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rsadelleThe idea behind this is that Alex and Brandon hook up off and on. They don't talk about it, and they don't tell anyone about it, but Alex keeps borrowing Brandon's clothes. I only wrote some of the snippets of this story.
"Do you think I look prettier like this?" Alex asks later, when she's had a few drinks.
Brandon can see it, the makeup, the hair, the dress, but he can also see the way the corners of her mouth are turned down. "I think you look uncomfortable," he says. "I think you look prettiest on the ice celebrating a sweet goal."
It's the right answer; she beams at him, and then leaves to go to the bathroom and comes back with her makeup scrubbed off. "Anna put too many pins in my hair," she says. "Will you take them out?"
Brandon picks them out of her hair one by one, combing his hands through it to make sure he's gotten all of them.
"It is probably a mess now," she says when he's done.
"No," Brandon says, "it looks good. Like you're letting down your hair."
Alex giggles at that. "I want to dance now." [And then insert sexy dancing here, but not enough for a montage.]
*
Alex strips off her sweatshirt before she takes her turn at the beer pong table. There's a moment of silence that pools out from her.
"Since when are you a Rangers fan?" Gally asks. Alex looks down at her shirt like she had no idea what she was wearing and shrugs.
"How much of my clothing do you have?" Brandon asks.
*
"You have my dress," Alex says once when she comes back from raiding Brandon's closet.
"Yeah." Brandon shrugs. "You left it here, so I threw it in with my dry cleaning." It's the first time they've talked about that night.
*
"Naila wants to meet my friends," is the explanation she gives, and Brandon's not about to turn down a home-cooked meal he didn't have to cook himself.
After dinner, Alex's parents leave the rest of them to hang out on their own.
"You found people who dress as badly as you," Naila says to Alex when they're all hanging out in the living room. She's sitting on the floor in front of Anna while Anna does something to her hair. She eyes Brandon. "I think I've seen you wearing that same shirt."
Gally never knows when to keep his mouth shut, so of course he says, "It probably was the exact same shirt. They share clothes."
"We don't share clothes," Brandon says. "She steals my clothes."
"You wore her shirt to practice last week!"
There's no denying that one; Brandon had put on a clean T-shirt without realizing it was one of Alex's until he got to the rink and Patch recognized it. Today he's definitely wearing his own shirt, although there's no guarantee that Alex hasn't also worn it.
Naila looks between the three of them and says something to Alex in Russian. Brandon doesn't need to know the language to recognize how indignantly defensive Alex gets.
"We're being rude to Prusty and Gally," Alex says after she goes back and forth with Naila and Anna for a minute.
"And you need to stay still if you want me to do your hair," Anna says to Naila.
"Did you really come all the way across the country just to have Anna do your hair?" Gally asks.
"She does cooler things than I can," Naila says with a shrug of her shoulders that keeps her head still. "And Alex won't sit still for it, so Anna has to practice on me."
"She sits still for it sometimes," Anna says while she does something complicated looking to Naila's hair.
"And then she just makes Prusty take it down again later," Gally says.
Anna and Naila both pause to look at Alex at that.
"You use too many pins!" Alex protests far too defensively for the topic at hand. Gally might be oblivious, but if Anna and Naila haven't yet figured out that Alex and Brandon hook up sometimes, they're going to soon if she keeps that up.
"It is a lot of pins," Brandon says. "And probably harder to deal with behind your head when you're drunk." The chirp probably isn't going to wholly deflect Anna and Naila's attention, but it might be enough to head off the conversation for now.
"It's never that many pins," Naila says. "You could shave your head again."
"You shaved your head?" Brandon asks, trying to picture it.
"That was before I even met you," Alex says to Naila.
"I don't like short hair on girls," Gally says. "Long hair looks so much better."
Anna and Naila both roll their eyes at him. "You don't get a vote," Naila says.
"What? Why not? I'm a guy. I know what guys like. Prusty, back me up."
"No way," Brandon says, holding up his hands. "I know when to get in the middle of things and when not to, and this is one of those times not to."
"I want to know what you think," Anna says. Her tone says both that she knows that Brandon is hooking up with her little sister and that he'd better not get this wrong.
