Title: Kiss That Girl
Author: Alexandra Bruderlin
Feedback: Would be lovely if you feel inclined.
Rating: M
Notes: This chapter is dedicated to ZombieGurl98 for being so patient. This was an incredibly hard chapter to write. Thank you so much to all my reviewers who have shown such support for this fic; it really is my pet project. Since there was so long between updates, there's a little flashback to refresh everyone...
Warnings: Language
Disclaimer: Lexy belongs to me. Tawny indirectly belongs to Kara. Everyone else belongs to James Cameron and FOX, even though they so don't deserve them. No profit is being made, I swear.

Tawny slept shirtless, in his boxers. He lay on the left side of the bed, the streetlights outside reflecting light and shadows across his face, so I couldn't read his expression.

"Tawn?" my voice came out softly but strongly. He faced me and I knew he hadn't been asleep either.

I crawled across the bed and lay against his side. I knew he was giving me a quizzical look. I looked up at him and we both leant forward at the same moment. His hand came to rest on my hip, my hand cupped his cheek. And he kissed me.

It wasn't my first kiss; Joel had kissed me once or twice when I was playing at being 'Alecia'. But this kiss was different; it felt like my first kiss because never had Joel kissed me like that, or touched me so gently, stroking my hip through my nightshirt. I slipped my arm around his neck and deepened the kiss, my eyes closed.

Tawny began sliding my nightshirt up and I pulled back and shoved my hair back from my eyes and curled up next to him, my own hand catching his and pulling my nightshirt back down. He relaxed against the bed too, pulling me towards him, my head resting against his shoulder, and my feet icy against his legs. And we fell asleep tangled up in the blankets and each other like we were back at Manticore.

When I woke up, still curled around Tawny's warm body, I felt deliciously slothful but absolutely starving. My nightshirt was bunched around my waist and I pulled myself up pulling my hair off my neck; it was tangled like a spider's web. Tawny's room seemed almost depressing in the early morning light – the walls were grey with dirty marks across them. The light fitting was black with grime and the corpses of bugs and the carpet was frayed in a great rope across the room.

Tawny was known for sleeping like the dead, and he hadn't so much as flinched as I wriggled around in his bed. I gave up trying to wake him, and padded out to the kitchen, ignoring the grime I could feel clinging to the bottom of my feet.

The cartons from the previous night's Chinese food were still scattered over the kitchen sink; we'd eaten most of it, but a few of the carton's still had the odd spring roll or something in the bottom. But when I saw several cockroaches run across the bench, I dropped the cartons in the sink and wiped my hands on my nightshirt. Food was something I definitely needed but there was something about eating left over Chinese the cockroaches have already had a go at. Eww. It was just past six, and Tawny wouldn't be up until at least eight. I could go and find food or wash some of my clothes – I had one clean zip-front sweatshirt and no clean jeans. If I was lucky, I might have clean socks and underwear in my bag.

I left Tawny sleeping, changing into my jeans – that were so dirty, they felt damp - and my sweatshirt, and gathered up our dirty laundry in a garbage bag to take to the Laundromat – of all the businesses that shut down after the Pulse, Laundromats had flourished because no one could afford to run their own washing machine or dryer, so it wouldn't be too difficult to find one. I raided Tawny's wallet for a handful of quarters, the coins jangling loudly from my sweatshirt pocket.

It was barely seven as I made my way down the street. There were a few people walking in the streets, some in suits and heading towards work, and others having nothing else to do except walk the streets of New York City in the early morning hours.

I found a Laundromat on the next street, decorated with a blue neon light sign, with dirty linoleum floors and three walls of washing machines and dryers. A skinny man in grubby suit pants sat at a desk in the window, paging through a battered comic book, obviously the owner.

I didn't acknowledge him, but moved towards the rusted machines, dumping our jeans and sweatshirts into it and feeding coins into the side.

I couldn't leave our things in the machine and go and find breakfast; most likely someone would steal our clothes and neither Tawny nor I had enough clothes to let someone help themselves to them.

Tawny. I'd been trying to ignore what happened the night before since I left the apartment; well, not ignore but just not think about it. What could happen between us? If Zack thought that Tawny and I were together as anything more than brother and sister, he'd relocate us both faster than I could imagine; and the truth was that since Tawny had found me, I'd felt safer than ever before. It didn't matter that Lydecker got close enough to touch me, or how bad working at the Chinese restaurant really had been, it had automatically been better because Tawny was there with me.

I sat atop the machine next to mine, and found a water-logged, and sun warped magazine that was only two years old and paged through it without actually looking at the pages, my left knee jiggling nervously against the machine. I knew Zack; he'd find out that Tawny was my weakness, and Zack wouldn't abide by any weaknesses, emotional or physical. Zack had left me behind enough times in the future when I begged and pleaded with him to let me stay with him – he wouldn't listen to reason if it didn't agree with his personal principles.

