Love is a Laserquest - Alex Turner/Arctic Monkeys Fan Fiction

Love is a Laserquest

2014

I wake up the next morning with Alex's body wrapped around me in my own bed, warm and solid. It's not yet midmorning– the light outside my window gray and cold, the flat silent– and for a moment, I allow myself the luxury of enjoying the feeling of Alex's arms around me, of his chest rising and falling in his sleep. I think back to all the times Alex and I have slept together– in the literal sense of the term– and I feel the same contentment as every other time, a kind of peace and comfort I hadn't known since mum left and upended the foundation of my innocent life.

The first time was just after we lost our virginity to one another– the summer where all of our boundaries blurred or fell away. That August– weeks after we had had sex, weeks before it seemed like it would ever happen again– Alex woke me up in the middle of the night, tapping at my bedroom window.

I had to admit, I was surprised.

It sort of felt like Alex had been avoiding spending any time with me alone since that fateful night in Kyle Foley's guest bedroom, and it had been years since he had hauled himself onto our garage roof and to my window. He used to do it when we were young and wanted to finish a movie or listen to a record that we had been cut off from by curfew. So now at sixteen, after months of no word about what we had done, I couldn't imagine what he had in mind when I saw his shaggy head behind my curtain at nearly one in the morning.

I opened the window, feeling the warm, summer air brush against my arms as I whispered, "Alex! What are you doing here?"

He climbed through the window, landing on my bed unsteadily, and I could tell he had been drinking. I tried not to be offended that I hadn't been invited to wherever he had been, and then truly wasn't, because he was in my bedroom at the end of his night.

"I can't sleep," he said, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, pulling his shoes off with clumsy movements.

"'Ave you even tried?" I asked. "You're pissed, Alex."

He shrugged. "I was wiv the boys," he slurred, crawling under the covers of my bed with his jeans and t-shirt on, snuggling against my pillow. "We're going to start a band."

"Oh yeah?" I snarked. "Lovely."

"Come 'ere," he whispered, his sleepy, drunken eyes meeting mine as he reached out both arms for me.

My heart sped up, and I hesitated. I didn't know what this meant, I didn't know what he wanted, but I knew I wanted to lie in his arms– more than I had ever wanted anything in my whole life.

I crawled in with him, let him wrap his arms around me, bury his face in my neck and hair.

"Alex," I whispered after a long couple of minutes, thinking he might have fallen asleep. When he made a questioning sound, I asked, "Why are you here?"

"I missed you, Lils."

His voice was tipsy, sleepy, murmured. I wanted to say that he had seen me the day before, that I was never that far away, but I was also too exhilarated to say a thing.

We fell asleep like that, though I was too keyed up for ages about being in Alex's arms to even close my eyes. But when I did fall asleep, I felt perfectly content. And when Alex woke up and crawled out of my window in the early hours of the morning, kissing my cheek groggily before jamming his shoes on and crawling back out the way he came, I felt perfectly content still.

And for the first time in a long while, I feel that kind of content, peaceful, good again– though I know it won't last. The anxiety, the worries, the nagging thoughts are barking at the fringes of my consciousness, but I try to push them away, deciding to lie in Alex's arms without consequence a little bit longer.