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

Epilogue

2018

By the time my plane lands in New York, it's midday and the sun is setting. I took an afternoon flight from Heathrow, and it's been strange to watch the sun through the window, the light changing against the clouds, but somehow staying the same the whole time. When we finally touch down on the tarmac at JFK, I'm exhausted and nauseous from the long-haul flight, and from going more than twenty-four hours without sleep. I'm eager to get off the plane though, and I grab my bags in record time, before I'm standing on line waiting for a cab.

I've just finished a month-long book tour of the U.K. and I'm drained. It's my fourth one since I published my first book, but it hasn't gotten any easier. It's why Alex and I agreed I wouldn't fly to meet him when I was done, even though I had just missed one of his breaks because I was in Scotland. And I had fully intended to take several days to rest at home, catch up on some work, and then meet him in Norway for the last few stops before his next time home. But after the past couple of weeks, I need to see him in person.

The last four years have been nothing if not a whirlwind. My writing career, life with Alex, life without Dad, all of it. In the beginning, when I hadn't been published yet and I still lived in my flat with Tess, things were much the same as they had been when Alex and I were just friends who occasionally shagged. We had a hard time shifting gears, treating each other like proper partners, telling people we were together. But when the AM tour ended, and Alex stayed in London to work with Miles on Everything You've Come to Expect, we settled into our new relationship as well as we had once settled into friendship.

And, of course, everyone celebrated it with us– congratulated us, teased us for having taken so long. Penny flat out started crying.

"Mum!" Alex scolded her, when we went round to Sheffield after the tour ended.

We had just sat down to a Sunday roast like old times, and Penny had been looking between us like a bomb was about to go off. After the way things blew up at Dad's funeral, she had been left in the dark about us– apart from Alex calling to tell her we were all right before he went back on tour. But then sitting in their dining room, like a million other Sundays past, he took my hand right on the table and told them we were together. Properly together, now.

"I'm sorry," Penny sniffed, wiping her eyes with her napkin, smiling amidst the waterworks. "I'm just so happy. Your father would have been so happy."

She got up and kissed us both, held me tightly to her, and I could have cried too, because this was my family.

Other people weren't so emotional.

"Well, thank bloody Christ!" Alexa cheered dryly, when we met her for dinner after it became official. Of course, she had talked to both of us and knew already, but seeing us together, in front of her, she rolled her eyes and then grinned like a cheshire cat. "I thought I was going to be playing biased therapist to you two for years."

The only difficulty was Dad's absence. I tried to truly enjoy being with Alex in the beginning– because how long had I loved him? How many years had I longed for exactly what we had? But as we shared our relationship with our friends and family, and then the public– with paparazzi pictures popping up all over the internet– I felt a gaping hole in my insides despite the circumstances, and it left me feeling suffocated more days than not.

In fact, one morning when I had stayed at Alex's apartment that first summer, he found me in the bath, gasping through a teary panic attack.

"Lils," he said, sounding alarmed as he knelt by the bathtub, an arm going around my wet shoulders. "What is it?"