After the length of the last chapter, this one's a little shorter.
I feel like I'm back on track with the characters, so thanks for your feedback about that.
Review replies at the bottom of the page...
Nicky raised her eyes from her phone as Alex and Piper entered the kitchen.
"Hey, not-lesbians. Good shower?"
Piper blushed, and Nicky could recall seeing the same response on the face of a younger, debutante version of the woman before her. She felt ancient in relation to this vision of her youth, as though she were witnessing some sort of bad, alternate universe interpretation of herself.
Shaking the thought, she eyed the pair skeptically.
"You both seem pretty..." Nicky sought for a euphemism rather than a crude turn of phrase, but failed. "... Wet."
Alex set both hands on the table, and Nicky recognised the challenge when she saw it.
"I guess that makes you bone-dry, Nick." The brunette raised an eyebrow.
"Sure, but only since last Wednesday. I guess that's nothing in relation to your - what was it?" Nicky pretended to count the time since Alex's last lay on her fingers. "Six month drought?"
"There was a drought in California in 2011." Red remarked, joining the conversation from the corner of the room where she was cleaning the work surface. "Thirty-four percent less rain than expected."
"Wait - weren't you in California in 2011?" Alex teased, pointing a finger at Nicky before upturning the gesture into something obscene.
"Listen," Nicky began, earnestly. "There's a perfectly valid 'your mom' joke ready to go here, but I'm not going to take the opportunity because I respect you too much." She held up her hands in mock surrender. "We good?"
Alex's out-for-blood expression softened, and she nodded.
"Thanks," she acknowledged, turning her attentions back to Piper.
Nicky returned to the article she'd been reading, but raised her eyes from her phone once more to see Alex smoothing a stray lock of hair behind Piper's ear, and Nicky found that she couldn't help but make a suitably inappropriate vomiting noise to bring the couple back to Earth.
For a moment, Alex looked as though she might object to Nicky's refined form of comedy, but Red intervened, appearing behind her with two steaming bowls of stew.
"If you make that noise at my cooking, you won't have any." She warned, returning to the stove for the remaining portions. "And then you'll be sorry."
Before assuming her seat at the table, Red retrieved a jug of water and four cups, placing these final items in the centre of the group. Pouring a glass for each person present, she lifted her own into the air, an informal toast for no clear reason.
"There will be no drought here for anybody." She said, innocent smile affixed in place. "But that does not mean we should throw ourselves into the ocean."
The meal that Red had prepared for them was delicious, and Piper was embraced by the chef several times before being allowed to leave the house that evening.
Even Nicky insisted on giving Piper a cursory hug as she bid them goodnight, heading out to the car that Alex had running on the driveway.
"You ready to go?"
The brunette had her hands on the steering wheel, seat pushed back on its runners to accomodate her long legs.
Piper paused before replying, considering how to respond. "No."
"You left something? 'Cause you've got time to go back in and get it."
"No, I just..." Piper trailed off, still not completely sure how to tell Alex the truth: this was the best weekend she'd had in a considerable time, and it was still only Saturday night. "Can I get your number?"
Alex leaned over the centre console, and for a moment Piper thought she was about to be kissed again, but instead Alex snaked her hand into Piper's pocket, sliding her mobile phone from its hiding place.
Tapping several digits and a name into the address book, she handed the phone back, and pressed down on the accelerator.
With a final grin tossed in the blonde's direction, Alex pushed a CD into the stereo.
"Lead the way, kid."
Piper had never even heard of the band named 'Cold War Kids' before entering the vehicle, but by the time they reached her apartment on the other side of the city, she felt fairly well versed in their career to date.
Alex had played her a mix CD of her favourite tracks of theirs, and Piper had been too enraptured by her passion to notice that the sun had long since set, and they were parked in place outside her building.
"I guess this is where I say goodbye." She mumbled, hands balling into fists in her lap.
"No," Alex replied quietly, her hand lifting Piper's head until their eyes met. "Only goodnight."
Their final kiss was soft, gentle, and it took all of Piper's self control to open the passenger-side door.
She clambered out of the car with the grace and poise Alex expected, but swung round to say a final farewell, and nearly knocked herself unconscious on the doorframe in her haste.
Alex stifled a laugh as Piper scowled at her, rubbing the red welt growing on her forehead.
With a sigh and a smile, she relented. "I've had a really great time."
"Yeah, me too. See you on Monday?"
Piper nodded. She seemed almost melancholy, and Alex made a mental note to text her later to check in. "Yes, definitely."
