show me your teeth {grey's - alex/lexie}
Title: Show Me Your Teeth
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie | Alex/Lexie. Meredith.
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,818
Author's Note: Angst city. Blame foibles_fables and the fanmix she made a week or two back.
Summary: This is all part of her quest to change, to find her identity, find direction; she just didn’t count on breaking herself in the process (she's not ready to hit the brakes yet).
. . .
“Dammit, Lexie,” and we have exhibit a, flying off the handle Meredith Grey style, “what’s so different from last time?”
‘I’m not trying to change him’ she wants to say, but thinks that would probably reflect worse on her than him. It rings of giving up, the sounds of settling and all of that.
“I am,” she says instead, defiant, and when she raises her chin, the way they say you’re supposed to (keep your head up little girl) the ends of her hair tickle her shoulders and she swallows the almost laugh that results, thinking all the while that she’s got to be doing something wrong.
Meredith looks at her with eyes full of pity, and it’s quite possibly worse than anything she could’ve said to her right then.
The words themselves aren’t exactly a picnic either.
“No, you’re not.”
Lexie is without a comeback.
-
She was always the cute one. She was always the good one. She was always the mousy one. It really got progressively worse, the closer she got to Seattle, the closer she got to comparison and scrutiny and the other sister she didn’t know she had or really wanted -- the one who wasn’t all happy and perfect and as normal as blueberry pie.
There is no changing when there is no room to grow; there isn’t even the motivation.
There’s room now. There are acres in fact, because the girl she was for years is now tied into the identity of the girl who broke Mark down, put him back together, and somehow managed to break him again (unintentional, and she’ll swear up and down that this is several variations of the word unfair). It’s tied to a person she doesn’t want to be anymore.
It’s not like it got her very far either. It got her labeled and summarily dismissed, and if that was what they term a successful relationship, a good lesson to learn, whatever, then she’s kind of done with the whole relationship business entirely.
She dyes her hair blonde and she takes up with the same man for the second time and crosses her fingers that the results won’t be the same this go-around.
(Even if they are, it certainly won’t hurt as bad as the alternative).
-
Alex doesn’t kiss the same as he used to.
There was this hint of goodness, somewhere on the edges of it all, like he was on the verge of something that even he couldn’t figure out - change, his own brand of it. Now, he’s insistent, rough without the forcefulness, and it pushes her in a way that she thinks she needs. Lexie has to keep up, has to find the rhythm, has to match her lips to his and her body to his and her needs to his in order to create a more perfect whole (in order to form a more perfect union, and she can see her fingers underlining words on the page of a textbook, clear like everything else and that’s the problem with a photographic memory, you can never stop reliving everything, over and over, from the insignificant to the heartbreaking - you don’t have the luxury of forgetting).
That’s what they’re all searching for, somehow, even if they’re not thinking about it. And Alex isn’t it for her, he’s not her endgame, he might not even be a blip on her radar in a month, six months, a year, five, but he’s that much closer, and he’s a safe, warm place to hide for a while so that she can lick her wounds and course correct.
(She’s too young to be thinking in these terms, finality and forever and complete. She marks that down on her list of things to change).
-
The words ‘fix’ and ‘heal’ and ‘change’ never pass through her lips with him, and if they did she can already picture the eye roll it would earn her, thanks very much.
She treats him like a brother in public. She’s just as likely to tease him as she is to tell him to sit down and shut up in all seriousness, and there’s always just enough space between them that people overlook what’s right in front of them (not Meredith - she’s got her eyes permanently affixed in their direction and Lexie realizes that, while she’s not wrecking this relationship, she’s basically doing everything she can to achieve that, and she’s not entirely sure if it’s Lexie or Alex that Meredith’s trying to protect here).
In private, she works to keep herself on equal ground and constantly reminds herself that this is not a relationship, no need to get attached - in fact, please stop doing that entirely if you wish to stay sane, alive, intact. She learns the merits of being just as demanding as he is, learns that he’ll give just as good as he gets if you teach him right. The removal of expectations has always made sex with him more fun, more refreshing, but it’s more than that now - it’s exciting and it’s the kind of fulfilling that she can deal with, a stop gap on everything she doesn’t want to feel or deal with right now.
Just the shift in perspective feels like a change, temporary as it is.
-
“You’re not going to fall in love here or something, right?”
