Chapter Text
‘So.’ Clarke cleared her throat as she settled on the couch with Lexa’s laptop and another mug of coffee. ‘How does this work?’
‘See the little button at the top right of the keyboard? If you press it the pretty lights will come on.’
‘No, I mean...am I allowed to I talk to you? Or is this like your meditative time?’
‘I actually need absolute silence or my chakras won’t align and I might sprain a feng shui.’
‘Gosh, you just get funnier and funnier as the day goes on.’
‘Exponentially.’
‘Mm.’ Clarke was silent as Lexa lay down on a yoga mat and began her usual pre-class warm-ups; just little stretches at first, waking up muscles for the day, or in this case trying to persuade them to cooperate. ‘Would you mind if I drew you?’
‘You have to ask?’
‘Some people don’t like it. Though I’ve never actually asked anyone who was unshowered and about to work out.’
‘Well goodness, that’s so charming I couldn’t possibly say no.’ Lexa craned her head and gestured at the big wooden cabinet. ‘There’s paper over there, and I think I owned a pencil once.’
‘Thanks for the offer, but I actually need canvas and freshly-mined graphite.’
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ said Lexa sincerely, not really meaning to say it out loud and not really minding that she had. ‘I was afraid that after the gala this would all just...stop. You’d go back to your world and I’d go back to mine.’
‘There’s a young adult novel in there somewhere,’ teased Clarke, but her eyes were soft.
‘I mean it. I know it’s a lot to take in. You don’t just get me, you get some unholy package deal which comes with late nights and bonus choreographers walking in at all hours, and whatever this is that I’m doing right now.’ Lexa had to smile as it dawned on her how much time she spent there on the floor, decompressing, stretching, collapsing. Definitely not normal. ‘It’s new for you, and some of it is just objectively weird, so. Thanks.’
‘If I get you, I’d say that’s pretty good compensation for Anya disturbing my beauty sleep.’ The designer glanced at her innocently over the top of the paper she’d retrieved from the cupboard. ‘Although if you’d told me you’d be spending the morning on your back, I’d have had something else in mind.’
‘Temptress.’
Lexa didn’t have a permanent setup or a folding barre, preferring to take class at the company rather than do full warmups at home, but she had thoroughly confused the staff at the local furniture auction by testing chairs not only by sitting on them, but by turning them round to check the height for pliés. Clarke didn’t bat an eyelid when she dragged one out and positioned it side-central in the space, having evidently got at least semi-used to dancers and their oddities. ‘You don’t need me to move?’
‘You’re fine. I turn to work the other leg, so the lateral movement’s all to this side.’ Lexa grimaced dramatically as she untangled her earbuds. ‘If I get that far.’
As much as she liked to complain, and as much as she felt the tiredness in her muscles and the soreness in her ankle, the really bad days were few and far between. The comfortable rhythms of warmups and class were enough to soothe most things; she wondered sometimes if the familiarity would ever turn to boredom, but for now, it felt necessary. Nothing mattered but making each movement as perfect as possible. It was important, but it wasn’t complicated. After a week of tension, nerves, anger, desire, release, it felt like coming up for air.
Neat fifths. Don’t over-cross. Stretch the supporting knee. Keep the relevés bright. Turn out. Even without a mirror, corrections came to mind automatically, ingrained from years of teachers. She had planned for one great love in her life, and that was her job, and it had been good to her - but the world was widening around her, casting her adrift, and she couldn’t even be mad about it. The life that had stretched out before her for as long as she could remember, measured in classes and opening nights and new roles, had been thrown off course. Lexa had always been driven by her inner certainty that that was the life she was meant to have, but suddenly she was less certain than ever and happy about it.
She wondered if that said more about her or about Clarke.
A few flexibility stretches to wind down, a minute on each split, and she’d been so in her own head that it was almost a surprise to take the earbuds out and hear the tapping of the keyboard beside her. ‘How are the emails?’