"Hey," Alex lead with humour, hoping to brighten Piper's dampened disposition. "Monday seems a lot less shitty now that I know you'll be there."
Piper's answering beam was a beacon of hope. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. Text me?"
"Of course I will." Piper's smile blossomed.
"Great. Sleep well, kid."
"You too, Alex."
Piper slammed the door behind her, and Alex watched her walk to the front of her building, taking the steps two at the time.
She turned at the entrance, raising a hand in valediction, and slipped into the foyer.
Alex waited until the woman was out of sight before she dropped her head to the leather-covered steering wheel.
Fuck.
She was completely and utterly captivated by Piper Chapman, and couldn't figure out how it had happened.
She tried to track back through the past week to find the source, but it was harder than she could fathom, both more nuanced than she had become accustomed to.
It was as though every single simple gesture was accompanied with a wealth of meaning and detail, but Alex reconstructed the narrative as best she was able to nonetheless.
A little flirting had become a genuine fondness.
The fondness passed into the realms of affection when she saw the woman's vulnerability - insecure and yet carefree in bursts - coupled with a genuine naivete.
Affection became attraction, which lead to a single kiss, and the next leap in Alex's mind found them drunk and disrobed, half-dressed and fucking in her bed; Nicky would've been proud.
But then came the snuggling.
The hand-holding.
The honest-to-God concern she'd felt in the pit of her stomach when Piper - stupid, hungover Piper - had been ill.
The surge of protectiveness she'd experienced as the woman slept, and during the phone call to Polly, and when she finally surfaced after hours in Alex's bed, all Alex had wanted to do was hold her…
And the shower.
Holy fuck, the shower.
The care and attention Piper had shown Alex's body was greater than Alex had shown herself in such a long time.
Alex exhaled with as much force as she could, and ran her fingers through her hair.
It was time to go home, to see if she could sleep off the intensity of these feelings.
She didn't mind them objectively, but the timing was terrible.
Grabbing the closest disc to hand, she ejected the Cold War Kids mix and switched it for Sleater-Kinney. Jamming her thumb into the play button on the stereo, she sped off into the city, doing her best to ignore the lyrics bursting from the speakers, 'One More Hour' flaying her with a dozen ironies at once.
She skipped every track until she found something without minor chords.
It was going to be a long night.
Piper fought to keep the bounce from her step as she bounded into the apartment.
Kicking her shoes off by the door, she headed for her room, hoping to avoid her roommate for as long as possible.
"Well, here she is."
Piper glanced around the room at Polly's words, expecting additional company, but they seemed to be alone, the statement played up for dramatics.
"Hey, Polly."
"How was your lesbian love affair?" Polly pushed herself away from the kitchen counter she was leaning on and spread her arms in a gesture intended to invite answers, but instead simply slopped rosé onto the floorboards. "Sorry, I mean party."
"Ha, yeah. Funny." Piper took a clean glass from a nearby cupboard and poured herself some of Polly's wine.
"Well?" Her friend demanded, leaning forwards. "What happened? Tell me you didn't."
"Didn't what?" Piper countered, coolly.
"Have sex with a woman." Polly ejected the words from the corner of her mouth as though it was a comical aside to an unseen audience.
"And if I did?" The blonde replied with a long, slow sip from her glass, any excuse to avoid Polly's intense gaze.
Polly's jaw dropped, and if Piper hadn't been so simmeringly frustrated, she would have laughed.
"Oh my God, Piper! Are you that desperate?"
It was Piper's turn to express her disdain now, setting the wine down on the wooden kitchen surface a little harder than she'd have liked to. "Desperate to what? Feel a little human compassion?"
Polly visibly softened, and Piper allowed herself to settle her fingers at the stem of the wine glass, something to occupy her otherwise clenched fists.
"With a woman, Piper? Really?"
Piper sighed, raising her free hand to her head to massage her temple, which was pounding. She hadn't had enough to drink today, despite Alex's efforts, and the wine she'd just downed wouldn't help matters.
"Yes Polly, with a woman."
Polly occupied the ensuing silence with sound effects rather than syllables, and the chug of wine leaving a glass bottle echoed around their pristine kitchen as the woman refilled her own drinking vessel.
Piper noted that there was less than half of this particular beverage remaining: her roommate had obviously been filling her absence with alcohol.
"Couldn't you have called, at least? You didn't answer any of your texts. I was getting worried."
