Title: Kiss That Girl
Author: Lexie Jayne
Feedback: Would be lovely if you feel inclined.
Rating: PG
Notes: This chapter was incredibly hard to write, and you'll understand why once you read it. I hope you enjoy this chapter. Chapter 12 will be online before Christmas Day, just to give you an idea of time frame.
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.
After sitting in the bath for most of the afternoon, with a collection of bloody glass shards next to me, trying my hardest not to cry and to stop shaking, I managed to limp from the bathroom to get my bathrobe and some bandages; my left thigh was now a crisscrossed mess of cuts and blood. We didn't have many first aid supplies in the apartment – we hadn't really had any need for them before now and had saved our money.
There was a slightly yellowed piece of gauze and a few pieces of medical tape left; it would have to do until I decided to work to the drug store to get some better supplies.
I crept around the apartment like the Texan was listening at the door. I didn't bother getting changed, but put my pajamas on and braided my hair. I folded the laundry I'd done and left Tawny's on his bed, whilst I waited for Tawny to return home; I jumped every time I heard someone walk along the corridor. Neither Tawny nor I had bothered to get to know our neighbours, and I'd only seen two or three other people who lived in our building, which had around one hundred apartments in it.
It was typical that Tawny would get home late that evening; by that time, I was practically crawling up the walls, I was so jumpy.
"Hey Lex," Tawny dropped the paper bag of our dinner on the counter and shrugged out of his jacket. "There was a freaking accident at the site; bloody wires were screwed the second we wired them in, there was going to be problems…"
"Cheaper is better," I shrugged, hovering close to him. "Did you fix it?"
"Nah. After fourteen hours, they stop paying us. If the freaking site burns to the ground, they deserve it. Hungry?"
"Starving," I said, slipping into the kitchen for cans of soda and some plates. We sat hunched over food silently for a few minutes before Tawny flicked a corn chip at me.
"You had an okay day?"
"It was long," I said slowly, taking a bite of my food. "But Mr. Webster is giving me tomorrow off – unpaid."
"You should relax and get some sleep; you look like death warmed over." Tawny leant over and stole some of my enchilada, his arm brushing against mine and I swallowed hard. Tomorrow, our breakfast was tomorrow.
"Like I said, I had a long day," I sat back and watched him eat most of my food. The thought of breakfast the next day had taken a weight off my shoulders; we'd sit down and discuss how we felt like reasonable adults, and how we'd make it work. Other people had made relationships work, even with age differences. We could do it. The cold feeling that had clenched my stomach since the market place was slowly disappearing.
"Get off," I shoved Tawny away from my plate, which was now half empty, and reclaimed my fork. "What time are we heading off to breakfast tomorrow?"
"I've gotta be back at work about 6am, so I'll meet you there at about 9:30," Tawny sighed. "Fuck, do you think that Zack will pull us out of here any time soon?"
"Doubtful, very doubtful. We haven't been here that long," I shoveled the rest of my food into my mouth and moved to stack the plates. "I'm going to crash. I'll see you tomorrow morning, 'kay?"
"Night, Lex. Try and sleep tonight, okay?" Tawny took the plates from me and kissed me on the cheek. "Love ya." I managed a shaky smile and went off to bed. It took awhile for me to get to sleep – between breakfast the next morning and the kiss on my cheek; I almost understood how ordinary teenage girls could moon over boys for months at a time. I snuggled into my bed and somehow I did manage to fall asleep – and I didn't wake up until after eight, something that never happened to me.
Tawny was already long gone by the time I stumbled into the kitchen for a cup of tea – there was no milk, of course – and my own clean laundry, which I'd left all over the lounge. I'd thrown a few extra things into the laundry – my nicest blue top and best jeans, which weren't exactly brand new or particularly good but they were the best I owned.
By the time I had gotten dressed and wiped my boots with an old bath towel I promptly buried in the bathroom cabinet, and combed my hair like I had seen other girls wearing their hair – plus unburied and used one of the tubes of lip gloss I had taken from the twins in Boston (it was a strange vanilla like flavor but the pale pink colour looked almost pretty on me, I thought), I barely made it to the diner in time. I rather wished I owned a dress or a skirt or some nice shoes, but I did the best I could.
I slipped in through the doors of the diner, tucking my hair behind my ear and scanned the diner for Tawny.
When I spotted him, I thought maybe I hadn't woken up this morning and this was one of those bloody dreams that kept me from getting a full night's sleep; not scary or disturbing, just dreams that bothered me.
