Alex is barely taller than Beca, white-blonde hair cut short to match her pixie-like features. She prefers what Beca determines to be an expansive approach to her work, inside out, feng shui and pattern matching and color coordination included in the physics and physicality of a building. It mirrors the cross of the precision of math and the imprecision of art that creates music, the one that Beca fell for once upon a time, buried deep in her own childhood.

Beca wanders through Alex's apartment, buzzed and jittery, her limbs still loose with music from the concert they just left. The walls are carefully scattered with photographs and framed magazine covers, the tables overflowing with blueprint stacks and color swatches. It's more than she can take in at once, and she eventually plops down in an overly small armchair.

"So," she mumbles through too many drinks. "Apparently you're kind of awesome at what you do."

Alex chuckles, calm and modest like she has been through one lunch date and two dinner dates and the first concert Beca has been comfortable inviting someone to in ages—since Chloe, a nasty little voice pipes up from the background— and curls into a corner of the couch. "Just lucky," she counters. "I looked you up, you know. You're pretty amazing at what you do, too."

"Nah," Beca drawls out, ducking her head and scrubbing a hand over her cheek. The heat in her skin could be from the overcrowded venue they were at, or awkwardness, or humility, but there's no telling which at this point. "I don't build things, I just— change them."

Alex stands from her spot on the couch, shifting over to the arm of Beca's chair, a hand curling around her jaw. She drops down into the chair, settling easily on top of Beca's legs—she's light, so light, with none of the sinewy muscle that brought a subtle weight to Chloe's frame—and presses her mouth against Beca's, fingers wrapping easily in her scarf. It's neither new nor unfamiliar, and Beca leans into the softness, the delicacy, the concern for her that Chloe never demonstrated.

Long moments pass, comfortable and heated and easy, before Beca pulls away and leans her head against Alex's collarbone. Alex's shallow breaths slips past her temple on every exhale, her chest rising and pressing briefly with each heartbeat under Beca's dropped chin.

"I should—"

"Stay."

Alex's suggestion weighs carefully against Beca's cheek, and Beca pauses abruptly. Her limbs freeze, her spine tightens, but her heart rate redoubles and her hands shift from creeping up Alex's ribcage to curling just above her hips.

"I should go," she mumbles again. Her words come out as a breath, dying softly in the space between them, and her fingers, traitorous and untrustworthy in the face of a fading dedication to red hair and blue eyes and a voice that will never again brush against the upper limit of a standard soprano, drop and release, resting loose and unintentional around the subtle outcrop of Alex's hips.

"You sure?"

"Yes?" She breaks one hand loose, skimming awkwardly down the line of Alex's thigh and then back up again, and Beca squeezes her eyes shut and pretends her fingers aren't shaking, her palms aren't clammy. "No," she says more confidently.

"No, you aren't sure, or no, you don't want to stay?" Alex's fingers curl under her chin, grey eyes uncertain as they stare Beca down.

"No," Beca says, and she presses up, kissing Alex for once instead of waiting to be kissed. "I don't want to leave."

"Okay," Alex mumbles against her mouth. She kisses Beca, heavy and intentional, again and again, and tugs at her scarf, leading her blindly towards the bedroom.

There are gaping holes in Beca's chest devoted to Chloe's Disney-blue eyes and long red hair, but the rest of her zeroes in on short blonde hair and grey eyes that drop into black the closer they get to the bedroom. It should be harder, maybe, to ignore the parts of her that are still hung up on Chloe, to adjust to even height and not hurrying and sheets that don't smell like the life Chloe and Micah had built once, but Alex is small enough for Beca's hands to fit neatly against her without stretching and she doesn't grumble when Beca sucks a bruise into the side of her neck, so Chloe fades to a quiet nagging tug in the back of Beca's head.

She wakes up halfway to sunrise, the edges of a panic attack grasping at her chest, and creeps out of bed alone. She's dressed and slipping through the apartment before Alex stirs in her sleep, but doesn't make it out before catching a glimpse through the open bedroom door of Alex's eyes, open and confused and wounded.

Beca is slumped over a cup of coffee when Jesse bangs into the apartment, sweating from his run and singing Rihanna at the top of his lungs.

