Chapter One: I Hate You. No, Seriously. I Really Hate You.

After 6 straight hours of back to back to back to back to back to back classes with no lunch break to speak of, it's safe to say that around two or so, my mind had completely checked out and was solely focused on my stomach which did all my talking for me for the last three classes.

All English classes. Mostly Lit courses. Which translates into mostly torture dubbed "classic" novels. Maybe having a case of word diarrhea of the pen variety was cool back in the 18th century, along with being melodramatic and falling in love with a man who tried to rape you and succeeded in kidnapping you, but in the 21st century all it made me do was wonder which would be worse: jumping out of the third floor window or continuing to half-listen to my professor prattle on and on about the deepest meaning of a bunch of old, rich, white people's belly-aching about their sorrows.

Must be hard to be so privileged. Maybe if I was rich, I'd have been suicidal too. But right now, as a young black woman with more debt than one person should have just because she'd made the stupid decision of trying to educate herself...

Okay, I had a point with that. I swear I did. But thinking about my debt always gets me sidetracked. Especially when I think of people like those Jackass guys, who've managed to make a successful career out of doing a bunch of dumbass, obnoxious antics.

But college isn't for everyone right?

That's what I'd tried to explain to my mother senior year of high school, before asking if it was okay if I could take a year off and travel and "find myself" (as if somewhere along the way I'd misplaced myself in another state or country). All she did was laugh and say, "You'd better find yourself accepted and in a good college somewhere next year, or else you'll be finding my foot up your ass."

I had figured that, that wasn't going to work, but I had to try it anyways.

But anyways, that's neither here nor there, the whole point of you reading this happened shortly after I'd gotten back to my room. My room, which had been a double as a double first semester, but now was a double as doubly room for me this semester, since my roomie/best friend had decided to take some internship out in LA.

I would give you more details on what exactly she's doing and why, but that would've required me to be listening when she was telling me. I got the gist of it, the part that mattered: I'm leaving you alone in this middle of nowhere, conservative hellhole.

But she's doing what she loves, fashion or something like that. And I somehow got lucky enough that the girl (Kelli, Shelly, Melanie...whoever) they were gonna shove in here to replace her, decided at the last minute that she'd rather stay roomed with her roommate (Krystal) who sees nothing wrong with fucking her boyfriend (as in Krystal's boyfriend), while my never-to-be roommate is trying to sleep in the bunk underneath them.

I guess, when she'd come to see what I was like, a day before she was to move in, and I'd pretended like I had OCD, ADD, turrets and then started having an argument with my shoe, which I won by the way (by switching from English to Cow, which left the shoe all confused and me open to victory since it didn't know the longhorn dialect)--I guess she just figured, what's a little slap and tickle over her head every once in awhile (awhile defined as every weekend, at least)?

Point, point...right, now I remember.

So I walked back into my wonderful double as a single now room and the phone rang.

Okay, I realize that said in that way, it doesn't really create earthquakes that level whole cities to the ground, but this day, this call changed everything.

My best friend, Julie Drules (pronounced drools)--and unfortunately for her, that is her real name--she called me. Again not earth shattering, but what she said was pretty mind blowing. Which then makes me think of other kinds of blowing, the likes of which I never, EVER, ever asked her for details on. Because the thought of her and him...doing...the do was hard enough to wrap my brain around. Let alone getting into the nasty, naughty, freaky deaky details.

"I hooked up with Justin!"

She squealed this like it was her greatest accomplishment, and until I heard the last name I didn't understand what there was to be excited about.

"Yay!" I deadpanned back. "What happened to Carlos though? Or Jon? Or Michael? Weren't you in love with Michael last week?"

"That was so last week though. I'm over that. But this is major, this is huge, this is..."

"A another random hook-up with another random guy."

"JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE!"

I frowned. Usually just the mere mention of his name sent me into giggle mood. And I do not giggle. "What are you talkin' about?"

"That's the guy. My guy. My random hook-up with a not so random, totally HOT, gorgeous, fuck me tender, the sexy has definitely been broughten back by him, Justin screwedME Timberlake!"

I was mad. Jealous in a vague way. In a pit of my stomach, maybe this is a joke way. I was mad in a laugh it off way. A yeah, right, nice try, but I'm not falling for it, but maybe it is true way.