A tall, thin girl with long, shining blonde hair was sitting beside him and they were sharing a menu, laughing. She was very pretty, I realized with a sinking feeling. Her blonde hair was held in place by a pale pink Alice band, and her outfit was clean and obviously new – a matching pink skirt, a white halter neck top and white patent leather boots. On anyone else, it would have looked like a Halloween costume. On her, it looked like something bought from one of those expensive shops I was always being thrown out of.
I bit my lip and managed to walk towards their booth, with the unsettling feeling that I was interrupting something private.
"Lex," Tawny looked up from the menu, and grinned at me. "Thought you'd forgotten."
I slid into the booth, pointedly ignoring the girl who was sitting so close to him, she was practically in his lap. "No risk of that; there's nothing to eat back home."
"Yeah – you didn't get any milk yesterday, like I asked." Tawny turned to the girl next to him and rested his hand on her leg. "Sorry, Brie, this is my step sister, Lexy. Lexy, this is Brianna Hamilton."
"Please, call me Brie. Brianna reminds me of my grandmother." She smiled across the table. "Tawny's been dying for us to meet."
I licked my dry lips and nodded. "Tawny… he says nothing but nice things about you," I lied, suddenly not in the least bit hungry and my leg began throbbing in pain. Maybe I hadn't gotten all the glass out of it. I should've checked last night. It definitely felt swollen. Maybe I should make excuses and go…
Before I could come up with a plausible lie – having already told Tawny I had the entire day off made it difficult – a waitress came over, and Brie and Tawny began rattling off their order, deciding to share something. I wasn't paying much attention, honestly. Inside my head, I was curled in a ball and crying hard, wailing life was unfair.
It wasn't that I was head over heels for him. I wasn't even fifteen, head over heels would come eventually, I knew. It was that for every major event of my life, Tawny had been my safety net. He'd never let me down, always kept me safe. And this new girl, who was everything I wasn't, from being his age and a blonde, to being very confident and stylish, felt like the ultimate betrayal.
I simply ordered a cup of tea – no milk, no sugar, just plain – half hoping Tawny wouldn't notice but really hoping that he would notice and realize something was wrong.
He didn't notice, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Brie, as she twisted her hair up elegantly and fastened a single clip into it to hold it. I caught sight of my own reflection in the napkin holder – my hair was already windblown and tangled; the lip gloss already gone. I looked like a kid.
The food came, more than enough to feed us for the entire day, and with all the plates, no one noticed I ate nothing, merely stirred my bitter, lukewarm tea around the chipped cup as they chatted.
"We've put this off long enough, Tawny," Brie's voice broke through my own half murderous, half heart broken thoughts as they both focused on me. "Ask her."
Tawny grinned at me, a full, easy grin that held nothing back. "Lex, Brie's from Canada, she's in the city trying out for some European ballet companies, and she's already got a scholarship for the NYC Ballet School, but they haven't got any rooms for her until next semester, so Brie's moving in with us for awhile."
I blinked and hastily took a gulp of my tea to put off commenting. She was a ballerina with Canadian citizenship. I might as well have been the thirty year old toothless hooker who hung out on Avenue A.
"Only if it's okay with you, Lex," Brie hurriedly added. "I don't want to cause any problems."
I put down my tea and I think that's really when I made my decision. I managed a mechanical-feeling smile and nodded. "It'll be fun."
"That's just awesome. I have to go call Mom, because she's been worried that I'd end up in some crack house in Brooklyn," Brie slid out from her seat and checked her watch – an amazingly tasteful silver affair that would have got me a few hundred on the streets. "And I have to go into the school to fill out some forms and stuff – I have an audition tonight."
"I've got to get back to work; I'll walk you to a cab." Tawny followed her suit, throwing down some money to cover the meal. "I'll help Brie move her stuff into our place this afternoon Lex, and we might grab something to eat in the city, so order out or whatever."
I nodded mechanically and as soon as they walked off and out of my peripheral vision, I put my hand over my eyes and let myself cry quietly to myself. I wish I'd been the sort of girl who could have gone to bed with him, who could have kept him and made it work. Been a few years older and a little bit more together.
I wiped my eyes with a wad of napkins and left the diner, my head down. I slipped through the maze of streets, only pausing once to buy a hair band and get a few dollars changed into quarters at a street stand.
