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According to the old, battered clock that hangs pathetically over the office door, one of the only spots on this place’s walls where the paint hasn't chipped away entirely to reveal the drywall lurking underneath in all of its ugly, greyish glory, the time is exactly four in the morning. It's the same crappy clock they've had since Alice first got here, some ten wonderfully fruitful years of staring vacantly at the tiny hands slowly ticking the hours away behind the protective glass, as if compelling them to magically jump from three a.m to six, the sweet buzz of her phone alarm in her pocket signaling the end of another excruciatingly mundane night. How this janky piece of garbage has survived longer than every single one of her attempted relationships, Alice does not know. This entire place is probably some sort of limbo for shitty electronics and bad, watery coffee, amongst other unspeakable horrors. Certainly would explain how the computers still function- though she's using that term very loosely- and undead electronic devices are hardly the last thing she expects from the British government.
Now Alice finds herself staring at that clock again. Ten years, almost. Could've had a child during that time. Could've won the lottery. Could've died.
It's just me and you in this cruel world, clock.
The rustle of fabric, followed by the ring of Sam's voice, light still despite the exhaustion creeping just beneath, force Alice to tear her eyes away from the wall above the door and acknowledge her bastard friend currently in the process of abandoning her to the mercy of her massive backlog and less than ideal company. Celia smiles sweetly at her from next to him, arm hooked around Sam's free one. Alice gives her a glare. She's an abettor.
“Right, well, we'd better get going.” Sam announces to the almost empty room, moving to clasp his hand around the door handle.
“Sure. Whatever. Just leave me here. After everything I've done for you.”
“Alice.”
“No no, it's fine. I get it. Go have fun while I shrivel up and die down here.”
“Well, maybe next time consider not slacking off so much?”
“Touché, Sam. Touché.”
“Besides,” Celia chimes in, a giggle already tugging at the corners of her mouth “you're not alone. You've got Gwen.”
The figure in question is hunched over a crumbling keyboard, the soft glow of the monitor screen in front of her illuminating features stiff from sleeplessness and stress. She barely seems to register the mention of her name, a brief flutter of the eyelids the only sign that she's anything more than the reanimated corpse of a dead colleague.
Alice feels her eye twitch. Christ. The universe truly is conspiring against her.
“Aren’t I lucky.” she pushes through gritted teeth, and Celia tries and fails to suppress a small chuckle, at which Sam lightly elbows her side in protest, though he's struggling very hard to suppress a smile of his own.
“Don't be mean.” followed by a cough that could have been a laugh. “We're off now, anyway. Good night, or I guess, morning?”
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in harder.”
“If you hadn't let all your cases pile up this bad you could be joining us right now, you know.”
“Are you inviting me to be the third wheel on your little work-skipping date? That's so sweet of you, Sam.”
“Alice, what date, it's like four in the mo-”
“Enjoy your honeymoon! And don't think too much about old Alice rotting away in the basement of a shitty government facility.”
“Okay, yeah, we're leaving. See you tomorrow, Gwen!” Sam offers politely, though he receives little in the way of a reply. He sighs as he pushes the door open, holding it for Celia, who looks back at Alice with a grin that could almost be called apologetic.
“Try not to kill each other while we're gone, yeah?”
Alice rolls her eyes, doesn't return the grin.
“Please, she's probably already dead.”
The door closes behind them with a soft click as Celia's laughter echoes through the hall and down the stairs. Almost out of reflex, Alice looks back to the clock.
Four-o-five.
She slumps down onto her desk, defeated and irritated. It's shaping up to be a long night.
—
It is now four thirty in the morning. So far, Alice has finished two whole cases, doodled on her hand with what she was later dismayed to find out was permanent marker, gotten coffee, paced around the room, gotten coffee again, received a few sideways glares from Gwen, sat back down.
She is currently swiveling around in her office chair, an ancient thing that threatens to collapse with every sharp, sudden movement she makes. She is very bored. She wants to sleep. She wants to bother someone.
