When Alex came to, she was in her bed, her arms wrapped around an empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. She let go of it and sat up and looked around, feeling a little woozy when she moved. She raised a hand to hold her head and tried to remember what had happened the night before.

She stood up, seeing she was still wearing everything from the day before (except her boots). She wrapped her blanket around herself and slowly stepped out into the living room, moving to take a seat on the couch.

"Hey, you're awake." Alex looked up to see Jerry holding a paper plate loaded with random breakfast foods out to her. "Here."

Alex didn't hesitate to take it. "Marry me," she said, picking up the peeled tangerine and eating half of it in one bite.

"Alright, if it means I don't have to sleep on the floor again."

"You slept on the floor? Why? Is this fine couch not good enough for you?"

"Isn't that where Jo sleeps?"

"Yeah, so?"

"I couldn't just take her bed," he said with an almost incredulous laugh at the suggestion. "I mean, it was alright anyway. You have carpet. It was nice."

Alex shook her head and chuckled to herself as she ate the food. "Did you already eat?"

"Huh? Oh, no. I'm not hungry."

Alex rolled her eyes as she finished her breakfast and stood up, walking into the kitchen with the blanket trailing on the floor behind her. "Come on, you gotta eat something. And I have a lot of options now--it's not just bagged noodles and canned fruit."

"Yeah, I noticed," Jerry said with a grin, getting up to follow her. "You're thriving, aren't you?"

"Yup," she said, turning to him with a big smile. "It's great. So what do you want? I can't really cook, but I can do my best," she said with a laugh.

"Nothing, come on. I made you food so you wouldn't have to make any."

"You should've made yourself some, then. You're gonna eat. You can't just skip breakfast after drinking...however much it was you drank."

"I didn't drink as much as you did, I'll tell you that. Also, we didn't finish it all. What's left of the beer is still in the freezer."

"Oh, I forgot I put them up there." Alex opened the freezer and her eyes widened at the sight of its contents. "Holy shit, why did we buy so much?"

"I don't know, but we drank more than double what's in there, so..."

"My God. I don't even remember drinking all that."

"Don't forget the first bottle of Jack Daniel's."

"First? Is that supposed to mean there's a second?"

"And third," he replied, opening one of the cabinets. Two full bottles of Jack Daniel's were sitting in there.

Alex stared at them in surprise and reached out to grab one. She turned it over to read the label before setting it down on the counter. "How the fuck are we alive?"

"I don't even question that anymore," Jerry laughed. "Maybe we're just immortal."

"Damn, I hope I'm not," Alex said, stepping back to move the beer out of the freezer. "Imagine having to live to see everything humanity decides to put the world through."

"Yeah, but you get to drink as much as you want without worrying about your health."

"I'd probably end up immune to the effects--you know what? This is too painful to talk about. Come on, you still gotta eat."

"What if I just drank a ton of water? Would you leave me alone then?"

Alex rolled her eyes and filled a glass with water, putting it in his hand and staring him down until he drank every last drop of water in it. Then she turned and grabbed an orange from the fridge, putting it on the counter and carefully sliding it toward him. He laughed and picked it up, and without any words they had an agreement.

Meaning to finish reading the label, Alex grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel's and carried it into the living room. She made to sit down on the couch, but before she could get comfortable there was a knock at the door. There was no time to get up and open it because not three seconds after the knock the door was swung open. Charlie was home.

Or maybe not.

She went directly into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

"The nerve," Alex said to Jerry in a disgusted tone that was clearly meant to mask amusement. Jerry stood up from where he'd been sitting at the kitchen table trying enjoy his orange in peace and moved to sit on the arm of the couch.

Charlie reappeared a minute later with a box in her arms, her expression blank and her eyes trained on the floor in front of her.

"Yo, where are you going? What's in there?" Alex asked her.

Charlie stopped and replied without looking up, "my stuff."

"What stuff?"

"Pretty much everything I own."

"Why? Where are you taking it?"

She looked up with narrowed eyes. "That's none of your business. I'm just moving out is all. It's nothing to you."

"What?" Alex's voice held a good amount of disbelief. "You're actually leaving?"

"Isn't that what you fucking wanted?"

"I was just...talking shit and..." She cleared her throat. "You don't even have anywhere to go!"

"Yes I do. Ben's."

"Or you could stay at our place," Jerry piped up. "It's closer to your work, isn't it?"

"Layne said that, but what about you? You--"

"Don't mind."

