Work Text:
Be careful of the curse that falls on young lovers
Starts so soft and sweet and turns them to hunters
When Lexi is eight years old, her grandma gives her the best advice she ever receives.
Grandma Howard is her favorite person in the world. She is the only person who doesn’t seem to prefer Cassie, even in the unobvious, subconscious way that her parents seem to. She’s quiet, like Lexi - a watcher, a gatherer of information, the kind of person that examines all the variables before making a decision. It’s not hard to see where Lexi gets it from.
And her Grandma is an incredible baker - like, a little bit famous in their Oakland suburb, even. They’re making a lemon cake for her mom’s birthday and had just finished separating egg whites from the yolks for the lemon curd. Lexi is about to dump the discarded whites in the trash when her grandma stops her.
“No, save those, Sweet,” her grandma tells her, shooing her away from the trash. Sweet. That’s what her grandma called her. “Whenever I make a curd, I always make macarons to use the extra egg whites.”
“I thought we were making cake,” Lexi says, carefully setting the bowl back down on the table.
“We are,” she agrees. “But if we make macarons too, then we can use them to decorate the cake with. It will make it look fancy, and it ends up being less work, because while making macarons takes time, it’s easier than trying to decorate a cake.” Her grandma looks at her then, giving her a soft smile, and says something Lexi would never forget. “Take it from me, Sweet. Work smart, not hard. Always aim for two birds with one stone.”
Lexi didn’t like the image those words made. “Why would you want to hit birds with a stone?” she asks, wrinkling her nose.
Her grandma laughs, a warm sound that makes Lexi feel like someone had hugged her soul. “Not real birds, Sweet,” she says gently. “It’s an expression. It means, if you can, accomplish two things you want by only doing one thing. Throwing only one stone, but hitting two birds.”
-
Two birds, one stone. Words that, as soon as she hears them, become her mantra. They’d served her pretty well. She’d recycled homework assignments, economized tasks, cut corners in a hundred different ways without actually cutting corners. Working smarter, not harder: the actions of a dreamer that didn’t necessarily love logic and reason but knew how to use them to accomplish a goal.
It works out pretty well, too, until she falls in love with the local drug dealer and logic goes out the window.
January 5th, 2019
She feels stupid.
Nothing had gone the way she’d wanted it to, the way it had played out in her mind over and over again on the ride to Fez’s store. In her version of events, she was going to be confident and cool, flirty and forward. In actuality, she’d stammered and stayed silent as Mr. Jacobs had done his weird intimidation thing. She’d barely managed to say goodbye to Fez before she’d slunk out the door, hopping back on her bike to ride to the safety of her home.
Embarrassing. Lexi the meek. Lexi the silent. Lexi the absolutely nothing at all.
Seeing herself through this lens made it easy to start writing her play. She was on the outside looking in anyway, might as well channel it into something productive. It actually keeps her busy enough for a couple days that she’s able to almost forget about Fez and her aborted attempt at romance. Almost.
Her heart still leaps into her throat every time her phone buzzes with a text.
Which is why she’s just jittery enough to drop her phone when she looks at the notification and sees that he’d actually texted her.
hey lexi. was hoping you’d stop back down to the shop one of these days. did I scare you away?
She’s eternally grateful that her sister is out doing whatever it is that she’s been up to lately because the squeal she let out is more than obvious. Turns out she hasn’t screwed it all up.
No, you didn’t! she types, and starts gnawing on her thumbnail. I’ve just been busy, sorry!
no problem, her phone buzzes a minute later. are u busy now? we can talk later if u want.
She feels the same flutter of nerves that she did when she’d gone to his shop, but this time it’s tempered by the knowledge that Fez is still interested. “Fortune favors the bold,” she mutters to herself, and types her response into her phone. I’m free now, actually, if you are, she replies. Want to hang out?
She may not have the experience Cassie does but even she knows it’s a good sign that her phone buzzes back right away. hell yeah, he texts. want to come over? we can hang out and watch a movie or something.
Her butterflies are replaced with something more closely resembling the anxiety she’s used to, now that this is actually happening, but it still feels good. She thinks of being a kid and swinging on the swings at the playground, getting as high as she could before she’d let go and fly through the air. Sometimes she’d land gracefully, half the time she’d fall in a heap, but it was always worth it - that glorious moment of weightlessness after she’d let go of the swing.
This was going to be worth it, too. She could feel it.
March 8th, 2019
Two nights before Lexi’s play, Rue comes crawling through her window.
She panics, at first. Rue’s only been clean a whopping eight days, and Lexi’s anxiety has her thinking of peeing in Tylenol bottles and what the hell they’re going to do with Rue now before she realizes that Rue isn’t high.
She is, however, crying.
“Rue? Rue? What’s wrong?” she whispers frantically, hugging her friend back while Rue clings to her.
“I fucked up, Lex,” she sobs. “Like, really bad.”
Lexi hums and she holds on, one hand gently smoothing down her hair. “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she tries to reassure her. “Whatever it is, we can work it out, okay?” Rue shakes her head, hiccuping, tears still running down her face, and Lexi tries again. “Just tell me. We’ll figure it out. We always do. Right?”
Rue takes a shuddering breath. “I got in real deep, with the wrong people,” she says. “I had this idea to sell, so I could like, get high off my own supply, or whatever,” she ducks her head, embarrassed. “Drugs for free. So I went to Fez’s supplier, Laurie, and she fronted me a suitcase, but I used too much, and then my mom found the rest and she flushed it -“
Lexi exhales. Shit. This was way, way worse than using again. She knew enough from her relationship with Fez to know that there were two things these people didn’t fuck with: power, and money.
“How much do you owe?” she whispers, afraid of the answer.
Two fat tears roll out of Rue’s eyes and down her cheeks. “Ten grand,” she admits. “And it’s more than the money, though… she talked about selling me to some ‘sick people’” - her hands come up in lazy air quotes - “like it was a threat, and I think…” she looks back up at Lexi, shame all over her face. “I think she knows that Fez and I are tight. I think she knows he’d do shit he doesn’t want to do, just to protect me.”
All the things she’s feeling - anxiety, fear for her friend, frustration that this is where they were - are burned out of her in an instant, leaving smoldering rage in their place. It makes sense now, why a dealer would front an addict ten grand in drugs. It was never about Rue or Rue’s scheme to sell, it was about one thing: getting Fez under Laurie’s control, the way she’d probably had Mouse under her control before that. A long line of disposable men, only useful for getting her more, more, more. Under her comforter, Lexi’s hand squeezes into a fist.
She’s not going to let this woman hurt Fez. He’s hers, understand? Hers.
“Tell me everything you can,” she says evenly. “We’ll work it out.”
Rue sighs, nods, and begins to talk.
January 24th, 2019
Fez is absolutely nothing like she would have thought.
For one, he has the most gentle heart she’s ever seen. It’s crazy that he has this personality that he can slip on when it’s time to do business and slip off just as quickly. She’s not stupid, she knows damn well that he’s not soft like this for anyone but her. She loves the way that makes her feel.
Powerful.
She’s learning stuff about herself too. Sexy is never a word she’d have used to describe herself, but that’s how she feels now, crawling onto Fez’s lap to straddle him as they kiss, slow and lazy in the haze of the afternoon sun.
“Fuck,” he murmurs against her lips, hands skating over her ribs. “Fuck, Lexi -” She hums into his mouth and slowly, deliberately, rocks her hips forward.
He gasps. “Lexi,” he breathes. “We should slow down -” but she’s shaking her head, cutting him off. “I don’t want to slow down,” she interrupts. She pulls back but her hips are still rolling, gently, a ship on the ocean. “We can stop if you want to,” she says sincerely, meeting his eyes. “But if you’re stopping just for me -”
“Nah, I’m…” he pauses, kissing her again like he can’t help it, hands sliding down until he could squeeze her ass. “You sure you good?” he asks, helpless, eyes wide. Her hips roll again and she feels his cock, hot and hard in his jeans, rub against the silky crotch of her panties.
“So, so good,” she breathes, and loses herself in him again, his tongue licking into her mouth.