Gwen still hasn't moved a centimeter from her desk. Not to stretch, not to get anything to drink, hasn't even taken her eyes off the screen except for the occasional angry glance at Alice's direction. Alice struggles to figure out how and why anybody could be this dedicated to something this extraordinarily dull. In the back of her mind, a thought surfaces with odd clarity, and for a second she's certain Gwen is one of those people who collect stamps. Hundreds and hundreds of them, spilling out from within albums and filling up her entire apartment. It's like Alice can see it all in front of her. The walls, the floor, the furniture. Everything is stamps.
The thought dissipates as quickly as it manifests, and Alice is left looking vacantly at the back of Gwen's head, straw blonde hair neatly tucked behind a black headband that Alice swears she sees Gwen wear every day. She's overcome with the sudden urge to tug at some strands, run her hand through them, grab Gwen's head and rattle it around, open up her skull and peer into her brain in hopes of finally understanding how she works, what she feels, if she even does at all. Alice, instead, pushes her swivel chair next to Gwen at her desk, resting her head on her forearms and eyeing her playfully, a sardonic smile already creeping its way to her lips.
“Hey, Gwen.”
There's no response, save for the sound of Gwen's fingers running rapidly across the keys.
“Gwen. Gwen. Gwen.“
The typing halts to a stop, replaced, momentarily, by the sound of a very deliberate deep inhale.
“What.”
“There she is!” Alice grins, words laced with honey, sugary sweet and intentionally sickening. “I knew you'd missed me. You wanna hear a joke?” She tilts her head slightly closer to Gwen, who doesn't make any move to reposition herself, instead staring stiffly into the monitor ahead.
“No.”
“‘Course you do. Ever heard that joke about construction?”
“...”
“...See, this is where you're supposed to say ‘no’.”
“I don't care about your construction jokes, Alice. Just- let me get back to work, please.”
“Ah-ah-ah, no can do, Miss Bouchard. Come on, just one. Just say ‘no, I haven't heard the joke about construction’.”
Gwen sighs. It's significantly deeper this time, less like she's trying to make a point of being busy and more like she's making an active attempt to choke down anger. There's some imperceptible emotion moving just behind the pale blue of her eyes. Alice's grin only widens.
“If I play along with your stupid joke, will you leave me alone?”
“That’s for you to discover.”
There’s a brief pause. The computer fans make a low humming noise that seems to grow steadily louder. Gwen lets out a sound almost inaudible, caught between a groan and a tortured sigh, and then, like pulling teeth, spits out,
“No, I haven't heard the joke about construction.”
“Well,” Alice pauses for dramatic effect, then hangs her head back so her lips barely brush past Gwen's ear. The black headband curls around her head, an impenetrable fortress between the outside world and Gwen's own mind. Alice wonders what would happen if she grasped a firm hand around it and slid it clean off. She wonders if Gwen would fall apart before her eyes. She wonders if she'd enjoy that.
“Well,” Alice repeats. “I'm still working on it.”
Silence falls. Gwen stares. Alice smiles proudly.
“Right.”
And so the typing resumes. For a little while, the only sounds that fill the room are the whir of the computer fans and the faint, distant ticking of the clock. Ten years, Alice thinks to herself, for no particular reason at all.
Gwen's eyes are once again focused on the screen. Alice examines the woman's features, sharp, cold and delicate at the same time. She notes the massive eyebags under Gwen's eyes, that only seem to grow deeper by the day, the way her lips are torn and bleeding at the edges, the slight furrow of her brows wrinkling her forehead and giving the impression that she's always vaguely irritated at something. Alice almost reaches out a hand to smooth over Gwen's brow, push her face into an expression of neutral relaxation instead of this uptight, barely concealed worry. Don't frown so much, she wants to say, it doesn't look good on you.
What instead comes out of her mouth before she can stop herself is,
“You look like shit.”
Gwen glares, and this time it stings a little. Alice finds herself looking away.
“Thanks. Listen, Alice, if you just came over to stare at me and comment on how horrendous I look, I would really prefer it if you went back to work.”
At this, Alice snaps her head back, brief embarrassment forgotten and energy restored. She latches onto the implication Gwen left, most likely unintentionally, hanging in the air between them, and from Gwen's facial expression turning steadily sour(er), Alice can tell that she, too, has caught on to her grave mistake, that she can very much see the glimmer of mischief shining in Alice's eyes.
Gwen lets out a sigh, visibly prepares herself for what's to come.
