Losing Balance
by Lionel

chapter 42

Thirty minutes later, Alexis had concluded her business at the PCPD and was ready to head back to her office. She and Marcus were passing by the security screening area on their way out of the building when Alexis stopped suddenly. "My umbrella," she remembered. "I left it upstairs." She turned back toward the elevator, but when Marcus tried to follow he was stopped by one of the police officers manning security.

"Gotta go through screening," the officer told the bodyguard, gesturing at the line stretching out the door.

Alexis took a look at the line and waved Marcus off. "I'll be right back. Meet me at the Fifth Street entrance in a couple of minutes. I'll slip out the back way."

"You know I can't do that, Ms. Davis."

"I'll be fine, Marcus. It's a police station, for heaven's sake." She walked away before he could say anything more, and when he saw the elevator doors close behind her Marcus reluctantly went outside to pull the car around.

Alexis quickly retrieved her umbrella from the squad room upstairs and walked down a back hallway toward the service elevator. The elevator doors ahead of her were open, and Alexis increased her pace to try to slip into the elevator before they closed again and sentenced her to a tedious wait for the creaky old box to return. The rapid but uneven clicking of her heels echoed through the hall. She was still several feet from the elevator when the doors began to slide shut, and she reached out her umbrella in a futile effort to interrupt them. The doors continued to close and her arm fell uselessly to her side. "Dammit," she muttered, with a vehemence that expressed her frustration with more than just the wait she faced for the elevator to return.

The narrow band of light between the closing doors had almost disappeared when a hand reached out from inside the elevator and forced the doors back. "Thank you, thank you," Alexis gushed gratefully to the unseen source of her eleventh hour pardon as the doors retreated. She stepped quickly toward the widening gap, but then froze in her tracks when she saw the expensively dressed man to whom the rescuing hand belonged. She took a step back, her eyes slipping to the call button on the wall, and she waved him off. "I'll just wait for the next one," she said nervously.

Sonny cocked his head to the side and shook his head in humorless exasperation. "Don't be ridiculous, Alexis. You'll be here all day."

Alexis bit her lip and forced a tight smile. "You know, I don't mind. I'll just take the stairs."

Sonny raised an eyebrow as he glanced down at her wrapped ankle. "On your broken foot? I won't bite." Alexis's right eyebrow tipped up skeptically. Sonny shrugged and let his hand fall from the elevator door. "Suit yourself."

As the doors began to slide shut again, Alexis jerked herself forward. Sonny was right. She was being ridiculous. And she needed to get back downstairs before Marcus came looking for her. With a wan smile, she strode forward into the elevator as Sonny's firm hand again stopped the doors in their track. She turned to face the front of the elevator and gave him a polite nod as the doors finally closed. "Thank you."

"No problem."

They stood in grim and uncompanionable silence as the rickety old elevator began to move down. Sonny stole a glance over at Alexis. She stood rigidly, eyes glued straight ahead of her, arms folded tightly across her chest, her tense shoulders rising and falling with each controlled breath. She looked as miserable as he felt.

Sonny pressed his fingers hard against his forehead and temples, as if it might keep his head from exploding, and then let his hands run back through his hair. "Jesus, Alexis," he muttered.

Alexis looked up at him sharply. Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly as she waited for something - more words, movement, a look - that would give her a clue to the meaning behind Sonny's utterance.

Her quick movement drew his eyes to hers, and he realized that he had spoken out loud. There was fear in her eyes. She was forcing herself to stay calm, but she looked nervous and wary, like a cornered but still cunning fox waiting for the hunter to give its next move away. Or like a scared little girl trying to stay quiet, knowing that if she didn't say or do the wrong thing, maybe the bogeyman outside the closet door would go away. Sick from the slow, uneven descent of the elevator, or maybe the look in her eyes, Sonny shook his aching head and rested his hands on his waist. "You're afraid to be in the same elevator as me. What the hell has happened to us?"

Alexis stopped breathing for a moment. The last thing she had expected was any hint of softness from Sonny. She was tempted to respond in kind, to offer a smile, a reassurance, a platitude, anything to bridge the painful abyss between them. But she knew better than to expose a chink in her own armor. "It's an old survival instinct, courtesy of Helena and Stavros. I try to avoid being in small, enclosed spaces with people who hate me." Sonny stiffened up, and Alexis saw the quick twitch in his eyes that told her that she had struck deeper than she had intended. All to the good.