They’ve been together for a little under a month now. She knows she doesn’t have a lot of experience in this area, and it’s not like she had anyone to model a functional relationship for her, but she’s pretty sure this thing they’re building between them is something special. They don’t really do anything fancy, but she’s cool with that. She’s never been the kind of person that thought flowers, presents, or dinners in fancy restaurants were what made romance. They were creating something else, something bigger.
It’s intimacy.
Hours talking about everything. He never seemed to get tired of listening to her, and he was much smarter than anyone, including himself, had given him credit for. They trade stories about who they were when they were kids and growing up, things they had missed being the kid of a dealer and of two addicts, respectively. They watch movies and shows and talk about them, Lexi elaborating with little asides of all the weird facts she knew because she’d had nothing but time to learn them. She tells him about her play, how it was going. He promises he’ll be there in the front row on opening night.
And then there was this, the heat between them. They’ve been tiptoeing around it long enough, Lexi had decided, being pretty sure that the reason Fez hadn’t tried to go further was because he knew she was inexperienced and he didn’t want to rush her. As long as he wants to keep going, though, tonight? She isn’t going to stop.
She tugs his hand from her waist and slips it under her shirt, hearing his breath catch as his warm palm dances up her ribs and gently squeezes her breast. She grinds her hips down on his more insistently and he squeezes her nipple through the thin fabric of her bra. She lets out a little moan, a high pitched noise from the back of her throat.
“Fuck,” he murmurs again, and the low growl of his voice makes the heat build between her thighs.
What’s between them is more than special, she thinks. It’s everything.
There are times that it scares her, the enormity of this feeling. There are times that she resents it, too, feeling this way about a drug dealer. It would have been nicer, easier , if she could have felt this way about a normal guy in her class, someone that didn’t sleep with a gun between the mattress and the headboard. It even makes her a little angry. She looks at Rue, clearly having relapsed again, and feels resentment that it was Fez that had started her on this path in the first place, even if he refused to sell to her anymore.
But then she sees him feed the stray dog that hangs around the shop and gently rub between her ears, or the way he takes care of Ash, or the way he holds her gaze and listens to her talk like there was nothing in the world he’d rather be doing, and she remembers that he never really had a choice in living this life. Her parents may have been addicts, but she’d never had to worry about getting enough money to keep a little brother fed and clothed. They’d never handed her baggies of cocaine and told her to tuck them into her underwear. He’s a product of his environment, doing the best he can with what he’s got, and remembering that is enough to make any of her lingering doubts drift away.
His mouth drifts to her neck, biting with just the right amount of teeth, and she tumbles over the edge, coming with his name on her lips. He holds her through the aftershocks, hand gently cupping her breast before she can catch her breath and lean back to face him.
“You okay?” he asks gently, and she can hear a touch of pride in his voice.
She laughs. “Very,” she says, capturing his lips in another kiss. “Very, very, very.”
He chuckles and it jostles her just enough to feel that he’s still hard in his jeans. Lexi of a month ago might have been too shy to do this, but being with Fez makes her feel brave. “Your turn,” she whispers in his ear, hands fumbling with his belt buckle.
“You don’t have to,” he protests weakly, but he’s already breathing heavy and shifting to let her slide his jeans further down his hips. His dick is hot and hard in her hand and she pumps it, gently, listening to what makes his breath catch and stutter.
When he comes a minute later, the look on his face is something like love.
December 21st, 2018
“No, but Lexi, you can’t tell anyone, okay? Anyone.”
Lexi fights the urge to roll her eyes. Who was she going to tell? She has two friends, one of whom had ditched her at dance an hour earlier, and the other is Cassie. She swallows down the slight hum of frustration and nods, the alcohol making her loose and pliant. “I swear,” she says, crossing her fingers over her heart. “I will not tell a soul.”
Cassie nods and flips the light switch, then tiptoes over to Lexi’s bed and crawls inside. She pulls the covers over their heads and Lexi feels like a little kid again, making a fort with her big sister and sharing secrets.
“So Maddy found this CD,” she whispers, even though there’s no one there to hear them. “It was stuck in one of Nate’s books like it was special or something. She took it, and she played it when she got home, and…”
Lexi’s enthralled. “And?” she breathes, urging Cassie to continue.
“ And … it was a sex tape. Of Mr. Jacobs. Fucking Jules.”
“What?!” Lexi screeches and Cass shushes her and they’re both laughing, but it’s not because anything about this is funny. It’s because this is fucking terrifying, a grown man having sex with their friend and recording it. It’s shock and fear and something that makes their stomachs hurt, something that neither of them can name.
“Maddy doesn’t think Nate knows she has it,” Cassie murmurs, once they calm down. “He hasn’t said anything about it.”
“Does Mr. Jacobs know it’s gone?” Lexi asks, and Cassie shrugs.
“He’s a scary guy,” Lexi admits quietly. “Like… I’m afraid of him, and I’ve only met him a couple of times.”
“He is,” Cassie agrees. “But. Maddy is too. In her own way.”
Lexi remembers flashes of Maddy, beating up girls twice her size. “I guess,” she allows. They’re silent for a moment before Cassie says, “How weird is that though? That Nate finds this tape and takes it, and then Maddy finds it and takes it, and it happens to be Jules that’s on it?”
Lexi’s head spins as she puts the pieces together. “I bet… I bet there’s more than one,” she muses. “Tape, I mean. Like, with other people.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, for sure. It’s the kind of thing that you wouldn’t have known to look for, unless you already knew what you were looking for, you know? Does that make sense?”
“Kind of? Not really?”
“I bet he’d found others before,” she says confidently. “And when he saw Jules was on this one, he kept it. Because he knew her, or to protect his dad, or whatever.”
They’re silent for a minute before Cassie starts whispering again. “You mean to tell me,” she says, voice trembling with barely restrained laughter, “that Nate Jacobs found his father’s porn collection, regularly checks it, and watches tapes of his dad fucking guys and trans women? Is this what we’re saying here?”
Lexi starts laughing and Cassie follows, the two sisters dissolving into a pile of giggles and gasps and all Lexi can think is how much she’s missed this.
“That family is so fucked up,” she says, once they finally catch their breath.
“For sure,” Cassie agrees, setting off another round of laughter.
They fall asleep like that, curled around each other in the same bed, just like when they were kids.
February 13th, 2019
Something’s going on with Cassie.
Lexi isn’t stupid, she knew something’s been going on with Cassie for like, a while. There was the getting up at four AM, this absolutely insane beauty routine that she’s adopted, and the weird getups she’d been wearing to school. Lexi thought Cass was always like, effortlessly pretty, but now it seemed like she’s trying way too hard. Half the time the clothes she wore looked like a costume. Maddy thinking she’d dress that way to try out for Oklahoma wasn’t really that off base.
Then there’s the sneaking out - again, not necessarily abnormal - but Cassie usually would tell her who she was going to see. Now, Cassie’s lips are buttoned up tight. It’s only fair though, Lexi supposes ruefully. It’s not exactly like she’d told Cass who she was spending time with.
Let them both have their secrets. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
The thing that actually has her concerned, though, is that Cassie constantly seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She thought it was breaking up with McKay, or the abortion, but this is something different. Whatever she’s doing with… whoever she’s doing it with, it isn’t making her happy. More than once, she’s gotten up in the middle of the night, crawled into Lexi’s bed, and cried softly as Lexi held her. She wouldn’t tell her what was wrong, ever. “I’m just sad,” she says, and that’s that.
It finally hits her one day as she watches Rue stumble around the halls. Cassie’s an addict. It isn’t drugs, but something else, something far more insidious. After all, love affects the brain the same way that Oxy does.
March 2nd, 2019
“I think being naked in your bed is like, my favorite place to be,” Lexi decides. She’s curled into him like a cat, and it’s all she can do not to purr.
Fez laughs. “I’m down with that,” he says. “I don’t know if I’d get anything done though if I got all this waiting for me at home.”
“Hey, one of us would have to work,” she says, poking him gently in the ribs. “You’re going to have to go get that money, keep me in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed.”
He laughs again and rolls over, caging her in with his arms. “Nah, you’re gonna be like, a playwright or some shit,” he says. He nuzzles the side of her nose with his, pressing small kisses to the apples of her cheeks.
“You gonna be my kept man?”
“Bet.”
She hums and twines her arms around his neck. “You think you could give it all up? The business, I mean.”
