one over the other, the book she'd bought at the airport balanced on her knee.
Gently, the brunette reached out around her and pulled her closer. She pressed her lips against Piper's head while her hand travelled down Piper's back, finding the patch of skin between her sweater and her jeans. The caress then snaked under her sweater and moved upwards, until Alex's cool fingers reached the back of her bra and slid under it. Piper breathed out, her eyes closing instinctively, and let the woman touch her in that slow, careful way. While once it would have seemed unbelievable to miss Alex -considering the fact that they had hardly been apart during the span of their relationship-, the brunette had been so terribly busy lately that all they appeared to be doing was sharing different hotel rooms. Not that they were roomies exactly, since sometimes Piper was able to tear Alex away from the computer or the phone, and other times Alex did her best to appease her. However, none of those actions had taken them much further than the bed, and every time that Piper managed to convince Alex to move, it didn't really feel like a success. On the contrary, it left her with a curious sensation of defeat, and perhaps it was because she believed that being with her girlfriend shouldn't have to be a battle. It had to be a given, like it had been before.
Furthermore, Piper felt such relief every time she managed to get Alex back that it almost terrified her as much as not achieving it, because it only proved how much she depended on that one person. She knew that she couldn't keep operating under relief, because relief wasn't a pure emotion - it was born out of other emotions bargaining amongst themselves. Although it felt good momentarily, it was actually corrosive on the long run. And, as used as she was to negotiating with herself and adapting her own nature to whatever was coming, Piper didn't favor doing that with Alex, since Alex had been the only one who had managed to bring out her unadulterated emotions. All that pretending that Alex's job didn't exist -or that it was like any office job-, pretending that she wasn't implicated in it, pretending that she wasn't scared, pretending that nothing had changed… it was slowly eroding her, since she just wasn't capable of filtering everything out.
Her situation was like a wave, and she was just a random rock awash on the shore; however, instead of softening her into a smooth, round pebble, this wave seemed to be carving into her, making her spiky and full of angles and tiny holes. She felt on edge too, more often than not, and occasionally didn't like the version of herself that she was seeing.
Sometimes she felt small and lost, or like she was fading, perhaps as a consequence of the old, majestic cities they were traveling to, together with Alex's intermittent presence. She remembered when Alex had told her about the trip she was to take to Brussels, how she had instructed her to conveniently "lose" her passport, and how strange, and eerie, and creepy it had all been. It had felt as if she had lost a big chunk of her past - a part of her life gone, erased voluntarily, for Alex. It was getting increasingly harder to not think about that.
Piper raised her head to look at the brunette, her eyes unexpectedly colliding against Alex's blue orbs.
"What's with the face?"
Snapping out of it, Piper blinked a couple of times and shook her head. She'd thought that Alex hadn't noticed that she was awake, and didn't know which one of her passing thoughts had seeped through and altered her features. Alex was looking at her intently, her raised eyebrows like a pair of question marks turned sideways.
"I missed this," she answered, jerking her head at Alex's hand, invisible under her sweater.
The brunette flashed the sweetest of smiles at her and bent down to kiss her, rubbing their noses together. Piper welcomed those lips like water in the desert, but didn't externalize her desperation, since she didn't want this to be about sex. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but this was the kind of contact she had been really missing, and right now she needed Alex to fix her like this. She needed Alex to be present and her touch to convince her mind that everything was okay.
Of course, Piper realized that she was bargaining again, because she couldn't really trick herself, could she? But she could attempt to do the next best thing, which was to turn down the volume almost completely, and this was the way of achieving it. She draped her arm around Alex's waist, her thumb getting under her shirt and caressing her hipbone.
With a quick movement of her wrist, Alex flipped away the novel she had been reading and then pulled off her glasses to place them on top of her head.
"It was a crappy story anyway," the dark-haired woman said, grinning goofily and using her now-free arm to hug her tighter.
Piper buried her face in the warmth of Alex's neck, acknowledging that she felt much better now. It almost took her by surprise, her own capacity for believing, greatly helped by the fact that she wanted to believe. And who wouldn't want to believe, when they were together and they were traveling to an enchanting place?
As the pilot started chattering about the weather, they both turned to look out the small rounded rectangle that was the window. Through the thick pane, Piper saw that the clouds were dense and wavy, forming an extensive surface which looked like someone had just unrolled a thick, white carpet in the middle of the sky for the plane to travel. The clouds seemed solid, making Piper doubt the pilot's words about there being rain underneath them. With their cheeks pressed together and their arms around each other, they kept watching as the plane highlighted the clouds with its shadow.