"You think I hate you?"

"Yes, I do." She turned her head back to the front of the elevator and let the words hang in the air. But she couldn't leave it at that, and she looked back at Sonny. "That's the message I receive when someone tells me again and again that they're going to break me. At first I thought that you just didn't give a damn, but then I realized that you hate me. You wouldn't enjoy humiliating me so much if you didn't hate me."

"You don't think I have good reason to hate you?"

"I didn't say that," she said softly, shaking her head.

"You took the things that I said to you in confidence, as my lawyer and my friend, and tried to use them against me. You tried to expose my most private things to the world. Knowing what it would cost me. What am I supposed to do with that?"

Alexis shrugged her shoulders slightly. "You're supposed to hate me. And maybe you're supposed to enjoy humiliating me. So there you have it. Things are the way they're supposed to be between us. We can stop talking about it." She fastened her eyes to the front of the elevator again.

Sonny watched her for as long as he could stand it and then looked down at the floor. "I don't hate you, Alexis."

"You'll have to pardon me if I find that difficult to believe." Her teeth were clenched so tightly that her jaw ached.

"I hate some of the stuff you did, but I can't hate you. It would be like hating myself."

His cryptic words drew her eyes to him, and she saw all the marks of the past two years on his face - in his tired, dull eyes and his receding hairline, in the lines of strain around his eyes and the tics and twitches that disrupted his mien. She felt the slightest stirring in her hardened heart - compassion for a man she once knew so well and cared for so deeply. "You look very much like a man who hates himself, Sonny," she observed.

Sonny looked up and met her eyes, but she turned away quickly. The pain in his head grew worse, and he squeezed his eyes closed. "God, I hate this," he said, grimacing.

"I'm not exactly having the time of my life here either, Sonny."

"No, I don't mean this." He gestured impatiently around the elevator. "I mean seeing you look at me that way. I mean it, Alexis. What the hell happened to us?"

"You want the condensed version? Let's see. My sister died. Your wife didn't." She couldn't help but be flip. She had worked too hard at separating herself from Sonny - at cauterizing the part of her heart that was vulnerable to him - to let him rip it all open just to refresh his memory. "I can't do this, Sonny."

Sonny let out a heavy breath. "Fine. Forget it." He shook his head in something like disappointment or disgust and fell into dark silence again.

The lights in the elevator flickered twice, drawing their attention to the ceiling and then to the dial above the door. There were still two floors to go to get to the ground level. They shared a wary look.

"The storm must be picking up," Sonny said.

"Do you think this thing has a back-up generator?" Alexis asked with a tight smile. It was becoming very difficult to breathe.

"I don't know. I doubt it. But we'll be out of here soon." Sonny tried to sound confident, but he looked as uneasy as she felt.

"Hah. Famous last words." Alexis felt a wave of panic begin to well up. "Obviously you don't know about me and elevators. We're doomed. No one should ever let me take an elevator. You should have let the doors close in my face. Look -- this license expired four years ago. You would think a police station -- "

"Alexis --- "

Suddenly the lights went out and the elevator jerked to a halt, throwing Alexis off balance. Her umbrella clattered to the floor, and she reached out her hands in the dark, grabbing Sonny's right arm to steady herself. "Whoa," he said, turning toward her and putting his left hand supportively on her hip. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said, breathing harder than normal. "It just caught me by surprise." It was pitch black in the elevator, and it was disconcerting to feel Sonny so close in front of her yet be unable to see him. Without use of her eyes, her other senses were heightened, and she was intensely aware of his hand on her hip, the sound of his breathing, and the scent of his familiar spicy cologne. The sensations were much too intimate, and too reminiscent of another intimacy they once shared, and she took a step back.

"Where'd you go?" he asked, his voice unexpectedly low and rough. He had been caught by surprise, too. He didn't know his body still remembered her - her scent, her energy - and still wanted to curve into her soft warmth. His traitorous hands wanted to play hide and seek in the dark, to search her out in the empty space between them, to feel for her like a blind man, but he kept them still. The intimacy was a momentary illusion, he knew, a figment of the darkness, and any further contact would be bitterly unwelcome.