“Hell yeah,” he says. He rolls back over and pulls her on top of him. She rests her chin in her hands on his chest, suddenly feeling serious.
“Like… for real though,” she asks quietly. “Have you ever thought about giving it all up?
“Of course I have,” he scoffs, and she’s floored.
“Really?”
He sighs. “This business, it’s got a fuckin’ expiration date, you understand?” he asks. “Like, you get so far, and you either get clapped by someone lookin’ to replace you, or you catch a charge and go to jail. There ain’t much in between.”
She slides her finger under the chain around his neck, slowly moving it back and forth. “What would you do instead?” she asks quietly, and he shrugs underneath her. “We got the store,” he says. “Like, even on its own, it makes money. We almost got the house paid off now. If we wasn’t paying on a mortgage, we could get out of this, for real. I could be that kept man you were talking about.”
The hope bubbling up from her chest comes spilling out and she’s laughing, joyfully, kissing him. There’s a part of her that never even thought about this being real, this thing between him. She’d felt about it the same way he’d talked about dealing - it had an expiration date. She wasn’t going to be a drug dealer's wife, waiting by the phone while he was out making deals, frantically dumping powders down the toilet if they got raided. But if he was serious, if he wanted out…
She could keep him.
God, does she want to keep him.
“I will happily keep you as my kept man,” she says, smiling wide, and his answering smile is bashful and sweet.
“Nah, I’ve been thinking, like. Weed is legal in Colorado, you know? And fuck, I may not know much about running a legit business, but I know as much about good product as anybody. Ash, too.”
Her breath catches in her chest. Colorado. Home of the college brochures that now litter the surface of her desk.
“You want to come to Colorado?” she asks, hope clear in her voice.
“Wherever you go, I go,” he says shyly. “I mean. If you want me.”
She’s nodding before he even finishes talking, wanting to soothe the part of him that feels unsure. “I want you,” she says, kissing his forehead, his cheeks, his lips. “I want you.”
“I love you.”
She tilts her head back and she can’t help the tears that are starting to sting against her eyes but she’s smiling and laughing and telling him she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.
It’s the first time either of them has said it.
February 15th, 2019
She finally figures out what was going on with her sister the day after Valentine’s day.
As bad as things were, they had gotten worse on the 14th. She’s not sure exactly what happened that day, but by the time she’s come home after spending the day and most of the night with Fez, Cassie’s having a full meltdown. Lexi finds her in the bathtub, staring into space. It’s one o’clock in the morning.
“Cass?” she asks timidly. “Are you okay?”
When Cass doesn’t answer, she creeps forward and reaches for her hand, her forearm dipping into the water. It’s ice cold.
“Jesus Christ, Cass!” she yelps, wrapping her hands around her sister’s arms and tugging her up. “You have to get out of there, you’re going to give yourself hypothermia!”
She pulls her sister out of the bathtub but Cassie’s barely moving, barely even blinking as her eyes stared forward. Lexi wraps her in towels and leads her to their room, gently pushes her onto the bed, and rifles through her own drawers for the oldest, warmest flannel nightgown she had.
“What’s going on, Cassie?” she asks, as she pulls the flannel over her sister’s head. “Please, please. Tell me.”
Cassie just shakes her head. Lexi feels like she’s going to cry.
She gets up but Cassie’s hand darts out, icy fingers wrapping around Lexi’s wrist. “Stay,” she begs. “Please.”
Lexi swallows and gets into bed with her sister, wrapping her arms around her and spooning her from behind. “I love you, Cassie,” she says. “And I’m here for you, always.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything back.
And then, the next day, Cassie’s fine. Right as rain. Springing up to start her insane beauty routine, handing Lexi her nightgown back with a cheerful thank you and an apology that she was so out of it the night before. “Valentine’s Day is a hard day to be single,” she says, and Lexi’s smile is brittle in return.
She decides she’s done with this shit when Cass’s phone starts buzzing around seven that night and Cass hops into the shower, again, and starts exfoliating and moisturizing, again. She is not going to wait for Cassie to tell her what the hell was going on. She’s worried that the next time, it wouldn’t be her sister’s live body she finds in the bathtub.
She tells her mom she’s going for a walk and creeps behind her sister, staying safely half a block behind. Cassie never even turns around. Two blocks away from their house, Cassie lingers on a street corner, and a minute after she stops, Nate fucking Jacobs’s truck rolls up next to her and Cassie climbs inside.
“Fuck,” Lexi growls. And she hates it, hates how much it makes sense, that this fucking psychopath that she knows framed a kid for assault and did God only knows to Jules and choked Maddy and had gotten her boyfriend’s house raided and is now, apparently, responsible for her sister’s declining mental health.
“Fuck,” she says again, and turns back home. She wants to scream, to punch something, wrap her fingers around Nate’s throat and choke the life out of him. She feels fury coursing through her blood and she tries to steady her breathing, thinking that there had to be something she could do, some way to pull her sister away from that fucking monster. There’s a way out of this. She just needs to figure out what it is.
March 10th, 2019
She and Fez have been together for three months and they’ve yet to have a fight, but Lexi thinks they’re about to.
He didn’t come to her play. He’d promised, swore up and down that he’d be there, that he wouldn’t miss it for anything. She’d saved him a seat right in the front row - nothing fancy, just a little card that said reserved taped to the chair back of the first seat on the aisle. She’d kept an eye on it all night, and it had sat empty, and she was fucking furious - in part because she was fucking scared. What if something happened, what if he was sick or hurt, or worse, what if the small, self-conscious part of her was right. What if he’d lost interest. What if she, like her sister before her, was only good at capturing anybody’s attention for a little while before they left.
She couldn’t think of anything worse than that.
So, yeah. She’s mad and scared and crashing after the rush of endorphins the applause of the crowd had produced, and she needs to find Fez and figure out what the fuck was going on. She’s been zoning out on the way there, barely remembering the trip, until she comes to a stop at the end of Fez’s street.
It’s blocked. Completely. Filled with rows upon rows of SUVs with blacked-out windows.
“Shit,” she whispers, her anger evaporating and being replaced by bone-chilling fear.
She wants to go down his street, but she knows she isn't going to be able to. “Fuck, shit, fuck,” she mutters, turning on her bike. She has no idea if Fez had been there when the raid started, and no real way of finding out, but if there was any chance he wasn’t in cuffs in the back of one of those SUVs, he’d probably have gone to the store. She pedals as fast as she can, praying to a God she didn’t believe in that Fez was safe.
The lights are on at the store and she sighs in relief, her tires skidding to a stop - but it isn’t Fez behind the counter. It’s Ashtray, and he looks fucking murderous. She feels her heart sink.
“What happened,” she says flatly. It isn’t a question. She already knows the answer.
“We got fucking raided,” Ash grinds out.
“No shit, I went by the house already,” she snaps. “I meant Fez. Where is he.”
“I dunno. Holding, probably.”
“Fuck,” she whispers. Her voice shakes.
Ash rolls his eyes and hops off the counter, reaching in the cooler for a bottle of malt liquor. “It’s fine, they didn’t get nothin’. We don’t keep product in the house no more after the last time.”
“So, why -”
“They can hold him for seventy-two hours before they charge him,” he says, unscrewing the cap and taking a big swig. “And knowing those fuckers, they gonna hold him for every second of that seventy-two, ‘cause they’re gonna be pissed they wasted all that money on a fuckin’ raid and didn’t get a goddamn thing, but they got nothing to charge him on so they’re gonna have to let him go.”
She feels the vise grip around her ribs lessen a touch and she breathes, probably for the first time since she’d realized that Fez hadn’t come to the play. She slouches over to the counter and heaves herself up, sitting next to the register. “How did this happen?” she asks quietly.
Ash glares at her. “I dunno. Somebody must have fuckin’ said something to somebody. You know anything about that?”
She glares back, feeling that righteous fury well up inside of her again. “Fuck you,” she says evenly. “I know you don’t fucking like having to share your brother, but I love him, you understand me? I fucking love him. And I wouldn’t do anything that would hurt him. Never.”
Ash ducks his head, ashamed, and pulls himself up next to her. “I know,” he says quietly. “Fuck, I’m sorry Lexi. I know. I’m just fuckin’ pissed.”