"Then..."

"You'd move in with Layne? Now? Fuckin'...two months into the relationship?" Alex asked in disbelief.

"I knew you for five years before moving in with you, and look how that turned out."

Alex blinked. "Get the fuck out."

"Gladly. Stay classy, Alex."

"Yeah, okay. Tell Layne that there are no refunds on this one."

Charlie rolled her eyes and stuck her middle finger up at Alex before walking out of the apartment and kicking the door closed.

Alex sighed and shook her head, looking down at the bottle on the coffee table. She stared at it for a minute before suddenly reaching out and snatching it off the table, opening it and putting it to her lips as she settled back against the headrest of the couch.

"So...Day Two?" Jerry asked. That was supposed to be a joke, but Alex turned to him without moving the bottle away and nodded.

✩✩✩

"What does beer taste like, Dad?"

Viktor looked down at his tiny daughter and thought for a moment. "Like rotten fruit. You wouldn't like it."

"But you like it, don't you? How come?"

"Because I'm dumb," he replied, "and my dumb brain makes me think it's good."

"I don't think you're dumb," the little girl said, looking up at her father with sadness in her expression, as though the thought of her father thinking himself dumb caused her a great deal of pain.

"Okay, I take it back. But it really is nasty. It's like...you know how the first sip of soda makes you make this face?" He scrunched his face up a little and his daughter nodded. "It's like that, but worse. And it's not sweet like soda is."

"Then why do you drink it instead of soda? Soda sounds better."

"I guess I got used to it and now I like beer more. Don't you ever start drinking it, okay? You don't wanna end up all dumb like me," he said, smiling to let her know it was a joke and nothing to get upset over.

"I won't start drinking it," she said. She eyed the bottle of beer on the little end table next to couch. "But can I taste it?"

Viktor looked at the bottle and thought for a moment. Figuring she'd hate the taste and never want to drink it again, he said, "sure, but just this once. And only a little bit."

The girl stuck her little hands out and the cold bottle was placed in her hold. She examined the label for a moment, then tipped her head back and took in a big mouthful of the fizzy liquid. Her father widened his eyes and snatched the bottle away as she made the exact face he'd made while explaining the taste and gulped it down. "Ew!" she cried out, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

"You were only supposed to take a little sip!" her father exclaimed, trying to be stern and hide his amusement at the look on his daughter's face.

"Little sips are for babies. I'm not a baby. But beer really is nasty."

"I know, right? So, are you ever going to drink that again?"

The little girl made a face and quickly shook her head. "Nuh-uh."

"That's what I thought. Now go get yourself some chocolate milk and we'll watch Looney Tunes until I have to go to work. How's that sound?"

"Good!" she squealed, jumping off the couch and running to the kitchen to get the milk.

Viktor laughed to himself and put the beer back on the table. He heard his daughter come back into the room and asked, "where's the clicker?"

"For the last time, Dad, it's called a 'remote.' No one says 'clicker' anymore." She walked over to the TV and looked around it for a moment, quickly spying the remote control in the tangle of wires behind the set.

"I know," Viktor said, "but how would you know that? You're just a baby."

"I'm not a baby!" she argued.

"Okay, okay. C'mon, sit here so we can watch Bugs and Daffy."

"It's not just about those two, you know," his daughter replied as she took a seat next to him. "Oh, wait. I wanna make popcorn." She scooted off almost as quickly as she'd jumped up and went back to the kitchen to get the popcorn.

Popcorn sounded pretty good. Viktor looked in the direction of the kitchen and yelled, "make enough for the two of us!"

"Got it!"

She came back with the popcorn a couple minutes later. "Put Looney Tunes on already!"

Viktor laughed and changed the channel. "All good things come in time, you know."

His daughter wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "No one has time for that. Good things come if you make them come!"

He looked at her with a funny expression. "You're a strange kid, Alex."

She looked right back at him and giggled. "I know."

✩✩✩

"It's like soda, but...worse," Alex said, narrowing her eyes at the bottle in her hand. "Beer's nasty."

"Then why do you drink it?" Jerry asked, looking at his own drink.

"Because I'm dumb."

"Oh. Me too." He looked around. "Do you have a clock or something?"

"No. I look at where the sun is and guess the time, like a real American."

"I'm--"

"Turn the news on. They always have the time in the bottom right corner."

Jerry nodded and started looking around for the remote. "So...you don't have a clock?"

"Of course I do, I just don't know where it is. Why, anyway? You got somewhere you have to be?"

"Nah. I'm just wondering what time it is. I've had no sense of it since yesterday, so..."

"Oh shit, me neither. That's so weird. Okay, let me guess. It's....six."

Jerry shrugged. "I think it's seven."

"You wanna bet?"

"I already lost a ton of money to you in that Charlie and Layne bet. I'm not gonna lose another hundred."

"I was only thinking a dollar, actually. But if you wanna make it that interesting, I wouldn't be opposed."

Jerry turned and looked out the window, then back at Alex. He sighed and stuck his hand out, and Alex shook it.

6:30 p.m.

"What? What the fuck?"

"I won," Alex said. "I said six. It's six-thirty. It's in the specified hour."

"I was closer, though," Jerry said. "It's six-thirty and some seconds. So it's thirty minutes and a few seconds away from six, but only twenty-nine minutes and a few seconds away from seven. So I won."

"Maybe it was 6:29 when we made the bet. It did take a few seconds to find the remote."

"But maybe it wasn't. Your way isn't right."

"Yes, it is! It's six-something, I didn't specify that it should be six o'clock on the dot!"

"How is that fair? Okay, maybe I didn't specify that I meant seven minus some minutes."

"Who would guess that? That's cheating."

"You're cheating!"

"No, I--"

"Why does this happen to all of our bets?"

"I don't know. I just know it's your fault."

"You are the fault."

"I'd rather be the fault than have the fault."

"That's not even a good comeback."

"That's not a comeback at all."

Jerry opened his mouth to say something else but closed it when nothing came to mind. "I give up. Who won the bet, then?"

"No one," Alex said, shaking her head. "We'll leave this one alone."

"Fine by me. Alright, what should we do now?"

"Um, we're running low on beer. Maybe we should go get some more."

"We have lots of Jack Daniel's left..."

"So? Jack isn't beer."

"Fair point. Let's go, then."

It took them a good hour and a half to get the drinks and get back because they couldn't find the exact beer they both had the same craving for (and also because it ended up becoming a grocery trip). The moon had fully risen by the time they found it and headed back to the apartment.

Day Two was a lot more fun than Day One; that much was very obvious. The two idiots combined with too much beer and upbeat music (think Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself and Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody) made for a long evening of being stupid and forgetting their every trouble. Whereas Day One had consisted of not much more than the expression of a lack of regrets, Day Two was all about pretending there was nothing to feel regret over in the first place. And they were both okay with that.

"I bet this is what married life is like," Alex slurred as she took the beer Jerry had just opened for her.

"How so?" he asked, almost missing the chair he meant to sit on.

"I don't know. I just bet it is."

"You wanna actually bet?"

Alex looked at him with a puzzled expression. "How would we even find out who wins?"

"Get married," Jerry said, shrugging and spilling a little bit of his beer, "and see what life is like then."

"But you didn't say what you think it's like."

"Oh, right. Uh...I think you're right."

"Then there's no need to bet. It's a shared theory."

"Theories--you have to prove a theory."

They both seemed to actually consider it for a moment before Alex put her beer down and looked around. "Where's the last of the Jack Daniel's?"

"Still in the cabinet. What, you think it grew legs and walked away?"

Alex narrowed her eyes at him and shook her head. "That kind of shit's not gonna fly when we're married."

"You do that kind of thing all the time!"

"No I don't."

"Yes you do."

"Yeah, I know. Alright, what do you wanna do now?"

A drunk person can almost never say for sure what they want to do next, and if they can, it's usually something either very stupid or entirely impossible. Quite luckily for these two, neither had anything in mind, and they were spared from an unnecessary excess of idiocy as relating to matters concerning the rest of the world. Quite unluckily, however, two people can still make something stupid happen amongst only themselves, and if there was ever a pair of people that could more than prove that to be one hundred percent true, it was Alex and Jerry.

It was 1 in the morning when things finally began to calm down. The music was turned down and the drinking slowed somewhat. Feeling fairly exhausted and ready to wind down, they went and sat on the balcony, enjoying the feeling of the night breeze cooling them.

They eventually sobered up enough to hold an actual coherent conversation (that's not to say that they were at all sober, they just weren't falling-out-of-chairs, joking-about-getting-married, should-be-dead-by-now drunk...anymore). They ended up talking for a long time, covering just about every topic under the sun (hell, they even made up a few topics of their own). For two people known for constantly being less than serious, they could hold a pretty serious chat, and it turned out to include birth, life, death, and everything that came with the three. They traded stories of the past and asked each other questions that warranted a whole lot of "well, it's a long story..." and "hey, we have time."