I found myself in Tompkins Square Park just before noon – it was a mix of hookers, drug and arms dealers and the odd psychopath these days. Seedy, rusted and dangerous, I had made a point of never going there. Today, I felt like I might fit in. A runaway government project with severe emotional and abandonment issues with four dollars in quarter, a hand gun inside my mattress at home and an overwhelming aversion to sex? I was practically royalty in the court of the Severely Screwed Up.
I sat cross legged on a bench for hours. Three people approached me – a drug dealer who thought maybe I was after something and didn't know how to go about it; a weasel-y looking man with a beard that looked to me like a potential pedophile, the way he was leering at me and any other little girls who passed by the parks in the company of their parents, and a concerned whore, who offered me a cigarette and told me that the park was no place for a kid like me to hang around.
I didn't take the cigarette from her, but I did walk across the street to the pay phone, slowly, holding the quarters in my hand tightly. I already knew exactly what I was going to do, but I pretended I had a choice, that I could turn around and walk away at any moment.
I fed the quarters in slowly and dialed the number of Zack's voice mail and waited.
This is Zack. Leave a message after the tone.
A completely non-descript message that was read off by a mechanical voice so no one could trace the voice patterns. All the messages we left were translated into a computerized voice, too – Zack was anal about safety, even giving us pseudonyms to identify us in the messages so that no one would hear anything suspicious and we would never have to actually say our location out loud.
"It's me calling, Alecia. Tony's doing great here," I said, my mouth feeling dry. "Me, I'm not doing so well. Its 3:12pm, I'll wait till fifteen minutes past, and then I'm out of here." I hung up and slumped against the phone booth and waited.
Zack returned my call at precisely 3:15pm. "Alecia?" he said sharply.
"I'm here." I clutched the phone tightly between my hands.
"You want out?"
"I hate it here, I want to leave." I knew I sounded childish and sulky and felt embarrassed. Zack wasn't into emotional manipulation. Well, he wasn't into being emotionally manipulated. He was happy to be doing the manipulation himself.
"But Tony's okay?"
"He's fine."
"I'll be in the city tomorrow, at dawn." And then Zack broke his own stick code of phone conversations. "Tinga needs help. You're the closest to her. Just you. If Tony's fine, he can stay where he is. If he's not, he'll go somewhere else."
"I'll be ready," I said and hung up before Zack could add anything else, and began walking. I had enough money left over that I could get myself home via the subway, my heart pounding and my thoughts running a mile minute; I never even registered the stench and horror of the subway.
I didn't even go straight back to the apartment – it was just past mid afternoon, and I was hungry. I didn't have more than a few dollars on me, and paused at phone booth to get some money. It was easy; I balanced the handset between my ear and shoulder, cupped one hand over the keypad as if I was just leaning my hand there, and used a pen knife that I carried to pry off the cover of the phone, leaving wires and the plastic money container exposed. Then it was the matter of scooping out money without anyone realizing what I was doing, and getting the casing back on. It sounded more complicated than it was – a variation of something we had been taught at Manticore as toddlers – and took around a minute to do. The phone box in question only held about six dollars in quarters.
Pen knife back in my boot, along with the change in my pocket, I walked towards a dingy looking deli that smelt of fried food, which sounded delicious. I ordered potato cakes, that were cooked to perfection and I'm sure were delicious, but I barely ate a mouthful; my stomach was churning with the anxiety of telling Tawny I was ditching him. At least I had the excuse Tinga needed help. I couldn't even contemplate what was wrong with Tinga. It felt like I was walking around outside of my body, and watching myself make decisions that I couldn't stop, couldn't change at all.
The sun was setting by the time I gave up on eating, and I headed back to the apartment; I had to pack my things and take a shower – god knows when Zack would bother stopping for rest and the like. And I should raid the fridge before I left. There was some soft drink left, and some stuff I could chuck into my backpack.
When I let myself in, a bunch of boxes and bags were stacked in the lounge room, all labeled as Brie's. I frowned as I stepped over one box and slipped into my room. I didn't have many things of my own – my collection of ratty clothing, a hair brush, a beat up paperback novel and a toothbrush. They were the only things I managed to drag from place to place – anything else got lost, stolen or simply forgotten. It didn't take long to cram all my stuff into a backpack, and I began to worry.
I took a long shower, examining the swelling on my thigh from the milk bottle glass cuts – there had to be more glass in the wound as it was purple and red and swollen. I sighed, jabbing the wound with my finger, before deciding that I'd have to find some out of work nurse or doctor to take a look at it. One of the cuts probably needed stitches, it was so deep. I ripped up an old pair of underwear to use as a bandage before wriggling into my comfiest pants and shirt. I made weak tea – still no milk, but I had lost my taste for milky tea now – and a sandwich of stale bread for dinner, before watching a Spanish soap opera.