"I'm - I'm right back here." She sounded flustered, even to her own ears. The jolt of the elevator had been nothing compared to the jolt of realizing how Sonny still affected her. "I keep a little flashlight in my purse. I'm trying to find it." There was an unzipping sound and rustling as she searched through her purse. "Dammit. I know it's in here somewhere."

"Want me to look?" Sonny asked. "I got good hands." She couldn't see him, but she was certain his dimples were blazing.

"No, thanks. I'll find it." Even in the dark, he knew her cheeks were flushed and her lower lip was pulled between her teeth.

"Come on, let me have a try." Sonny stepped toward where he thought Alexis was and reached out. He found her arm, and followed it down to the purse in her hand, wrapping his fingers around the purse and giving a tug.

"Hey," Alexis objected. "A woman's purse is private. Hands off." She jerked the purse away, at the same moment that Sonny relinquished his hold, and she fell back against the rear wall of the elevator.

"You okay?" Sonny wanted to reach out and steady her again, but he didn't dare. He was afraid to touch her, afraid something would spark again or it wouldn't, afraid of any of the things that might happen if he touched her, afraid as he had always been - except for that one night - to put their feet to the fire and find out what was real and what was an illusion, or if not an illusion then as tenuous and fragile as a bubble.

"I'm okay," Alexis confirmed in a shaky voice. She continued rummaging through her purse. "Found it." She pulled out a flashlight and pushed the little switch, releasing a small beam of light. It was barely enough to illuminate the wall on the other side of the elevator, but seeing anything at all inside that small box made their predicament painfully real. Her throat tightened, and she had to focus on drawing steady breaths.

Sonny went to the control panel, pressing buttons and growing increasingly tense himself as nothing worked. "It's like it's all been disconnected. Even the alarm bell doesn't ring." He gave a tug on the doors, but they wouldn't budge. Staring at the useless control panel again, Sonny pressed his palms to his forehead and took a deep breath.

Alexis pulled out her cell phone on a long shot. No signal. She felt herself losing control of her breathing. "Oh, god, this is just great. No, no, no, no, no!"

Sonny gave up on the control panel and turned back to Alexis, putting his hands on her shoulders. "Shhh. Breathe, Alexis."

She looked into his familiar dark eyes and heard the familiar reassurance, and even through her respiratory distress a smile cracked her face.

Sonny slipped a gentle arm around her shoulder. "Come on. Sit down." They both slid down to the floor. "You know I hate this just as much as you do. We'll get through it together, if we just stay calm. Freaking out isn't going to do any good."

"It makes me feel better."

"No, it doesn't. It makes you feel out of control. We're going to stay in control here, Alexis. We're going to sit here calmly, we're going to breathe nice and easy, and we're going to wait this out. Sooner or later the electricity will come back on or someone will come to get us out."

"When did you become so patient?"

"Well, see, I had this friend. She tried to teach me how to wait one time."

"Yeah? Did it work?"

"I don't know. To be honest, I never gave it a real try before." He flashed his dimples at her in the faint light, and the years of hostility seemed to melt away.

Alexis smiled back, her own dimples just barely peeking out in the dark shadows. For a moment, she could almost imagine he had never stopped making her cappuccino. She knew it was an illusion, though, and her eyes were still sad and tense.

Sonny put his hand over hers and gently pulled the flashlight away. "We should turn this off for now." He pushed the switch, and they were again engulfed in darkness.

"I don't know which is worse. The dark or seeing."

Sonny took a deep breath. "Uh, the dark for me. Definitely the dark."

She found his hand in the blackness and squeezed it. "If you want to turn the light back on, we can."

"No, no, I'm okay. You?"

"No. I think I prefer not seeing. It's easier to forget where I really am. I can imagine I'm just sitting in bed in the dark and not trapped in this metal box dangling on a cable." She ran out of oxygen as she spoke.

"Don't let yourself think about it, Alexis," Sonny said gently. "You remember that time I was locked up in jail and you stayed with me?"

"Of course I remember."

"You talked to me. You told me about Briarton-Griggs. Your green and gray uniform."

"You remember?"

"Yeah. Of course I remember."

"And you told me about the ballet."

"Yeah. You kept me together that night, Alexis. Just talking to me. That's all we have to do now."

"Talking, huh? You think we can just talk our way through this?"

"Well, you can talk your way through anything, right? And I can talk my way out of anything. So between us, yeah, I think we'll be okay."