‘Oh. Endless. Almost all of them are totally irrelevant, but you can’t ignore them because somewhere in the pile of shit there’s usually a diamond. An Anna Wintour-shaped diamond. Or rather her assistant. Her third assistant. I need a new assistant. But I’m lucky to have an assistant at all at this point, and I can’t afford anyone else right now, so here I am trawling through the shit when I could be doing literally anything else. Or anyone else.’ Clarke closed the lid of the laptop and rubbed her eyes. ‘Sorry, I make terrible jokes when I have to do admin. How’s contorting your body into impossible shapes?’
‘It helps, it really does. Untangles the knots.’ Lexa rolled out of the split with a sigh. ‘Hungry work, though. You hungry?’
‘Starving.’
Clarke followed her into the kitchen and scooped the cat off the countertop. ‘Who’s a sweet boy? You’re a sweet boy. Yes you are.’
‘You’ve never had a pet, have you.’
‘Never. My mom is a chief of surgery and my dad ran a business, and I did all the extracurriculars under the sun. We would have killed anything needier than a cactus.’ She hitched herself up onto the windowsill, Astro still perched in her arms with what his owner could have sworn was a long-suffering expression. ‘I finished drawing you, by the way.’
‘Do I get to see?’
‘It’s by the laptop.’
Lexa set the chicken grilling and wandered over to retrieve it, shaking out the aches in her legs. ‘Wow.’
‘D’you like it?’
It was a head and shoulders fragment, focused on the long, proud lines of neck and jaw, eyes and cheekbones. ‘It’s good. You’re really good.’
‘It’s my job.’
‘No, I mean...this is amazing.’ Lexa shook her head and smiled as she handed it back to the artist. ‘Although, seriously? I do all these fancy moves for you and you show me a picture of my face?’
‘I like your face.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘It was more your expression. All those...I mean, I won’t even try those fancy French names you use, but you did all those movements and your face barely changed. You were so intent. I wanted to capture that.’ The designer studied the page thoughtfully. ‘I don’t draw people very often for work. Just bodies. It was nice going back to it.’
Lexa stepped away from the stovetop and kissed her, because she could, because there was a beautiful girl in her kitchen on a Sunday morning and it would have been a crime not to, and Clarke kissed her back because the world was good and somewhere along the line she’d struck lucky. There was no particular reason for any of it; it just was , and all the better for it.
Trapped between them, Astro yowled and made an energetic bid for freedom. Lexa pulled back exasperatedly. ‘You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?’
‘That’s not what people usually say after they kiss me.’
‘I’ll try to remember that.’ Lexa glared at the offending animal, now sitting placidly in front of the fridge and therefore precisely underfoot as she went to open it. ‘I swear he does it on purpose. Cats know. Could you grab plates? Behind you.’
‘I don’t think you’re a pain in the ass,’ said Clarke loyally as she passed the cat, collecting crockery. Astro ignored her.
‘Wait til he tries to steal your chicken.’
***
‘So you’ve done your barre,’ nodded Clarke, mentally ticking off items. ‘You’ve made me a salad that had no business tasting that good given the fat content. Or lack thereof. What else do ballerinas do at the weekend?’
Lexa stretched, joints clicking like a typewriter, and tried to remember her to-do list. ‘Shoes. Bath. Physical therapist. Nap. Dinner.’
‘Did you say nap?’
‘Highly underrated. Join me.’
‘I refuse to go to bed with you just to nap.’
‘I’m clingy when I’m tired.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Clarke looked at her watch; still her gold evening watch from the night before, absurd under the tattered cuff of Lexa’s - or possibly Lincoln’s - sweater. ‘I’ll need to go back to mine before dinner, but I could stay till then? If I’m in the way -’
‘Clarke.’
‘- you’ll tell me, yeah, okay. But you will tell me, right?’ The designer put her empty plate on the table and took Lexa’s hand, suddenly serious. ‘I’m conscious of it, you know? I mean, how could I not be given everything that happened last week. And if we’re going to find a way to make this work, I need to know that you’ll tell me what you need.’
