Part 8: Rebuilding the lies (sorry, guys, I couldn't resist. Please don't hate me! By the way, you might want to skip over the lyrics. They suck, but I couldn't find a song to use. I apologise in advance.)

When Marissa finally woke up, the thoughts swimming around her head made her want to crash back against her pillows. How could she have been so stupid to lose control like that? She was setting Alex up for a fall, not herself. She was already at the lowest point she could have been. When would she learn how to treat this girl the way she deserved?

She'd let her guard down last night, on the beach. The details were hazy now, a side effect of her addiction, but she knew she shouldn't have been there. She should have been sleeping in his arms, she should have been happy with him. She shouldn't have been drinking away her pain. Especially not pain caused by a girl.

Alex wasn't just any girl, though. Marissa was drawn to her from the first time they met, like opposite poles of magnets. She never managed to separate where she ended and Alex began. That was why now she felt like part of her was missing. It had to stay missing, though, she told herself. That was the only way to divide herself from these feelings. From Alex.

Addicted to this girl, I don't fit into her world,

Holding me together and pulling me apart

She's enigmatic, but over dramatic

But I love all of her and then some

Addicted to this girl, she doesn't know 'bout my world

Making me feel high, then I stumble and fall

She's complicated, over simplified,

But I want all of her and more

Addicted to this girl, who wanted us to work,

Making me smile, and then falter at her words

She's full of broken promises after all

But I don't care because I'm too far gone

Addicted to this girl, I'm never coming back

Made me get lost in her so I can't find my way

She's beautiful, and she's neurotic

She was never perfect, but she was mine.

Songs playing on the radio sometimes made Alex need to scream. People shouldn't be allowed to describe things that way. It would be so much easier if she couldn't relate to those songs. She was thinking about Marissa again. Alex never thought she'd find her in the state she'd found her in last night.

It made her hate Ryan even more. He had Marissa; he could make her happy. But he didn't. He let her drown herself in alcohol, and when she finally sunk under, he probably wouldn't even notice. He'd go on living his life, unconcerned. Alex remembered Marissa's words to her last night.

It wasn't the first time she'd said she loved her. The other time she'd been drunk, too. Alex didn't care, because she had so desperately wanted it to be true. When she'd whispered back that she loved her too, Marissa had smiled and pulled her closer, but the next morning, she couldn't remember anything. It was after that that Alex tried to avoid the two of them drinking too much together. That, and Marissa had clearly had a problem. She still had a problem now.

Alex wanted to make her better. She didn't want Marissa to be living that life. She wanted to make her happy, but she didn't know how. Marissa was complicated, and sometimes she was hard to read. When she smiled sometimes she didn't mean it, and Alex wanted her to mean it sincerely every time she smiled. She had tried to make her happy once, and she must have failed, because where were they now? He wasn't making her happy either, though, Alex reminded herself.

Maybe Marissa was searching for something that was just out of her reach, something neither Alex nor him could provide for her. Alex had never regretted anything more than not being able to make Marissa happy. It was all she had ever wanted from their relationship, and she hadn't succeeded.

She dragged herself out of bed, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she did so. She looked like hell, she thought. The dark circles under her eyes were rapidly becoming darker, giving her eyes a hollowed appearance. Her skin was pale from all the time she had spent locked in her room, her hair a tangled mess where she had spent the night tossing and turning, sleep eluding her.

She had to be at work in an hour, enduring the people asking her if she was okay. She'd never be okay again, she thought sometimes. She had promises to keep this time, but she didn't think they'd end up being worth anything. Marissa's drunken statements, confessions of need and declarations of love probably wouldn't mean anything to her in the morning. She'd be back in the real world, where there were only shades of black and white and the shades of grey had all disappeared.

Alex sometimes saw herself as a shade of grey. It was experimental; it was what you got if you mixed black and white together. Sometimes she felt like that was what Marissa had been doing with her, and then the experiment was over, and Marissa had decided she didn't like the shade she'd created.

It wasn't like Alex hadn't had girls who just wanted to experiment before. But those girls were disposable. They could be discarded; they could be irrelevant. Not Marissa, though. She didn't fit into that category. She didn't fit anywhere, because for Alex, what Marissa meant to her was indescribable. She really wasn't like the other girls. When Marissa had said that to her, all Alex could think was that it was incredibly accurate, at least in her eyes.

Alex walked along the streets towards her new workplace. They were quiet; it was early yet. The town she was living in now was small, the people grey and unwelcoming. It never rained here, but it seemed like it should. All the buildings were the same colour, blending into each other. She'd avoid the cracks in the pavement sometimes, wishing she could avoid other things so easily.

She planned on keeping her promise, she really did. But she didn't know what she would say. All methods of contact from a distance had always seemed so impersonal to Alex. She'd rather be looking into someone's eyes while she was talking to them, not reading between the lines when they wrote a letter or talked on the phone. She had to start somewhere, though. They had to start somewhere.

She pushed open the door of the club, greeted by an overenthusiastic co-worker. She wondered why, with all the unwelcoming people in the town, she ended up working with the ones that were constantly cheerful, talking endlessly. She'd rather deal with the ones that didn't speak to her. People speaking to her sometimes made her want to break down and tell them all about Marissa.

She told them the usual lies. She was fine; she'd had a good night. She was getting good at these lies, beginning to lose herself in them. The lines between the truth and lies became blurred sometimes, Alex herself not knowing how she was really feeling. She was constantly questioning herself recently.

Marissa wanted Alex to call, and at the same time, she didn't want her to. She was slowly reconstructing her lies, making an effort to pretend that last night hadn't happened. She knew that it would be fruitless if she heard Alex's voice, but she couldn't stop herself from trying anyway. She was sick of the lies, so she was building her own truth. It may have been a misguided one, but Marissa had never been good at dealing with her feelings.