“I get it,” she says. “Me too. So I say, again - how did this happen?”
They sit in silence for a minute before Ash takes a sharp intake of breath. “Oh shit,” he breathes. “Fuck. Fuck!”
“What? What is it?”
“I bet it was that fuckin’ old dude, Cal Jacobs. He’s been hanging around, something about Rue and Jewel or some shit. He bragged that he knew the fuckin’ cops, he must have done this.”
“Cal Jacobs has been hanging around?”
“Yeah, it’s a long fuckin’ story, Fez beat the shit out of his son -”
Lexi waves him off. “No, no, I know all that,” she says. “Because of the raid, and Rue, I know.”
“Speaking of, would Rue have snitched?”
Lexi shakes her head. “No. Never. She’d never do that to Fez.”
“Well, if it’s not that old dude or Rue… I dunno. You make a lot of fuckin’ enemies in this business. Maybe we pissed Laurie off, maybe this is some kind of warning.”
Everything froze. The world stopped rotating on its axis, nothing moving, nobody breathing, just this single moment in time.
“Who’s Laurie?” she asks, voice tight.
“Our supplier,” Ash says, voice going cold as he picked up on the tension in her own. “But something tells me you already fuckin’ knew that.”
There’s a pause. “Rue’s into her for ten grand,” she finally confesses. “She told me two nights ago.”
“Fuck,” Ash growls. “Well, that explains some shit. Fuck, we got this fuckin’ rich white boy and his crazy fuckin’ father, and this fuckin’ crackhead trying to scam drugs off a fuckin’ supplier, and meanwhile, my brother’s in fucking holding!” Ash jumps off the counter and slams his fist through the glass of the cooler door. “ Fuck!”
“Jesus Christ, Ash!” she exclaims, hopping down. “Hold it up, you have to elevate it -”
“It’s fine, it’s just some cuts -”
“Still,” she says firmly. She pushes him back to the counter, forcing him to sit down. “Hold it up and keep it elevated,” she says sternly, reaching under the counter and pulling out a first aid kit. Slowly, carefully, she cleans his cuts with alcohol wipes and covers them with bandaids. She feels numb.
“What are we gonna do?” Ash asks quietly. He looks defeated.
They sit in silence, each going over their thoughts. Nate Jacobs and Cal Jacobs, the rotten fruit from the rotten tree. Laurie, the supplier, who’d given an addict a suitcase full of drugs as a way to get Fez under her thumb. Enemies. Vultures coming for her family.
Her family.
Vultures. Birds and stones. For some reason, she thinks of her Grandma.
She swallows. “I have an idea.”
January 17th, 2019
Lexi Howard is going on her first date and she is terrified.
She and Fez have been hanging out for two weeks now, and it’s been pretty amazing, but they hadn’t actually like, gone on a date. Tons of hanging out at his house and the store and one very memorable night of cruising in the Cadillac, but they hadn’t gone to a destination. Together. As a couple.
Which they were. Or at least, Lexi’s pretty sure they were.
They were talking about nothing, as per usual, and the topic of favorite foods had come up. Lexi had waxed poetic on how much she loved a really, really great taco and Fez had said that he knew the most amazing Mexican place and then, with just a hint of blush on his cheeks, asked her if maybe she’d like it if he took her there this Friday. She said she’d like that and he’d said, a little shy, “then it’s a date.”
She had to kiss that look off his face. She couldn’t help it.
But now, she’s the one that was nervous. She’s somewhere in the vicinity of trying on her third outfit and she’s beginning to get really frustrated. For a moment, she wishes that she wasn’t alone in the house, that her mom or sister were there to help her pick out what she was going to wear and make sure her makeup was just right. Unfortunately, that’s not the hand that she’s been dealt. Cassie’s out somewhere, and her mom’s working late, and she’s alone.
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Fez likes her. She knows that, and she knows that he’s going to think she’s pretty no matter what she’s wearing. Still, she wants to look good for him. Different. She wants him to know that she thinks tonight is special, too.
Well, if Cassie’s not here, she’s going to take advantage of it. She rarely dips into Cassie’s closet - they don’t exactly have the same taste, and even if they did, it’s not like Lexi has enough of a chest to fill out her sister’s clothes - but desperate times call for desperate measures. Her fingers trail along the rows of fabric until she gets to the back of the closet, home of the handful of things Cass has outgrown or worn once and discarded. That’s where she finds it: a simple black baby doll dress patterned with little red and white flowers. It’s kind of exactly what she was looking for - feminine without being too fancy. She’ll still look like herself.
Her sister has an enormous pile of beauty gear and Lexi doesn’t know what half of it even does, but hey, that’s why youtube was invented. She again feels a pang of sadness that Cass isn’t here to help her but she also likes that this is something that’s just hers, that she doesn’t have to share more than she’s ready to as a transaction of information in exchange for help.
She showers and shaves, uses Cassie’s weird stone thing (Gua Sha, she learns from the youtube video that she watches on her phone while scraping the jade rock along her face in the mirror), blow-dries her hair and gives it just a little curl. She doesn’t wear too much more makeup than she usually does, completely ignoring the sheets of stickers, gems, and glitter in Cassie’s makeup pile in favor of using her own brown eyeliner and mascara. Just a hint of Cassie’s cream blush just to make her cheeks glow, and the red lipstick that in her bolder moments she’s starting to think of as her signature, and that’s it. She’s ready to go.
She’s still half-frozen in the mirror when the doorbell rings. She practically runs to the door, throwing it open with an excited “Hey,” and catches sight of him - just dressed up enough to show that it’s more than just another day hanging out like the ones they’ve been spending in the past two weeks. His eyes widen and his jaw drops open, just a little, and she wishes she could stay in this moment forever.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, a touch of reverence in his voice, and when he hands her two red roses tied together with a ribbon she’s so happy she could die.
March 11th, 2019
Every Thursday night, the Jacobs family gets dinner at the same restaurant. It’s more an ostentatious display of wealth and power and less a loving family sitting down together for a meal. Lexi knows this because she’s seen it, having had the misfortune to be at the same restaurant at the same time on more than one occasion. It makes her sick to think of it now, the endless parade of WASPs coming over to their table to kiss the ring and fawn over the golden boy. Tonight though, that routine serves her interests, and she’s glad for it.
She parks a block away from the Jacobs’ house and walks there. She'd fought the urge to dress all in black, knowing that she’d look way more conspicuous, and kept on the same outfit that she’d worn to school that day. Her steps are slow and measured, just another teenage girl that could have been stopping by the house for any number of reasons, and she slides the cuff of her blouse over her thumb as she rings the doorbell. She kneels to pretend to tie her shoe and lets the radio frequency jammer - Ash had given it to her, sworn up and down it would disrupt the Jacobs’ alarm system - slide out of her other sleeve and onto the ground, flicking it gently with her hand to send it tumbling into the bushes next to the stoop. With any luck, they wouldn’t find it until all of this was long over, and maybe not even then. Standing, she rings the doorbell one more time before walking away.
She only walks past a couple of houses before taking a hard right through a side lawn and going behind someone’s house, carefully walking behind the hedges that separated one house from the next. Finally, she comes out of the bushes into Nate’s backyard.
Her hands are shaking as she opens the door, but only for a minute - only until it registers that all that’s greeting her is blessed silence, not the beep of a triggered alarm. Ash has done his job, then. Once she knows that, her nerves settle.
She knows from enough conversations with Cassie and Maddy that Nate’s dad has an office upstairs, so she heads straight for it. It’s fairly sparse, which is good - fewer places she has to poke around. She goes to his huge desk first, some giant wood behemoth, and it doesn’t take her long to find the locked top drawer.
“Bingo,” she mutters, pulling a pick out of her pocket. It’s one of the stupid little talents she’d picked up out of boredom. You can buy a lock picking kit on Amazon for under twenty bucks.
She snaps on rubber gloves and goes to work. It’s a pretty simple lock, skeleton key, so it doesn’t take long for her to pick it and pop the drawer open.