“So what you're saying, Gwendolyn, is that you'd rather I stay close and whisper sweet nothings into your ear? Tell you how pretty you look? Stare into your eyes longingly?”
“Alice, please, I'm tired, can you not-”
“Oh, Gwendolyn Bouchard, how marvelous you look on this fine ass-crack of dawn, how I yearn for the feeling of your hands on mine, how you-”
“Alice-”
“-shine like a well polished diamond in the mid-day sun! Oh my, I truly envy the man who takes you as his bride-”
“Alice, shut up!”
And Alice gifts her a grin full of teeth.
“Only if you make me.”
And Gwen then does something. Alice wasn't expecting her to do something, wasn't expecting her to do this something, or any something like this, because this wasn't something that was supposed to be done like this. Or ever. Not here, not anywhere, not between them.
Gwendolyn Bouchard leans sharply forward and presses her mouth against Alice's.
It's brief. It's strange. Her lips taste bitter, like black coffee mixed with blood, drunk on a rainy day. She pulls away almost immediately, but the feeling lingers. The taste lingers. Alice stares.
Gwen's face is thoroughly flushed. Alice thinks it's the most red she's ever seen a person go, and yet Gwen's gaze remains stubbornly locked on her own, unrelenting, challenging her, almost, to turn away. To yell. To run. To be loudly disgusted and perplexed. Alice studies her eyes, the swirling patterns of blue and grey and light brown that seem to possess a life of their own behind the safety of Gwen's eyelids. Alice hasn't seen her eyes from this close before, hasn't observed how their color twists and flows and leaks out and through Gwen's face. Alice hasn't noticed, up until now, how pretty they are. There is an addictive sort of quality to Gwen's unwavering, penetrating gaze that makes part of Alice think that being locked in place, staring at each other like this, wouldn't be something she would hate at all. Not at all.
She knows she should look away. She should go back to her desk, finish filing her cases, drink the rest of her coffee and ignore this, ignore Gwen, ignore everything that's happened today, stuff it all neatly into a tiny box and dispose of it in her brain's crematorium when she gets back home. She should feel alarmed, confused, and she does, but not for the reasons she should.
She wants to want to run. But she can't find it in herself to do so.
When she opens her mouth, her voice comes out hoarse.
“You-”
And then she's leaning in.
She cups Gwen's face between her hands. Feels for any loose strands of hair that might have fallen around her cheeks. Holds her like she's delicate porcelain, prone to break at the slightest movement. That is how Gwen feels under her palms right now. Delicate porcelain. To be handled with care. She doesn't know why.
It lasts longer this time. It's deeper, this time. The taste of blood and coffee still lingers, but the feeling of Gwen's lips interlocked with hers drowns out any other sensation. Alice's hands move to rest at the nape of Gwen's neck. Gwen's hands do nothing, but she doesn't pull away, either.
It's weird, this feeling in Alice's stomach. She can't tell if it's excitement or fear. Her brain is screaming at her that what she's doing is wrong- I mean, Gwendolyn Bouchard, she’s making out with Gwendolyn Bouchard- but the hammering of her heart in her chest, this feeling that she's just discovered something she didn't even know she was missing…
She wants more. She wants to know completion. She's just gotten hold of something truly important, and she needs to find out how it ends.
It's only when Alice's hands move downward from Gwen's neck to her chest and then even lower still, that Gwen pulls away. Her face is a contortion of a multitude of different emotions fighting for control, confusion, pleasure, fear, shock, all cycling through her eyes and mouth like the channels on a television screen, and Alice somehow feels like it almost perfectly reflects her own.
Gwen falters. She stutters. She looks at Alice, looks away. Her face is red. It's always red.
“Alice, wait, I don't think- Not here.” she gestures vaguely around, one hand still holding on to Alice's own. Alice doesn't think she realizes this.
“Why, are you afraid that Freddy's gonna be listening in?” Alice tilts her head playfully. And then, in a more serious tone, brows creasing and demeanor faltering slightly, “If you don't want to- it's okay-”
“No, I-” Gwen cuts her off, before cutting herself off, before running her thumb over Alice's forefinger, deep in thought. Alice only looks at her, wondering to herself, just how long has it taken her to notice how beautiful Gwen is? The way she bites her lip when she's thinking, the way she every so often tucks some loose strands of straw colored hair behind her ear, the way her eyes reflect external light like the surface of the moon. Though, Alice considers, maybe she had noticed these things sooner. Maybe she had ignored the feeling, called it something else. Frustration. Dismissal. But not love. Never love, not until now. How?
