Kinda short, kinda filler. It happens.
…0…
Washington; 2018
Alex introduces him to the minister as Justin, just Justin, and he gets hit with déjà vu waiting for the familial connection that never gets said.
It's so close to her townhouse that they walk back, Alex saying there was no point in taking her car just a few blocks. She stops just a few feet away from the church and pulls her heels off, walking barefoot the rest of the way. The sight makes him grin.
"What?" she demanded, seeing his expression. "Try three inch shoes sometime and see how long you last."
Justin holds his hands up in defeat. She does have a point.
"So…church."
"Church," Alex agrees.
"Not Mass," he goes on. "Protestant church."
Sighing, Alex swings her purse to her other shoulder. "It makes me feel better."
He can certainly understand that.
"And besides," she continues, "I was never a very good Catholic anyway. Confession, Lent, it just wasn't for me."
"I can see that," he teases and she shoves at his shoulder with a roll of her eyes. "But I still never thought I'd see you in any church voluntarily."
They're at the corner now, where they cross back to her street. A car passes and they stop, Alex looking up at him with the utmost seriousness on her face. "It's been a long time, Justin. Things change. People change."
God, does he know that as well as anyone.
They stand there for a few seconds, Justin lost momentarily trying to decipher some unnamed flicker in her eyes until a car horn interrupts them. Alex jumps and turns to wave to whoever is in the car. Blinking rapidly, she crosses the street, bypassing a few fallen leaves and twigs, leaving him to catch up to her.
"Do you still go to Mass?" she asks when he catches up to her.
He shrugs. "Not as much as I should probably."
"I guess there's not really much point anymore," she remarks, slowing as they come up in front of the stoop leading up to her house. He thinks how pretty it is the daylight, how it looks like her. "You can only ask for forgiveness so many times before it starts to feel a little pointless."
The logic in that statement, no matter how flawed, strikes a cord. She may be right. One of the reasons that Justin went from weekly Mass and almost daily confession to only sporadic, holiday worship was because it stopped feeling like it was working. His guilt eventually evened itself out. Solitude and self imposed exile does that to a person. Maybe he even thought that cutting himself off from all the people he loved was punishment enough. Penance enough.
"I have to get changed and get to the gallery," she tells him. "Callie and I alternate Sundays and today is mine so…"
"Oh." Justin cringes at ho small his voice sounds to his own ears. This is brush off if ever he heard one. "Right. I guess I'll just…you know, call about a flight then."
"Okay." It's all so silent and awkward after that, so tense that even Alex's movements are jerky when she finally turns and walks down the hall to her room, the sound of her bedroom door shutting making Justin flinch as if struck.
…0…
New York; 2012
Things after the night uptown are different.
They can't ever be a normal couple, they know that. There can't be any more kissing on the steps of public places, no more silly squabbles about things that make them conspicuous. They have to act normal, and most importantly, not draw any attention to themselves.
Alex seems to enjoy that last part the most judging from the way she smirks at him when she catches him poring over a new comic like it was the Holy Grail and makes some not too veiled comments about the varying level of dorkiness.
Jack, who never seems to get more than a foot away from Alex at any given time she's in the restaurant despite what the proximity does to his coordination, strikes up a conversation with him about the Golden Age shortly after that. He's a nice kid, Justin realizes. And so smitten with his sister that he can barely see straight.
"She's just so…different."
Yeah, Alex is definitely different. Justin can attest to that personally. He looks up and meets her eye over Jack's shoulder and she winks at him.
He doesn't ask Jack if the rumor of his showing up wherever he knows Alex will be is true. The sight of him hovering at a sunglasses rack not ten minutes after they tell their mother that the two of them are going to walk over to check out the vendors on West Broadway confirms it for him.
Now that Justin knows exactly how watched they are (her, him by association), he knows how careful they need to be as well.
He ends up with the late dinner shift one night, about a week later, since there was never any doubt that he wasn't going to be working in the shop over his visit, and comes upstairs after cleanup duty to find Max and Alex both asleep on the couch, their parents long gone to bed.
His mom has been on a cleaning spree lately and there are stacks of assorted items littering every available surface. He sees an old gingham throw tossed over the back of the dining room chair and an idea forms in his head.
"Alex," he shakes her shoulder a little while later, careful not to wake Max and ruin the plan. "Wake up."
Her eyes blink open, hazy until they focus on him. He presses a finger to his lips, cocking a head at Max at the other end of the sofa and stands, hand out toward her. "Come on."
She stands, wary expression on her face, and wraps a blanket around herself before she places her palm in his.
"Close your eyes," he whispers, leading her over to the staircase, just far enough as to not disturb Max and pulls out his wand, incanting almost silently. There's a soft 'whoosh' feeling of air blowing around their ankles, followed by the second of misplacement when they land and regain their equilibrium.
"Okay, open."
Alex's eyes flutter and then widen once she realizes where they are, lips falling apart in a silent expression of awe. "Oh my God, Justin, this…this is amazing." Then her gaze falls on the blanket, the mound of pillows, the picnic basket. "Who would have guessed you actually are romantic under it all?"
"Well, it was just a matter of finding the right girl to enjoy a starlight picnic on top of the Brooklyn Bridge."
"What kind of snacks did you bring?" She digs into the basket while he chuckles and settles beside her. She rips open the bag of Starbursts and pops an orange one into her mouth, grinning. He didn't even know if you could consider a basket full of candy a picnic, but he was going with it.
