206. Chapter 206

When she first found out she needed them, she cried.

Eliza had gone on about how smart her little girl looked in glasses, and Alex just wanted to cry.

Because she got made fun of enough – she was enough of a nerd, it was hard enough for her to get through lunch without wisecracks or someone spilling a drink on her or general laughter sent in her direction – and glasses? Glasses would just make it worse.

It was Jeremiah that knew. It was Jeremiah that ordered her contacts. It was Jeremiah that fought with Eliza to get Alex to be able to use them, instead of her glasses, when she went out.

Vicky Donahue caught her in her glasses once. She’d dropped by unannounced and Eliza had let her up to Alex’s room without a second thought. It was nice that Alex had such a good friend now, after all.

Alex was laying on her bed, her nose stuck in an astrophysics book, trying to puzzle out the contradictions between the stories Kara told her about Kryptonian physics versus the Earth physics whose math she was scribbling into the margins.

“You wear glasses?” Vicky had asked, and Alex had jumped a mile high, moving to take them off immediately.

Vicky strode across the room quick enough to still her hands, quick enough to push the rectangular frames back onto her face, a small smile tugging at her lips.

“They’re cute,” she said, and Alex felt her face, her entire body, getting hot, felt an odd tugging sensation just underneath her belly, and she adjusted them like Kara did when she was nervous.

“You think?” she asked, and she’d never heard her own voice go that high.

“Yeah! You should wear them more often,” Vicky told her as she pulled Alex’s textbook into her lap before declaring it gibberish and that they should go grab some ice cream.

It was that, more than anything, that made Alex wear them a little more often at Stanford. In her dorm, at least. In her sweater and fuzzy socks and basketball shorts, one pen sticking out of her mouth and one pushed into her hair behind her ear.

They were replaced almost entirely by her contacts, though, when Eliza’s railing on her got too much. When I don’t understand how you could choose your own prestige over Kara’s safety, she’s languishing in Midvale without you, Alexandra became their every phone call, and the alcohol and the clubs and the attention from men with rough hands and cocky smiles at least made her feel… something. Sort of. Not really. But it was worth a try.

So her glasses, then, became standbys only for her worst hangovers, when dragging herself to the bathroom to slip in fresh lenses was just too much to ask.

And then there was J’onn, and then there was the DEO, and the days were so long her eyes would sting, but she would refuse to complain, and she would refuse to put on her glasses – or even acknowledge that she had them – until J’onn showed up, somehow, with her under-used glasses case and insisted that she take a minute to replace her contacts with her frames, because how could she expect to continue training when her eyes were that red, that painful?

He got her improved lenses after that, but he always made sure he kept a pair of glasses for her in storage, for those nights she insisted on working extra late, extra hard, extra, extra, extra.

But for the most part, still, her glasses still only come on at night, when she’s alone, when she’s huddled in her old Stanford sweater and sweatpants and no bra and a single bobby pin keeping her hair off her forehead as she loses herself in reading.

But then there’s Maggie Sawyer.

Because the first time Maggie sees Alex in her glasses – it’s late and they’re settling in for a night of snuggling, of reading, by the fireplace – Alex pads out of her bedroom tentatively, eyes wide, eyes nervous, pajama pants and gray long-sleeved shirt, biting her bottom lip slightly, because what if Maggie thinks she looks weird, what if Maggie thinks she looks ridiculous, what if Maggie thinks her glasses are stupid, that they make her less… perfect?

But when Maggie looks up, her breath hitches and her jaw nearly smacks onto the floor, and she gulps, and she splutters, and Alex reddens, because she’s still just getting used to being this vulnerable, still just getting used to being this… worshipped.

Because Maggie is rasping her name and padding across the floor to her and sweeping her hair away from her face and staring, staring, staring, because “Alex, you… you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“You don’t think they look silly?”

Maggie gulps and Maggie takes a long, slow breath. “I think they look like the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Alex’s heart flutters and heat pools between her legs. “Really?”

Maggie pulls back to take in the whole picture of Alex looking that domestic, that vulnerable, that trusting, that smart, that sexy, that perfect.

“Oh yeah.”

So she starts wearing them at night, to cuddle, to read, to talk by the fireplace, to have tickle fights and laugh, and she even starts wearing them to some game nights, and god is it a relief to not have to always have her contacts in, to always have her guard up.

She starts wearing them while Maggie fucks her, slow and steady and harsh and ragged; starts wearing them when she gives Maggie lap dances wearing nothing but her glasses and a slip; starts wearing them when she puts on a tight-fitting suit and takes Maggie out to dinner, and Maggie can barely speak the entire time, and they don’t even make it fully back into the apartment before she slams Maggie into the wall and gives her exactly what she knows she’s been wanting all night; she starts wearing them and nothing else on lazy Sunday mornings while Maggie makes breakfast and coffee and sweet, desperate love to her.

She starts wearing them to tutor Adrian – and, as it turns out as the term progresses, the small handful of friends he starts bringing by every other week, because our professor doesn’t make physics half as cool as you do, Agent Danvers – and she starts wearing them to brunch on weekends and to the park on evening strolls and to the grocery store with Kara, Adrian, and the woman she swears she’s going to marry one day.

Because glasses?

Glasses don’t make her less perfect.

Glasses make her her, and if it’s good enough for Maggie Sawyer, then dammit, it’s good enough for her.