Losing Balance
by Lionel

chapter 52

For twenty minutes, Alexis let Lorenzo sleep on top of her, though he was heavy and she ached to stretch her limbs, and with middle-of-the-night satiated languor she contemplated intimacy: its forms, its limits, its possibility even. She contemplated the man entangled with her, joined with her still in flesh and in unobserved, essential nakedness, skin against skin, sticky and smooth. Here was a man she barely knew until three and a half weeks ago – a man she had feared and disliked – and now there was a near-perfect intimacy to the way he slept in her arms, affect abandoned to the lassitude of sleep. Her hands rested lightly on his back, and she felt every breath he took, every catch, every stirring. She felt the slow expansion of his chest as it filled with air, pushing down on her own lungs and inflating her embrace, and she felt its retreat. She watched him, her face unseen and untelling, perfectly attuned to the physiological manifestations of him.

Her lips traced the curve of Lorenzo's shoulder, and she licked lightly at his salty skin. They were both exhausted, and they might just as easily have separated after they made love, turned away to their respective sides of the bed, and gone to sleep back to back. That was the conventional retreat from the unbearable intimacy of sex, the drawing of curtains about private territory, the recloaking of the naked self. But he had precluded that by holding his position and dozing off, and she was glad. She was hardly comfortable right now – the points of her pelvis felt bruised from the weight of him, her thighs were irritated where his coarse hair rubbed against her tender skin, and she yearned for a hot shower – but there was something comforting about this crude connection in the aftermath of sex. It was satisfying and complete in a way mere sex wasn’t.

He had pushed her to a level of physical intimacy she wouldn't ordinarily permit so soon, and he was demanding an equal emotional intimacy. A month ago Alexis had doubted that she could offer emotional intimacy to anyone, but now she wasn’t sure that she could deny it to him. Her uncharacteristic surrender of her body she could understand; it was easily accounted for by the force of attraction between them, so powerful from the beginning, whether by accident of chemistry or history or something more mystical. It was the easy offering of her soul that bewildered her. Why did truths roll so easily off her tongue when she was with him? Why did it seem as if he'd always known her? It was as if he had found a passkey that allowed him to slip inside her gates, and he was graced with a sense of divine right of entry. Or maybe he himself was the passkey. Maybe it was as simple, and unlikely, and terrifying, as he said: they just fit. Or maybe it was just an illusion, soothing and fragile. What did she know of him really? What could she know of him? Wasn’t intimacy just an illusion, a willful lie told themselves by giddy lovers in the surrender of passion? Or a mirage that arises when masks slip in a moment of shared emotional exhaustion?

Her mind played tricks on her as they lay there. In one moment Lorenzo seemed like a part of her, as close as another person could be; in the next he seemed like a stranger. She twisted a bit beneath him, adjusting the way his weight fell across her hips. He was a big man, broad and muscular, and his head was heavy against her shoulder. She knew she would have a hard time if she really wanted to move him off her. At that thought, a wave of panic moved through her, and for just a moment she felt trapped, barely able to breathe. The feeling passed and she forced a deep breath in, raising his limp body just a bit with the pneumatic force of her own lungs. As she exhaled slowly, his weight settled onto her again.

She tried to remind herself that the man pressing down on her was neither part of her nor a stranger, that he was simply Lorenzo, a friend, and that although he was separate and his own, he was also not entirely unknown or unknowable; indeed he was her trusted partner in growing intimacy. He’d demanded her body, all of it, and she’d given it to him; he’d proven a trustworthy guardian as well as an extraordinary lover. Perhaps with a little sleight of hand he could convince her to hand him her heart as well. She couldn’t quite imagine it, but he had a way of surprising her.

*****

Eventually Alexis grew antsy, and the leaden weight of Lorenzo atop her grew crushing. When she could no longer resist the urge to roll over to her own side of the bed and lay claim to its open space, she lifted her head and brushed her lips against his ear.

"Lorenzo … " she called in a low, resonant singsong. She slipped his earlobe between her teeth and sucked lightly at it, surprised by the rise of passion that rippled through her own body. She'd been sure she couldn't feel another thing after all her body had been through, but now the heat and stickiness of skin on skin that a moment before had her headed to the shower spurred a rough and primitive sort of arousal.

Lorenzo stirred as her tongue flickered over the hidden spot behind his ear. With a bare murmur of approval, he nuzzled deeper into her. She nibbled her way down his neck, and his responses grew more coherent as she eased him into consciousness. When she reached the base of his neck, she scraped his skin with her teeth, settling her mouth around the swell of muscle there. Lorenzo suddenly lifted his head and pulled away.

His eyes were open, and he looked at her accusingly. "You were going to bite me."

She grinned. "Just testing your reflexes. Pretty good for a sleeping man."

"I’m a light sleeper. It's a survival skill. We're going to have to work on your wake-up technique."

"What's wrong with my wake-up technique? You're awake, aren't you? And quite alert."

"Adrenaline will do that. That will teach me to fall asleep on you."

She cast her eyes down coyly. "Well, I tried to wake you more … gently, but it didn't work." Her eyes danced at him through her lashes.

"You did?"

"Mm-hmm," she nodded solemnly. "I've been putting the moves on you for ten minutes and getting nothing."

"Ah, that explains the lovely dreams I was having." Lorenzo briefly glanced away, trying to solidify the pleasant dream remnants swirling in his head, but he quickly abandoned them in favor of the warm, waking woman beneath him. "So you were putting the moves on me? And you felt you were getting nothing?" With lifted eyebrow, he nodded downward.

"Nothing useful," she hedged. "You were smiling, but dead asleep. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you are not a light sleeper, Mr. Alcazar."

"Well, I thought I was safe with you. I didn't know I was sleeping with a vampire."

"I don't want your blood."

Her throaty murmur and wickedly flashing eyes quickened his pulse, and his own voice dropped lower, rougher suddenly. "No? What do you want?" The tip of her tongue danced maddeningly over the swell of lip caught by her tugging teeth. He nibbled at her lower lip, claiming it for his own, and she let him.

"That," she murmured against him. Her hand slid down over his hip, finding a bit of space between their bodies.

"This?"

"If it suits you."

"It suits me. I just thought you might be weary."

"I am weary. I'm tired and hot and dirty, and I want to take a shower and go to sleep, but first, right now, I want to have tired, hot, dirty sex with you. No showing off." Her mouth curled against his. "Let's just fuck."

"Such language, Ms. Davis," Lorenzo scolded, but her words made his blood surge and he shifted his position compliantly. "I'm going to have to wash your mouth out with soap."

"Later. You can wash all of me later. Right now, I just want you to …. yeah."

*****

"Oh my god." The weak words were muttered under a much-needed breath as Lorenzo recovered from her simple little fuck. He was sprawled on his back, staring at the ceiling, and he felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut – utterly unable to move his limbs. The most he could manage was to flop his head to the side to look at her. "Oh my god," he repeated.

"That's goddess to you." Alexis's weary and self-pleased smile teased his incapacity from her equally incapacitated place beside him. She lay on her stomach both on him and next to him, half on, half off, with her top leg running the length of the canyon his legs formed. Thoroughly exhausted herself, she could do nothing to unwedge herself from him, so she just nuzzled her face in the curve of his neck.

Lorenzo brushed his lips against her forehead. "I think we'd better call John. Tell him we're not going to make it in to his office by nine."

Alexis lifted her head just enough to take a crooked look toward the window. The curtains were drawn, but it appeared it was still dark outside. "What time is it?"

Lorenzo fumbled for the clock on the nightstand and brought it close to his face, squinting to make out the numbers. "Almost three," he sighed. He tried to put the clock down again, but it slipped out of his weak grip, hit the edge of the table and crashed to the floor.

"Hmm," she mused wearily. "Just six hours to pry ourselves apart, get dressed and get over there? We're going to need a plan."

Lorenzo's head swayed slowly from side to side. "It doesn't matter. I'm never moving."

"Never?"

"Not for a very long time. And then only if absolutely necessary."

She shook her head and clucked in disappointment. "Hit the wall, have you? And with three hours still to go until sunrise?"

Lorenzo gave an apologetic shrug. "Clearly I'm going to have to get in better shape to keep up with you."

Her giggle was muffled by his neck. "You burly men with your gym obsessions. That’s your mistake. You waste all that energy moving big heavy things up and down, up and down. You should save your energy for the fun stuff."

"Oh, is that the secret to your otherworldly stamina?" He cast a mocking glance down at her lifeless body.

"Yup. Avoid pointless exercise." She licked lazily at the hollow of his throat, tasting first the salty layers of their exertion, then the real flavor of his skin. "But I like your shape just fine. In fact," she murmured, "I like everything about you. I like the way you taste … and the way you feel … I like the way you touch me and the way your body fits so nicely with mine." She curled the tips of her fingers in his chest hair and pressed wet flickering kisses up his throat, punctuating each word. "I … like … you." The last was a slow, savoring kiss on the lips, and then she rested her head on his shoulder again.

"I knew it," Lorenzo declared mildly, wearing a small, satisfied smile. "And it only took, what has it been, three weeks to convince you?"

"Three and a half. I'm a hard sell."

"And let's see, how many …" He held up his fingers and counted. "…Two, three, four orgasms?"

"Four. Not that anyone's counting. But it was the third one that really convinced me of your charms."

He laughed lightly, and then he tipped up her chin and gave her a gentle kiss. His eyes were a clear, deep blue, and they held hers in a soft gaze. “Are you happy?”

“Of course.”

A slight scowl creased his smiling features. “No, no, no. Not ‘of course’. I don’t mean pleased … or satisfied.”

“Because you know I am both.”

“Yes. And I know you’re relieved, too.”

“Relieved?”

“After all the build-up. You were worried you’d be disappointed.”

“Seems silly, doesn’t it? But, yes, I’m pleased, satisfied and relieved.” She kissed him lightly and nuzzled against his neck again.

“ But are you happy?" he prodded. "Is your heart singing?”

“You don’t want to hear my heart sing. Off key every time.” She spoke against his throat, and her voice rumbled with a nervous giggle.

“Serious question, Alexis. We waited a long time to do this so that --- “

“A long time? I don’t think three weeks really counts as waiting a long time.”

Lorenzo's lips pressed to her forehead as if the pressure could compel her to stop her childish evasion. “Stop it. Just listen to me. I’ve wanted to take you to bed every day for these last three weeks, but I didn’t because I wanted it to be okay for you. I didn’t want you to hate yourself, I didn’t want you to have regrets. I wanted you to be happy. And now I just want to know if you’re happy, Alexis.”

She finally grew serious, forcing her nerves down, and met his eyes directly. “Yes, I’m happy, Lorenzo," she assured him. "No regrets. In this room, in D.C., in this alternate world, I’m ecstatically happy.”

“But in the other world you’re not?”

“In the real world things are complicated. And they just got a lot more complicated. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I don’t regret this at all. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and it’s wonderful, spectacular, better than I ever imagined. Being with you like this – not just physically, but relaxing with you, letting myself enjoy your company – is the most fun I've had in a very long time. And it's more than fun. I'm just not ready to figure out exactly what it is or how it fits in right now. It's too soon, it's too late, it's too much. I'm tired."

"Okay," he said quietly, but his eyes still studied her for the answer to some unasked question. He flashed a self-deprecating smile, acceding to her deflection of further serious talk for the moment. "Just in case you were wondering, I like you, too."

Her eyebrows lifted in mocking surprise. "Oh, you do?"

"Yes." His eyes drifted down to the teasing curl of her mouth, and he covered it with his own until it yielded to the shape of his own lips. Her lips melded with his in the warm pressure of a swollen kiss, and there was a slight stickiness when they withdrew, moist tender skin on skin clinging deliciously for an instant and then releasing. "Quite a bit," he averred.

*****

They lay there peaceably as the clock clicked through a quarter of an hour from its shipwrecked landing spot on the floor. Lorenzo offered her anything and everything – drink, food, clothing – but Alexis declined it all, contentedly lying on his chest and staring tiredly toward the window. She listened to the sounds of him: the rhythmic whooshing of his beating heart, the slight wheezing of his lungs, the deep bass of his voice rumbling in his chest. He was warmer than she was, and the heat from his body seemed to protect her naked skin from the coolness of the hotel's late night air, warming her from within.

"Are you ready to sleep then?" Lorenzo finally asked, gently prodding her hip with the heel of his hand.

She stretched her neck to glance up at him. She wore an endearingly helpless look, part frown, part smile, part bafflement, part plea. "I don’t know. I'm too tired to think."

"Then don't think about it. Just close your eyes."

She shook her head against him. "If I close my eyes, I'll fall asleep, and then I'll wake up and it will be morning, and the night will be over."

"That's okay. I'm not a vampire, Alexis. I don't turn into a bat or a pumpkin or anything else when the sun rises. And despite the bite marks on my neck, I'm fairly certain you won't either."

She offered an abashed half-smile, but it quickly faded to seriousness. "I don't know what happens tomorrow, Lorenzo. Tomorrow is tomorrow, and tonight is tonight, and I'm just not ready for tonight to end yet. I don’t want to be done."

Lorenzo's fingers brushed across her cheek, lifting her hair from her face and smoothing out the tousled strands. "We don't have to do everything tonight, Alexis. We don't need to figure anything out. We don't even have to talk about any of it tonight. The fair will still be here tomorrow. Just close your eyes and sleep."

She peered up at him with teasing suspicion. "Are you quitting on me?"

"Of course not," he assured her, curling his fingers around her head and grasping a handful of hair. He savored the small primal rush the bit of possessiveness provided. "Noble and devoted as I am, I will ignore the protests of my too weak flesh and push right on through to dawn, as promised, if that's what you would like. But even goddesses need to sleep. Especially those with demanding clients expecting brilliance at the negotiating table all day. We'll be useless tomorrow if we don't get a few hours of sleep."

Her index finger drew a zigzagging line down his chest, trailing off at his navel. "This demanding client will have no one but himself to blame if I'm a little slow off the mark tomorrow."

His fingers left the nape of her neck and slipped down, leisurely tracing the graceful curve of her naked spine to the small of her back. God, she was perfect, he thought suddenly, losing his focus as a wave of tender emotion washed over him. He snaked his arm around her hips, claiming her perfect bare curves. "Maybe we should postpone the meetings a day," he suggested, certain he would be hopelessly distracted. "Spend the day in bed. Rest up and tackle it when we're fresh."

She rubbed her cheek against his chest. "Mmm … that's a very tempting idea, but I don't think John would appreciate our self-indulgence." A bit of reality occurred to her, and she reluctantly propped herself up on an elbow. "And tomorrow's Friday, Lorenzo," she pointed out hesitantly. "I have to go back to Port Charles tomorrow night."

Lorenzo's hand fell to his side. He wasn't sure what he had expected – he hadn't thought that far ahead – but he felt blindsided by the suggestion that she would leave so soon. "What if the negotiations aren't finished?" he resisted, taking refuge in reason.

"Then I'll fly back here Monday. I can't play hooky on my maternal duties all weekend. It isn't fair to anyone." She left Jax's name unsaid, but guilt shadowed her eyes and his presence was heavy in the air between them for an awkward moment. "And I don't want to. I miss my daughter."

Lorenzo looked away in frustration. She was going to slip away. Once they were back in Port Charles, he knew the tangled vines of obligation would weave around her again. Whatever had happened here, she would go home to the house she shared with Jax, and even the best outcome would require careful, difficult disentanglement. He had hoped for more time with her here, in this green world with its lightness and freedom, more time to create an entanglement of their own, something she couldn't just walk away from, a foundation substantial enough to keep her oriented toward him through the painful and nerve-wracking steps that would have to follow.

"Then I think we really should cancel tomorrow, Alexis," he said, deep disappointment darkening his eyes. "I don't want to spend our last hours here in a conference room with a bunch of government lawyers. I can make this simple and give them whatever they want."

She pressed her palm to his cheek gently, understanding that it was his frustration that made him sullen and reckless. "This is too important to cancel or to shortchange that way."

He closed his eyes for several seconds. "You're right. Of course, you're right. I just --- This is important, too, Alexis. It's important to me. Please stay just one more night. We'll go back to Port Charles on Saturday. Please. We need more time."

His eyes entreated her to grant him the same consideration and favor she so easily and generously gave to the others in her life. His was a fair request, she knew, and she balanced it against the weight of everything else that pressed on her, her head wagging as she wavered. "Mmm-maybe," she offered finally. "I'll call home in the morning, and we'll see. That's the best I can do."

Lorenzo let out his breath, and gave a deep nod of gratitude. It was a small thing, that he could make a selfish demand of her and she would try to indulge him, but he thought it a marker of a change between them. "Okay," he agreed. "Thank you." He gently pressed her head to his chest again. "Now you really should try to get some sleep."

*****

Ten minutes later, Lorenzo thought she was asleep. Her eyes were closed, her body was still and her breathing was slow and regular. He had taken his fill of her, of watching her, of drinking in the precious intimacy of her naked body against his, his craving satisfied for the moment at least, and he was letting himself drift off to sleep when her body twitched and her hand jerked down to scratch her thigh. He smoothed his hand soothingly over the bare expanse of her back, and she resumed her repose, but a few seconds later she twitched again and scratched her neck. She settled down again, but her breathing was uneven now, and he felt the tension rising in her body as she tried not to fidget. Finally her eyes opened.

"Lorenzo?"

"What?" His voice was warm with fond indulgence.

"I can't sleep like this."

"Like what?"

"Sticky. Welded to you."

Lorenzo sat up a bit, stifling the yawn that started to move through his body, trying to stretch his weary muscles and lead him to sleep. He pushed her to a sitting position. "Okay. Why don't you go take a shower? I'll get the bed changed and join you. We'll get clean, and then we'll sleep."

Getting out of bed required almost more effort than Alexis could summon, and by the time she had managed it she was having second thoughts about leaving bed at all. She grabbed one of her hairclips from the nightstand and stared at it in sleepy contemplation.

"Go," Lorenzo instructed, giving her a slight push, propelling her reluctantly toward the bathroom. Once she was away from the warmth of bed and Lorenzo, she felt cold as well as tired and sticky, and a bath suddenly seemed like a very good idea. When she reached the bathroom, she turned the tap on hot and emptied a bottle of the hotel's bath wash in the tub.

She was buried deep in bubbles and hot water and breathing in steam when the door to the bathroom opened and Lorenzo stepped in. Languorous and lazy, she turned her head and watched as he slid off his robe and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. He stepped into the shower and washed himself off, and then he emerged and approached the tub. He didn’t bother with a towel, and her eyes moved over his dripping body greedily. She made note of the things she planned to do to him once she'd had some sleep.

***EDITED***

*****

They didn't say another word to one another before they went to sleep. Side-by-side and silent, they rinsed off quickly in the shower, and then Lorenzo dried Alexis from head to toe with a fluffy white towel and led her back to the bedroom. He retrieved a white t-shirt from his drawer and slid it over her head, running his hands possessively over the soft curves beneath the cotton as he smoothed the material and tugged the hem below her hips. He pulled back the covers on the bed and watched her get comfortable on her left side, and then he followed her in and curled up around her beneath the crisp, clean sheets.