You could almost get away unscathed and tell yourself that you hated Lexa's stupid socks. They were those kinds, the HUF socks with marijuana leaves adorning them. Lexa wore them everywhere. You would know.
You couldn't quite tell why you had such a strange fixation on them. You couldn't really care about what Lexa wanted to do with her life – not entirely anyway, not in the right way. Perhaps it was just absolutely unlike whatever you knew of Lexa, but whatever you did know of her was from the few times you've been in the firm's office and whatever else you spent outside of it, but nowhere else. You couldn't be seen together outside of that.
You knew Lexa, knew her with clothes and without. Perhaps it'd just become an instinct to immediately roll your eyes in vague adoration when you'd attended more formal occasions together, and more than once you had found yourself raking your eyes down Lexa's entire form until they reached those stupidly flourescent orange leaves.
Still, Lexa wore them, and it didn't deter you either. You pestered her about it and she nudged you with her marijuana leaf adorned foot, anywhere from poking at your sides to shoving that foot under your nose insisting that you take a very close look at the designs – because artists do that, Clarke, they appreciate art. No matter what you had to say about art concerning Lexa, you withheld it, and Lexa kept wearing them and you kept going on.
It's my little secret, Lexa had said. It's one thing I get to do that the world doesn't expect.
In between those lines, you could read what else she was saying. Nobody else in the world knows except you and I. You're in on the secret.
Somewhere in an intangible far away in your heart, you wished Lexa would say something more than that. You were hoping Lexa would carry on with an afterthought, but the only echo that you felt was a longing you couldn't place. You couldn't help but think that the ripples of any afterthought made their way to you just because you happened to be in the way, not because of some defined choice Lexa made or some predestined decision by fate. No, you'd hoped for something much simpler.
I trust you.
But just because you were in on the secret didn't mean anything. You were, in fact, not exactly on certain terms with each other, let alone your respective life partners, and that in itself wasn't a secret, at least not to either of you.
Yet, you wanted more, and you were always terribly sorry for it.
Nobody else in the world knows. You are the secret.
- - - - - -
You had met at a club, some time between the hours of 6pm and too damn late on a Friday. It could have been any other Friday, too, if neither of you had been eyeing each other with the candour of a motel vacancy sign. Your eyes were flashing with a new kind of intensity under the club's raging lights, syncopated to nothing in the music around you but to each other as you told secret stories and shared looks of something more and made promises.
Some time between the space of then and now, you found yourself pushed up against the bathroom sink with her hands all over the damn place. You couldn't help but feel important with the way her lust-addled mind fought itself over you. You couldn't help the excitement you felt while you watched her struggle to decide where her hands belonged, tangled in your hair in vice grips to guide your neck to her mouth or to keep you still for christ sake, or if they belonged on your shoulders digging into the muscle, or if she should have kept them sliding up and down your thighs, but they eventually find their way onto your abdomen.
She couldn't decide, but for you it was rather simple really, and even your drunken mind could attest to it. You wanted her everywhere, and you wanted to be everywhere she was.
The stranger, in turn, felt quite comfortable with her mouth in the space of your neck just below your ear, planting kisses everywhere she came and went. Because that's all she was, simply a tourist visiting unmarked territory only to be left in recollection – to be recalled upon as a memory and nothing more.
It didn't hurt you as much as you thought it would. You were in fact, out on a Friday night for a reason. You wanted to forget.
You had realized something monumental as you clenched around the girl's slender fingers, your hands impressively tangled in the mess of dark hair as your sporadic breathing came in bursts and stops. Whoever this was that took you on the bathroom sink wasn't important to you, because you knew that you were simply an airport, insofar that sometime in your life you became an entity that nobody ever intended to stay for.
And just when you'd expected the stranger to leave as quickly as she'd dropped by, you finally looked into her indecipherable eyes, coloured with a palette you couldn't immediately place – perhaps they were grey, bearing a reading you don't think you'd want to know even if you weren't so drunk, and that was when you remembered everything you promised to forget.
You remembered Finn, and only because you had to remember what it was that you didn't want.
- - - - - -
She took you on a date after that, insisting that it's right. What exactly she meant by “it” and what her definition of “right” could possibly entail, you don't know.
You were about ten paces away from the club that night when you heard someone calling to you from the distance. You couldn't look back.
In your defense, you'd never hooked up with anyone in a bathroom before – whether or not it was a private bathroom and there weren't any other stalls in there, well, that was just technicalities. You didn't have to look back.
But she still called out to you, not grabbing you or getting in your space like you'd expect from any close encounters you often get on nights out.
She waits five paces away from you and watches you walk away. You hear it again, “Let me take you out. Please.”
It was that one word that made you pause. You really didn't want to, didn't think you would handle it well considering how the events of the night unfolded. Lately, you hadn't handled anything well. So you turn around, nothing else to lose.
There's none of that pathetic desperation you thought you'd expected. There's intensity, and it's almost imploring, but it's not pathetic. It's anything but that.