He isn’t looking at her when he asks. He’s lying on his back in bed and her fingers are stilled on his chest, legs tangled with his. In some movies, the heroine would be smoking right now, the afterglow and ‘that was fun but you can go now’.
Some would call this harsh. The new Lexie would call this unfortunate reality, the ‘you see what you get’ mentality.
“No,” she replies, soft, inhaling against his skin, familiar scent, and there’s still tension in his body, like he doesn’t quite believe her and it compels her to add, “don’t flatter yourself.”
It takes everything in her not to leave at that very moment, to keep on with the steady breathing and relaxed position and the playful smile she fakes when he looks at her.
-
In trying to be this person, she always ends up feeling like an imposter.
She isn’t ready to hit the brakes yet.
-
When he begins to veer towards the delicate, the gentle, like he thinks she can’t handle it anymore, like he doesn’t want to break her, she pushes back with every bit of force she’s got in her.
“I never did understand why she left you.”
Her hip hits the dresser at an odd angle; she adds another bruise to the list. Her fingers curl into his side.
“She comes back and then suddenly she’s just gone - just like that,” she kisses him, and he’s relatively unforgiving in the way he responds, in the way he grinds against her. Game on, she supposes, and she’s never been quite this manipulative before. It makes her feel powerful; it also makes her feel a little sick. “It’s just, why bother?”
He turns them and she’s on her back on the bed before she registers the movement. She can talk a good game but he’s done this before and nothing beats experience. This is him; this is merely a version of herself, the girl formerly known as Little Grey, who drank juice boxes and held hands in the elevator (she prefers tequila now, and hasty make-outs in the elevator, and maybe Meredith’s whole issue is that Lexie’s rapidly turning into an earlier version of her older sister).
She arches her back and spreads her legs and he’s between them soon enough.
“I told her to leave,” he says, before his lips find her skin again, and there’s something chilling about the way his voice sounds in that moment, rough and raw and painful, third degree burns that will never heal.
She moans but it’s choked; he pretends not to notice.
-
In the hallways, Mark looks at her like he doesn’t recognize her.
She finds it preferable to whatever cocktail of hatred, hurt, anger, betrayal, and vulnerability he was mixing before.
-
He tosses the apartment listings on the kitchen counter on the way out his door one morning, his way of asking her to move in with him. To move out of here.
Meredith dribbles coffee on the counter, distracted, and shoves the coffee pot back into the maker with little grace. She doesn’t say a word.
She thinks about all the places she’s lived in the past few years, she thinks of this house and her sister and illicit affairs in the attic, in Alex’s bedroom; she thinks of the apartment she shared with George and unfulfilled and unrequited feelings, misplaced as they may have been, and redecorating and sad smiles and funeral flowers; she thinks of another apartment, this one with Mark, and the time they christened the shower and breakfast across the hall with the newspaper and coffee and all the times she’d said “I’m going home” and really, without a doubt in her mind, meant it. She thinks of an apartment that is yet unknown and separate but shared bedrooms and quiet mornings without dancing around the two other people living here and that grown-up feeling she first had when she moved in with George.
And then she exhales “okay”, soft and under her breath and Meredith looks like she’s on the verge of losing something.
-
She isn’t ready to hit the brakes yet.
So she’ll just brace for the crash.
-
“I like it.”
“Okay,” he says, decision made on their lunch break in the middle of the day one Wednesday.
They’ll move in a little over a week.
(In the car, near empty parking lot, her “thank you” gets slurred against his lips and his hand is on the nape of her neck, in her hair, and if not for the console between them she’d probably be in his lap right now, but there is that barrier - it’s a good metaphor, if she thinks about it long enough).
-
This is not like with Mark.
It’s was Mark’s apartment. Mark’s things. Her things littered it, and some probably still do, but there was never any question when they broke up about who would live where. It was his home - she’d only been a visitor, a guest who, as it turned out, had overstayed her welcome.
She’d still called it home, numerous times, and for awhile it was.
This will be different though. Different from him, different from Meredith’s, different from just about everything (no, not George, but the tension in the air was so stifling that she stopped living there long before she stopped paying rent) because it will be half hers. It’s half her money, half her stuff, half her territory, and she has rights and responsibilities and independence.
It’s nothing like with Mark.
(What she means: history will not repeat itself. She swears.)
-
Five days before they move in, Alex hits the road the customary forty minutes before she does and she sits in the kitchen with her sister once more, one of the last times, drinking orange juice and pouring over the newspaper so as not to be completely oblivious of the world around her.
