It's just Pretend | clexa AU

chapter twelve

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Abby and Jake left again soon, but not before hugging their daughter and Lexa goodbye, wished them good luck for the next weeks and Clarke's apartment door fell into the lock with a 'we're talking about your new girlfriend, this isn't the end of the conversation!'. Clarke sighed, her hands supporting her head as she leaned on the table.

"I'm sorry Lexa. This is such a mess."

Lexa was still grinning over both ears. "I think your parents are nice people."

"Of course you do. Do you also think the apartment is clean?"

Lexa shook her hand in a 'fifty-fifty' movement. "Mhm, as a professional apartment critic I must say... I really like your place."

Clarke laughed shortly. "I have an atelier for all those paintings by the way. I was just cleaning it out real quick and you come just when everything is crammed in one place."

"They aren't supposed to be there?"

"Uhm- no, my living room is indeed not supposed to look like a bazaar and I preferably have it without easels, canvas and sketchbooks stacked all over the floor."

"Sorry. It has something, you know."

Clarke shook her head in amusement, slipped off her chair and looked at the mess that was her living room with an internal groan. Then, she straightened her back, brushed a strand of hair that had loosend from the ponytail behind her ear and said, "Give me one minute. This will all be tidy in just a second."

Lexa offered her help several times, but Clarke always vehemently shook her head no while carrying firstly two big canvas at once, then three, and in the end a stack of ten together with a folded easel on top.

It was prone to falling down but Lexa was repeating it would, that Clarke needed to take it easy, in vain. She was there just in time to catch the slipping tower.

"Clarke. Slow down," her voice came muffled from beneath paintings.

"Oh. Thank you. Just a slip, let me take those."

Lexa carried them into the atelier just as stubborn as Clarke had taken the others before, and went on like that with the others left as well.

"Where the hell did you even get so many paintings?" she asked once the living room was cleared, looking over the now full atelier.

Clarke envied Lexa for how casually she was speaking, that her face wasn't red and her breaths were normal although she had carried several heavy things back and forth. Clarke was panting against the kitchen counter, and her ponytail had long become hopeless. "They're mine."

"I can see that they're yours Clarke, they're filling up a quarter of your apartment, but who painted them? If you don't mind me asking."

"Me. Didn't I tell you I majored in art and liked to paint? If we're going at this rate we can forget that partnership," Clarke joked.

"You painted these?"

"What's so surprising?"

"Clarke, why the fuck are you still sitting in an overheated office working with me? Those paintings are insane."

A blush sneaked between all the red on Clarke's face that came from the exercise and stress. "Thank you."

"For real though, if you're actually the artist... you should get a better job or something! They're amazing."

"Lexa, have you forgotten I design our clothes?"

"That's not even remotely your potential!"

-

Lexa couldn't stop talking about how great Clarke's paintings were. She paused when Clarke went to shower and continued where she had left off once the door opened again.

That sentence about said paintings didn't last very long. Her brain wasn't particularly fixed on the painted art anymore when Clarke came into the living room in nothing more than a towel, and so her mouth stopped working too.

Clarke's hair was darker wet, falling over her bare shoulders and- and the towel was too short and fastened too tightly to properly cover up Clarke's breasts, Lexa noticed without meaning too. She might have also stared a tiny bit too long on accident.

"Sorry. I forgot my fuzzy socks were in the cupboard."

It reached Lexa's brain a little too slow. "What?" she asked when Clarke was out of the kitchen again already, and she had taken the sentence in fully.

"My socks. I accidentally put them in a bowl last time I was doing the laundry and they've been in a cupboard since then."

Lexa looked confused, but before she could think of another question, Clarke was in the bathroom again. Five minutes later she came out fully dressed, with her hair semi dried and the strangest fuzzy socks on her feet that Lexa had ever seen.

Once she had grabbed a bag of chips and two wine glasses, she made her way to Lexa on the couch.

"Will I get a taste of your gas station wine now?" Lexa asked with a lopsided grin, but Clarke shook her head very seriously.

"Nope," she said, popping the p, and hurried back into the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of wine. For Clarke Griffin, she seemed rather nervous putting it on the couch table. Her teeth were worrying her bottom lip and once it was freed again, Clarke quickly started rambling, "Look I was in this really fancy wine... shop? thingy and I asked them if they had any- well any fancy wine from France or Germany or Spain or Italy and he like laughed at me because that was apparently 98 percent of the stuff they had, but I told him you know I wanted something fruity and full and nice and he gave me a few options but I kind of really don't know about wines so- I have no idea what this is or if it's good but I got it anyway."

Lexa stared at Clarke first, then the wine.

"Are you for real?"

"Uh- yes?" Clarke asked unsurely.

"Oh my God. Do you know that this is one of the best Italian wines you can drink this year?"

"I- no, I mean that guy told me something of wine critics and 90 whatnot points but I have no idea."

"You didn't have to do this. Gas station wine would've been fine."

"I wanted to. Also I kind of do, because compare this to your apartment."

Lexa looked around with furrowed eyebrows. She didn't know what Clarke was talking about. The living room had several bookshelves at the wall, all filled with books and, again, smaller paintings and here and there a roomplant peeked out. The walls were a nice light brown color and a poster of the moon hung in the back, surrounded by smaller pictures of certain constellations that were taped to the wall a little... messily.

The couch was a soft brown too, and felt like a sheep cloud to sit on. There was an armchair that looked just the same, and the only thing that made it clear that the living room wasn't the secret library of some literature or art professor was the flat-screen TV.

The whole room had a soul and a mind, not like Lexa's modern penthouse. Sure, that one was elegant and Lexa wouldn't want to exchange it exactly, but for Clarke's apartment- she'd think twice, at least.

"It really isn't comparable," she said. "This has such a different vibe. You know, it's so... you."

"Is that a compliment or not?"

"I mean I'm just saying it's like a fragment of your mind is this living room, you know. It's so calm and... kind of friendly."

"Aw. I'm kind of friendly?"

Lexa raised a brow as seriously as she managed. "A fragment of you might possibly be, I said."

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