You sigh.
“Why would you want to do that?”
She gives you a strange look, something mixed with confusion and maybe the tiniest bit of offense, but it's mostly just looking at you like the answer is so obvious and it'd be absurd not to realize it.
“Because I want to.” She says it almost like a question, but not quite. You're vaguely impressed.
You glance around you, anything to stall whatever this is. There are taxis everywhere, cars parked haphazardly along the curb, people all dressed to the nines leaning on their friends or smoking in groups or bracing themselves on the walls.
You look up and sigh in defeat, eyes upward to whatever gods are playing you this time, and you wonder what new adventure awaits you in your series of Positively Exhausting Social Encounters.
You want to ask her, because you doubt her, you really do, but you don't think you want to hear the answer. Not when she's so earnest under a street light with most of her hair escaping what was left of her neat braids earlier that night but were now generously unravelled. Not when she's so vulnerable and so certain at the same time. You've seen vulnerability before, but it's nothing like her, and you've never seen someone so comfortable with it before.
At least, you don't think she's uncomfortable, but the longer you seem to go unspoken and the longer she waits for you is when more of her tells start showing, favouring one leg and then the other and then back again, nervously running her hands through her hair. She blinks and looks around a lot too. You really wish you weren't already so set in figuring her out, even whether you're aware of it or not.
So you ask her something else instead. You don't ask her if she's being honest. Even if she was, you wouldn't want to hear it. You couldn't have been able to hear it. You settle for something not any more simpler, but something safer. You've come to understand that simple does not always mean safe, and mysteries aren't always reserved for the complex.
“Do you always take people out after you sleep with them?”
You say it so blankfaced, you almost want to cringe. You didn't mean to sound so brisk. Despite everything, your mother raised you better than that. It's only recently that you learned how to become callous and uninterested. Initially, it was an unintentional coping mechanism, a defense you developed out of necessity. Now, it's become instinct, and you don't think you can just shut that part of yourself off.
Whatever it is, her lips quirk up a bit, and it seems to have come across to her as something mildly amusing to her.
Rude.
Even if you did intend to be mean and cold-hearted and unperturbed, who did this woman think she was to look at you being stoically indifferent and consider it something bordering on cute?
“No, actually. I don't. Then again, I didn't actually sleep with you.”
It's your turn to give her a strange look, and she grins freely now, and you just know already that she's going to push just as stubbornly and obnoxiously against whatever challenge you just as equally stubbornly and obnoxiously pit her against.
You don't think about how she's already winning.
“Well, I mean, we did kinda just had sex on a bathroom sink, so it's not like we actually slept in a bed-”
“Okay, I get it.”
You cut her off. She's rambling and you're already dreading how fond you are of her rambling and how obnoxious and stubborn she is in general.
She stops herself, and you ignore how you revel in getting her stupid smug smirk off that face of hers. But she's smirking again after a few moments of bewildered silence and this time, you're sure you melt. But you have to stop it somehow.
“So, do all of your helpless victims fall for your broody aura, great sex, obnoxious dork, smug asshole routine or what?”
You moved closer to her at some point during your exchange, and you don't recall it, but you're thankful for your subconscious motions. You can see her better now. She smiles unabashedly, and god help you, but you think you see a blush when she's actually staring intently at the ground like you're now the least interesting thing in her universe.
“No, not everyone. Not you.”
Later that same night in a 24 hour diner, you learn that she doesn't believe you fell for whatever act you think she played on because she knows that you know better than that. Even in your however many hours of your evidently long history spent with each other, she already knows what you're thinking. She knows you don't really think of her as the sleazy type. What goes unsaid though is how no, you didn't become fixated on the broody aura, great sex, obnoxious dork, smug asshole routine. You were entranced by so much more. You were an anomaly. What goes unsaid is that maybe, unlike everyone else, you saw through her.
She knows that you know she wasn't actually intentionally pulling any sort of macho defense act to overcompensate the hypersexuality that just always sticks in clubs, but even still you don't hesitate in telling her that she is so entirely full of bullshit.
You will still choose to believe literally anything besides the fact that she genuinely wanted to spend time with you after getting into your pants.
She insists it's the truth, and you're so certain about how earnest and real everything is to her, but you don't tell her that. You're beginning to find that you particularly like pushing her buttons, and you're starting to find out that the look she has on her face when she realizes you're just messing with her but you're going to keep bugging her anyway and she's going to keep falling for it anyway could quickly become one of your favourite things in your small, unaffected world.
You don't tell her any of this, but you do settle on one thing.
“You know, usually I let people take me out to dinner first before they sleep with me. Not the other way around.”
But she's just as quick on the uptake and you think you've finally met your match.
“Yeah, well, at this hour this is more breakfast than it is dinner. So exceptions can always be made.”
- - - - - -
Sometimes, you feel the frown on her lips while you're kissing, and you can't help but realize that they feel a bit heavier than they should be.