‘It’s not complicated really. Boring, even. Eat, sleep, rinse, repeat,’ Lexa tried, lacing their fingers together carefully as she looked for the next words. ‘But it does come with odd hours and times when I just need to crash, and I’m not...used to people needing things from me. Things that aren’t work. And I can’t fix that with silence.’
‘So we talk?’
‘We talk.’
‘I can do that.’
The shoe shelf already looked comparatively bare by the end of rehearsal period. Lexa picked out the five pairs nearest the end and did the easy things first - testing the balance, stepping on the box, bending the shank - before sitting down with her kit and the shoes ranged around her.
‘You guys are brutal with your shoes,’ observed Clarke disapprovingly from behind the laptop.
‘Keep watching. There’s fire later.’
‘I watched Octavia do some of hers, the night I ran into you on the stairs, and she slammed them in the door hinge.’
‘That feels like about a hundred years ago.’ Monday? Tuesday. Less than a week. ‘Right. That was the morning we did a couple together before class.’
‘She really appreciated that.’
Lexa shrugged, self-conscious, and concentrated on measuring out the ribbons. ‘That’s the weird thing about shoes, though. No one ever really teaches you how to do them. It’s all word-of-mouth, and trying stuff out, and asking older girls what works for them.’
Clarke picked up a shoe and turned it over experimentally, running a finger around the inside toe. ‘And you’ve done this to every shoe you’ve ever worn?’
‘Every one.’
‘So how many times is that?’
‘I’m not even going to go there. Thousands.’
‘Genuinely?’
‘I don’t want to think about it.’
‘You’ve probably done more hand-sewing than I have.’
‘Believe me, it sometimes feels like I’ve done more hand-sewing than anyone in the world, ever.’
‘Sometimes when I close my eyes all I can see is sequins.’
Lexa grinned and retrieved her lighter from the darkest corner of the bag where it always managed to sink. ‘I started pointe when I was ten, and since I’ve been in the company I’ve gotten through five or six pairs a week. So that’s...easily upwards of three thousand shoes.’
‘Holy shit, Lexa.’
‘This is why I try not to think about it.’ They were silent for a moment as Lexa concentrated, methodically burning each end of the ribbons and elastics to stop them fraying. ‘I did all my growing early, so when I got my first shoes I was sure they made me nearly as tall as my dad. Which wasn’t even slightly true.’
Clarke put her smile into her voice. ‘I bet.’
‘He was almost a foot taller than I am even now. I used to be terrified that I’d end up too tall for ballet, but I guess I must have taken after my mom.’ There was no reason why she would ever have asked her dad how tall her mother had been, but there was still a twinge of guilt every time she realized something that she didn’t know. One of the many things she didn’t know. ‘What about you? What was the first thing you ever sewed?’
‘I made a dress for my teddy bear out of the Christmas tablecloth.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Mom was pissed.’
‘I can believe it.’
‘She’d just bought me a new red dress for Christmas and I wanted my teddy to have one too, so I got the scissors and...in hindsight, mistakes were made.’
She was passionate and impulsive and perfect and Lexa knew she was going to fall hard, if she hadn’t already. ‘But look where it’s got you.’
‘Yeah, well. I’m pretty sure my mom thinks I’m still at the tablecloth stage.’ Clarke shrugged, resigned. Lexa rolled up the ribbons into the shoes, packing three pairs into the bag. ‘Is that it? Are you done?’
‘Not even close. I need to bribe my muscles with a bath so I’ll sew these four while I’m soaking, and then I have to head to PT.’
‘You sew your shoes in the bath?’
‘Depends how many hours there are in the day. I do the rest on the subway.’
‘The fashion world has a lot to teach ballerinas about safe working practices.’
‘You’ll have to show me sometime.’
‘Gladly.’ The designer looked up at her, smiling with something between disbelief and amusement. ‘Anything I can do while you’re gone?’