The owner shot me a look – my leg swinging against the washing machine was obviously irritating him, with the echoing noise it made. I bit my lip and tucked my legs underneath myself and refocused on the magazine, detailing society's ills with the odd page about a washed up celebrity and a recipe that no one could cook because all of the ingredients were impossible to get.

I smoothed out the article about a Post-Pulse actress, with long gold-blonde hair piled on top of her head in loose curls. My own hair hung loose around my face, on my shoulders and I twisted some of it around my fingers – the actress wore her neck bare, her dress long and ice blue, baring her midriff, her shoulders and her back, and I wondered what Zack would say if I did my hair up and wore a dress like that.

I wondered what Tawny would say.

I flicked to the back of the magazine, examining an article on unemployment in New York, my mind still stuck on that beautiful dress; I couldn't remember the last time I had worn a dress or a skirt that wasn't skin tight. My entire wardrobe now consisted of jeans in different stages of threadbare, and t shirts that never looked truly clean.

"Lex."

Tawny had burst into the Laundromat, wearing a pair of jeans that looked even grosser (if that was possible) than the ones that I had brought down here to wash, and a band t shirt that bore several holes.

"I've been looking for you everywhere," Tawny came up to me, and offered me a paper bag. "You shouldn't have run off without telling me where you were going – new city and all that jazz. Grabbed you something to eat."

I opened the paper bag and looked inside – a sugary, jam doughnut that felt warm through the brown paper. I grinned up at him and took a bite. "Oh god, that's good," I said, through a mouthful of fried dough, sugar and raspberry jam. I wiped my mouth on my hand. "We needed to do some laundry and you were sleeping."

"Then wake me up," he pulled himself up onto the washing machine next to me. "Not exactly rocket science."

"I can handle myself, Tawn," I laughed, taking another bite of the doughnut. "I'm not completely helpless."

"But we haven't even been in the city twenty four hours yet, and you're running off without even a cell phone?" Tawny rolled his eyes. "You are such a girl."

"I go out to do your laundry, and this is all the thanks I get?" I asked in a teasing voice, finishing my breakfast, crumpling the paper bag up and cramming it in the pocket of my jeans.

"You did my laundry, too?" Tawny grinned. "You didn't say that. But you should've woken me up."

"Whatever," I tossed my hair back. "It's almost done, anyway."

"Good. Cause I am starving – we need to get to the market and pick up some food. Maybe get you a cell phone so you don't go running off on me again," he pulled my hair gently. Before I could answer, the machine let out a sad sounding noise to let us know it was finished.

"We can dry this stuff at home," Tawny jumped off the machine and held his hand out for me to get down. I couldn't meet his gaze, but I did unnecessarily steady myself on his arm, my hair falling into my face.

It didn't take us long to get back to the apartment and rig up a makeshift clothes line in the bathroom – the curtain rob from the lounge room balanced across the top of the shower, and then Tawny dragged me off to the market for food.

"I'm starving," Tawny moaned as we moved into the massive indoor markets, with the huge crates of food and people shoving others out of the way for the best of the food. His arm was resting around my shoulder as he guided me in, and I was tempted to lean into him but bit my lip and looked up at him, with the sweet smile I had perfected over the years.

"Let's do this and then go and get pancakes," I said, twisting out of his grip.

"Okay," Tawny pulled the ends of my hair and we moved into the throng of aggressive shoppers.

We didn't talk about what had happened between us, as cliché as it sounds. I just tried to remove myself from it, I guess. I wasn't a forward sort of girl and I was terrified Zack would turn up and make me leave Tawny behind. I couldn't let that happen. It seemed like my happiness was like spider web or cotton candy – I had a grip on it but it was so fragile, so flimsy, so insubstantial that I could lose it again. I think Tawny tried to talk to me about it several times, but I ducked my head and willed him to let it go, which he did. He always said he could read me like a book.

The first few days were strange for me; I had always been shoved into foster care – weaving lies to get myself by with some normal family (well, 'normal' is relative) who could take care of me. But it was so different with Tawny. He got us both fake IDs (he laughed, and pointed out that all the hippies were grown up now, and no one named a kid 'Tawny' anymore), and painted a pretty lie for anyone who asked. Some woman at the market had asked, eyeing me with my long tangled hair and him with the slightly punk look he was trying out, and Tawny called me his step sister, which still felt weird; my efforts to remove myself entirely from That Kiss were failing miserably.

Tawny got a job fairly easily in the city, on a construction job in the Bronx, which ate up most of his time; I only got to really see him on the weekends. It was harder for me to get a job, still being my young, skinny self. I tried everything, at Tawny's urging, from being a cleaner at a local club to helping at the market but, unlike Boston, no one in New York believed I was sixteen. I had missed my fourteenth birthday sometime during our time at the Chinese restaurant, and my fifteenth was approaching, but the fact was I still looked pretty much like a kid.