Jesus Christ. There has to be fifty discs in here, all in candy-colored cases. Some are turned on their sides or upside down in some sort of code that she doesn’t bother to solve. It doesn’t matter anyway. Reaching in, she pulls out half of the discs, setting them on the desk before untucking her blouse and letting the bag she’d hung around her neck fall free. It would be bulky, but nobody would probably notice. That’s the thing about most people. Everyone thinks that people are staring at them, that they’re being obvious, but most people are too caught up in their own shit to notice anything about anybody else.
She pulls her blouse over the full bag and tucks it back into her waistband. She slides the drawer shut, locks it back up with the lock pick, and creeps out of the house and back into the bushes. Twenty minutes later, she’s back home. Her mom and Cass didn't even notice she was gone.
February 27th, 2019
There’s no other way to say it - Fez is fucking hot.
There’s just something about him, she thinks, watching him negotiate with some boys that she knows for a fact are on the football team at the private school in town. They’re all built and stand a head taller than Fez does - clones of Nate Jacobs, in the flesh - and still, even on a superficial level, she wouldn’t take them over Fez any day of the week. Fez has this magnetism, this power about him that they don’t have.
They’re bickering over prices and kegs and she can see that Fez is losing his patience. His shoulders roll back and his spine goes taut, every line in his body ready to beat someone’s ass if he needs to. He tilts his head back and looks at the entitled white boys with narrowed eyes and the sheer intensity radiating from him has her clenching her thighs.
She’s already wet.
They may all be about the same age, but these football players are boys. Fez is a man. That’s what it is, she thinks, as they realize that they’re out of their depth and that paying Fez what he wants is better than leaving with no keg at all, and fork over a fistfull of bills. She loves the way he looks (those eyes, she could get lost in those eyes), loves his freckles and lean muscle, but the thing that’s got her panties damp is that between his life experience and his old soul he’s grown in a way they’re not. If he had to, Fez would protect her. If one of these fucking basic boys saw her in the back room and started talking shit, Fez would kill them. It’s not an exaggeration. Not because of some macho, possessive, egotistical bullshit, but because he’s a grown man and that’s what a grown man is supposed to do.
The football players finally leave and Fez enters the walk-in, running his hand over his buzzcut in exasperation, and she’s on him before he can say a word. She feels out of control, fucking feral, and if she doesn’t come in the next couple minutes she might actually die. If he’s confused about how they ended up here, it doesn’t show, kissing her with equal passion and cupping her breast through her blouse. He’s always as hungry for her as she is for him.
He finally breaks away to kiss the hinge of her jaw, her pulse point. “What got into you?” he asks, sucking a mark into her throat.
“You’re just so fuckin’ hot,” she admits, and he shudders. She wonders if anyone’s ever told him that, if anyone’s ever meant it like she does. She wants to pull him back in for a kiss but he’s pressing her into the wall and sliding lower, lower, falling to his knees before he pushes up the hem of her skirt an inch and kisses the inside of her thigh.
“This okay?” he murmurs, pulling the skin from her thigh through his teeth and biting, just a little.
She’d probably be nervous if she wasn’t so turned on. It’s not like she’s ever done this before. She knows how his tongue feels on hers, the way he’ll gently trace the seam of her lips, and the thought of him doing that to a different part of her anatomy has her hips rocking forward involuntarily. “Please,” she begs, and he smirks before pushing her skirt up around her waist and lifting one of her legs over his shoulders.
“Fuck,” she breathes the second he makes contact, his fingers pushing her panties to the side, knuckles brushing against her lips, and before she has time to recover his mouth is on her. He licks her clit, slow and sweet, tracing patterns she can’t even begin to decipher. His warm hand is squeezing the thigh that’s resting on his shoulder, and she thinks he might leave a mark. The thought of pressing her fingers into a bruise shaped like his fingerprints and remembering what he’s doing to her in this moment is enough and she’s coming, hips jerking as Fez holds her steady, anchoring her through it, holding her safe from the world while she loses control.
She’d thought about someone doing this to her before - she’s inexperienced, not a nun - and there was always an undercurrent of shame to it. She always thought that the first time it happened she’d be embarrassed, worried that she’d be judged and found lacking, but all she feels is bone-deep satisfaction.
He gently slides her thigh off his shoulder and stands, meeting her eyes. He’s smirking a little. It’s clear he knows how much he affects her, how much what just happened has shaken the foundations she stands on.
“You proud?” she teases, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“I mean,” he drawls, and she laughs. “Should I be?”
She laughs and kisses him, tastes herself on his mouth. She’s already thinking of when they can do it again.
March 12th, 2019
Getting the other disc from Maddy was harder. One, Maddy doesn’t know that Lexi knows she had it. Two, she isn’t super close with Maddy. However, she’s not a member of the drama club for nothing.
“Please, Cassie, please,” she begs, making her eyes wide and vulnerable. “If I get ready while mom’s here, she’s going to notice and start fussing and my date isn’t even coming over here -”
“You’re asking an awful lot for someone who won’t even tell me the name of the guy she’s going on a date with,” Cassie sing-songs, fingers flying over the keys on her phone while she eyes Lexi over the top of the screen.
“I know, I know,” Lexi says. She flops down on her sister’s bed, lying horizontally across the bottom. “And I’ll tell you, I will. It’s just. New.”
“Hmmmm.”
“And I don’t even know if I like, like him or not,” she lies. “It’s more about me than it is about him, okay? Like a practice date.”
Cassie hums again, but Lexi can tell she’s wearing her down. She moves in for the kill. “I just, you know how nervous I get. When it’s someone I actually like, I don’t want to be anxious. This will help. Really.”
Cassie’s eyes soften, and Lexi spends a minute feeling bad that she hasn’t told her sister that she’s spent the past three months fucking Fez on every surface in his house. And car. And in the back room of the store. The time for being nervous about a first date has long since passed, but Cassie doesn’t know that.
Cassie’s phone buzzes and she looks at the screen. “Well, it’s your lucky day,” she says cheerfully. “Maddy’s home and she’s dying to help you play dress-up.”
Lexi squeals and throws her arms around her sister, letting her real excitement that her ruse had worked bleed through. She talks and giggles with her sister the whole way to Maddy’s house, plays along as they powder her and stick tiny diamonds on the corners of her eyes, and easily plucks the pastel CD case from where she spots it on Maddy’s bookshelf when the girls disappear into the closet to pick out an outfit.
It’s almost too easy, but that only strengthens her conviction.
If she’s doing the wrong thing, something would have gone wrong. Blessed are the righteous, she thinks wryly as she waves goodbye to the girls to go on her “date.”
She doesn’t believe in God, but she’s heard it said enough - God helps those who help themselves.
February 21st, 2019
She flounces into Fez’s house, throwing her backpack onto the couch. She’s pissed, but not pissed enough to go home. Even when she’s mad at him, she’d still rather be with him than with anyone else.
“Lexi, come on. Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?” she says, faux innocence. “Like someone that wants to keep you safe? Someone that wants to share parts of your life? Is that how I’m not supposed to be?”
“Come on, it ain’t even like that.”
“No, I think it is,” she says. “I think you think I’m some fucking baby that can’t handle the business you’re in. I’m just some kid you’re messing around with on the side, to keep you busy in between deals.”
She has the sense that she’s gone too far, that she’s spinning out of control, but it frustrates her sometimes. There’s steel in her, too, even if Fez can’t see it.
His eyes darken and his jaw clenches. “Yo, don’t ever try to tell me that you don’t mean something to me,” he says, his voice low and dangerous. “You can be mad at me all you want, but I’m not apologizing for trying to keep you safe from this shit. You mean more to me than any of these fucking deals, or the money, or any of it. You understand?”
“And you think you don’t mean the same to me?” she explodes. “Jesus Fez, do you ever think about what it would do to me if something were to happen to you? I don’t… “ she trails off, shaking her head, hating the tears welling in her eyes and wishing that for her, indignation and crying didn’t always seem to go hand in hand.
Her eyes are closed to keep the tears from spilling over her cheeks so she doesn’t realize he’s come close to her until he takes her hand in his. “I care about you,” he says, and by the way his voice cracks, she thinks that “care” is maybe not the word he wants to use. “I’m gonna keep you safe. Even if you’re pissed off.”
She opens her eyes to meet his. “Fine,” she says evenly. “But just so you know, I’m gonna keep you safe. Any way that I can. Even if you’re pissed off.”