“Okay.” Gwen whispers softly in Alice's ear, whisking her out of her thoughts while she wraps Alice's arms around her body like a lifeline. “Okay, here.”
And somehow, Alice knows exactly what to do. Like they've done this before. Like they were always meant to be doing this.
She pushes Gwen against the desk, computer still on but completely disregarded, and lifts her up so she's sitting just centimeters away from the keyboard she'd been busying herself with so diligently not a full five minutes ago. Their heads are standing at about the same height, now. Alice giggles internally at how short Gwen is compared to her, even with her heels on.
Neat Gwen. Tidy Gwen. Dress code following Gwen. Refill-the-kettle Gwen. Alice presses her hands against Gwen's chest and starts unbuttoning her pristine white flannel. No wrinkles, perfectly ironed, just like everything about her. The little headband nestled in her hair. Her smooth, almost knee-length skirt. All so rehearsed, so perfect, no room for flaws, for people to doubt, for people to know the real woman behind that squeaky clean outwards projection. Alice is sick of neat. She’s sick of tidy. She wants to mess up Gwen's hair, to hurl that headband away against a wall, to rip up her skirt and burn her stupid white flannel. She wants to see Gwen completely come undone, at least this once.
The shirt is on the ground and Alice has to resist the urge to step on it. Instead, she rings her arms around Gwen's body to gently undo her bra. Alice can't help but notice, absently in the moment but with more clarity later on, how even her bra is perfectly boring, no laces or frills or whatever other fun stuff the girls Alice had previously hooked up with revealed once their shirts were off, just a very dull beige. In hindsight, it was a pretty silly thing to notice, but Alice supposes that's just how these things work.
The entire time Alice's hands had been busy, Gwen was sat stiff as a plank on her desk, legs slightly parted in the position Alice had propped her up in and doing very little in terms of movement to assist with the undressing. Alice worries, for a second, that Gwen might have only said yes to appease her and doesn't actually want to go through with any of this, so she stops, bra in one hand, and looks her in the eyes for some clue of how the woman is feeling. It's only when their gazes intertwine and Gwen turns that now familiar shade of pink that Alice begins to catch on to what's actually going on.
She smiles, tries to be reassuring without sounding too much like she's finding the whole situation comedic, even when she is.
“Have you never done this before…?”
“Am I- am I doing something wrong?” There is a hint of panic in Gwen's voice, an indirect, and accidental, confirmation to Alice's suspicion.
“Oh my God. You're a virgin.”
“No, I- I was just- I'm not-”
“Hey hey hey, relax, it's okay. I'll go easy.”
“I've just- never-”
“It's okay, Gwen. Nobody's here to judge.”
Except for Alice, after they're done.
“Don't. Go easy. I'll be fine.”
Alice smiles. “Right you are, Madam.”
She lets the bra fall to the floor at her feet, over the now crumpled shirt, and holds out both of Gwen's arms, wrapping them around her own shoulders and pressing their faces closer together.
“Here, this should be more comfortable for you.”
Gwen nods, closes her eyes, and for a while, all is quiet as they make out in the semi-darkness of the office, tongue meeting tongue, relishing the taste of each other, the feel of their bodies pressed up against one another. Alice begins to rub small circles on Gwen's now bare chest, and Gwen makes a little noise in the back of her throat, surprise or pleasure, Alice can't tell, but she feels the vibrations inside her own mouth like they're both sighing in sync.
The headband comes off next. Alice lunges for it, violently, almost, and lets it fall softly on the desk beside Gwen, beside the archaic monitor and the crumbling keyboard. She runs her free hand through Gwen's hair and turns her carefully styled hairdo into a disarray of color and electricity, and the halo of light falling onto her from the fluorescents above makes her look like an angel, and Alice thinks that if all angels looked the way Gwendolyn Bouchard does in this very moment, maybe Heaven wouldn't be so bad. She can feel Gwen's heartbeat through her chest, a frantic rhythm that begs to be matched, begs for completion, just how Alice herself is, and she swears that, at least tonight, she will see that completion to the end.