"Someone came in late last night," he says, throwing a fist out for her to bump. Beca stares at it for a brief moment before redirecting her attention back to her almost-empty coffee cup.

"Uh oh." He drops down into the chair across from her, scrubbing a hand over his hair. "What's with the moping? Did you crash and burn?"

Beca's phone rings, Alex's name flashing on the screen, and Beca's elbow disrupts her mug as she fumbles to silence the phone. The last remnants of lukewarm coffee splatter onto the table. "Shit."

"Hey, what happened?" Jessie yanks a towel off of the counter behind him and wipes up the coffee, not looking away from Beca. "I thought things were good with you two."

"Yeah, well, I'm an idiot."

"What? Come on, whatever it is, it can't be that bad. Not unless you, like, yelled out Chloe's name in—oh my God." His eyes widen comically. "Did you?"

"No! I wasn't even thinking about her when we—during."

"Okay." His head cocks to one side. "So what happened? Was she crap in bed? Because she looks like she'd be amazing."

"Hey," Beca says, indignation narrowing her eyes. "You don't get to talk about her like that, or think about her like that."

"Really not the point here, Eeyore," Jessie says. "Why are you sulking?"

"I freaked out," she says, exhaling loudly and leaning tiredly against her hands. "I—it was good, it was great, and then I woke up and I freaked out and—"

"And?"

"And I left," she finishes quietly. "I just—I couldn't stay, I didn't know how, so I left."

"Oh," he says. "That's way worse."

She kicks him under the table. Her phone vibrates, indicating a voicemail, and she flinches back from it.

"You know you have to call her, right?"

"No, I was completely unaware of that," she snaps.

"Hey, don't do that bitchy I-hate-everyone Beca thing, okay," he says. "Not with me, not when you know I'm right."

She groans, her forehead hitting the table. "What do I say?" she asks her knees.

"Step one," Jessie says, and she doesn't have to look up to know he has his best scholarly face on. "You apologize for leaving her in the middle of the night after, I presume, rocking her socks off. Step two: you do something to show her that you're actually sorry and not just saying shit to get in her good graces. Step three: you tell her about Chloe."

Beca's head shoots off the table. "Say what?"

"Beca, come on," he says, rolling his eyes. "Alex is super awesome, and you were a dick. Apologies don't mean anything, not really, not unless you show her you're going to try and make up for it."

"But Chloe is—Chloe," she says. "She's never told people my secrets, I'm not going to tell anyone hers."

"Then don't use names." He shrugs easily. "Best friend. Lots of clandestine banging. Emotional roller coaster. Moved cities to find your bliss or whatever. Still working through it. Bim bam boom, explanation given, and maybe she forgives you."

"And what if she doesn't?" The words come out halfway to a whisper, and her shoulders slump. Once upon a time, she would have never been this girl.

"Then she doesn't," he says quietly. "And maybe she won't. But even if there was no chance that she would, you would still owe her an explanation, and you know it."

"Yeah," she says. "I know."

"Good." He hops up from his seat. "Now, I'm going to go hog all the hot water, and you're going to call her and see if she's still willing to see your stupid face again, and then you're going to take a cold shower as penance for being a dick to me, too."

"I hate you."

"I'm well aware." He punches her in the shoulder on his way out of the kitchen. "Don't procrastinate! Call her now."

"Go away, asshole!"

She putters around the kitchen, brewing another pot of coffee and emptying the dishwasher as the sound of Jesse singing in the shower drifts out into the apartment. Her phone sits on the table, an innocent light blinking the corner to indicate a voicemail and a missed call.

She finally picks up the phone, counting to three and dialing Alex's number before she can stop herself.

It rings twice before Alex picks up with a quiet "Hey."

"Hi," Beca says. She squeezes her eyes shut, wishing desperately for Chloe—her best friend Chloe, the one who would sit at her side and squeeze her hand and help her through the harder things in life before she became the hard thing in Beca's life—as she speaks.

"I'm sorry," she blurts out. "I mean—I owe you an apology, and an explanation." She takes a deep breath, forging ahead through Alex's silence. "Can I come over tonight?"

"Beca, look," Alex says. "If this was just some—thing for you, some get some and get out thing, then just let it end with that. I'm a big girl, I can handle that."