She falls into his arms and hears his breath hitch and she wonders, not for the first time, if anyone besides his grandma had ever promised to take care of him. She promises herself as she holds him, hands gently cupping the back of his head, that she’s going to do whatever she can to protect this boy and the gentle, gentle heart he’s entrusted in her care.
March 13th, 2019
“This is a fuckin’ stupid plan,” Ash exhales, staring out the windshield.
“It’s fine,” Lexi says. “I need to be there. Faye and Custer know me, and they know enough about me that none of this is going to seem weird or out of place.”
“Yeah, but Fez didn’t want you mixed up in this shit,” Ash exclaims. “Why the fuck you gotta be there, huh? He’s gonna fuckin’ kill me.”
“Well, he has to get out of holding first,” Lexi says. “Look, no part of this is going to be easy for either one of us, but it’s what we have to do. Besides, the last thing you or I need is for you to get pulled over when you’re driving home with all that stuff. I’m going to look way less out of place behind the wheel than you are.”
Ash sighs. The pair are quiet for a minute before Ash asks, so soft she could barely hear him, “What if something goes wrong?”
Lexi stares forward. “Then something goes wrong,” she says simply. “We’ll deal with it. But right now, we don’t have much of a choice.”
He nods. Being backed into a corner is something he’s used to.
He gets out of the Cadillac and slams the door behind him, jogging across the parking lot to the stairwell. Lexi plucks her phone out of the nylon drawstring backpack - not something she ever really uses - and starts scrolling through her feeds, looking all the world like the everyday teenage girl waiting in the car while someone else accomplishes some chore.
Even though she knows it’s coming, she still lets out a yelp of surprise when she feels a hand wrap around her mouth. One of Laurie’s henchmen - Bruce Junior, she thinks, when she catches sight of the curly black hair - pulls her out through the car window and slings her over his shoulder, not thinking twice about the slim drawstring bag she’s got the handles of wrapped around her wrist.
“Picked up a stray,” BJ drawls, dropping her onto the couch. Bruce Senior turns to glare at Ashtray, and he shrugs. “I needed her to drive the car, man. I can’t be getting pulled over when I’m moving this shit.”
“Well, who the fuck is she?”
“That’s Fez’s girl,” Faye supplies from under Custer’s arm. “She’s like, cool and shit.”
“I don’t care how fuckin’ cool she is, why the fuck you bringin’ people here?” Bruce explodes. “You keep coming here, bringing people I don’t know. How the fuck am I supposed to know if she’s wearin’ a wire?” He turns to Lexi, cold fury in every line on his face. “You. Take off your fuckin’ clothes.”
“Nah, man, come on -”
“I didn’t fuckin’ ask you,” Bruce snaps at Ash. He reaches for the shotgun on the table, racking it with one hand, before turning back to Lexi. “I didn’t fuckin’ ask you either,” he says lowly. “Take off your fuckin’ clothes. Now.”
Ash meets her eyes. “It’s fine,” she assures him. “It’s fine. I get it.” She stands and pulls her shirt over her head, pushes her skirt down in a swift movement, leaving her in only her bra and panties. “See?” she asks, turning around slowly. “No wire. This isn’t even an underwire bra. Okay?”
Bruce looks back at Laurie, and she nods. “It’s fine,” she says. “Thank you for understanding.”
“What’s in the bag?” BJ asks, gesturing to her backpack. Wordlessly, she holds it out to him and he pulls the drawstring open to peek inside. “Just a bunch of my school work,” she shrugs as he peers inside, looking at the pile of papers. He nods and hands it back to her, not interested now that he knows the bag’s holding trig notes instead of a Glock.
Now that she’s proved she isn’t a threat, she’s quickly forgotten as Ash, Laurie, and the others go into the little dining room to talk business. This is her superpower, she thinks wryly. She leans back on the couch, folding one of the papers over the candy-colored disks held together with a rubber band underneath her notebook at the bottom of the bag. Everyone keeps their backs to her as she slides them out and tucks them in between the couch, coffee table, and wall, and then tosses the paper she’d used to keep her prints off the disks back into her bag. Lexi Howard, the amazing invisible girl. The unobtrusive observer. The one nobody notices, the one everyone forgets about until it’s too late.
By the time Ash is ready to go, nobody remembers the slim backpack she’d carried with her, and nobody notices that it’s markedly thinner than when she’d been dragged through the door.
March 10th, 2019
Her phone’s ringing.
It takes a minute for it to register - nobody calls her, everyone texts most of the time, and it’s 7am and she’s still half asleep. She was up until 3 in the morning, nervous about opening night and going over her pre-play to-do list over and over again in her mind. Her body had finally given out and fallen asleep, and it doesn’t seem to want to wake up.
“Lex,” Cass calls from the bathroom, where she’s finishing off her morning primping. “Your phone is ringing!” Lexi groans and flops her hand around on her nightstand, fumbling until she finds her phone and swiping the screen to answer the call. She drops it on her face, mashed up against her ear, and mumbles what could maybe be a hello into the phone.
“Shit, did I wake you?”
Her eye cracks open. “Fez?”
“Hey,” he says, and she can hear the hint of laughter in his voice. He’s said more than once he loves her gravely, half-awake voice, loves how goofy and out of it she is in the morning. Lexi always needs a few minutes to transition from asleep to awake.
“Hey,” she rumbles, smiling. “This is a surprise.”
“Well, it’s your big day,” he says, and that has her snapping up and looking at her clock.
“Shit!” she exclaims, flinging herself out of bed. “I overslept, I’m so fucking stupid -”
“Hey, that’s my girl you’re talkin’ about,” Fez teases. “You’re fine, it’s barely even seven. You got time.”
“No, but I was supposed to go over the timeline again before -”
“Lex -”
“everyone got there, to make sure that I’d paced everything right -”
“Lexi,” he interrupts firmly. “Breathe. Ok? Take a deep breath with me, come on.”
Reluctantly, she sits back down, matches her breath to the deep ones he’s taking on the other end of the line. Like she always does with Fez, she feels calmer. Safer. Once again, he’s caught her from where she was spinning off into the atmosphere and anchored her to the Earth.
“Better?”
She nods and smiles. “Yeah. Better.”
“Good. Now listen, you keep breathing all day, you understand? And you call me if you need me. I got nothing going on all day, cleared my schedule just for this. You need me, I’m there.”
Her heart swells with love and she’s smiling. She’s lucky. Luckier than all her friends, with their stupid plays of romance, the way everyone her age acts out their dramas in a pantomime of adulthood. This, this is real romance. Fez calling to wish her luck before she starts her day, preventing her from spinning out and getting swallowed up by her anxiety, holding her heart in his hands and handling it with care. It’s love as a verb.
“You’ll be there tonight?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he assures her, and they exchange hushed I love yous too quiet for Cass to hear in the other room before she hangs up the phone. She stands, rolls her shoulders back, and lifts her head high.
Showtime.
March 14th, 2019
When the time comes, Lexi can’t believe how fucking easy Nate and Cal make it.
Weeks ago, when she was just a concerned sister and not a criminal mastermind, she had followed Nate once to figure out where he’d take Cassie to hook up. She actually laughed out loud when she saw his truck turn into his father’s housing development. Nate wasn’t stupid. Psychotic, yes, but not dumb. Nobody there at night, isolated from anyone that might have caught them. And if, by chance, some nosey cop or busy body came by to investigate, no one would think twice about Nate being there. It was actually kind of perfect.
And no cameras anywhere. Which means it’s actually kind of perfect for Lexi, too.
She makes herself wait until five minutes have passed after Nate and Cassie have gone into one of the houses. She’s pretty confident they’d have picked a room in the back of the half-built house, so they wouldn’t be seen - and luckily for her, so Nate wouldn’t be able to see anybody fucking with his truck. It’s actually really easy to clone the new digital keys that every car seems to have, and finding a clone for Nate’s Dodge Ram was no exception. She creeps up to the car, snaps on rubber gloves, quietly unlocks the doors, and opens the back seat.
His bag of football shit is back there, as she knew it would be. She can’t believe how nervous she isn’t , as she carefully pulls the zipper down. She thought her hands would shake, that her heart would pound. Instead, all she feels is… rage. Bone deep rage, boiling her insides, righteous fury. She thinks of the painting of Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind. That’s how she feels. An avenging angel, exposing Nate to get justice for all the people he’s wronged. Jules. Rue. Ash. Fez. Cassie.
