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Alexander was never entirely fond of bar scenes. Alcohol was shit for his nerves, and the bright lights and loud talking gave him migraines a majority of the time, but Eliza came here every Friday night. Eliza was the best woman Alexander had ever known, and so every Friday night, he sat in the gross plastic leather seat four to the left of the back wall, and waited for her to show.
Eliza was hard to figure. The more you knew her the less she made sense, and so Alex gave up on decrypting her altogether. She was trying to be a poet, under three different pen names so nobody would know her because of her father, so nobody could decode the girls she wrote about via their connections to her. Eliza liked to stand on the ledges of buildings just to write about the way the sun looked gleaming off the sides of skyscrapers, but wouldn't go on a rollercoaster at the pier because she didn't trust it. She was a mystery, and Alex was no detective, so he'd just hold her close and be there to solve anything she let him.
"Hey, hon," Eliza greeted, hopped up on the stool next to his, sliding his gin and tonic over to her like it was hers all along. Alex let her, ordered another from the bartender with sparkling brown eyes, and continued on with Eliza.
"Hi, Liza. You look nice tonight," he said, referencing her red velvet dress and heels. She painted her lips almost purple, and the gold bracelets her mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday jingled on her wrist. "Date with Maria?"
Eliza looked at him like she had a secret held between her teeth. "Maybe, why? You jealous someone else has my attention?"
"Oh, please." He scoffed. "Me and you were written in the stars, Eliza, nothing could tear me out of the center of your eye." He bumped their shoulders together, breathed in the lavender scent of her perfume.
"I don't know, Lex, Maria is certainly giving you a run for your money. Her laugh, I swear , could stop wars, stop everything. The way she walks, her foot hitting each section of pavement like she owns the world under her feet, all while professing that the world is not hers to own. God , I'd marry her tomorrow if I could."
"Y'know, if you keep telling me all this, you won't have anything to put down on paper later."
Eliza finished her drink and motioned for another one. "I could write epics about her and it still wouldn't be enough." She swirls the new glass, clean without condensation and an unsqueezed lime slice perched on its edge. "So, how's Lafayette?"
And that's a question Alexander is not ready for at all . Lafayette, who Alex has seen screaming with a bullet the size of Alex's eye in their leg, who once told Alex over a cigarette while sitting naked by a lake that being male didn't really interest them, and only went by male pronouns in the company of people they weren't willing to fight. Lafayette with as many names as Alex had brain cells who wore their hair pinned back with whatever they could find in the barracks. Alexander was no poet, just a shitty soldier with a knack for persuasion, but he would steal a little of Eliza's talent if it meant being able to put Lafayette down on paper.
He would write about Lafayette swimming in the Rur River, back when they were a little younger and had both of their legs, chest glimmering in the night as Alex sat and picked at the scabs on his legs from walking through thickets of forest, too scared that they might brush against one another if he got in.
"I don't bite, you know," Lafayette told him, one eye open.
Alex laughed, all sharp edges and quick wit. "Yeah, but I do."
Ink would spill across his pages like a downpour, describing how Lafayette's smile got him through the war, how sometimes, when they were alone, half freezing to death from the wet ground of their dug-out, their hands would find each other in the darkness, sliding down, down, down, until the cold of the soil didn't bother them so much anymore. Alex would wrap his arms around Lafayette while they cried for their friends, their losses, their victories, their pain. He would write about what it felt like to fall in love in the middle of a war, when it was the last thing he should be thinking of, but he did it anyway.
"Lafayette is fine," Alex spits out after too many beats of silence pass between him and Eliza. "Yeah, they're good."
Eliza smirked, spun around to face the dancing couples on the floor behind him. "Don't you wish you could just take them out there, spin them around until you were the only one there, and Adams back there is kickin' you out because it's twenty minutes past closing time and not even he noticed because the two of you were so captivating. Maria told me, once, that she'd bring me here when the war was won, and she'd bring me up on stage and kiss me right where everyone could see."
Alex turned to face her direction, all the ice in his glass already melted. "You and Maria have something, though. You love her, she loves you, you basically live in her apartment when Phil isn't makin' a fuss about it." He swallows down the rest of his drink in one burning gulp. "Sometimes I feel like Lafayette looks at me and just sees the war, only keeps me around because without me in the apartment they'd only have silence, and that's worse than war."
Eliza looked at him like she only spoke English and he was talking in French. "Lafayette looks at you like you hung the stars, Lex. They would never see just war in you, and never see you as anything but a blessing to them. They came to New York for you ."
"They came to New York because Europe was too brutal for them."