Twenty minutes later, Meredith’s phone rings.
(This will come to mean something. Meredith’s phone rings. Not hers.)
“Wait, what happened?”
Meredith’s body shifts, hip cocks and leans against the counter, and she’s got this expression of worry on her face that makes the toast Lexie’s eating turn to sawdust in her throat.
“You were in a car accident?”
Lexie stops moving. She thinks she knows who’s on the other end of the phone now, and she’s playing worst case scenario and - holy shit what if something bad happened to him, like really, really bad and they’re supposed to move and he hadn’t really slept last night and she kept talking to him and maybe that was her fault and maybe he wasn’t paying attention and that’s why all of this happened and oh god oh god oh god.
“Yeah, but if all you got was a couple of cuts and bruises, I’d call yourself lucky. I’ll see you at - yeah, okay. Bye.”
Meredith turns to look at her, apparently aware that something’s wrong on her end.
“That was Alex. Everything’s fine, it’s just a minor thing - his car’s got a dent in the side of it but it’s drivable and - are you okay?”
She nods. Except she’s really not. In fact, when the relief overtook her and she realized that she was making something out of nothing, she blew out a breath. And then two. Three. Deep breath in and out, rapid, and the next thing she knows tears are pricking her eyes and she’s breathing so erratically she’s feeling dizzy.
“Lexie - ”
She closes her eyes and focuses on not hyperventilating and the next thing she knows there are arms around her and Meredith’s chin resting on the top of her head. She can count on one hand the number of times her sister has hugged her and she doesn’t know if this being one of them is a good or a bad thing.
This is when she realizes that the whole not getting attached, changing who you are completely thing really isn’t working out for her.
-
Meredith and Alex spend fifteen minutes yelling at each other at the end of the day.
There is the slam of the front door at the end of it all, followed by the slam of a door at the other end of the hall, and she pulls the covers up and tries to go to sleep.
(At two in the morning, the bed shifts, and his knee bumps the back of her leg. She doesn’t react.)
-
Four days later, she loads her stuff in the back of her car and drives to the new apartment.
Meredith watches her from the door.
(It’s her last act of defiance; the curtain’s coming down soon).
-
It’s fine for the first few days.
Work picks up and they’re barely there and when they are they’re so exhausted that they end up in their own rooms, passed out in bed. She doesn’t have time to stop, to pause, to think, and so nothing bothers her. It’s almost nice.
But even that ends, eventually, and when it comes down to it there’s just her and Alex and too few rooms, and that same tension hanging heavy in the air.
what’s so different from last time
i am
no you’re not
-
She used to think that maybe they weren’t so different.
She’s broken. He’s broken. They could be broken together. It made a kind of poetic sense, symmetry and common ground and misery loves company.
After all of this? She doesn’t know how he looks in the mirror in the morning, she doesn’t know how he makes it through the day at all without this overwhelming sense of doom and panic - like everything’s fucked up and there’s nothing to do about it because you don’t know how to fix it - and she doesn’t know how he’s been doing this all for as long as she’s known him, save for a few months where he looked normal, like he might make a comeback, Izzie by his side, and then she was dying.
Lexie can’t. She can’t do this.
She’s not like him at all.
-
“We can’t do this,” she says, the last syllable lost, and his teeth scrape over her lip.
“Yeah, whatever,” he replies, his answer to everything he doesn’t want to deal with, and his hands slip up under her shirt and she pulls him in closer all the same.
-
“We can’t do this,” second time, not the charm, and the sheets are bunched underneath her in a way that isn’t the most comfortable thing ever.
“Grey,” he says it like he says it to her sister - there’s no ‘little’ in front of it, nothing separating the two - and she thinks he’ll say ‘shut up’ or he’ll say ‘whatever’, any number of the old standbys, except what he says is, “you’re better as a brunette.”
In her head, it all rhymes with ‘stop pretending’; she sighs against his mouth.
-
“We really can’t do this.”
And you know, he never touches her again after that.
-
A week later:
Lexie buys hair dye and turns the shower up to drown out the sound of the other woman in Alex’s room, one who must not understand the concept of roommate and ‘keep it down’.
In the morning, he turns a smile on her - the girl already long gone, having not even stayed the night - and it’s the closest to him that she’s felt in too long.
It’s also the closest to herself that’s she’s felt in too long.