Luckily, the bag she needs is right on the top. She pulls out his bag of toiletries and empties it out onto the floor of the truck, then slips the plastic bag she’d carried off her wrist. She fights the urge to rush and slowly, deliberately, pulls out the wrapped cocaine, the vacuum-sealed bag of weed, the plastic baggies of Oxy and Xanax, and god knows what else and drops them into the toiletry bag. Nate’s fingerprints wouldn’t be on the drugs themselves, but that shouldn’t matter. It would be enough that his prints would be all over the toiletry bag, to make it seem like he’d held it open while someone had dumped all their supply inside. She keeps breathing, slow and even, as she zips the toiletry bag back up and tucks it back inside his athletic bag, and tosses the little bottles of shampoo and bodywash from the floor into her plastic bag. She’ll dump some in a garbage can over at In-N-Out when she stops to get a milkshake, and toss the rest in a dumpster behind the Walmart on the way to her house. She gently shuts the door to the truck, locks it, and walks the block back to where she’s parked.
Quietly, she drives off into the night.
March 6th, 2019
“I love this nose.”
She barks out a laugh, throwing her head back. She is majorly, overwhelmingly, joyfully happy, lying against the arm of Fez’s couch while half in his lap, legs thrown over his. They just finished smoking and there’s still a pleasant haze filtering through the sunlight coming through the windows, the slightly skunky smell of the weed lingering in the air. He’s looking at her and his expression is just a little stupid and goofy as he runs his fingers down the bridge of her nose.
Lexi didn’t know it was possible to feel this good. She loves Fez and is loved by him in return. Rue’s now six days sober, something that has soothed a hurt she didn’t realize still ached. Her play is in three days, she’s slightly stoned and more relaxed than she’s ever been in her entire life, and in this moment she feels euphoric, staring at Fez through unfocused eyes.
“Well, I love your freckles,” she says, rubbing her thumbs over his cheeks.
“Nah, come on, don’t play.”
“I do!” she insists. “I do. I love them.”
“Yeah, well I love these knobby ass knees,” he says, his warm palm resting on one and giving it a little shake.
“I love your beard,” she counters, cupping his chin and pressing a kiss to his lips.
“I love your hair.” He twirls a lock around his finger.
“I love your smile.”
“I love yours.”
“Yo, y’all are mad corny,” Ash says, disgusted, as he walks through the room to the kitchen. “This is some fuckin’ Degrassi shit, for real.” He shakes his head, grabbing a drink from the fridge, and turns around to go back to his room. “You know, y’all got a room you can be in. You don’t need to be doing this soft shit where the rest of us have to hear it.”
“You got a room too, bruh!” Fez shouts at Ash’s retreating back. “Go fuckin’ hide out in there, if you don’t like it!” Fez turns back to her, blushing just a little, and they both start laughing.
March 13th, 2019
She sits in the grass outside her house, tucked around the corner and hidden by a couple of bushes. About an hour after she gets home, Nate’s truck rolls up and Cassie slides out of the passenger seat. After she hears the front door slam, and Nate leaving a squeal of tires and exhaust, she gets up and starts walking in the opposite direction.
She’s only been walking for a couple of minutes when her phone buzzes in her hand. just turned onto vine, the text reads. Good. Nate will be on that for a few miles, even if he isn’t going straight home. There’s no turn-offs.
She pulls the burner from her pocket and clears her throat, waiting for someone to answer.
“Hello, Highland Police Department. How can I help you?”
She pitches her voice just a little higher, talks just a little slower. She could be anyone.
“Yeah, I’m driving home? And this truck in front of me is like, all over the road,” she says. “I don’t know if he’s drunk, or on drugs, or what, but he’s going to get somebody killed.”
“Thank you for calling. Can you tell me where you are?”
“I just turned onto Vine. And look, I might be crazy, but I swear, it looks like he’s pulling cans from the back seat of his car. I think he’s drinking while he’s driving.”
It’s not a perfect plan. They need the cop that stops him to not be in a hurry, to be someone that Cal Jacobs doesn’t know, for Lexi saying there was beer in the back of the truck to be enough probable cause to investigate. They have backup plans if this doesn’t work, but this is by far the best option, the one that involves them the least. They can only hope that in Nate’s attempt to prove himself innocent, he voluntarily tells the cop to check in the backseat. Just a little luck. That’s all they need.
“Can you describe the automobile?”
Lexi rattles off a cursory description of the truck and the license plate that she has memorized. The receptionist promises to look into it and thanks her for calling, and hangs up the phone. Lexi pulls the SIM card out of the burner, drops it on the sidewalk, and grinds it under her heel. Kneeling, she sweeps the pieces into her hand and dumps them into the storm drain before snapping the burner flip phone in half. She puts one half in a garbage bag in front of the house she’d stopped at, and the other in another garbage can halfway to her house.
As soon as she gets home, she texts Fez’s phone a thumbs up. She pictures Ash seeing the message, grabbing his own burner and taking a walk like she had done, calling the same number she had called, using the voice modulator she’d swiped from the drama club prop box. She imagines him saying the words they had practiced - that he wasn’t going to give his name because he didn’t want to get fired, but he was an employee of Cal Jacobs and had stopped by the job site to pick up the lunchbox he forgot and there were a couple of cars parked on the road, even though nobody was supposed to be there. How he’d seen a bald guy walk into one of the half-finished houses with a bag and then leave without it, and how a couple minutes later a tall kid walked out of the same house with the bag and drove off. In her mind, she hears him rattling off the license plate numbers for Nate’s truck and Bruce’s old SUV, pitching his voice to sound just the right amount of concerned, saying he was afraid somebody plated a bomb or something and he didn’t want his ass getting blown halfway to hell. She pictures him hanging up before they ask too many more questions, pouring beer over his own SIM card and disposing of it and his own burner before heading for home, and that’s it.
It’s out of their hands now.
March 14th, 2019
She’s up early the next morning. She's surprised, she thought that with everything going on, her anxiety would have gotten the better of her and she’d have been up half the night, but she slept like a baby.
She and Ash are waiting outside of the police department, her sitting on the hood of the Cadillac while he leans against the passenger door. Fez had called Ash to come pick him up about an hour ago, and they’ve been waiting ever since, Ash explaining that they were probably dicking around with processing and dumb shit. He finally comes through the doors, looking more than exhausted, and she hops off the car and into his arms. He clings to her like a life preserver.
“You good, bruh?”
“Yeah, I’m alright,” he answers Ash, humming into her neck. “Just fucking tired.”
She pulls away and tugs him toward the backseat. “Come on,” she says gently. “Let’s get you home, okay?” She pushes him in and slides in next to him, then tugs him back towards her, pulling his head into her lap so he can lie down. He’s so tired, she can tell, and she strokes his head gently to soothe him.
“Y’all don’t be doin’ none of that corny shit while I’m driving, you understand me?” Ash says, putting the car into reverse and backing out of the parking lot. “Wait until you get home for that shit.”
“Just drive the fuckin’ car, man,” Fez mumbles. He reaches for her hand and kisses her knuckles, then holds her hand against his chest, and her heart aches for him, this man she loves more than she ever thought possible.
“Yo,” he says, cracking an eye open. “There’s like, a lot of fuckin’ activity at the police station. Did something fuckin’ happen while I was in there?”
Her eyes flit up and she and Ash share a look in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, nothin’ you need to worry about, bruh,” he says finally. “We’ll talk about it after you rest. Sleep, shower. Eat and shit.”
Fez gives her a questioning look but she shushes him. “Just go to sleep,” she whispers. “We got you. Okay?”
“Kay,” he murmurs. “Love you.”
“I love you,” she says, and thinks he has no idea how much she means it.
March 17th, 2019
There is a small but exploitable weakness when dealing with criminals - their own stupid, egotistical, self-preservation-driven urge to lie. It’s almost pathological, the way they can’t tell the truth, even if the truth would somehow set them free. Nate, Cal, Bruce, Laurie - they all fell victim to the same weakness, just like Lexi had a feeling they would.