"You're lying."

I tried to make my voice sound as defiant as possible. Yeah, she was in LA. Yeah, guys tended to fall all over themselves to talk to her. But this was Justin Timberlake. My Justin Timberlake. The guy I drooled over in online pics and concerts from the nosebleed section.

This was my Justin who I could work into nearly every conversation and to which Jules would simply reply, "You know I bet he's a real grade A asshole."

To which I'd simply say, "See, then he couldn't even be an asshole without being the best at it."

To which she'd roll her hazel eyes and say, "If I ever met him, and he showed even the slightest interest in me, I'd snub him. First, just to see what he'd do and second, just because he's really not that hott."

I remembered the conversation exactly. Not because she'd only said it once (we'd had the conversation several times, with slight variations), but simply because it always bugged me that she didn't share my overly fond interest of him.

"If I'm lying, I'm dying."

"You are dying. We're all dying and mistaking it for living."

I can just imagine her eyes rolling as she sighed heavily on her end. "I didn't call to talk about how much life sucks..."

Interrupting her, I said, "And let's not talk about sucking of any kind."

She giggled. "Isn't that cool though? I mean, who would've ever thought something like that would happen??"

"How did something like that happen?" I said, still trying to securely hold onto my incredulity.

"Well, I was at this event, this fashion show that Teen Vogue was a part of and out of nowhere there was this rush of bodies. Cameras flashing like crazy. I was nearly blinded, so I closed one eye but kept the other open in case there would be any serious problems and I'd need a face to attach to the lawsuit." She giggled and I would've laughed along too, if I wasn't falling deeper and deeper into hatred of her at the moment.

"So then this man, cause I still couldn't see really, appears outta the blinding lights. And these two beefy bodyguards just start manhandling the Camera Faces, pushing and pushing the crowd back until they're out of the doors again.

"And then, the man walks up to me. Directly. His eyes on me the entire time and the entire time I'm trying to get my eyes to function normally again. And then he's right in front of me and finally my eyes adjust back and it's him. It's Justin Timberlake. And he's staring at me.

"Then he asked me if I knew where Mary Beth Sue, whoever was. And at that point, I couldn't have even told him who I was, let alone figure out who he was talking about and point him in the right direction.

"Turns out though, that whatever her name is, is his cousin. She's a really nice girl. Kinda short to be a model though, maybe he pulled some strings to get her into the show. But that's pretty messed up, y'know... being related to someone famous and then having everyone think that you're only doing what you're doing because your famous relative helped you along the way..."

"Jules, I really don't give an atomic dog crap about Susie Q's problems."

"Right. So I found my tongue and managed to direct him in the right direction. Since I'd been working with his cousin earlier and I guess she liked me somewhat she asked if I was going to the after party. And as soon as I said no, Justin was all over me, practically begging me to go."

"Now back to reality, Jules."

Laughing, she said, "Okay so all he said was, 'You should come. We were planning on going.' But that's all he needed to say though."

"So how does that lead to you hooking up with him?"

"I'm getting there. Damn." She sighed. "So anyways, I get all dressed up in my hoochie finest, strut my stuff in through the doors, talk to some people I know from work, and then immediately try to inconspicuously search out Justin. But he found me...way before I'd have found him. I think he was just saying hi, before he bounced, but somehow I managed to get him to stay. And we talked. I don't even remember what about. But I remember laughing a lot. And drinking. And then the next thing I knew..."

All of her hook-up stories had that same line. That same "and then the next thing I knew" segue into the land of the morally deprived. I usually let her continue, but this time I cut her off almost immediately.

"I still don't believe you."

She laughed, in that way of hers that let me know she'd known I wasn't going to easily fall for her story. "Check your email."

"What did you do, take pics of the man naked?"

"A picture can speak over a thousand words. Or whatever the saying is."

"Yeah, but in what language." I muttered, settling down in front of my desktop. A minute later, my screen was filled with picture after picture of Justin. My Justin strewn across sheets, barely covered, with enough flesh flashing that there was no doubt in my mind that he was nude. He looked peacefully asleep, as if he didn't have a care in the world. As if the girl he'd slept with could be trusted not to take intimate pictures of him when he'd least expect it. The last one was of the two of them in bed, his arm was across her waist. Holding onto her, as a child would a teddy. She was smiling into the camera, his face was buried somewhere behind her head in her hair.