-
fin.
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Characters/Pairings: Lexie | Alex/Lexie. Meredith.
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,818
Author's Note: Angst city. Blame foibles_fables and the fanmix she made a week or two back.
Summary: This is all part of her quest to change, to find her identity, find direction; she just didn’t count on breaking herself in the process (she's not ready to hit the brakes yet).
. . .
“Dammit, Lexie,” and we have exhibit a, flying off the handle Meredith Grey style, “what’s so different from last time?”
‘I’m not trying to change him’ she wants to say, but thinks that would probably reflect worse on her than him. It rings of giving up, the sounds of settling and all of that.
“I am,” she says instead, defiant, and when she raises her chin, the way they say you’re supposed to (keep your head up little girl) the ends of her hair tickle her shoulders and she swallows the almost laugh that results, thinking all the while that she’s got to be doing something wrong.
Meredith looks at her with eyes full of pity, and it’s quite possibly worse than anything she could’ve said to her right then.
The words themselves aren’t exactly a picnic either.
“No, you’re not.”
Lexie is without a comeback.
-
She was always the cute one. She was always the good one. She was always the mousy one. It really got progressively worse, the closer she got to Seattle, the closer she got to comparison and scrutiny and the other sister she didn’t know she had or really wanted -- the one who wasn’t all happy and perfect and as normal as blueberry pie.
There is no changing when there is no room to grow; there isn’t even the motivation.
There’s room now. There are acres in fact, because the girl she was for years is now tied into the identity of the girl who broke Mark down, put him back together, and somehow managed to break him again (unintentional, and she’ll swear up and down that this is several variations of the word unfair). It’s tied to a person she doesn’t want to be anymore.
It’s not like it got her very far either. It got her labeled and summarily dismissed, and if that was what they term a successful relationship, a good lesson to learn, whatever, then she’s kind of done with the whole relationship business entirely.
She dyes her hair blonde and she takes up with the same man for the second time and crosses her fingers that the results won’t be the same this go-around.
(Even if they are, it certainly won’t hurt as bad as the alternative).
-
Alex doesn’t kiss the same as he used to.
There was this hint of goodness, somewhere on the edges of it all, like he was on the verge of something that even he couldn’t figure out - change, his own brand of it. Now, he’s insistent, rough without the forcefulness, and it pushes her in a way that she thinks she needs. Lexie has to keep up, has to find the rhythm, has to match her lips to his and her body to his and her needs to his in order to create a more perfect whole (in order to form a more perfect union, and she can see her fingers underlining words on the page of a textbook, clear like everything else and that’s the problem with a photographic memory, you can never stop reliving everything, over and over, from the insignificant to the heartbreaking - you don’t have the luxury of forgetting).
That’s what they’re all searching for, somehow, even if they’re not thinking about it. And Alex isn’t it for her, he’s not her endgame, he might not even be a blip on her radar in a month, six months, a year, five, but he’s that much closer, and he’s a safe, warm place to hide for a while so that she can lick her wounds and course correct.
(She’s too young to be thinking in these terms, finality and forever and complete. She marks that down on her list of things to change).
-
The words ‘fix’ and ‘heal’ and ‘change’ never pass through her lips with him, and if they did she can already picture the eye roll it would earn her, thanks very much.
She treats him like a brother in public. She’s just as likely to tease him as she is to tell him to sit down and shut up in all seriousness, and there’s always just enough space between them that people overlook what’s right in front of them (not Meredith - she’s got her eyes permanently affixed in their direction and Lexie realizes that, while she’s not wrecking this relationship, she’s basically doing everything she can to achieve that, and she’s not entirely sure if it’s Lexie or Alex that Meredith’s trying to protect here).
In private, she works to keep herself on equal ground and constantly reminds herself that this is not a relationship, no need to get attached - in fact, please stop doing that entirely if you wish to stay sane, alive, intact. She learns the merits of being just as demanding as he is, learns that he’ll give just as good as he gets if you teach him right. The removal of expectations has always made sex with him more fun, more refreshing, but it’s more than that now - it’s exciting and it’s the kind of fulfilling that she can deal with, a stop gap on everything she doesn’t want to feel or deal with right now.
Just the shift in perspective feels like a change, temporary as it is.
-
“You’re not going to fall in love here or something, right?”