In the days after it all goes down, it’s absolutely everywhere. The teachers don’t even bother pretending to actually teach, too busy texting each other and needling the kids for information on why Nate was dealing for his Dad, why his Dad was running drugs out of his housing development, how Cal had partnered up with the drug distributor that, once their place was searched, had evidence that Cal was a pedophile. It was fucking insane, right? Could you believe it? Like, what the fuck? There were all these videos. Insane.
Lexi hums and makes all the right noises of outrage. Insane, indeed. Unlike most of her peers, she’s devoured every news story on the topic she can find instead of relying on the grapevine of gossip. In truth, the police had all the pieces, but they couldn’t quite make them fit. The bag of drugs in Nate’s car - drugs covered in Laurie and Bruce’s fingerprints, drugs that Nate swore had been planted - plus the metadata from his phone that put him at the job site the night in question. A closet in a half-built house at Cal’s job site with tons of drugs tucked away inside, a license plate that led them back to Bruce and Laurie, and enough supply to lock them away for life. A pile of candy-colored disks the cops had found while raiding Laurie’s apartment, all sex tapes of Cal Jacobs - and some of the subjects of those videos were definitely not 18. Nobody was talking, but it didn’t really matter. That’s the one thing Lexi had been banking on - perception is everything. It looks bad enough that it doesn’t matter if nobody’s willing to explain. The only thing that had worried her was the possibility that Nate would drag Cass into this as some sort of alibi, but whether it was because of his obsession with Maddy and not wanting her to know, or because some small part of him actually did have feelings for Cassie, he didn’t say a word. Alibi or not, they had him dead to rights on possession with intent to distribute (especially factoring in things with his dad and Laurie) so when they dangled a five-year bid in front of him, he took it. It’s not like his family had the money for a lawyer to get him off anyway, not with Cal out of commission.
Cal confessed pretty quickly to whatever theory the cops concocted to make it all make sense so he could try to avoid a federal CSAM charge. The DEA was pleased enough to have Laurie and her cohorts in custody and Cal to tie the case together - the tip on Cal’s construction site and Bruce’s fingerprints (still in the system thanks to being on probation) on Nate’s drugs being the whole reason Laurie’s place had been raided at all - that he offered Cal a plea. Fifteen years, just to make it go away and let them focus on the big bust.
Nobody believed Laurie when she said she’d never met Cal because she couldn’t explain how the discs had gotten into her house, or drugs covered in their prints got into Cal’s job site or Nate’s car, other than to accuse the cops of evidence tampering. Mostly, her case was being kept very quiet, but her apartment was cleaned out and their cars abandoned. If Lexi has to guess, she thinks Laurie’s probably flipping on someone higher up on the food chain to save her own ass. Either way, Lexi isn’t worried. It’s not like they - or Nate, or Cal - were going to be a problem anymore, for Rue or Fez. For anyone.
Three birds. One stone.
Fez had been pissed when she and Ash had explained what happened, but it’s not like he could do anything about it. It was already done. He made her promise to never, ever put herself in that much danger ever again, especially not for “his stupid ass,” and she doesn’t bother to tell him that she’d do it all over again if it meant keeping him safe. He’d never say thank you because he doesn’t want to encourage her, but by the way he’d worshiped her that night with his fingers, his mouth, his cock, he doesn’t have to. She knows what he means.
“Jules was on one of the tapes,” Rue confides in her later.
Lexi fakes just the right amount of surprise and outrage. “Holy shit, really?” she asks, wide-eyed. Dumb and innocent.
Rue nods. “Yeah. I guess she got a call from the police. She doesn’t need to testify, or anything? Because Cal took a plea. But I guess they like, had to notify her or whatever.”
Lexi nods. “Is she okay?” she asks, looking over her shoulder at Jules giggling at her locker with Maddy and Cassie.
“Yeah, actually. She’s doing really good.” Rue slams her locker shut and turns around to lean into it. “She had no idea he was recording her, and neither of us had any idea Nate and Cal were working with Laurie. And I’ve been to Laurie’s place! I was going to like, sell for her and shit! It’s insane, right?”
Lexi looks across the hallway. She hasn’t seen Cassie - or Maddy, for that matter - look so cheerful in years. It’s like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders, the specter of Nate Jacobs no longer haunting them. Jules has color back in her cheeks, wide smiles that finally reach her eyes again. Happy, Lexi thinks, feeling her heart swell. They all look so happy.
Rue looks down at her shoes, dragging her rubber-covered toe against the linoleum. “I’m gonna be safe now,” she says quietly, meeting Lexi’s eyes. “Laurie… she’s got bigger fish to fry when she gets out. If she gets out.”
“Sounds like they all got what they deserved,” Lexi says firmly, and something in her voice has Rue looking up, peering into her eyes, trying to put puzzle prices together that she can’t name before she shakes her head as if to clear it, huffing out a laugh.
Rue would never guess. Neither would Cassie. The only three people that would ever know were her, Ash, and Fez. The only people who knew that for as kind and gentle as Lexi Howard could be, she would protect her family at any and all cost.
Lexi smiles, throws an arm around Rue’s shoulders, and steers them off to class.
August 15th, 2020
“I come bearing treats!” Lexi calls, walking into Fez’s house without knocking and closing the door behind her.
“Treats?” Ash says, head popping up from the couch. “What treats?”
She smiles and hands him a lemon cupcake, filled with lemon curd and topped with a little macaron. “Oh, word,” Ash says reverently, taking it from her. “Thanks, Lexi, for real.”
She waves his thanks away. “I made a whole bunch,” she says, gesturing to the box on the table. “Take all you want, just save some for Fez.”
“Yo, he won’t save me shit,” Fez drawls, walking down the hall and into the room. “He’s a selfish motherfucker, you know that.”
“Fuck you,” Ash garbles through a mouthful of cupcake, and she laughs.
Their house is filled with boxes, stripped bare of the touches of home that used to fill it. They’re leaving for Colorado in three days, a caravan with a medical transport for Fez and Ash’s grandma leading the way and them following close behind. There were a ton of resources they could use to take care of Marie, ones Fez and Ash had never heard of, not because they were stupid but because medicare and the social security administration don’t make a fucking thing easy. Lexi, though, has always had the meticulous nature that was well suited for tedious paperwork, and helps them navigate the system to get her the care she needs. An ambulance to transport her to her new home, a nurse to sit with her during the handful of times when Fez is working, Ash has school, and Lexi has class.
Yeah. Lex would be helping take care of her too. Kind of comes with the territory if she’s going to be living with Fez and Ash.
It might be stupid for her to skip the freshman college experience, but she doesn’t really give a shit. She’s seen enough keg parties and douchebags with red solo cups to last a lifetime. And sure, it might not end well. They might break up years down the road. Lexi doesn’t think so, though. She was willing to destroy three people’s lives for this man, more than that if you count the fallout for Cal and Laurie’s families, and a year later she still doesn’t have a single regret. Love like that doesn’t fade easily.
“I made you a cupcake,” she says bashfully, handing him one. “It’s lemon.”
“Oh fuck yes,” he says, eyes lighting up. He plucks the macaron from the top. “What’s this?”
“It’s a macaron,” she tells him. “A kind of cookie. Tastes a little like a marshmallow. Try it, you’ll like it.”
He takes a bite and hums in satisfaction. “You made these, too?” he says, impressed. “Damn, you didn’t have to do all that for us.”
She waves her hand. “Nah, I always make macarons when I make lemon cake,” she says. “The lemon curd only uses egg yolks, and macarons only use egg whites, so I bake them both at once so I don’t waste anything. Plus, then I can use the macarons to decorate the cake. See?”
“I get you,” Fez nods. “Two birds, one stone.”
She feels an unexpected warmth wash over her. “My grandma used to say that,” she says, stepping up to him. He’s got a little white frosting on his lip and she wants to lick it off, wants to lick all over him, wants to keep that sweet smile on his face forever.
“Yeah? Mine too,” he says, wrapping her in his arms. “That’s a trip.”
She hugs him and swears she can feel his heart beating against his ribs, can feel it beating and synchronizing with hers, their own little world that only they share. “I love you,” she says, and it feels like a promise.
If you could only see the beast you've made of me
I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free
Screaming in the dark, I howl when we're apart
Drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart