We're On Each Other's Team || Lilly and Aleks
Aleks rested her cheek on the backside of her forearm, rested against the windowsill of her old bedroom window. It had been nearly two days since the party, and she had told Shirley she would be staying with her mom. That phrase alone was a stretch. When Aleks had shown up at her mother's run-down apartment with her knapsack, her mother simply exhaled a puff of smoke and smiled softly. It was an old, wry smile. The kind of smile Aleks could never read, but it was one her mother used to flash often. Aleks couldn't decide whether she had missed her mother's cryptic, icy Bulgarian ways, and spent most of the time in her room, by the phone.
Lilly was supposed to call. Any day now. She had promised. Aleks held onto the hope that her bond with Lilly was stronger than that of her bond with the Starlets. Though it had been years, she had Lilly's childhood. The gang had part of her adolescence. It truly depended on how much more impressionable she was in one as opposed to the other.
It was now mid-morning. Aleks' mother had left a few hours ago. For what, she didn't say. Or perhaps Aleks didn't hear, but the first was more likely. As long as no men came back with her mother, things could be fine. It was the abusive men she could never cope with in their apartment, the thing she ran from the most. Though she always hid before they could find her to strike her, she felt fearful nonetheless. Fear was something she rarely felt with the Black Widows, their company brought defenses and security. They were her true home, as she could read their expressions like their minds only after four years. Her own mother was still an enigma even after eighteen years.
A knock on the door snapped her out of her thoughts and Aleks furrowed her brows. No one knocked on their door, unless things had changed. She strode out of her room to the door of the apartment, unlatching the several manual locks on the door and opening it slightly to peek out.