He isn’t looking at her when he asks. He’s lying on his back in bed and her fingers are stilled on his chest, legs tangled with his. In some movies, the heroine would be smoking right now, the afterglow and ‘that was fun but you can go now’.
Some would call this harsh. The new Lexie would call this unfortunate reality, the ‘you see what you get’ mentality.
“No,” she replies, soft, inhaling against his skin, familiar scent, and there’s still tension in his body, like he doesn’t quite believe her and it compels her to add, “don’t flatter yourself.”
It takes everything in her not to leave at that very moment, to keep on with the steady breathing and relaxed position and the playful smile she fakes when he looks at her.
-
In trying to be this person, she always ends up feeling like an imposter.
She isn’t ready to hit the brakes yet.
-
When he begins to veer towards the delicate, the gentle, like he thinks she can’t handle it anymore, like he doesn’t want to break her, she pushes back with every bit of force she’s got in her.
“I never did understand why she left you.”
Her hip hits the dresser at an odd angle; she adds another bruise to the list. Her fingers curl into his side.
“She comes back and then suddenly she’s just gone - just like that,” she kisses him, and he’s relatively unforgiving in the way he responds, in the way he grinds against her. Game on, she supposes, and she’s never been quite this manipulative before. It makes her feel powerful; it also makes her feel a little sick. “It’s just, why bother?”
He turns them and she’s on her back on the bed before she registers the movement. She can talk a good game but he’s done this before and nothing beats experience. This is him; this is merely a version of herself, the girl formerly known as Little Grey, who drank juice boxes and held hands in the elevator (she prefers tequila now, and hasty make-outs in the elevator, and maybe Meredith’s whole issue is that Lexie’s rapidly turning into an earlier version of her older sister).
She arches her back and spreads her legs and he’s between them soon enough.
“I told her to leave,” he says, before his lips find her skin again, and there’s something chilling about the way his voice sounds in that moment, rough and raw and painful, third degree burns that will never heal.
She moans but it’s choked; he pretends not to notice.
-
In the hallways, Mark looks at her like he doesn’t recognize her.
She finds it preferable to whatever cocktail of hatred, hurt, anger, betrayal, and vulnerability he was mixing before.
-
He tosses the apartment listings on the kitchen counter on the way out his door one morning, his way of asking her to move in with him. To move out of here.
Meredith dribbles coffee on the counter, distracted, and shoves the coffee pot back into the maker with little grace. She doesn’t say a word.
She thinks about all the places she’s lived in the past few years, she thinks of this house and her sister and illicit affairs in the attic, in Alex’s bedroom; she thinks of the apartment she shared with George and unfulfilled and unrequited feelings, misplaced as they may have been, and redecorating and sad smiles and funeral flowers; she thinks of another apartment, this one with Mark, and the time they christened the shower and breakfast across the hall with the newspaper and coffee and all the times she’d said “I’m going home” and really, without a doubt in her mind, meant it. She thinks of an apartment that is yet unknown and separate but shared bedrooms and quiet mornings without dancing around the two other people living here and that grown-up feeling she first had when she moved in with George.
And then she exhales “okay”, soft and under her breath and Meredith looks like she’s on the verge of losing something.
-
She isn’t ready to hit the brakes yet.
So she’ll just brace for the crash.
-
“I like it.”
“Okay,” he says, decision made on their lunch break in the middle of the day one Wednesday.
They’ll move in a little over a week.
(In the car, near empty parking lot, her “thank you” gets slurred against his lips and his hand is on the nape of her neck, in her hair, and if not for the console between them she’d probably be in his lap right now, but there is that barrier - it’s a good metaphor, if she thinks about it long enough).
-
This is not like with Mark.
It’s was Mark’s apartment. Mark’s things. Her things littered it, and some probably still do, but there was never any question when they broke up about who would live where. It was his home - she’d only been a visitor, a guest who, as it turned out, had overstayed her welcome.
She’d still called it home, numerous times, and for awhile it was.
This will be different though. Different from him, different from Meredith’s, different from just about everything (no, not George, but the tension in the air was so stifling that she stopped living there long before she stopped paying rent) because it will be half hers. It’s half her money, half her stuff, half her territory, and she has rights and responsibilities and independence.
It’s nothing like with Mark.
(What she means: history will not repeat itself. She swears.)
-
Five days before they move in, Alex hits the road the customary forty minutes before she does and she sits in the kitchen with her sister once more, one of the last times, drinking orange juice and pouring over the newspaper so as not to be completely oblivious of the world around her.