A ball of light streaks across the sky, catching both their attention. "Is that a shooting star?"
"I think so," Justin says. He stares at her, at the open wonderment on her face and feels himself fall, hard, and crash land directly in the center of hopelessly enamored. "Make a wish."
Her eyes slip shut and she purses her lips up in concentration. "Okay," she announces. Justin laughs, falling back into the pillows and snags one of the Starbursts for himself. When Alex lies down against his side and tosses her blanket over him, he points out the constellations that are visible, ignoring her ribs and barbs, and she twines her legs through his when her feet get cold, head in the crook of his shoulder.
…0…
Washington; 2018
Alex leaves her number at the Gallery for him, just so he can call her with his plans. She doesn't hug him goodbye, doesn't even say it. All she does say is "It was good to see you." before disappearing out her front door.
And of course the only flight to Chapel Hill isn't until the next afternoon.
Justin looks down at the phone in his hand, thinking about his promise to call her right away with his plans. But then it dawns on him that he's alone in Alex's house. The temptation is too much for him to resist.
He's in the kitchen, so he starts there, just looking around. Really looking-trying to gleam some insight into the girl he doesn't even know anymore. He doesn't even remember Alex cooking anything when they were growing up, but it certainly appears as though she uses her kitchen quite a bit. Cookbooks and grocery lists are scattered about every type of cooking utensil to be found is there somewhere.
But the dishes are sparse and that says a lot. She eats at home a lot, alone.
His stomach clenches.
The living room looks comfy and lived in, art books in heaps on the shelves and coffee table, magazines and CDs stacked on top of them, photos and knick knacks arranged in a fashion that made little sense to him, but that was unsurprising. Justin smiles as he takes it all in. He feels like he's getting to know her all over again.
It's a nice feeling.
Then his eyes light on the hallway floor and he follows the line down to the end where Alex's bedroom is.
Does he dare?
His feet take him there because he can't seem to make them listen to the fact it's a bad idea, and he lingers heavily against her doorway before stepping in.
It reminds Justin very little of Alex's bedroom back in New York, which had still been covered in pink fur and hanging beads last time he'd been there, with the soft, muted shades of blues and the black and white prints on the wall.
Take away the feminine bent of the photos and the teddy bear on her dresser and it looks eerily like his own room in North Carolina.
The realization is, for lack of a better word, disturbing.
There's only one thing in the room that seems like it could belong to the sister he knew and that's the antiquey looking vanity sitting in the corner piled high with little glass bowls full of jewelry and tubes of make up. He sees the heaps of silver and colored beads, the lip gloss and perfume bottles, and he remembers the little girl who used to beg him to let her try out their mother's make up on him, the girl he sat and watched from her bed while she chattered about anything that popped into her head and got ready to go out. Running a finger along the edge of the glass top, Justin imagines the woman (so distant, withdrawn) from the top of church steps in her quiet dress and painful heels sitting there, applying her eye shadow so carefully, just like she used to.
Then reality kicks in and the full weight of what he's doing dawns on him. This is the road to ruin, he knows that, and it leads down a familiar path of hurt and resentment that he, they, can not go down again.
He's about to leave when his gaze falls on a jumble of dark blue beads that he recognizes. Rosary beads, porcelain, with a crystal cross that their grandmother gave her when she was confirmed, a family heirloom that she had always treated with the utmost respect.
Old habits die hard he thinks, running the cool beads through his fingers.
…0…
New York, 2012
Alex takes up silk screening at the local Y, bringing home dozens of scarves that she gives to Theresa or drapes over her lampshade to see what kind of 'mood' it will set.
"Its kind of like one of those rotating camp lights," he remarks and stuffs a pillow under his head, looking at the flower patterns on Alex's ceiling, "only it doesn't move."
"And you get straight A's," Alex muttered.
He props himself up on his hands and watches her sew a zipper into a pretty pink top with lace down the front. Not something she would wear, but she handles it as though it is the single most important thing in her vicinity right now. He likes that about her, how focused she is.
Is it wrong that he sort of likes it because that's a trait she's always chided him about. The irony, unspoken of, is not lost on him.
They're less than a month away from the battle and the tension in the house is slowly building, leaving them all to deal with it their own ways. Max spends more time at the garage than ever (he should be practicing, Justin thinks) and he doesn't talk that much when he is at home, preferring to take magic books up to his room alone. Theresa cleans almost constantly, and Jerry tries in vain to get them all to talk about what will happen once its over and two of them are powerless.
When Paige calls and tells her that she met a guy in the Hamptons and they're getting married, begging Alex to come to Greenwich for the wedding, Alex spends three days straight making a new dress to wear.
He watches her, occasionally doing some research on his senior engineering project, as an outlet of his own because there really isn't that much else to do with none of his old friends around now Alex has even said that him being chummy with Jack bothers her.
She spent two paychecks from the restaurant on an entire bolt of peach colored silk, screening it with exotic looking blooms in bright pink and turquoise to be the foundation of her collection, and her dress for the wedding comes from it. She makes him give her an honest opinion of it the night before they go (she insists he come) and quite honestly, she the sight makes it hard for him to breath it suits her so well and he presses her up against the wall of her bedroom, hands in her hair, until they hear their dad calling them through the open door and spring apart.
He begins to doubt agreeing to go with her on an overnight trip to Connecticut. They've avoided disaster so far, now it just feels like they're courting it.
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