Alice parts their lips, or, rather, has to force herself to, as she begins to move her hands slowly downwards, making sure to let her touch linger in every exposed part of Gwen's body. She traces small circles with her forefinger on Gwen's bare stomach, chuckling lightly when she feels the woman shiver beneath her, a small gasp escaping her lips as she tightens her grip around Alice's shoulders. Alice had forgotten this feeling of closeness, of another body on hers, of someone placing their entire trust in her, trust that she would be sweet and gentle if asked to, or wild and unpredictable, if asked to. Trust that she loved, and was loved, and was aware of both of those things.
She lowers herself just slightly to place a soft kiss on Gwen's abdomen. Gwen giggles from above her, rests her head on Alice's shoulder and sighs in contentment, and it's enough to feel trusted and loved, even in this small basement office buried deep in a decrepit old building.
One hand still drawing small circles on Gwen's abdomen, and earning a few ticklish giggles along the way, Alice slides her free hand up Gwen's skirt, tracing slender fingers along the inside of her thighs, before settling, gently, over her underwear.
Gwen flinches at this, and Alice shoots her a should-I-stop sideways glance, though Gwen shakes her head and smiles down at her.
“Just not used to- it's… different” she says “when other people do it.”
A laugh escapes Alice and she's quick to pass it off as just a cough.
I wonder why, she wants to say, but ultimately decides against it, because she feels it slightly insensitive to make fun of someone right as she's about to stick her hand inside them.
She tries three fingers first, but when Gwen lets out a low, pained whine and digs her nails in the fabric of her shirt, Alice goes for two instead. She pushes as far as she can go, as far as she thinks it won't cause too much pain, and then carefully twists. Gwen shudders and tries to choke down a noise by biting her lower lip, drawing blood in the process, her arms still wrapped tight around Alice's shoulders. Doesn't want to risk being heard, or does she think her pleasure distasteful? Alice wonders in the semi-dark.
“Hey,” she offers “if you don't want to risk- being loud, you can just bite my neck, if, you know, that helps. Better than biting your lips.”
Gwen stares, hazy-eyed.
“That'll hurt you, though. I don't want-”
Alice laughs. “What, that? I'm used to it, had partners who liked it. Maybe you'll like it.” She winks, sliding her shirt a bit lower so part of her shoulder and neck are properly exposed. Gwen considers the offer, brings her face closer to Alice's skin, nods. Alice trembles slightly at the feeling of Gwen's hair brushing against exposed skin. But it doesn't feel bad. Doesn't feel bad at all.
It all falls into a melodious rhythm, the in and out and around of her fingers, Gwen's small sounds muffled by her mouth against Alice's skin, the electric sensation when Gwen buries her teeth deep into Alice's flesh, bruising, bleeding, like a thunderbolt shooting right through her core. She grabs the hair on the back of Gwen's neck as she pushes and pulls, feels the inside of her across her fingertips, savors the feeling of Gwen's body under her hands, fangs meeting skin meeting blood meeting pleasure in pain. When Gwen comes, body shuddering and fingers trembling ever so slightly over the fabric of Alice's shirt, they don't say much. Alice rubs Gwen's back with one hand, staring absently down at the sticky residue on the fingers of her other, and neither of them think to move for a long time.
When Alice walks into work the next day, she finds a small sticky note taped to the bottom side of her monitor. The handwriting is neat, tidy, though the tail on the y’s curls upwards slightly more than it strictly should.
“What do you call a can opener that doesn't work?” the note reads. “A can't opener.”
Alice glances around the room in mock irritation, unsticking the note from her computer and folding it carefully into the front pocket of her jacket. She's certain she knows who the mysterious sender is before she sees them.
Gwen sits at her desk, diligently working away as usual. Her hair is pin straight once again, flannel shirt clean and ironed and, Alice notices with some dismay, the black headband has made a miraculous and not at all asked for comeback. But when Gwen locks eyes with her through her reflection on the monitor, Alice thinks she can see her smile, and she looks ever so slightly happier than she used to.