Alex doesn't look like she's going to stop Brandon from saying anything about it, but he still chooses his words carefully, and directs them at her instead of at Anna.
"I like your hair," he says, because he does, likes the way it looks falling across her shoulders and onto the pillows in his bed, likes the way it feels when he combs his fingers through it after he pulls all the pins out of it, likes the way it streams out from behind her when she skates. But also, "You like your hair."
Alex smiles at him like he got the answer right. "I do like my hair," she says.
"What if she did shave it?" Gally says. "Don't you think she'd look terrible?"
"If she did shave it," Brandon says, "I'd make sure she got laid as much as she wanted, just to prove you wrong."
Everyone laughs, and Brandon figures Alex gets that he's saying he'd still be into her.
Anna gives him a speculative look and says something in Russian that garners responses from both Alex and Naila. Brandon has the distinct feeling he's being talked about.
*
Sometime later, as part of the relationship escalation (basically they're friends, and then sometimes they hook up but never really talk about it and for a while Alex always leaves in the morning before Brandon can offer to make her breakfast):
"Chucky, what did you do to your hair?" Dale asks.
Alex makes a face at him. "I was napping," she says. "Gally dragged me down here before I could do anything about it." Her hair is a mess. It looks like her braid came halfway undone and then tangled, and there are bits of hair pulled out of shape at the top of her head.
"Pricer, can't you teach her what to do with her hair?" Nathan says.
Carey shakes her head. "Nope. She wants to keep it that long, she has to figure it out."
"I have it figured out," Alex says. "When Gally isn't interrupting me." She puts a hand up to her hair and makes a face.
"Come here," Brandon says, and he gestures her over to the couch he's sitting on.
"What?" Alex asks, looking suspicious even as she comes over.
"Sit down," Brandon says, and when she does, he turns her half away from him so he can untangle her braid.
"See?" Carey says. "She doesn't need me. She has Prusty to be her hairdresser."
Brandon and Alex both flip her off.
Brandon goes slow with Alex's hair, being careful not to pull on it or make it worse, and he combs through it with his fingers when her braid is fully undone. He stops before he really wants to, and pats her shoulder. "You're good."
Alex smiles at him, sweet enough that he would kiss her if they weren't in front of their teammates. "Thank you."
*
A different escalation point:
"But do you make breakfast?" Carey asks. The topic is hookups, and she's directing the question at P.K.
"Do I make breakfast?" P.K. scoffs. "Of course I make breakfast. I am a gentleman."
"Always make breakfast," Patch puts in.
"What do you know?" Gally asks. "You're married."
"How do you think I got that way?"
That causes a round of laughter.
"Come on, you don't have to make breakfast," Gally says. "Chucky, back me up."
Alex looks up from her phone. "I live with my sister and my parents. I don't bring guys home."
Brandon chuckles with everyone else, despite the twinge at the thought of her hooking up with guys in the plural.
"Well, okay," Gally says. "But when you go to a guy's, do you expect him to make you breakfast?"
"I don't stay the night," Alex says, "or I leave before breakfast."
"Oh, jeeze," Patch mutters. "You both have terrible manners."
Alex shrugs. "I don't want to be there when they realize they slept with a girl who could beat them up. It ruins the morning after."
There's a moment of uncomfortable silence after she says that, and she looks back down at her phone.
"I bet Prusty's a gentleman who makes breakfast," P.K. says, sidestepping it for all of them.
"Yeah," Brandon says. "I mean, you know, if they stay. Of course I make breakfast."
Alex looks up from her phone again, and stares at him for a minute while the conversation goes on around them.
The next time they hook up, when they're cuddling together and making out softly afterwards, Brandon says, "You should stay."
Alex gestures to where they have the blankets pulled up over both of them. "I'm staying."
Brandon brushes her hair back. "In the morning," he clarifies. "Stay. I'll make you breakfast."
She kisses him a few more times, and they fall asleep together like they usually do.
In the morning, Brandon's up first, like he usually is, and he's in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew - he's making two cups, like usual, even though Alex has never stayed to drink one of them - when Alex comes in. It's a change from the way she usually yells a goodbye on her way out without stopping to talk to him.
