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[takecourage]

It's a slow night at the club and Alex is bored to tears. Sitting in her office with her booted feet kicked up on the desk, she scrolls through her phone and pulls up her message thread with Lee.

Are you free? Work's fucking boring.

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[takecourage]

"Didn't see you doing any dancing," she says, but she does take the notes he tucked into her G-string earlier out of her jeans pocket and offer them to him between two fingers.

"Was on the house, though."

[atehimrightup]

Lee looks down at cash and snorts softly in amusement, shaking his head and gesturing for her to get onto the truck.

“Nah, you earned that. It was a hell of a lap dance, Stern.” He swats playfully at her ass as she climbs into the cab, then shuts her door and whistles jovially to himself as he twirls his keys around his finger. Once he climbs onto the bench seat next to her, he starts up the old engine and looks over at her as if warms up a little.

“They make this cream with aloe and stuff in it,” Lee says in a more serious tone, vaguely concerned as he thinks about the red marks on her ass in a less erotic context. He’s about to offer to get her some, then snorts and rolls his eyes at himself as he buckles his seat belt. “Sorry, forgot who I was talkin’ to for a sec. You have a sex dungeon and we met at a sex club. Of course you know about the lotion.”

[takecourage]

"Don't call me that," she says, and her tone is mostly flat but there's a soft, plaintive note in it. She copes pretty well, most of the time, but it still hurts to hear her surname used as a term of endearment.

She tucks the notes back into her pocket, not about to argue about it. What he says next makes her laugh. "Yes," she says. "I know about the lotion."

[atehimrightup]

Lee couldn’t have known it was a trigger, but he still feels bad about accidentally poking at a wound. But she doesn’t make a big deal of it, so he doesn’t either.

“It won’t happen again,” Lee assures her, filing it away in his mind with the other things she doesn’t like. This one kind of shoots up to the top of the list, though.

He’s relieved when she laughs, even if it’s at his expense, and shakes his head with a chuckle as he reverses out of his spot and leaves the parking lot.

“Well, it works,” he admits with slightly pink cheeks. “So make sure you use some.”

[takecourage]

It's incredibly endearing and Alex smiles, softer than she sometimes is, her hair dark wings around her face. "I promise," she says. "I will absolutely rub lotion into my ass before I go to bed."

[atehimrightup]

“Good,” Lee says with a huff. He’d offer to do it himself, but that feels almost too intimate, like it’d be crossing a line that he’s not too comfortable with. Which is kind of ridiculous, given all that they’d just done.

“Do you want tacos?” He asks after few minutes of companionable silence. “There’s a good place with a drive-thru coming up and I’m starving. I’ll buy you some or I can hit it after I drop you off if you just wanna get home.”

[takecourage]

"Tacos sound really good," says Alex, settled comfortably in the passenger seat, her head turned to one side so that she can watch the lights spilling by. Edie's sitter is paid really well to stay until Alex gets home, so she's got otime. "You know, the only thing I really miss about California is the drive thrus."

[atehimrightup]

“Mm, I never made it as far west as California,” Lee muses, checking his mirrors before navigating into a turn lane. “Always meant to.”

He chuckles and turns into the parking lot, stomach growling at the smell of grilling meat and spices. “There was no good Mexican food in Kentucky. I’ll tell you that much.”

[takecourage]

"I'd never really left the valley before I went to Yale," she says. "The only times I left LA was when Mira tried to ship me off to bootcamp in the desert. And juvie."

There's nobody left in Darrow who knows that much about Alex's youth. Danny had known, obviously. She'd told Kavinsky some of it. Otherwise, she guarded those painful, shitty memories like a wild thing would guard a wound.

[atehimrightup]

“Ah, juvie. They tried to stick me there a time or two,” Lee says with a low, rueful chuckle as he navigates into the drive-thru line. There are two cars ahead of them, and Lee slumps back into his seat with his foot on the break. “They never could hold me.”

Alex knows a thing or two about having a rough upbringing. Lee is curious but he knows voicing that curiosity isn’t wise, because he might invite that same curiosity back on himself. Still, he can’t help but wonder.

“How do you go from juvie to Yale?” He asks, figuring that’s safer.

[takecourage]

"I was in and out of juvie and psych wards when I was younger," says Alex. "Mira tried to send me to one of those fucking...scared straight in the desert bootcamps, but I'd already figured out how to get out of a zip tie by then." She glances across at him, her face unreadable for a moment.

"I was...scouted," she says. "By a secret organisation." She makes a face. "It's exactly as bullshit as it sounds. Yale has all of these secret socities, but everyone kind of knows about most of them. Then there's the one that most people don't know about. Lethe."

[atehimrightup]

It’s a lot of information to learn about someone when you’re idling in the drive-thru of a Mexican restaurant. The neon yellow menu blinds him from a few yards away, and Lee blinks as he takes it all in. Before Darrow, he would have called bullshit.

But now he’s got a boyfriend, apparently. And it’s the fucking Earl of Buckingham. It’s easier to roll with the punches now.

“Well, damn,” he finally says, huffing out a laugh and grinning over at her. It doesn’t seem to be the easiest thing for her to talk about so while he’s curious, he doesn’t press for more. Not right now, anyway.

“Okay, miss secret society,” he says warmly. “What kind of tacos do you want?”

[takecourage]

She's weirdly grateful when he doesn't immediately ask for more details.

"Carne asada," she says, without hesitation. "Please. And a Coke."

[atehimrightup]

Lee orders a whole mess of tacos, a few drinks, and some taquitos to eat on the ride home, and hopefully George will be there. He did it again, he realizes. Home is George's place. Home is wherever George is. Christ, he's so fucked.

"I've got a bunch of shit, too," Lee offers as they inch forward and he leans over to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. "I'm not gonna get into it all right now, but just-- you're not gonna rattle me. If you ever wanna talk."

[takecourage]

"Thanks," she says, because she really is grateful. She leans her head against the window, looking out into the darkness as they ease forward in the line. "I...Had a pretty shitty life before I got here. Being here...being with Danny...have Edie. It was the first chance I ever really had to be happy and, even then, I tried really hard to fuck it up at first."

[atehimrightup]

"Me too. Exceedingly shitty," Lee says with a slow breath, brow furrowing slightly as Alex continues. It's sometimes easy to forget that Alex is a mother. He's never seen that side of her, aside from the obvious love in her voice when she mentions her daughter. Lee doesn't take it personally that she doesn't share much of that part of herself with him. It's not really something he's earned, and he would have no idea how to act around a kid anyway.

"Ah, self-sabotage," he breathes out, smiling ruefully and tugging his debit card out of his wallet. He never had one of these before Darrow. "How long has it been since Danny--"

He can't really bring himself to say it, and he feels a sudden surge of panic that makes his body seize up a little, breath caught in his throat as he imagines the same thing happening to George. Just the thought makes him want to throw up.

[takecourage]

Somebody else calling him Danny feels so strange. He would always have introduced himself as Darlington. She would have introduced him as that, too. SHe hadn't even thought of him as Danny until Darrow.

"Since July last year," she says, worrying the corner of her thumbnail with her teeth then pausing to inspect the damage. She wears press ons, sometimes, when she's dancing but, now, her natural nails are short and ragged. "We both got here in 2019, and it took us a while to get our asses in gear, but we were together pretty much from February 2020 until the day he went."