"No!" Beca says. "No, no, that is so not what it—no. I promise, that's really not what it was. I wouldn't do that. I just have some—stuff."

"Stuff."

"Yeah." Beca squeezes her eyes shut, fingers clamping over the edge of the counter. "I know it sounds lame and like a totally crap excuse, and maybe it is and—can I just explain?"

"Okay," Alex says heavily. "I should be home by seven."

"I'll be there," Beca says. "I—thanks. For not blowing me off."

"I'm not really a fight fire with fire kind of girl," Alex says, listless, and Beca winces.

"I'm going to say it again later, but I am sorry."

"I'll see you tonight." She sounds exhausted, and Beca bites down on the inside of her cheek when the line goes dead.

Jessie is out of the shower, and she has an hour before she has to be at work. True to his word, he's left her no hot water.

Beca barricades herself in her office all day, catching up on paperwork and old projects, responding to emails and generally avoiding human contact. Four times her thumb hovers over Alex's name on her phone; five times, over Jesse's; twice, she dials Chloe's number from memory and almost calls her each time. People were always Chloe's thing, more than Beca's, more than Jesse's, more than anyone else, and she's the lifeboat Beca still reaches for at times like this.

Chloe isn't the solution anymore—she's not even really the problem—though, so Beca leaves work at lunch and goes for the first run she's been on in a month, going and going and going until her lungs burn and her exposed skin is bright red from the cold air and her legs can barely carry her home; even after an unhealthily long hot shower and her fingers thawing out, she still has two hours to kill.

She winds up pacing up and down the stairs in front of Alex's building at ten past six, measuring her paces so that she makes it up and down once for every ten seconds that pass, hands shoved into her jacket pockets and tapping with the rhythm of the music in her headphones.

She's on the fourth song and approaching a hundredth pass on the stairs when Alex is suddenly there, arms crossed defensively but curiosity edging out of her gaze.

"Hi," Beca says, teetering on the step and yanking her headphones down around her neck. "I'm early, sorry, I—"

"It's okay," Alex says. "Come on, it's cold out here."

Beca's legs shake as they climb the stairs to the third floor, calves burning after being run so hard. It gives her something to focus on other than the back of Alex's head and the uncomfortable silence between them.

In Alex's apartment, the scarf Beca had worn last night is still hanging haphazardly over an end table where Alex's nimble fingers had dropped it, and Beca's fingers clench at the lining of her pockets.

"Do you want a drink?"

"God, yes," Beca says too quickly, and a flicker of a smile flashes across Alex's face. "I mean, I don't need to—I just—yeah," she finishes, grinding her teeth together to stop herself from saying anything else.

She sits on the edge of the couch—as far from the chair she'd been in the night before as possible—and grips at her knees until Alex returns with two bottles of beer in hand.

"Thanks," she mumbles, taking a long pull of the beer.

Alex sits on the other end of the couch, curling back into the corner, knees up and protective in front of her chest, and picks at the label of her own beer.

"Why did you leave?" she asks after a long moment, and Beca's fingers flex sporadically around the neck of the beer, the bottle almost slipping from her grasp.

"I—I was freaking out," Beca says honestly. "It was stupid, I shouldn't have—I just freaked, and I ran."

"But why the freak out? It's pretty obvious that wasn't the first time you'd—"

"No, no, that's not it." Beca sucks in a sharp breath, rolling her eyes up towards the ceiling. "It's this really long story and it all kind of boils down to me being emotionally incompetent, I guess."

"I have time," Alex says firmly.

"Right." Beca sets her beer on the coffee table, first on the table and then jerking back out quickly to move it over onto a coaster and wipe the condensation off the wood with the sleeve of her jacket, stalling.

"Right," she says again. "You know how I just moved her a little while ago."

"From New York."

"Yeah. I—God, this sounds so stupid." Beca pushes a hand through her hair, clenching her jaw. "There was a girl. My best friend. We had a—I don't know what it was. We weren't together, but we were screwing around. A lot. And she had a boyfriend, but we were sleeping together before she even met him."

Her cheeks are hot, and she stands from the couch, pacing up and down between the coffee table and the fireplace twice before stopping front of Alex, fingers curling around her own elbows. "I don't know if it ever meant anything to her, but it wound up meaning a lot to me, and—and I knew it was wrong, and I knew we shouldn't, but we just kept coming back to each other, you know?"