She's dressed, what looks like her jeans and his shirt, but she looks uncertain and vulnerable all the same.
"Coffee's almost ready," Brandon says. "I'll make eggs in a minute."
Alex doesn't move. "Are you sure?"
In answer, Brandon walks across the kitchen to her. He puts one hand in her hair and one on her cheek to tilt her head so he can kiss her, soft and easy for the morning after.
Alex kisses him back, her arms around him loosely, and she comes into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee when they're done.
Brandon does make eggs, and he tells Alex to sit down when she offers to help. He even forgoes the chirp about her cooking abilities.
After breakfast, Brandon puts their dishes in the sink - he can wash them later, when he doesn't have Alex in his kitchen - and turns to Alex to kiss her, deeper and dirtier than he did earlier.
"Breakfast isn't the only reason to stay." Brandon has a hand firm on her ass, the other tangled in her hair again, to make his point.
Alex pulls back. "I should go home. We have practice later."
Brandon tugs at the hem of the shirt she's wearing. "You're going to wear my clothes today anyway. You can leave for practice from here."
Alex hesitates for another minute before she gives in and leans close to kiss Brandon.
Brandon maneuvers them over to the couch while they're making out, and he takes the condom out of his pocket before he pushes his pajama pants down.
"Really?" Alex asks with a look at it.
"I was hoping you would stay this time," Brandon says. He rolls the condom on while she takes off her pants, and then wraps his arms around her when she settles on top of him. He's pretty sure she isn't wearing a bra, and he pushes her shirt - his shirt that she's wearing - up over her breasts to find out for sure.
Alex gasps when Brandon bends to lick at her nipple, and rolls her hips in a way that's unbearably good for both of them.
"This is why you should stay," Brandon says in the afterglow, Alex still on his lap, their arms around each other. He presses a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth. "Breakfast and more sex."
Alex laughs, her shoulders shaking with it.
"I mean it," Brandon says, smiling into her neck. "Isn't this better than running out?"
Alex stops laughing, and she cups his cheek with one strong hand. "Yes."
"Do you think I look prettier like this?" Alex asks later, when she's had a few drinks.
Brandon can see it, the makeup, the hair, the dress, but he can also see the way the corners of her mouth are turned down. "I think you look uncomfortable," he says. "I think you look prettiest on the ice celebrating a sweet goal."
It's the right answer; she beams at him, and then leaves to go to the bathroom and comes back with her makeup scrubbed off. "Anna put too many pins in my hair," she says. "Will you take them out?"
Brandon picks them out of her hair one by one, combing his hands through it to make sure he's gotten all of them.
"It is probably a mess now," she says when he's done.
"No," Brandon says, "it looks good. Like you're letting down your hair."
Alex giggles at that. "I want to dance now." [And then insert sexy dancing here, but not enough for a montage.]
*
Alex strips off her sweatshirt before she takes her turn at the beer pong table. There's a moment of silence that pools out from her.
"Since when are you a Rangers fan?" Gally asks. Alex looks down at her shirt like she had no idea what she was wearing and shrugs.
"How much of my clothing do you have?" Brandon asks.
*
"You have my dress," Alex says once when she comes back from raiding Brandon's closet.
"Yeah." Brandon shrugs. "You left it here, so I threw it in with my dry cleaning." It's the first time they've talked about that night.
*
"Naila wants to meet my friends," is the explanation she gives, and Brandon's not about to turn down a home-cooked meal he didn't have to cook himself.
After dinner, Alex's parents leave the rest of them to hang out on their own.
"You found people who dress as badly as you," Naila says to Alex when they're all hanging out in the living room. She's sitting on the floor in front of Anna while Anna does something to her hair. She eyes Brandon. "I think I've seen you wearing that same shirt."
Gally never knows when to keep his mouth shut, so of course he says, "It probably was the exact same shirt. They share clothes."
"We don't share clothes," Brandon says. "She steals my clothes."
"You wore her shirt to practice last week!"
There's no denying that one; Brandon had put on a clean T-shirt without realizing it was one of Alex's until he got to the rink and Patch recognized it. Today he's definitely wearing his own shirt, although there's no guarantee that Alex hasn't also worn it.
Naila looks between the three of them and says something to Alex in Russian. Brandon doesn't need to know the language to recognize how indignantly defensive Alex gets.
"We're being rude to Prusty and Gally," Alex says after she goes back and forth with Naila and Anna for a minute.
"And you need to stay still if you want me to do your hair," Anna says to Naila.
"Did you really come all the way across the country just to have Anna do your hair?" Gally asks.
"She does cooler things than I can," Naila says with a shrug of her shoulders that keeps her head still. "And Alex won't sit still for it, so Anna has to practice on me."
"She sits still for it sometimes," Anna says while she does something complicated looking to Naila's hair.
"And then she just makes Prusty take it down again later," Gally says.
Anna and Naila both pause to look at Alex at that.
"You use too many pins!" Alex protests far too defensively for the topic at hand. Gally might be oblivious, but if Anna and Naila haven't yet figured out that Alex and Brandon hook up sometimes, they're going to soon if she keeps that up.
"It is a lot of pins," Brandon says. "And probably harder to deal with behind your head when you're drunk." The chirp probably isn't going to wholly deflect Anna and Naila's attention, but it might be enough to head off the conversation for now.
"It's never that many pins," Naila says. "You could shave your head again."
"You shaved your head?" Brandon asks, trying to picture it.
"That was before I even met you," Alex says to Naila.
"I don't like short hair on girls," Gally says. "Long hair looks so much better."
Anna and Naila both roll their eyes at him. "You don't get a vote," Naila says.
"What? Why not? I'm a guy. I know what guys like. Prusty, back me up."
"No way," Brandon says, holding up his hands. "I know when to get in the middle of things and when not to, and this is one of those times not to."
"I want to know what you think," Anna says. Her tone says both that she knows that Brandon is hooking up with her little sister and that he'd better not get this wrong.
Alex doesn't look like she's going to stop Brandon from saying anything about it, but he still chooses his words carefully, and directs them at her instead of at Anna.
"I like your hair," he says, because he does, likes the way it looks falling across her shoulders and onto the pillows in his bed, likes the way it feels when he combs his fingers through it after he pulls all the pins out of it, likes the way it streams out from behind her when she skates. But also, "You like your hair."
Alex smiles at him like he got the answer right. "I do like my hair," she says.
"What if she did shave it?" Gally says. "Don't you think she'd look terrible?"
"If she did shave it," Brandon says, "I'd make sure she got laid as much as she wanted, just to prove you wrong."
Everyone laughs, and Brandon figures Alex gets that he's saying he'd still be into her.
Anna gives him a speculative look and says something in Russian that garners responses from both Alex and Naila. Brandon has the distinct feeling he's being talked about.
*
Sometime later, as part of the relationship escalation (basically they're friends, and then sometimes they hook up but never really talk about it and for a while Alex always leaves in the morning before Brandon can offer to make her breakfast):
"Chucky, what did you do to your hair?" Dale asks.
Alex makes a face at him. "I was napping," she says. "Gally dragged me down here before I could do anything about it." Her hair is a mess. It looks like her braid came halfway undone and then tangled, and there are bits of hair pulled out of shape at the top of her head.
"Pricer, can't you teach her what to do with her hair?" Nathan says.
Carey shakes her head. "Nope. She wants to keep it that long, she has to figure it out."
"I have it figured out," Alex says. "When Gally isn't interrupting me." She puts a hand up to her hair and makes a face.
"Come here," Brandon says, and he gestures her over to the couch he's sitting on.
"What?" Alex asks, looking suspicious even as she comes over.
"Sit down," Brandon says, and when she does, he turns her half away from him so he can untangle her braid.
"See?" Carey says. "She doesn't need me. She has Prusty to be her hairdresser."
Brandon and Alex both flip her off.
Brandon goes slow with Alex's hair, being careful not to pull on it or make it worse, and he combs through it with his fingers when her braid is fully undone. He stops before he really wants to, and pats her shoulder. "You're good."