Alex learned that Jerry's favorite guitar strings were Dean Markley and that his favorite fast-food joint was in West Hollywood. She found out that his dad had fought in Vietnam and that his mother had died in 1987. He didn't have the best relationship with his brother, he said, but he hoped he could do something to make it better. Jerry learned that Alex had a very small tattoo on her hip (a casette tape) and that she'd gotten it because Charlie was sure she wouldn't. And, through a lot of persistence and bargaining for the answers, he got her to tell him about her family. Blood family, that was--he'd initially said, "tell me about your family," to which she'd replied, "well, Jeff is probably my favorite big brother." She ended up telling him the story of her parents and how her mom had left Alex's dad when Alex was 8, and that her mom was a heartless bitch and how she wished she could've stayed with her dad.

"I bet she's incapable of love," Alex mused. She took a sip of her beer and shrugged. "That or I'm just unlovable."

"Shut up, that's not true." Jerry lit a cigarette and handed it to her before lightning one for himself. "Everyone loves you."

"Now there's a claim," Alex scoffed, taking such a long drag from the cigarette that a little bit of ash fell off the end.

"Well, I love you, for whatever that's worth."

Alex took another deep inhale of smoke and tilted her head back, blowing it all out in a thin stream. "No you don't."

He laughed. "Not again...I do! You're...nice."

"That's a lie."

"Hey, you have your moments. And that doesn't even matter anyway. I love you, Alex. A lot. To the moon and back. I'd give you my last cigarette. I'd give my guitars away for you. I love you more than I love new strings. And--"

"I get it," Alex interrupted, her cheeks burning as she tried to contain a fit of giggles. "I get it. I love you too. More than heavy boots and that first cigarette in the cold morning."

The two drunk fools shared a laugh and sat for a bit in the quiet.

"I think I should go back to my apartment now," Jerry said a minute later. "Me and Layne are supposed to run an errand in a few hours and I promised him I'd get him another lighter 'cause I lost his, and I haven't gotten it yet..."

"What, you're gonna walk home? Now?"

"Yeah...?"

"It's still dark and you've had a shit ton to drink--is that really a good idea?"

"It's not like anything's gonna happen."

"If you say so," Alex said after a moment. "Come on, then. I should clean up in here so Jo doesn't come home to a bigass mess."

"Oh, I can help--"

"Nah, I got it. I like cleaning." Small lies don't count, right?

"Well, this was fun," Jerry said when they were standing outside the front door. "We shouldn't do this more often. I'm surprised neither of us passed out."

"Yeah, me too. Although I wouldn't say I'm not at risk of that right now."

"Let's hope it doesn't happen to me while I'm in the middle of the street," Jerry said, almost wheezing at the look of dismay on Alex's face when he said that. "Hey, I'm just kidding."

"Sure. Alright, now get the hell outta here. Don't forget the lighter for Layne."

"I won't."

They exchanged awkward smiles and Jerry put his hand up to give her a small wave before turning to go. That would've been the end of it, but (and credit this to an impulse of some kind) he turned back around and wrapped Alex in a big hug before stepping back and giving her a kiss on the cheek that just barely missed the corner of her mouth.

That also could've been the end of it. When it came to Alex, however, it was never that simple.

She put a hand on his arm and he froze, his eyes meeting hers as he briefly wondered if he'd, well, fucked up. All Alex could really say about the moment was that she never knew she could feel so much at once: anticipation, a strange kind of desire, anxiety, and just about a million more seemingly random emotions. She was starting to think she should back up when Jerry lifted his hand and brushed his thumb across her cheek, moving his index finger under her chin as he did so and gently guiding her head up so he could lightly press his lips against hers.

And that was the end of it. He moved away only a few seconds after her eyes had fluttered closed. It was a good thing they were now both looking down, because it gave Jerry a chance to move past the fact that he was unable to open his own eyes for the moment after the kiss.

When Jo walked in the next morning, she found a shining apartment and Alex fast asleep on the floor in front of the couch, hugging a black-and-blue flannel with the smallest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

✩✩✩

;)
i have no answers.
yes, Charlie really moved out. nobody get mad at me ok i'm sensitive.
anyway, remember to stay safe and hydrated, have fun, listen to good music, be what you wanna be, and stay sober for Layne! until next time <3