Alex is quiet, impassive, her chin resting on her knee as she watches Beca shift uncomfortably. Beca tugs her jacket off, overheating in the warmth of the apartment, and stares at her shoes.

"Before that, before any of that, I didn't know I was gay," Beca says quietly. "But it just—I just—I figured it out. I don't know if that makes me an idiot for taking that long to figure it out or what, but I didn't—not until then. I was gay, and I was falling for my best friend, and we were screwing behind her boyfriend's back. And I kept letting myself go back to her, or her come to me, because I thought that what we were doing was better than nothing, I guess?

"But I couldn't keep doing it, because I'm just not—cut out for that, I guess? But apparently she can, or she could, or she had no problem doing it with me. Whatever it was, I finally blew up at her and told her I couldn't keep doing it, that what we were doing was screwing with me and I just wanted to be with her, and then she showed up at my door drunk a few days later and tried to sleep with me after she'd run out on a fight with her boyfriend, even though he was right behind her.

"After that, I really couldn't deal with any of it anymore," Beca finishes heavily. "I packed up all my crap, moved in with Jesse, and convinced my boss to let me keep working from Chicago."

Alex is quiet, eyes narrow as she studies Beca. Beca tugs at the leather band around one wrist, jittery in the face of silence and honesty and memory.

"So you ran out on me because you're still in love with her?"

"No!" Beca says quickly. "I mean—Jesus, I don't know anymore, Alex." She crashes down onto the couch, curling around her knees. "I don't think I am. I know that I don't want to be. But I guess I also just let her—I let her get to me."

"If she showed up at your door tomorrow," Alex says after a moment. "Sober, single, and ready to be with you. Would you take her back?"

"You can't take back what you never had," Beca says quietly. "We were never together. She was using me, and I was letting her, and it was fucked up and weird and not something that should have ever happened."

"That's not what I asked."

"I don't want to be with her," Beca says. She sits up straighter, fingers clenching at her knees so tightly her knuckles ache, and forces herself to meet Alex's level gaze. "She was my best friend, I can't stop caring about her, but I don't want to be with her."

"When we were—last night. Were you thinking about her?"

"Dude, no," Beca says firmly. "I was definitely not."

"Okay," Alex says after a few seconds. "Okay."

"Okay?" A miniscule bit of hope edges into Beca's voice, a tentative smile starting to form. "Is that a good okay?"

"It's an okay," Alex says. "An I need a little time to think okay."

"Right," Beca says, nodding. "Of course."

She pushes herself up to her feet, shrugging back into her jacket. "Just—uh, you obviously know where to find me. I'll be around."

"Okay," Alex murmurs, and Beca nods once more.

"Thanks for letting me explain," Beca says quietly, shoving her hands into her pockets and turning towards the door.

She's just pulled the door open when Alex slams it shut, spinning Beca around and kissing her heavily. Beca responds immediately—it's easy, so easy, when Alex takes the lead, because there's no pretense, no façade, no guilt—and sinks into the way Alex's hands grip at her shoulders, pinning her against the door.

"If you're staying, you're staying," Alex breathes out against Beca's mouth, and Beca's entire body trembles. "No running away this time."

"Okay." She pulls Alex closer, hands skimming up her spine and back down again.

"You promise?"

"Promise," Beca says, hot and raspy, and drops her hands to clench at Alex's hips, fingertips skidding under the denim of her jeans.

"Prove it," Alex says heavily, and kisses her again. Beca's hand fumbles behind her, struggling blindly to make sure the door is locked—just for good measure, paranoia built out of Chloe's secrecy—before she surges forward, pushing Alex towards the couch and settling on top of her.

author's note:

this chapter is a clear reminder of a) that dialogue will forever be the worst thing in the world, and b) why i sat on this stupid fic for half a year in the first place: because i do *not* have the discipline to write this the way it deserves to be told. alas! maybe i'll find some inspiration or something... also, i apparently totally screwed myself with the structure. this is becoming an unfortunate habit. anyways, point is, for the sake of full disclosure: this might not get finished, at least not in even the most remotely timely manner. because i'm a butthead. my sincerest apologies, duckies.