Alex smiles at him, sweet enough that he would kiss her if they weren't in front of their teammates. "Thank you."
*
A different escalation point:
"But do you make breakfast?" Carey asks. The topic is hookups, and she's directing the question at P.K.
"Do I make breakfast?" P.K. scoffs. "Of course I make breakfast. I am a gentleman."
"Always make breakfast," Patch puts in.
"What do you know?" Gally asks. "You're married."
"How do you think I got that way?"
That causes a round of laughter.
"Come on, you don't have to make breakfast," Gally says. "Chucky, back me up."
Alex looks up from her phone. "I live with my sister and my parents. I don't bring guys home."
Brandon chuckles with everyone else, despite the twinge at the thought of her hooking up with guys in the plural.
"Well, okay," Gally says. "But when you go to a guy's, do you expect him to make you breakfast?"
"I don't stay the night," Alex says, "or I leave before breakfast."
"Oh, jeeze," Patch mutters. "You both have terrible manners."
Alex shrugs. "I don't want to be there when they realize they slept with a girl who could beat them up. It ruins the morning after."
There's a moment of uncomfortable silence after she says that, and she looks back down at her phone.
"I bet Prusty's a gentleman who makes breakfast," P.K. says, sidestepping it for all of them.
"Yeah," Brandon says. "I mean, you know, if they stay. Of course I make breakfast."
Alex looks up from her phone again, and stares at him for a minute while the conversation goes on around them.
The next time they hook up, when they're cuddling together and making out softly afterwards, Brandon says, "You should stay."
Alex gestures to where they have the blankets pulled up over both of them. "I'm staying."
Brandon brushes her hair back. "In the morning," he clarifies. "Stay. I'll make you breakfast."
She kisses him a few more times, and they fall asleep together like they usually do.
In the morning, Brandon's up first, like he usually is, and he's in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew - he's making two cups, like usual, even though Alex has never stayed to drink one of them - when Alex comes in. It's a change from the way she usually yells a goodbye on her way out without stopping to talk to him.
She's dressed, what looks like her jeans and his shirt, but she looks uncertain and vulnerable all the same.
"Coffee's almost ready," Brandon says. "I'll make eggs in a minute."
Alex doesn't move. "Are you sure?"
In answer, Brandon walks across the kitchen to her. He puts one hand in her hair and one on her cheek to tilt her head so he can kiss her, soft and easy for the morning after.
Alex kisses him back, her arms around him loosely, and she comes into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee when they're done.
Brandon does make eggs, and he tells Alex to sit down when she offers to help. He even forgoes the chirp about her cooking abilities.
After breakfast, Brandon puts their dishes in the sink - he can wash them later, when he doesn't have Alex in his kitchen - and turns to Alex to kiss her, deeper and dirtier than he did earlier.
"Breakfast isn't the only reason to stay." Brandon has a hand firm on her ass, the other tangled in her hair again, to make his point.
Alex pulls back. "I should go home. We have practice later."
Brandon tugs at the hem of the shirt she's wearing. "You're going to wear my clothes today anyway. You can leave for practice from here."
Alex hesitates for another minute before she gives in and leans close to kiss Brandon.
Brandon maneuvers them over to the couch while they're making out, and he takes the condom out of his pocket before he pushes his pajama pants down.
"Really?" Alex asks with a look at it.
"I was hoping you would stay this time," Brandon says. He rolls the condom on while she takes off her pants, and then wraps his arms around her when she settles on top of him. He's pretty sure she isn't wearing a bra, and he pushes her shirt - his shirt that she's wearing - up over her breasts to find out for sure.
Alex gasps when Brandon bends to lick at her nipple, and rolls her hips in a way that's unbearably good for both of them.
"This is why you should stay," Brandon says in the afterglow, Alex still on his lap, their arms around each other. He presses a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth. "Breakfast and more sex."
Alex laughs, her shoulders shaking with it.
"I mean it," Brandon says, smiling into her neck. "Isn't this better than running out?"
Alex stops laughing, and she cups his cheek with one strong hand. "Yes."