Work Text:
Alice meets Inez in the middle of a crowded street, panting from the run, sweat and hair sticky against her forehead. She and Lucy had to sprint four blocks to catch Inez, elusive, integral (at least Alice is hoping she’ll be) and apparently, a fast walker. But when Inez turns, confusion mapped across her face at the red-faced girls who shouted her name from the previous block, Alice chokes on her next inhalation.
It’s one thing to study a famous face from a newspaper, or hear about Inez’s charm and presence in a removed, vaguely admiring way. It’s an entirely different thing to be faced with the woman herself. Lucy shoots Alice a questioning look and Alice presses a hand against her chest, gesturing for breath. But this is why Lucy’s the best friend anyone could ask for. She steps up, offers her hand for Inez to shake, and introduces them both.
By the time Alice can breathe again, the fire under her feet and coursing through her palms desperate for Inez to join the cause, Inez is smiling. She agrees to help, even as Alice explains I’m really a good speaker, normally, and laughs at Alice’s grimace. I trust you. You seem like the kind of woman who can get things done. So that’s the first meeting, and strange as it is, Alice wouldn’t want it any other way.
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Four years later Alice is sitting at the desk she shares with Doris, head bent over a recent attempt at presidential correspondence, when the door creaks open. “Inez,” Alice greets, without looking up.
She doesn’t need to. The room smells like roses, which means it smells like Inez’s favorite perfume.
“Oh, come on,” Inez’s voice is teasing, “put down the work for a second. You’ve been in that same spot since this morning.”
A lot of things about Alice have changed since the first time she met Carrie. Her optimism, her experience, her faith in the president and her clear-cut sense of what exactly should happen next. But Alice at twenty-six loves her friends, her collaborators, her sisters-in-arms as much as she ever has. It’s an important thing, she reminds the women around her, to never forget how valuable and capable and deserving every woman is. Regardless of what the law says.
Sometimes Alice can enjoy the inner workings of her own mind, to remember. When this fails, she looks around the room, at the faces of the best people she has ever had the pleasure of knowing, and is knocked over once again by politicians’ inability to recognize what she has known since birth, that women will not allow their humanity to be ignored. Inez has a habit of standing out in a special way, even then.
Charismatic, persuasive, charming – the words Alice first used to describe Inez ring hollow after knowing her for so long. After watching her get knocked down, and stand back up, and spit in the face of all those who would have the suffragists suffer. Inez is breathtaking, dark eyes and curls and that knowing smile, and her magnetism isn’t just look at that girl! But I would follow you to the ends of the earth.
When Alice mentions this to Inez, Inez waves a hand, like Alice is faking the compliment. But then Inez shows up like this, at the end of a long day, when Alice’s back hurts and her eyes want to slip closed from strain, like it’s her personal mission to make sure Alice doesn’t fall asleep at her desk, again.
“I’ll go home soon,” Alice says, turning to toss some sort of assurance-filled look Inez’s direction. “You don’t have to wait for me. I’m almost done.”
Inez rolls her eyes. “Liar.”
Alice tries to hold back a smile and fails. Inez grins back, and slides onto the desk, sitting just next to Alice’s papers. Her dress is black and simple, her shawl red, and Alice can see the smooth muscle of her throat. “I don’t know why you find such satisfaction in distracting me.”
Inez chuckles, and crosses her legs, lifting her skirt up her calves in the process. When Alice looks at her again, her cheeks are pink. “I can’t give you all my secrets, Ms. Paul.”
Alice isn’t sure if this is ever an especially good idea, but there’s something practical about it, the practical application of valuing women, and Inez is a woman who commands armies and changes hearts. So what good is Alice’s crumbling resolve to draft a message to Carrie about the president against Inez’s bared collarbones, against the smooth press of Inez’s hands to Alice’s shoulders. When Inez leans in for a kiss, Alice surges up to meet her, pressing their mouths together with the frustration of the day, of the week, of the month.
Inez tastes like smoke and cherries and she’s warm, a furnace inside a woman, familiar and playful against Alice’s touch. The first time Inez kissed her, three years ago, Alice froze and couldn’t look her friend in the eye for three days.
But Inez explained, my husband doesn’t mind and we all need a little more pleasure in our lives, even you, especially you, and Alice would be lying if she said she didn’t like this. If she doesn’t come alive at Inez’s mouth on her neck, careful to bite where her hair will hide the marks, if her skin doesn’t hum and flutter as she slides a hand beneath Inez’s skirt.
Inez wriggles onto her lap, their bodies pressed together tightly between the chair and the desk, close but somehow not quite close enough, so Alice buries her face in Inez’s hair and presses her fingers further, curling at the soft sounds that are coming from Inez’s mouth, panting and biting and a hand tight at the back of Alice’s head.
Inez bucks in Alice’s lap, hips moving in tandem, and Alice closes her eyes at the sensation, loses herself in Inez’s laugh, and the shape of her chin, and trusts, trusts truly and deeply, that the work will wait for her to grasp this small scrap of joy.