Sorry this took so long - I promise you're not going to have to wait another month for the next chapter! Just let me know whether you're still reading this - and whether you liked it or not!
Twenty-eight hours and forty-two minutes. That was how long it had been since Alex had kicked Olivia out of her apartment. The blonde ADA was sitting at her terrible expensive and terribly chaotic desk in her apartment, staring out of the window into the night. It was almost ten pm and she was still buried in paperwork – not that that wasn't her own fault, though. She had thought about calling in sick this morning, but had quickly dismissed that thought and dragged herself to work, purposely avoiding the 16th precinct all day. So instead, she had – yet again – brought work home with her, feeling guilty about having left work so early the day before. The only problem was that she couldn't focus. No matter how hard she tried not to think about what had happened (and could have happened), certain images just kept flooding her mind: The look in Olivia's eyes when she had pushed her away. Staring at the broken coffee mug on the floor, wondering whether everything was falling apart now. Fleeing the scene. Kicking Olivia out of her apartment. Crying herself to sleep on the couch after reading the text message Olivia had sent her after Alex had been ignoring her calls for almost an hour.
Ever since last night, she had probably re-read Olivia's text message more than a hundred times, but she still hadn't texted back, not knowing what to say. How did one respond to a resignedly-sounding "I'm worried about you, Alex but I'm not gonna force you to tell me anything – I just want you to know that I'm here for you, okay?" - With an "I know"? With "Thank you"? With "Please stop saying that because I'm terrified I might actually tell you and I can't ever let that happen"?
Alex involuntarily shook her head as if she could dismiss her thoughts and worries by just shaking them out of her mind hard enough. Of course that didn't work, though. So instead, she got up to refill her coffee mug once more, trying to push the memory of the incident of the previous morning away. If she just worked hard enough – she figured – she could just take it all back: If her work performance didn't slip now; if she just kept pretending everything was fine, people would eventually forget about how she had freaked out in the precinct, right? She grabbed yet another file from her desk. Flipped through it. Frowned. Sighed. Got up again to grab a specialist book on law. Flipped through it. Frowned. Sighed. Got up again to grab more coffee. And started again.
Just before the sunrise was painting Manhattan in a kitschy pink-orange, Alex had worked through all files on her desk and read up on some weird kind of brain injury a particularly pain-in-the-ass-y attorney was planning on using as a defense strategy for his client who had gone on a rape-and-killing-spree, seemingly because his altered brain anatomy had made him do it.
Although she had actually watched the sunrise, Alex still seemed to be surprised by the fact that it was indeed morning already: She flinched when the alarm on her phone went off. Jumping to her feet, Alex suddenly felt so dizzy she had to get hold of the tabletop to steady herself. Oops. She took a deep breath, waiting for the dizziness to subside, but instead, guilt was creeping up: She had just pulled yet another all-nighter and hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before. But so what? She was fine.
Okay... Maybe she should have gotten some sleep. Should have eaten more and had less caffeine. But eventually, this wasn't any different from finals week in law school, was it? And now, she was an ADA for the Special Victims Unit in Manhattan, for god's sake! She had known right from the beginning what she was getting herself into, hadn't she? Alex sighed loudly. She was fine - didn't have any right not to be fine. After all, nothing had happened.
Right?