"Honestly, Alexander, if you can't see how much they love you then you're blind." Eliza trailed off as a woman in a blue dress came up and told her there was a phone call for her. Maria.
Alex sulked in his seat for a second. He gestured for the bartender again, the tall one with broad shoulders that had a thing with his ex. "Hercules, tell Eliza that I went home when she comes back."
Alex wasn't drunk enough to forget his address, or how creepy the tall buildings looked at night, but he was tipsy enough to stumble into the apartment and onto the couch before he realized that something lumpy laid in between him and the cushions. He felt blindly beneath him, until his fingertips found a nose, eyelids, two lips he remembered all too well.
"Oh, hi."
Lafayette groaned and put their hands on Alex's hips. "Hello, Alexander. How was Eliza?"
"She's fine, really likes the Maria girl she's been seein'. Says she wants to marry her." Alex buried his face in Lafayette's shoulder, breathing in the spicy pine scent of their cologne and the cinnamon from their soap. He loved them so fucking much .
"Do you think she ever will?" They ask tiredly, combing Alex's hair through their fingers. "Marry her, I mean."
"Maybe. All I think, now, though, is that I really wanna go to bed."
"M'kay, but you're gonna have to help me," they mumbled, gesturing to their artificial leg on the ground.
"Want me to put it back on, get your crutch, or be your crutch?" Alex asked, his lips ghosting at the skin on the underside of Lafayette's jaw. Day old stubble scratched at his nose, but he didn't comment on it.
"Be, please."
Alex nodded and stood, waited for Lafayette to sit up and grab their leg from the ground before pulling them up. The two of them made their way to Lafayette's bedroom, where Alex spent most of his nights, collapsing side by side on the hard mattress that felt like heaven compared to the bumpy bar stools back with Eliza. Lafayette looked over at him, eyes glimmering in the starlight, tongue darting across their lips. Alex stifled his smile, knew what was coming next.
"Can I —"
Alex kissed them, hands flying up to either side of their neck. Lafayette rolled so they could reach Alex easier, pulling his waist closer and closer until one of Alex's legs slotted between Lafayette's thighs. It's been a while since they did this, but not so long that Alex had forgotten the curves of Lafayette's body, or the sound they make when Alex kisses that one spot on their neck. Even if nothing came of this, and Alex woke up in an empty bed and a note saying how Lafayette couldn't stand being with him anymore, their intricate details would be written into Alex's memory like a branding burn.
"Alex," Lafayette breathed, reaching down and sliding their hands under the high waist of Alex's pants. "You know—You know I love you, right?"
The whole world seemed to stop at that moment. Alex rocked his hips down unintentionally, savoring the quiet moan Lafayette tried to hold back and failed. He didn't know what to say, so he pulled them to him again, kissed him like it would kill him if he didn't.
"Say it again," he ordered, pushing Lafayette's shirt up their body and over their head. "Please."
"I love you," Laffayette repeated. "I always have, since the day I told you you needed to eat dinner and you told me to go fuck myself."
"I don't like being coddled," Alex argued, laughing and kissing them again.
Lafayette turned Alex his back and sat up, legs crossed on the bed. "I've noticed. However, with me exposing all my feelings and being in love with you and all, let me take care of you for one night."
Their hand trailed up Alex's stomach to the top button of his shirt, undoing each of them as Alex held his breath. They hauled themself on top of him, kissing down his skin, unbuttoning his pants and undoing the zipper. They were already wearing only their boxers, not surprising considering they spent the whole day at work sitting on the couch reading.
"I love you, too, by the way," Alex swallowed, so scared to say it after all this time. He kicked his pants off the rest of the way down his legs after Lafayette couldn't reach, feeling exposed down to his bones in the dim light. "I always have. I always will."
Lafayette wiped their eyes and kissed his forehead. "I called the bar tonight," they admitted, "to see when you were coming home. I didn't know if you'd already left or not, but I know Eliza is always there late so I called and asked her, and she told me that she knows how I feel, and that if I wanted to tell you any time soon I needed to do it now. I thought she was lying at first, but then she told me what you tell her, not everything, just some, but it was enough to confirm it."
"Remember Adrienne, that you dated this summer?" Alex asked, continuing when Lafayette nodded, eyebrows knit together. "She didn't break up with you because she was scared of you going back to war. She broke up with you because she thought I looked like a kicked puppy every time she came over, and that you never stopped talking about me when I wasn't around. We know the guys she's datin' now, fought with us once or twice. Feels like everyone who had the eyes to see it noticed before we had the guts to admit it."
"I love you," Lafayette whispered. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
Alex pulled them down into another kiss. "I know. I love you too."