Sometimes, you feel like you shouldn't kiss her like this after really mind-blowing sex, but you can't help yourself.
You can't help yourself. And you're sorry about it.
Lexa kisses you back though, and you love her for it, and you hate her for it. Some time in your life, you'd become an airport – an entity for which nobody bothered to stick around. Sometimes, it couldn't have been avoided, but after that, you'd had a direct part in making it that way.
You kiss Lexa back, and you love her for it, and you hate her for it. For the entirety of your recent adult life, you always understood people as airplanes, carrying ghosts of people with them no matter where they go, where they've been, and where they intend to go.
And it's fitting that even now, after all this time, you and Lexa only ever meet in the same hotel room. It's fitting that even still, you're sharing your most vulnerable secrets to each other in a room that's held so many other people's memories as well.
You'd told Lexa that you weren't ready to be with anyone – not yet, and she'd said fine. And you said fine. And it was fine.
Lexa always kisses you like she means it, and you love her and you hate her for it, but sometimes, she kisses you and she means something else.
Sometimes, you see the promise of not yet in her eyes, and you wish you hadn't told her that, because you don't know when.
You don't know when, or if ever, and you know damn well she does not deserve that.
“Shouldn't you go home soon?”
Lexa is used to your brusque way of saying things, knows how to decipher what you say with how you say it and translate it into what you want to say and what you meant. More importantly, Lexa knows how to understand what you mean without actually saying it.
“Getting rid of me already? Usually you wait fifteen minutes after cuddling for a bit.”
You don't have to look at her, but you know she gets it. You love her and hate her for it, because you know she's right.
You sigh, because that's all you seem to do lately, and Lexa knows that it's not just her – or at least, it's a sum total of everything occurring between you two and the sum total of your separate lives as you try to navigate through the mess that has inadvertently brought you together, but it's never an issue about her as a person.
Because you love her.
And you love her and hate her for it, and you're not sorry about it.
You wish there was a way you could sift through it all and only pick what you want. But that's never how it goes. You wish it could be simple, but simple does not always mean safe and mysteries don't always guarantee complexities.
You know this, because you love her, and it's the messiest thing you've ever done in your entire life, but you love her and that's enough. It's so simple to you. But it's a mystery how even with that, you still can't be with each other.
She sighs too, as if your thoughts were loud enough to make their way into her own. For all you know, and with everything you've been through together, you don't exactly doubt it.
“Home is where the heart is.”
And it's probably single-handedly the most disgustingly romantic thing she has said to you. And it's a ridiculously domestic thing to say considering your circumstances and how you're both naked and how you've spent way too much time in this very hotel room.
It's domestic, and it's gross. It's far too intimate.
It's too intimate for the hand that is given to you both, and somehow, even that is still not enough.
You realize you still haven't said anything, and you scramble to find something to say, but when you look up, Lexa's smiling at you, and your heart melts.
She gathers her clothes to shower before she takes off – it's become routine now, and she makes her way to the bathroom. You fall back into the bed as the bathroom door shuts behind her, and you eye the socks that she'd forgotten.
You can't help but wonder about them. Frankly, you love them, no matter how much you say otherwise. You love that Lexa is just so full of random quirks and even now you're still trying to figure them out, knowing that you probably won't know even half of them by the time your time's up. You can't help but think about how there's someone in this world who doesn't love them as much as you do, rather hates them so much actually. You can't think about how Lexa only wears them because of that reason.
It's my little secret, Lexa had said. It's one thing I get to do that the world doesn't expect.
But you know it. You know exactly what it is. Laying down on the hotel bed, you recollect yourself and gather your own things. Somehow, you are both in on the secret and you are the secret. You are both parts the thing that Lexa gets to do that nobody expects, and you are the unexpected surprise that made its way into her world.
Nobody else in the world knows.
But you don't know either. For the life of you, you can't figure out why you'll leave to return to your bare apartment and sit among the stacks of boxes that litter the space, and why Lexa will leave to come back to live her life and carry on her daily duties and sleep in an empty bed when her life shouldn't be lived alone and her errands belong to someone else and how she shouldn't go to bed lonely and alone. Not when she has someone who's supposed to take care of that for her.
You can't figure out why Lexa, even when she lives a life that is meant to be shared with someone else, still spends time with you. You can't figure out why Lexa is alone.
You wonder then, that perhaps misery loves company, and you both are so deprived that even the worst poverty that is loneliness couldn't tear you two apart.
You're sorry that you fell in love. You didn't mean to fall in love. And you know you can't pretend anymore.
You wonder if there's anywhere else you could meet Lexa, and you decide there isn't. You are relegated to a hotel room, and you're sorry that Lexa has to go home at some point in your time together and there's always an expiration date on you two. Sometimes you wonder about what it would be like if you were home for her. Really home. And not just a hotel room or like the derelict airport you are.
You wonder what it would be like to be it for her.
But you're not. So when she's done her shower, and you get what little belongings you brought with you, you both check out and go home.