‘No, you’re fine. Wait, yes -’ Lexa pointed out one of the cupboards at the bottom of the cabinet. ‘Pick out, say...six you like out of there.’
‘Six what?’
‘You’ll see.’
***
There was something slightly off-kilter about being at the theater during a performance without actually performing. The backstage area would be teeming, but the studios were eerily silent, dancers in their own little worlds as they warmed up for entrances later on in the programme, earbuds in, stage makeup on. Lexa might as well have been invisible. It always gave her the sense of being a shadow or a ghost - there but not there, caught out of time.
Even the physical therapist’s office, usually crammed to bursting with achy dancers and their hypochondria and their genuine issues, was quiet during a matinee. Being the exact opposite of a hypochondriac, Lexa did not appreciate the undivided attention.
‘Have you danced on it today?’
‘Not really. Barre, but no center.’
‘It’s stickier than I was expecting. Does this hurt?’
‘Yes.’
‘How badly?’
‘Four.’
‘What about during the show last night?’
‘I didn’t notice it. It was sore when I came offstage, but so was everything else.’
‘And then they made you go to that ridiculous dinner with no time to warm down properly.’ Denise rotated Lexa’s ankle carefully. She was Lexa’s favorite member of the healthcare team: business-like, effective, sympathetic but unimpressed by excuses. ‘See, here. The usual problem. Lexa, you need to be so careful about warming it up and then not letting it get stiff once you’re done. And by careful I mean religious.’
‘I know,’ sighed Lexa, truthfully. ‘Last night was just...yeah. Unusual.’ Because of the dinner. Because of the alcohol. Because I got fewer hours sleep than I did orgasms. But I’m not going to tell you that.
‘Good. Be a shame to let it slide just when we’ve got you back.’ Denise got to work briskly. Lexa gritted her teeth. ‘I’ll mobilize all these bones in your foot for now and you’ll be good to go tomorrow, but it’s really up to you. Keep the peroneal muscles strong, look after it, don’t do dumb things. Simple as.’
She was thankful to escape to the principals’ corridor, where the quiet was more familiar. If it weren’t for the muffled music behind a couple of the doors, she could have believed that no one was around, but that was often the case; few dancers were chatty in the run-up to performing. Lexa pushed open her own door and stopped dead as she was hit by the smell of flowers.
‘Ah.’
Nina, as promised, had delivered the rest of the flowers to what had once been Lexa’s dressing-room and could now have done reasonable business as a pop-up florist. The irises from Lincoln’s parents were by the mirror where she’d left them, but the other bouquets the runner had brought up the day before were now lost in the crowd. White roses from the chairman of the board. Lilies from a choreographer she’d worked with the previous summer. Oranges and pinks and yellows from the kids in her Friday class. Hydrangeas, dahlias, carnations, chrysanthemums, delphiniums, wish after good wish from people she’d never met who had still thought of her and were pleased to see her back.
Good luck for tonight.
(Don’t) Break a leg!
I love watching you dance and I hope you like these.
Lexa sat down limply in the free space beside the door and hugged her knees. Some things about dancing would always be strange to her. On the best days it was like breathing, so natural and so necessary that everything fell into place; the rest of the time, she wasn’t always sure where the need came from. Sometimes it was the promise of an audience that drove her, sometimes the near-obsessive compulsion to self-correct and self-perfect, sometimes an impulse so innate that she would never understand it. But then people sent her flowers, and it was enough to know that she had made them happy.
The framed sketch was still propped up against the mirror where she’d left it. Lexa got gingerly to her feet and smoothed out the brown paper, turning the picture over to wrap it up, and saw a white card tucked behind the hanging cord.
Lexa
For after the gala.
Clarke
Lexa looked at the flowers, and at the sketch, and back at the flowers, and started plotting the route downstairs that involved the fewest doors.
***
‘Holy shit.’ Clarke opened the door to what must at first glance have seemed like a walking paradise garden. ‘Did you get the subway with those?!’