Tawny and Brie came home late, smelling of Indian spices and laughing, and I don't look round, too busy following my soap opera, trying not to give anything away in my body language.
"Hey Lex," Tawny threw himself onto the couch next to me. "How was your day?"
"Tawny, I'm going to take a shower," Brie had left her purse on the kitchen counter, and it was only a little bit tempting to raid her wallet. Tawny would have probably stopped me, though.
As soon as I heard the bathroom door shut, I turned to Tawny. "I can't believe you told her your name. I can't believe you told her my name."
"What is up with you? She's sweet. I told her they were nicknames," Tawny shrugged and picked up the remote. "Chill. You're as jumpy as Zack, Lex."
I frowned as my Spanish soap opera changed to a black and white gangster movie. I could hear the shower running; there was no way the girl could hear the conversation I was about to start.
"I'm going with Zack tomorrow," I said in a conversational tone, reaching for the television remote that Tawny held loosely in his hand.
"What?" Tawny jerked around to look at me, dropping the television controls. I picked them up and before I changed the channel, one of the gangsters on the screen shot a woman four times. I went back to my soap opera and turned the volume right down.
"I called Zack this afternoon," I swallowed and pushed a strand of hair that had escaped from my braid out of my eyes. "I called Zack. From a payphone near Tompkins Square Park. He's picking me up first thing tomorrow morning."
Tawny stared at me, his mouth open. Before he spoke, I heard the shower turn off. I wasn't continuing this conversation in front of Tawny's girlfriend. I didn't care who she was, what she was, to Tawny; I would never trust an ordinary person. Ever.
I stood up and moved down the hallway, to my bedroom. My bag was in the doorway, and I picked it up and tossed it into the corner so that Tawny wouldn't tread on it. I could hear him talking to Brie – "Something's up with Lex's brother" – before he slipped into my room and closed the door. I flicked the lock, meeting his gaze.
"Talk to me," Tawny said quietly. "Why the hell did you call Zack?"
"I'm leaving New York City tomorrow," I said slowly, not taking my eyes away from his gaze. He looked almost … almost hurt. "I'm leaving and Zack's picking me up. He needs help with Tinga – I think I'm going to stay with her for awhile."
"Why did you call Zack?" Tawny blurted out and I looked away. "Lex, not because…"
"I think it's better if I get away for awhile, considering everything."
"Zack could use this to split us up for good." Tawny's hand rested on my shoulder and I tensed up.
"I don't think he'd do that," I replied softly. "I trust Zack. When it's safe, he'll let put us back together."
"When it's safe? This is Zack we're talking about, Lexy! It will never be safe enough to get back together, according to Zack. Odds are we're never going to see Jondy or Max or Zane, Lex, if we stick to Zack's rules." Tawny looked at me with a sense of desperation.
"Zack's always bailed me out, Tawny. I can rely on him. And if I play the game by his rules for awhile, maybe it'll work out to my advantage," I walked over to the window and stared down at the street.
"That's manipulative," Tawny shot back. "Why the hell are you doing this? Because of Brie? Lex, I can't just sit around waiting for you."
"And I'm giving you the space so you don't have to sit around. But I don't have to stay and watch," I turned around to face him and crossed my arms over my chest.
"Lexy, you aren't listening to me - You could never see me again. This could be Zack splitting us up for good," Tawny grabbed me by my shoulders and gently shook me.
"Look, maybe if this was just about you and me…"
"There isn't a you and me - Brie's a nice girl, you'd really like her. I want you to like her."
"Right. If this was about you and about me and Brie, maybe I'd call Zack back and tell him I change my mind. But he said Tinga needs help, and I can help her, Tawny."
"What about me?"
"You've got Brie. Plus two X5s in one place is dangerous. Three X5s in one place is a walking target."
"Moving target."
"Yeah. So…"
"So, you're going to go?"
"For Tinga."
"No because of Brie."
"Only a little bit because of her, I promise." I offered Tawny a thin smile, and he just stared at me, disappointment etched over his face. And then he stepped forward, wrapping his arms around me, and pressing his lips to mine. I wound my arms around his neck and deepened the kiss before we both pulled away at the same time.
"We'll see each other again," Tawny said, his eyes dark. "We will."
I nodded and looked back out over the city. "Your girlfriend is waiting for you, Tawny," I said softly.
He'd already left the room, closing the door behind him.