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"Explosions, on the day you wake up
Needing somebody, and you've learned
It's okay to be afraid,
But it will never be the same."
- Ellie Goulding, Explosions
Alex thinks about Coralee. About... Richard. And it's sick. She's sick. She can't stop. Did Richard and Coralee have sex? They must have. Coralee was beautiful, Richard knew he was good looking, Alex is sure they did.
Richard's smart. He must have been good at it. He has nice hands. She likes his hands. She pictures his hands on her, wonders what that new scruff of his would feel like between her thighs.
Alex lets out a low groan, burying her head in her hands. She just wants to sleep. But the more she wants to sleep the less she can actually do it. There's no relief, just spots dancing in her vision, making her heart race.
Just Nic's voice, telling her that she was the one chanting. Not even Amalia's presence in the other room - and Alex knows she's there, she checked - can keep the demons away.
She tries to cry, wants to cry; tries scrunching up her face, listens to sad music on her phone (directly disobeying her doctor's request, but she's never been much of a rule follower anyway). Still, nothing. She just feels numb, mostly.
And she wants to sleep.
Alex is hallucinating. She must be. There's no other explanation for... this. She can't be dreaming, because she knows she's awake. Maybe she drifted off for a bit, but she's here. She's present. Foggy, but present. And even if she was asleep, she wouldn't be dreaming anyway. It's never this real in her dreams.
So, yes. Hallucination is the only way that Alex can accept the fact that Richard Strand, of all people, is standing in her bedroom doorway, hands in his pockets, all casual as can be.
"Amalia let me in." Alex's sleep-addled, ultra paranoid, 3-in-the morning-brain can't even begin to process what he's saying, let alone register whether or not Amalia is still home to let him in. The dark, dysfunctional, normally dormant but now all too present parts of her brain whisper sinisterly to her. Amalia's not home. She's at Nic's. Who opened the door, Alex? Maybe we did.
She sucks in a breath, hating the train of thought but not able to stop it. She tries to play it off as a joke, instead, mostly because she's too tired to think of anything else.
"Amalia needs a kick in the head," she mutters, tugging a piece of her blanket back over her chest. She hates how he's leaning against her doorway, all tall and arms crossed, six foot whatever of man that she does not need at the moment.
She's for sure hallucinating. Apophenia, that's his favorite word. Can he hear her thinking it? Smile if you can hear this, she tries to project in his direction, but he's still standing there; vague, condescending smirk on his face like always. He looks tired, though. The beard brings it out in him.
Alex hates him, she thinks. Stupid Richard. Nobody has a right to be that tall.
Richard. Dumb name.
"What are you doing here?" she finally asks him, and his eyebrows furrow together like they usually do when he disagrees with someone's interpretation of events.
"Alex, you called me," he explains, as if this is a fact that she should be aware of. Which she should be, but she's not. "You don't remember?"
Her heart feels like it's stopping. Is this what a heart attack is, something that you can feel and identify? Is she supposed to know that she's having one? Is he even real? She sucks in a shaky breath, running her fingers through her hair. The shadows in the corners of her room seem to be closing in; laughing at her.
"Please tell me you're kidding."
Richard just looks concerned. He walks over and sits down on the edge of her bed. Alex scoots her knees into her chest; wraps her arms around them. Takes a deep breath.
"I really called you?" she asks him, and he nods. Alex breathes in again, longer this time. "Well, I've completely lost it. What did I say?"
"It's... it's not important," he decides. Alex bites her lip, scoots closer to him. She needs something to tether her to this earth, something steady and rational, something she can hold on to. And what is more rational than Dr. Richard Strand?
Except, now that they're here, she feels everything but rational. She feels lightheaded and woozy and she thinks that she might-- that she's in-- that-- she refuses to finish the sentence. She leans in closer to him, as if pulled by some magnetic force. She doesn't know that she'd be able to stop herself if she tried.
"Richard," Alex breathes into the space between them, one that's millimeters at most but feels like miles, and she wants to stay there forever and also close the distance and meld herself to him.
In a very un-Strand-like manner, he says nothing, just lets out a humming sound from deep in the back of his throat that she didn't think he was capable of, one so new to her that she thinks there's no way that he can actually be here, in her room. She has to be imagining this. There's no way that he could actually want her.
This has to the the culmination of endless nights of not enough sleep and her traitorous brain's uncanny ability to conjure him up at inappropriate times. She doesn't know how long they sit there, suspended in their simultaneous inaction, but her eyes finally start to get tired and she lets them flutter closed, even though she knows nothing will come of it.
Closing her eyes at this point is probably even worse than having them open. At least when her eyes are open she can pretend like she doesn't see anything.
Richard moves his hand to rest on her thigh, starling her eyes open again, and suddenly she's blinking up at him, closer than before but still somehow out of reach.
She presses their foreheads together; hard. She just pushes and pushes, reaching her hands up to clutch at his face. She wants-- she just... wants.
They're breathing heavy and his eyes are closed and Alex just fucking wants, so she takes, because this probably isn't real and what's the harm anyway, right?
So she kisses him. Because she wants to and on some basic level, she needs it. Because she's tired. Literally, but also just... tired of waiting. Tired of dancing around him.
In her defense, he doesn't push her away. That's a good sign, right? It's been what -- 20 years since he last saw Coralee? He can't still be in love with her, can he? Or maybe he is. Alex doesn't care. She doesn't care she doesn't care she doesn't care all she wants is this. Richard's mouth moving insistently against her own and his stubble scratching her face and the teeth and the hands and all of it.
And for a few brief seconds, she lets herself have it. She throws herself into this kiss like she's never thrown herself into anything, and she lets Strand push her down into her mattress and she lets him hold her hair and kiss her neck and then she stops.
They can't do this. She pushes him away gently, unable to force her hands off of his shoulders when she does it. His lips are swollen, his hair messier than it had been when she'd found him in his office that one day.
"We should-- we should stop," she says, trying to be practical. It's hard to be practical when he's looking at her like that. "Until I'm better," she amends, because there's no way that she can keep herself away from him after that.
The side of his mouth quirks into his signature smirk, and even forms all the way into a real smile. "I understand," he says in that formal way of his. It almost makes up for the fact that he's not actually there.
"I wish that--" she forces herself to shut her mouth. Richard raises an eyebrow.
"Alex." His voice has that soft yet demanding quality that always makes her want to spill all of her secrets. He places one of his hands on hers own, which are twisted and tangled together, a habit that she's recently picked up. It doesn't make her feel better. "You wish what?" She wishes that this were real. She wishes that she had the courage to make this happen in real life. She wishes she didn't have to wake up.
She just smiles sadly at him. "It doesn't matter."