‘Cab. I like to think I’m some kind of myth among the drivers.’
‘Crazy flower lady?’
‘Something like that.’ Lexa manoeuvred her way carefully into the hallway, bouquets balanced precariously in her arms, and let Clarke take the two which looked most likely to fall. ‘Did you look in the cupboard?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, I did.’ The designer pointed to the six glass vases assembled on the coffee table. ‘You are aware you have fifteen vases in your apartment? I counted. There were twelve in that cupboard and then I went to look for more coffee and found one on the top shelf behind the wine glasses, and then I spilled the coffee on the countertop and I found two more under the sink.’
‘I’m not a hoarder, I promise. I’ve just had a lot of birthdays.’
‘I never thought you were, it’s just…’ The designer gestured at the couchful of blooms. ‘What’s the most you’ve ever gotten at once?’
‘For one show? I don’t know. Twenty-five, maybe, for a big debut.’
‘Twenty-five.’ Clarke blinked once, then twice, as though she was trying to imagine what twenty-five bouquets on that scale would even look like. ‘Who sends them?’
Lexa picked out a couple of the cards to show her. ‘Sponsors. Other dancers. Lincoln’s parents send one at the start of every season. The kids I teach on Fridays usually team up to get me something. And anyone can get flowers delivered to the stage door so often they’re just from fans.’
‘What do you do with them all?’
‘Keep some, hence the vases. Otherwise I usually give a couple to my partner if he’s running low, and then the rest to the other dancers who were in the piece. One for the lady at the stage door. Orchestra break room. You know the kind of thing.’
‘That sounds kind of fun.’
‘It is. The secret flower-distributor.’ Lexa rifled through the kitchen in search of secateurs and finally found them in the cutlery drawer. ‘If I get some mid-run I sometimes send them to critics who gave bad reviews. Anonymously, to mess with their heads.’
‘You can mess with my head any day of the week if that’s what it involves.’
‘Critics are very highly-strung. Anya sends voodoo dolls.’
‘It says a lot about Anya that I’m not totally sure you’re joking.’
‘Girl has a reputation to maintain. If I snip, do you want to arrange?’
‘If by ‘arrange’ you mean put in vases…’
‘That’ll do for now.’ Stalk-ends scattered over the countertop. The cat leaped up to investigate, sniffed them, and retreated disappointed. ‘What happened to the flowers you got given?’
Clarke looked momentarily startled. It had only been the night before, but it was amazing how dreamlike the stage could feel in the cold light of day. ‘I think I gave them to Melissa before the dinner. You know, the unbelievably gorgeous intern who does the social media?’
‘Unbelievably gorgeous...Yeah, I think I might have noticed her once or twice.’
‘So enthusiastic it makes you want to wrap her up and protect her from all life’s disappointments?’
‘That’s her.’
‘Well, I saw her when we came offstage, after you and Lincoln had gone to change, and I wanted to say thank you. She was the first person I met at the company, pretty much, and she just seemed to pop up like magic whenever I didn’t know where to go, or she thought I needed protecting from Indra. So I basically threw the flowers at her.’ The designer shook her head disbelievingly. ‘It feels like weeks ago.’
‘It always does. It doesn’t feel fully real once it’s over. Just like none of this matters when you’re performing.’ Lexa had always found it supremely natural to exist on stage; it had been much harder to work herself out in the real world. ‘Maybe that’s the secret of our indestructible good looks. We don’t actually age while the lights are up.’
‘That would explain a lot.’ Clarke put the first vase on the kitchen windowsill - blue delphiniums and green-scented hyacinths, From the teaching faculty, with love - and came back to stand beside Lexa, smoothing back the strands of hair the wind had blown out of her bun. ‘This feels real to me.’
And Lexa kissed her, and the hyacinths bloomed, and the future was full of flowers.
***
Mondello was the kind of Italian restaurant where the service was so casual it could only be authentic. It was half an hour before Lexa managed to physically grab someone to take their order, upon which they found themselves asking for practically everything on the menu because to do otherwise would have hurt the chef’s feelings.