Alexis indulged in an unseen roll of her eyes. "So what do you want to talk about? In case you've forgotten, Sonny, you and I aren't friends anymore. There aren't a lot of safe topics between us."

"Tell me about Kristina. How's she doing? She's what, eighteen months?"

Alexis swallowed hard. "Yeah. She's … she's great." Nothing in Sonny's tone indicated that he was aware of the irony in his suggestion that Kristina was a safe topic. Alexis wondered if he remembered all of the angry words that had passed between them on the topic of her daughter.

"Come on -- you're a mom," he cajoled. "You're supposed to be impossible to shut up. What's she like? What's she doing these days?"

Alexis was grateful for the shield the dark provided as she struggled for a response. How to describe her precious, complex acorn of a child to her father? "Well … let's see. She's very sweet and affectionate. Loves to take care of her stuffed animals and dolls. She has her stubborn moments, but she's basically a really great baby. She's actually very funny, which caught me completely by surprise. And now she's talking up a storm."

Sonny laughed. "I bet. Like her mama."

Alexis smiled. "The longest, most convoluted sentences you can imagine. She's quite a girlie-girl, too. Adores her shoes and dresses and hair clips. It's a bit of a blow to my feminist sensibilities."

"And she's an artist, right? She likes to draw."

Alexis frowned. "How do you -- ?"

"I saw her at the courthouse that day. Remember?"

"Yeah. I remember."

"She looked so beautiful. All those curls, that little pink jacket. Prettiest little girl I've ever seen. So precious."

Alexis struggled to find her voice over the lump in her throat. "I - I certainly think so. She's grown up a lot since then. She's running everywhere now, climbing everything."

"Her health is good?"

"Yeah, it is now. It was rough in the beginning. But you - you know that."

Sonny nodded in the dark, remembering the brittle and angry shell of a woman he had seen in NICU. "You like being a mom?"

Alexis wiped away the tears that had fallen silently onto her cheeks. "Yeah. I like being a mom. It's the most amazing thing I've ever done. I had no idea I would love it so much."

Sonny smiled wistfully in the dark. There had been two times when he thought her little girl was his, and though his anger had overwhelmed him each time, there had been moments when he had let himself imagine sharing a child with Alexis. Despite her protests that she hadn't a maternal bone in her body, he had always suspected she would be a natural. She had a lifetime of practice taking care of other people and a tightly wrapped heart full of love looking for someplace safe to alight.

"I'm - I'm sorry it's been so hard for you, Alexis. But it seems like things have settled down. The Quartermaines aren't giving you any trouble?"

Alexis chastised herself for expecting Sonny to apologize for turning a deaf ear to her pleas for help. "Oh, Edward steams and rumbles and may erupt at any time, but for now everything is quiet."

"And Ned?"

"Ned's okay," she said nervously. "What about you? How are Michael and Morgan?"

"They're good. You know, they're okay. We've been having some problems with Michael. Running away, lashing out. He's angry about a lot of things - the guards, the divorce."

"He's been through a lot for a kid. He's been exposed to a lot of anger. He's had parents coming and going his whole life. That has to have affected him."

"Yeah, I try to remember that. And we're trying to give him his family back, but I'm not sure it's helping anything."

"He's just a kid, Sonny. He doesn't know what's best. He just knows what he wants and how to get it."

"Yeah." Sonny rubbed the back of his neck, where his tension had momentarily settled.

"Have you given any thought to how you might do things differently with Morgan?" Alexis held her breath after asking the question. She knew the answer would be no, in some form or another, but she couldn't help but wish for some sign that Sonny was learning to put his children first.

"Well, you know, things will be different just cause they are. There's no A.J. Morgan's got two parents together from day one. He won't be moving around."

Alexis frowned but didn't comment. She was genuinely perplexed how Sonny could ignore all the time Morgan had already spent separated from his mother - first when Sonny shot Carly during childbirth and later when he kept her from her children during their separation. She wanted to point out his blind spot, she wanted to tell him that a sense of security was what his kids were desperately missing, but it wasn't her place anymore to try to make Sonny a better husband, father or man. Not having to manage the dysfunctional Corinthos family was one of the enormous benefits of the brutal rupture of her relationship with Sonny and the agonizing secret she kept from him.

"Do you know what time it is?" Alexis asked, needing to change the subject. Her fingers tapped nervously on the floor.