Twenty minutes later, Meredith’s phone rings.
(This will come to mean something. Meredith’s phone rings. Not hers.)
“Wait, what happened?”
Meredith’s body shifts, hip cocks and leans against the counter, and she’s got this expression of worry on her face that makes the toast Lexie’s eating turn to sawdust in her throat.
“You were in a car accident?”
Lexie stops moving. She thinks she knows who’s on the other end of the phone now, and she’s playing worst case scenario and - holy shit what if something bad happened to him, like really, really bad and they’re supposed to move and he hadn’t really slept last night and she kept talking to him and maybe that was her fault and maybe he wasn’t paying attention and that’s why all of this happened and oh god oh god oh god.
“Yeah, but if all you got was a couple of cuts and bruises, I’d call yourself lucky. I’ll see you at - yeah, okay. Bye.”
Meredith turns to look at her, apparently aware that something’s wrong on her end.
“That was Alex. Everything’s fine, it’s just a minor thing - his car’s got a dent in the side of it but it’s drivable and - are you okay?”
She nods. Except she’s really not. In fact, when the relief overtook her and she realized that she was making something out of nothing, she blew out a breath. And then two. Three. Deep breath in and out, rapid, and the next thing she knows tears are pricking her eyes and she’s breathing so erratically she’s feeling dizzy.
“Lexie - ”
She closes her eyes and focuses on not hyperventilating and the next thing she knows there are arms around her and Meredith’s chin resting on the top of her head. She can count on one hand the number of times her sister has hugged her and she doesn’t know if this being one of them is a good or a bad thing.
This is when she realizes that the whole not getting attached, changing who you are completely thing really isn’t working out for her.
-
Meredith and Alex spend fifteen minutes yelling at each other at the end of the day.
There is the slam of the front door at the end of it all, followed by the slam of a door at the other end of the hall, and she pulls the covers up and tries to go to sleep.
(At two in the morning, the bed shifts, and his knee bumps the back of her leg. She doesn’t react.)
-
Four days later, she loads her stuff in the back of her car and drives to the new apartment.
Meredith watches her from the door.
(It’s her last act of defiance; the curtain’s coming down soon).
-
It’s fine for the first few days.
Work picks up and they’re barely there and when they are they’re so exhausted that they end up in their own rooms, passed out in bed. She doesn’t have time to stop, to pause, to think, and so nothing bothers her. It’s almost nice.
But even that ends, eventually, and when it comes down to it there’s just her and Alex and too few rooms, and that same tension hanging heavy in the air.
what’s so different from last time
i am
no you’re not
-
She used to think that maybe they weren’t so different.
She’s broken. He’s broken. They could be broken together. It made a kind of poetic sense, symmetry and common ground and misery loves company.
After all of this? She doesn’t know how he looks in the mirror in the morning, she doesn’t know how he makes it through the day at all without this overwhelming sense of doom and panic - like everything’s fucked up and there’s nothing to do about it because you don’t know how to fix it - and she doesn’t know how he’s been doing this all for as long as she’s known him, save for a few months where he looked normal, like he might make a comeback, Izzie by his side, and then she was dying.
Lexie can’t. She can’t do this.
She’s not like him at all.
-
“We can’t do this,” she says, the last syllable lost, and his teeth scrape over her lip.
“Yeah, whatever,” he replies, his answer to everything he doesn’t want to deal with, and his hands slip up under her shirt and she pulls him in closer all the same.
-
“We can’t do this,” second time, not the charm, and the sheets are bunched underneath her in a way that isn’t the most comfortable thing ever.
“Grey,” he says it like he says it to her sister - there’s no ‘little’ in front of it, nothing separating the two - and she thinks he’ll say ‘shut up’ or he’ll say ‘whatever’, any number of the old standbys, except what he says is, “you’re better as a brunette.”
In her head, it all rhymes with ‘stop pretending’; she sighs against his mouth.
-
“We really can’t do this.”
And you know, he never touches her again after that.
-
A week later:
Lexie buys hair dye and turns the shower up to drown out the sound of the other woman in Alex’s room, one who must not understand the concept of roommate and ‘keep it down’.
In the morning, he turns a smile on her - the girl already long gone, having not even stayed the night - and it’s the closest to him that she’s felt in too long.
It’s also the closest to herself that’s she’s felt in too long.
-
fin.