‘I can’t,’ said Clarke in dread as her garlic bread starter was placed in front of her, jewel-bright with olive oil and enough to feed an elementary school for a week. ‘I simply cannot.’
‘Back yourself,’ advised Octavia through a mouthful of mozzarella. ‘You deserve it.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I might rupture my stomach.’
‘Back your stomach.’
‘That’s all very well if you’ve just performed for two hours and burned a million calories.’
‘Legit. I am starving.’ The precise words were difficult to decipher through the mozzarella - mm mfff mfffing - but the sentiment was obvious. ‘Kane was giving corrections afterwards and all I could think about was pasta.’
Lexa grinned. ‘The first time we did the leads in Swan Lake I ate a cheeseburger so quickly that Linc thought it hadn’t arrived and ordered me a replacement.’
‘Which you also ate.’
‘We shared it.’
‘While you ate my fries.’
‘That was different.’
‘Sneakily, one by one.’
‘Anya, Lincoln’s being mean to me.’
Anya took a very large gulp of wine. ‘Sometimes it’s literally like the last ten years never happened.’
Clarke could have felt like an interloper, sitting there with the three old friends while they reminisced and argued and snarked at each other to disguise how much they cared, but it seemed to work. She talked plenty, and listened more. Lexa and Lincoln bickered like siblings, fiercely fond, and it was fascinating; for all the ballerina usually weighed her words, honest but thoughtful, she was scintillating once she was warmed up and had a glass of wine in her hand. It was the first time Clarke had ever seen Anya truly relaxed, lounging in her chair like an empress, smiling even as she rolled her eyes at the others. And Octavia was glowing. It was as though joining the company had un-snuffed the candle, unclipped her wings, kicked down the door, and she was finally the way she was meant to be.
Somehow they managed to eat their way through acres of pizza, miles of spaghetti and enough vegetables to make even a dancer admit defeat, before Anya ordered another bottle of wine and leaned forwards. ‘Okay. Let’s do the thing properly.’
‘Since you’re buying.’
‘Well then.’ The little circle grew quiet as the choreographer paused, deciding how to begin. ‘None of us had any idea where this ballet was going to end up when we started making it. Least of all me. But it turns out that when you have two spectacular dancers, and get them dressed by a fashion prodigy, good things happen. We do our best work for each other. It’s created something really, genuinely good. And now that I’ve said all that, I guess I’d better give a shout-out to our enablers.’ She sat back and raised her glass, drawing them all in with her eyes. ‘To the people who pay us to do what we love.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’
‘Doing what we love.’
‘Praise the sponsors.’
Everyone clinked solemnly. ‘Start thinking,’ whispered Lexa as she refilled Clarke’s glass.
‘Why?’
‘It’ll be your turn in a minute.’
It was clearly a familiar ritual because the next to speak was Lincoln, to Anya’s left, grinning and saluting his partner across the table. ‘To ballerinas who won’t give up.’
‘And the men who have to lift them.’
‘The choreographers who make them do it,’ put in Octavia.
‘The designers who make sure they don’t look stupid.’
Clarke winked at Octavia. ‘And the people who keep them sane.’
‘That’s sweet, but all I did was give you a kick up the ass after you told Le...I mean, whenever you need it. Generally.’ Octavia ignored Lexa’s elegantly arched eyebrow and hesitated, wine in hand, uncharacteristically shy. ‘I never thought that I was good enough to be in a ballet company, any ballet company, let alone this one. None of my teachers told me I should audition. And if Kane hadn’t been at my showcase and followed up on me, and if Indra hadn’t given me the time of day, and if Lexa hadn’t told me to separate my fingers and remember that I had a face - although you could have phrased that less confusingly -’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well, it worked. I got lucky. Sometimes it freaks me out, how lucky I got. So. I guess that’s it.’ Octavia raised her glass. ‘To luck.’
‘To luck.’
It rang true for all of them, in different ways - Clarke remembered Lexa in bed that morning, I didn’t do a single thing to make this happen - and even Anya looked reflective. Lexa had obviously had the same thought, swirling the wine around her glass before putting it back very deliberately on the table. ‘You all know how lucky I was to get here. Not just getting here, either - getting paired with Lincoln, and being in Indra’s sightline when they needed to throw someone on, and Anya sticking with me even though I wouldn’t talk to her for weeks after I arrived.’
‘Maybe I liked you better that way,’ said Anya gruffly.
Lexa flicked a stray leaf of parsley at her. ‘I’m lucky to have this life. It’s given me everything, and it’s made me happy. But…’ She shrugged a shoulder almost imperceptibly. ‘New things are good. And it’s hard to seek them out when you spend nine tenths of your time either in the theater or asleep. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m grateful we got to make this new work when we did, because my world is bigger as a result, and I think I really needed that. There it is. To newcomers and new experiences.’
‘Newcomers.’
‘Who are you, and what have you done with Lexa Woods?’
‘Sap,’ said Lincoln affectionately.
‘Moron.’ Lexa quirked an eyebrow at Clarke as they toasted. ‘Anything to add?’
Clarke imagined Octavia watching and wishing from the back row of the theater; Anya with a broken leg; Lincoln dancing alone; Lexa crushed, how terrible it is to be in love and still be wrong for each other, out of the studio for months and months as everything came crashing down at once. She remembered Lexa’s cold, closed face that day in the dressing room, the truce in the stairwell, the careful, melting way she’d kissed. The sound of thousands of people rising to their feet. The last, perfect line of a sketch. The smell of flowers.
She raised her glass. ‘To second chances.’
‘Second chances.’
Anya nodded gravely. ‘May we never run out of them.’
***
The restaurant was a few blocks from Lexa’s building in the general direction of Clarke’s apartment, so Clarke walked the ballerina home, feeling about sixteen years old. The city was nice on a Sunday night. Less frenetic than a Saturday, they passed couples on dates and groups of girlfriends, cops leaning against their cars, families on the way home from the cinema and bar staff coming off early shift.
Clarke had seen Lexa offer Anya a cigarette on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and watched them share it in silence, the last secret revealed, a final forgiveness of everything that had been said and done. She had hugged Octavia so hard the tears came, either from sheer pride or because her ribs were cracking. She had seen Lexa and Lincoln squeeze each other’s hands, no words needed after ten years, and she had smiled like a proud mother as he and Octavia walked off together. Lexa had risked her life hailing a cab for Anya. And that had just left the two of them.
The ballerina looked positively dangerous at night. It was the beautiful hair, and the eyeliner, the directness of her gaze, the way she demanded attention with the way she carried herself and the effortless, imperious set of her jaw; the way it all softened when she smiled. It was because Clarke wanted all of it, couldn’t get enough of it, knew she never would.
‘So, this is me.’
‘Nice place.’
‘You should see the bedroom.’
‘That was terrible.’
‘I had to try it, though.’ Lexa tilted her head so their foreheads were touching, fingertips dancing up Clarke’s arms, skimming her shoulders, soft against her neck. ‘Want another drink?’
‘I shouldn’t…’
‘You should.’
‘I have things to do.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Almost today.’ But she could have stood in that circle of light forever.
‘Go on,’ coaxed the ballerina, eyes warm with promise, ‘it’s just Monday.’
In a few hours Lexa would be back in the studio, analyzing and correcting and perfecting, creating moment after beautiful moment that no one but she and Lincoln would ever see, the way she had every day for ten years previous and would do for ten years after. Clarke had three conference calls, an interview, hundreds if not thousands of emails, but it was all worth it for the hours it let her spend with her mind on color, line, texture; taking a thing that existed in her head and making it real. Everything would be the same. So much would be different.
‘Stay,’ Lexa whispered.
And she did, she did.