Sonny flicked on the flashlight for a moment and looked at his watch. "Twenty after two."

"No electricity, no rescuers. What if it's just us, Sonny? What if no one knows the elevator broke down?"

"Don't borrow trouble, Alexis. You and I both got enough of our own. Max will come looking for me."

"Marcus will come looking for me," Alexis echoed, trying to stoke her own confidence.

"Taggart?" Sonny was bewildered.

"No, no. One of my bodyguards."

"One of Alcazar's bodyguards, you mean?"

"Yes." She waited for Sonny's comment. "What? No nasty remarks? No warnings? No crude comparisons?"

"Nah. Not today. We're trying to stay calm, right? That's not going to happen if we talk about Alcazar. Or Candy Boy."

"That's very big of you."

"Yeah, well, I'm bigger than you think, Alexis." He was rewarded with a little snort from her. "Why the bodyguards? Is Helena still coming after you?"

"Yeah. It looks like she's up to something big."

Sonny gave a short, humorless laugh. "So your daughter's growing up with bodyguards, too. Watch out, Alexis. She'll hate you for it."

"Well, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that it ends now."

"What, you're going to take Helena out?"

"That's the plan."

"And you think Alcazar can keep you safe?"

"I have every confidence."

"Yet here you are trapped in an elevator with me. Could have been one of Helena's men."

"Good thing for me it was just you, eh?"

"Yeah, good thing." Sonny sighed. "So what does Alcazar get out of this arrangement? A piece of the Cassadine empire? The pleasure of your company?"

"The satisfaction of a job well done, perhaps. You would have to ask him."

"Maybe I will."

The elevator jerked suddenly and dropped several inches. Alexis grabbed onto Sonny's arm in the dark. "What's happening?"

He squeezed her knee tightly. "I don't know. Just sit still."

There was a loud whirring of a motor starting up, and the elevator jerked again. This time, after the initial jolt, it continued down haltingly. Alexis didn't dare breathe during the slow, torturous descent. Finally, the doors slid open, and light from the windows in the hallway seeped into the elevator.

Alexis closed her eyes against the unaccustomed brightness, and when she slowly opened them again she saw Lorenzo standing in the door of the elevator. His face reflected a mix of worry and relief and query as he stood there assessing the situation like a field commander. Alexis released her grip on Sonny's arm and sat up straight, blinking rapidly. Sonny's hand lingered deliberately on her knee until she pulled her leg away.

"Are you okay?" Lorenzo asked, kneeling down in front of Alexis and offering her his hand.

She nodded as she took his hand and stood up. "I'm okay," she said, brushing off her skirt. "I could use a very large dose of fresh air and open sky right now, but basically I'm fine. We're both fine."

Lorenzo glanced suspiciously at Sonny, who was smirking ever so slightly and taking his time in getting to his feet. "What happened?"

"I'm not really sure." Alexis gathered up her purse and umbrella. Sonny handed her the little flashlight. "The power went out, I guess, and the elevator stopped. There was no light, no anything, so we just sat and waited."

"And talked," Sonny added, flashing a false smile as he took up a position just behind Alexis. "We had a good talk."

Lorenzo ignored Sonny. "Apparently this elevator was supposed to be out of service. No one should have been using it."

Alexis followed Lorenzo out into the hallway, where two men from building maintenance and several uniformed officers were gathered. Behind them she saw Marcus, looking very chastened. She gave him a wan, apologetic smile.

"We would have gotten you out a lot sooner if we knew where you were, Alexis." Lorenzo knew he sounded like a scold, but he had been worried.

"I know. I'm sorry. It wasn't Marcus's fault. I insisted on going back upstairs alone. I won't make that mistake again."

"Good." Lorenzo wanted to say more, he wanted to ask questions, and more than anything he wanted to put his arms around Alexis and assure himself that she was all right, but he was mindful of Sonny's watchful presence. "Let's get you outside. The rest can wait."

Alexis nodded. She started to follow Lorenzo down the hall, but after taking a step she stopped and turned around. Sonny was still standing in front of the elevator, watching her. She met his eyes almost shyly. "Thanks, Sonny."

"For what? Holding the elevator?"

She shrugged. "For the ballet. For everything."

Sonny nodded, and one of his dimples peeked out. "You're welcome."

"You should really do something about that headache."

"Yeah."

chapter 43