"And now what do you think?"

"I think..." I sighed, clicking harder than necessary on the mouse to cancel that window away. "I think I hate you."

She laughed at this as if I was joking. I did say that a lot in jest, but this time, I dunno, this time I wasn't so sure that she should be laughing.

I made up an excuse of needing to go do some homework, which she correctly suspected was a lie. I mean, I did need to go do homework, but I wasn't going to do it. I'd eat. Or watch TV. Or get online and look at pictures of Justin and wonder what had made him do it. What was he thinking? Was he drunk? Was he that drunk?

Did it matter? Yes. No. Yes.

After the phone was hung up and my homework still remained untouched like a bride who wore white for all of the traditional reasons, I went back to my desk. Sat back in my chair. Stared back at my screen as I pulled up my email.

Stared at that arm. That arm around that waist. That waist that was definitely not my waist. That waist that was definitely my friend's. My grinning, wholly proud of herself, best friend, whose last words on the phone to me that day were, "Can you believe that shit? That's amazing, innit? And to think, it could've been you, but you were so vehement about not spending the rest of your life shadowing me from place to place. You could've taken those boring classes at a school over here and you could've been in LA with me, instead of..."

Instead of being surrounded by cornfields and cows, I could've been surrounded by fashionistas and women who thought they were cows because they'd went from a size zero to an alarming size four. Instead of being stuck here, for stupidly moral reasons, I could've been there. I could've been there. In that picture. That could've been my waist. That could have been my grinning, wholly proud of myself face.

That could've been me.

Chapter Two: A Surreal Haze

I haven't decided what kind of asshole I was going to be. One thing was already settled though, I was an asshole.

I didn't normally go the groupie route. I'm not even sure what Julie would be classified as. I could try to put this all on her.
See, Cameron, it really wasn't my fault. She was practically begging for me to fuck her. What kind of man would I be not to fulfill such a desperate request?

But that would just make me a cowardly asshole. Maybe I'll try to be a sensitive asshole. Cry a little, sniffle a bit through my sob story of what a good guy I used to be before girl after girl after girl screwed me over and then I decided if anyone was getting screwed it damn sure wasn't going to be me anymore. Or at least not figuratively.

Hmm. Nah, that's too much bullshit, even for me.

I guess I'm stuck with being the stupid asshole. I'm just going to have to tell...the truth.

This wasn't my first time either. Cheating, that is. There were other Julies, but until now I'd never felt compelled to tell on myself.

Julie turned out to be a whole different breed of one-night stands.

She was sitting in the opposite corner of the room, shoveling cereal in her mouth. One foot propped up on the chair she was sitting in and the other was dangling down.

I woke up in a room I didn't remember walking into. This wasn't the first time something like that had happened to me. It had just been awhile. Cameron and I had been together for four years and for four years I'd been nothing but honest and the thought to cheat had never even occurred to me. When I woke up in another woman's bed and found her sitting in the opposite corner of the room, smacking on some cereal, my first thought was, "I wonder what kind of cereal that is."

Before I could sit up or feel guilty about my current lack of guilt over what I'd just done, Julie rose from her chair, walking over to the bed and extended her hand to me with a bright smile.

"I'm Julie and you took my virginity last night."

My eyes widened, my jaw dropped faster than Lindsay Lohan's draws when she remembered to wear them, and my head started to pound as I wondered what kind of R.Kelly/Kobe Bryant situation I'd gotten myself into. And just when I was starting to get a shaky alibi together which I would later have my lawyer work on, she chuckled and said, "Jk, jk. Oh and this is my place. It looks a little different in the light when your head isn't buried in my cleavage."

Running my hand over my close-shaved head, I sighed, never feeling so relieved in my life. When I looked back over at her, I just stared at her for a moment. I had no idea who this girl, this woman was and with that realization my relief was over.

I laughed nervously. "Did I really not even ask for your name?"