Finally, the only job I could get was rolling newspapers at a local newsstand, a job that paid way below the minimum wage, and involved me crouching behind the counter for hours. The Pulse had seriously damaged the journalism industry, and papers were delivered in great piles, leaving it to the newsstand employees to divide the pages up and roll them up. It was up to a woman named Nancy, who was practically blind, to put the pages in order, and she constantly got it wrong. By the time I made it back home of an afternoon, my hands and face were smudged with printing ink and I had a dozen new paper cuts on my hands. It was uncomfortable, sweaty, boring work; five bucks an hour in this economy was virtually child labour.

I spent most of my spare time in the apartment, thinking (read: freaking out) about whatever had changed between me and Tawny. I couldn't put my finger on what exactly had changed, but I knew something had.

It probably didn't help that I kept daydreaming, and he'd catch me staring at him, and give me this unreadable look that usually distracted me from whatever I'd been thinking about (and it wasn't always about The Incident; sometimes it was about creative ways to kill my employer).

It was a Saturday night, which meant we were both home and eating dinner – pizza. Well, Tawny was finishing the pizza; I had started on the cherry ice cream I had liberated from the supermarket a few days earlier. I was leaning against the fridge, spoon in my mouth, wondering if real cherries tasted anything like cherry flavouring.

"We should probably start cooking stuff ourselves, you know," Tawny gestured with his final slice of pizza.

"Why?" I shrugged, pink coloured spit dribbling down my chin, and I almost knocked myself unconscious in my haste to wipe it away.

"Because take out has no nutritional value," Tawny plucked the spoon and the ice cream out of my grip.

"I haven't got scurvy yet," I said in a teasing tone, reaching for my ice cream. Tawny grabbed my hand and spun me around slowly, a mischievous grin on his face as his gaze flicked lower. I tugged my hand away and mock glared. "I don't remember anything about scurvy affecting my ass, Tawn," I said in a coy little voice, and almost threw up on the spot. It just wasn't me that was saying this, that was instigating whatever would come next. I wasn't this person. It was one of those things you want to shriek and clap your hands over your mouth, and apologise for over and over again. But I was frozen in mortification. I had tried so damn hard to let it all go…

"Oh, Lex," Tawny said in a soft voice, pushing some of my hair off of my face. He was barely meeting my eyes. "You're just a kid, I can't…"

If I had been anyone else, any one of my sisters, I probably would have slapped him for that. But something in the way he said it made me step back, and pull myself to sit on the counter, picking up my container of ice cream and stabbing it with my spoon. A thousand responses were running through my head, and I'm pretty sure every single one of them was gleaned from a bad television show or tawdry magazine.

"We're fucked up enough, Lex," Tawny moved towards me, leaning against my legs. "You think people aren't going to ask questions if I'm with a girl as young as you?" The ice cream was melting. "And nothing pisses Zack off more than this."

The brazen side of me slipped out then. "If it wasn't about that, would you?" In that one moment, I hated his eyes because I just couldn't look away.

"You're special to me," he shrugged, stepping back and pulling himself up, next to me. "I think if things were different we probably wouldn't be having this conversation."

I nodded and looked at the rapidly melting ice cream.

Tawny sighed and dropped his head into his hands. "I fucked this up, didn't I?"

I shook my head. "No. I don't really know how this could have gone any other way."

Tawny nodded and moved to throw the pizza box out. I grabbed his arm. "I… you're the first person – the first guy who's ever made me feel like I'm not a freak, and I'm not screwing everything up, and that I'm safe, Tawny. It's always been like that, and it's not something that's gonna change just because of all the shit. I could drop dead tomorrow or in a week or in a decade, and it's always going to be you."

He offered me a small smile. "Then maybe we'll just wake up one day, and all the shit will be fixed."

"Well, Zack's not going to get any less anal," I replied flippantly, "but there's a chance I'll get older."

Tawny looked at the gun that was resting by his wallet, and twisted some of my hair around his fingers. "That's a chance I'd really like you to have, which is why…" he trailed off and shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts. "I need to get some sleep."

"Probably should have left the deep conversations until breakfast," I said, tossing my hair over my shoulder. "I'll be up for a couple of hours."

"Don't go anywhere," he warned, hovering near me. "This is going to be awkward for awhile, isn't it?"

"Only three more years," I replied sweetly, sliding off of the counter and dumping the dirty mugs in the sink.

"You're becoming a bad ass in your old age, sis," Tawny half laughed. "It's kind of hot."

I flicked the tea towel at him and he left the kitchen, chuckling to himself half heartedly. And I picked up the half full carton of ice cream and threw it against the wall, and watched it leave long, sticky, red trails on the dull coloured wall.

I solemnly swear that I'm not being totally evil. Just trust me, and I'll do everything in my power to update quickly!