Piper nodded slowly. "I'm sorry. I just..." She floundered, wanting to give Polly the truth, but aware of the consequences. "When I was with Alex, everything else was just background."
The expression Polly adopted told Piper that the worst was occurring. "What, since you turned gay your phone doesn't work?"
"Seriously, Polly?" Piper was becoming exasperated, and released her drink for the sake of holding her hands out before her, imploring. "You don't just turn gay. You fall somewhere on the spectrum, like on a Kinsey scale."
"Oh, so now we're measuring how gay we are?"
"Will you please just listen?"
The brunette folded her arms, but didn't say anything. Piper felt relieved that Polly was at least willing to give her an opportunity to talk it out.
"Alex and I have a spark. That's all. I'm not going to run away with her, okay? It's just an attraction."
A really deep, intense attraction, that she would probably lose sleep over.
Eventually, after an indefinite period of time that felt like hours to Piper, Polly began to speak.
"You keep looking for people you have that chemical thing with, but that's not the whole package." She set her glass down resolutely. "You have to find someone you can spend two weeks with in a cramped timeshare in Montauk, in the rain, and not want to kill, who made jigsaw puzzles fun and competitive."
Piper nodded slowly. "I get that, I do. I want warm, but I also want hot. I want fireworks. I want somebody I can have adventures with."
"And you think Alex might be that person? You barely know her." Polly shook her head. "Adventure is just hardship with an inflated sense of self. Eventually, you want someone you can curl up with. Someone who knows when it's time to order Chinese."
Watching Piper, who seemed defeated despite any evident success on either side of the dispute, Polly shook her head. "Do you even know if Alex likes Chinese food?"
Emptying her glass, Piper moved to the sink, rinsing the kitchenware and placing it on the drying rack. "We didn't really get around to talking about food. In between, you know, all the sex."
It was an exaggeration on her part, but perhaps Polly did have a point, as much as Piper loathed to admit it.
"One day, when I'm less mad at you," Polly joined Piper at the sink, their elbows connecting as Piper continued to wash and Polly invaded her space, easing the tension with an incline of her head in Piper's direction. "You can tell me what it was like."
Piper glanced at her roommate from the corner of her eye, and saw Polly smiling. She allowed the corners of her lips to quirk upwards at the corners, but kept her head hanging low.
"I'm off to bed." Polly stated matter-of-factly, brushing away the cobwebs of their previous conversation. "See you tomorrow?"
Piper nodded. "Sleep well."
"You too. Night." The reply was distant - Polly was halfway down the corridor - but heartfelt, and Piper felt the pressure in her chest ease.
She hated confrontation, particularly with her friends, but she was sure that Polly would see sense.
Piper liked Alex, a lot. Surely there was no immediate harm in that?
She hoped fervently that her roommate would wish her well eventually.
Sliding into bed, Piper toyed with the idea of sending Alex a goodnight message.
Thumbing through her phonebook, she found Alex's name curiously missing from under the letter A.
Her surname was Vause; perhaps she was filed under there instead?
Searching further, V was also lacking Alex's name.
Piper was bemused. Alex had entered her details, hadn't she? Becoming a little frantic, Piper scrolled back up to the beginning of the alphabet, cycling through each individual entry, pausing only when she reached H.
There it was: HotForTeacher.
Piper smothered a laugh with her open palm, biting her bottom lip to suppress the smile that threatened to make her face ache.
Opening a new message thread, she opted for simplicity. Taking any other route would've lead to hours of drafting and redrafting, and Piper recognised that she needed sleep above everything else in that moment.
Goodnight, Miss Vause.
She set her phone down, ensuring that the volume was on in case of any reply.
She had fewer than five minutes to wait, having only just turned off the light when her mobile buzzed beside her.
Goodnight kid. X
WB79 - Thanks, I appreciate that.
Nowthatsapherenotaspear - Much appreciated! Now here's a weird thing: I had a dream last night in which I was walking through some public bathrooms. You username was written on the wall in black marker pen. Odd, right? Cool though,
Prooffice - Thank you. I liked what you said about them 'circling each other'. I might use that…
VonZeppy - merci. I like your name.
Librarybook - Your review was really self-esteem boosting. Like, seriously. Thank you.
Ganyross - I like the idea of 'white hot sexiness'. Like, hotter than hot.
Valevauseman - I think they've settled into their comfort zones. Let's hope nothing comes along and disrupts their happiness…
Keep it coming with the messages and reviews. It's awesome to log in and find something new from you guys.