My eyes bounced around the tiny room. Lacy panties hanging off a lamp. Clothes strewn across the floor. All the furniture looked second-hand at best. The left side of the room was all windows and a sliding door leading out to a balcony. Sunlight streamed in, warming the side of my face.

I was never very comfortable in messes. Let alone a stranger's mess who I didn't know from Adam. But yet, the longer I sat there and the longer she just smiled at me with her bedhead brown hair looking just as disheveled as the room, I wasn't far from being comfortable.

"You did," she said, her smile ever-present as she let her hand finally drop to her side. She perched herself on the far corner of the bed, sitting cross-legged in an over-sized t-shirt and leg warmers. "but you kept calling me Jamie."

"That's a good name."

Her smile widened as she nodded. "So you said last night. Over and over. And over again."

Her eyes fell over me. Studying me. I let her look for awhile without making it too obvious that I wasn't the most comfortable under her scrutiny. When I sighed, she laughed nervously flitting strands of her brown locks over her shoulder.

"I was staring, wasn't I? I'm sorry, I just..."

"...had the moment you're gonna put on your tombstone."

She smiled again, only slightly this time. "It wasn't that good."

I cracked a smile this time. A tiny one accompanied by a shrug. "It's usually a little better if I'm not seeing three of you."

I rose to my feet, forgetting that little inconvenience that I was not exactly clothed. A wash of red spread up her neck and into her face immediately as she hopped up like something had jumped at her. She was even quicker to turn her back on me. Her hands over her mouth.

I laughed, it was too cute not to laugh at. "Your chance to see me fully nude in the daylight and you blush and turn your back on it?"

"I don't know what kind of girl you think I am, but..."

"Don't worry, I'm hardly in a position to judge you." I said, barely keeping the laughter out of my voice as I gathered up my discarded clothing. "You mind if I take a shower first?"

"Uh, no. No, of course not." She moved even further away from the bed, keeping her back to me and pointed out of the bedroom door. "The bathroom is just down the hall to the right. This place is probably the size of one of your closets, so you won't miss it. There should be clean towels in there already. If not, just yell."

I didn't run out of the room, but I wasn't taking my time getting to the shower either. I didn't care if she looked. I just cared that I was still here and I shouldn't have been. I should've been gone long before she even woke up. I should've crept back into bed beside Cameron by now so when she woke up and rolled over I could've been there pretending that I'd been there the whole time.

Maybe she'd stayed out with her girls and crashed at one of their places. God, I hoped so. It would save me from having to tell on myself so soon.

Just as I was stepping out of the shower, I was confronted with a pair of wide eyes staring up at me.

Julie was sitting on the toilet, lid down. I jumped and caught myself just before I nearly screamed the least manly scream of all.

Laughing as she watched me clutch my chest, she said, "Sorry, I didn't mean..."

"...to be sitting on the toilet while I showered?" I frowned, a small smile at the corners of my lips. "Accidents do happen."

"I came in..." She said, her eyes focused on mine. "cause I remembered the clean hand towels were in here, but not the ones for drying yourself. So I brought one and then as I was leaving, you started singing...so, I just sat down. I wasn't planning on still being here when you were done."

I didn't embarrass easily. But there was something about knowing she'd heard me singing in the shower that caused the heat to raise up my neck and into my face. I could sing in front of thousands of people, but there was something private about singing in the shower, especially when the songs you'd chosen to sing ranged from the classic "Mmmbop" to Ready For The World's "Oh Sheila" to Billy Ray's "Achy Breaky Heart."

And besides, this wasn't really a sing in the shower kind of time anyways. It was just an old habit of mine and it always seemed to help start the day off at least a smidget away from the fuckeduppedness that it may have started off as.

Now she was studying me with her head cocked slightly to the side, the tiniest hint of a smile in her eyes as her mouth remained in a straight line. This could have easily have been awkward, what with me still naked and in the shower, my body now air-drying, but I guess somewhere along the way she'd forgotten these little facts and only became aware of them once I shivered.

As if she suddenly remembered that she was still standing there and I was still dripping wet, she shoved the towel into my hand and rushed out.

I couldn't help but laugh as I dried off and changed into my clothes. When I walked out, she was in the living/family room, looking in the direction of the little 12-inch TV, but the TV was off.

"Do you normally watch TV without turning it on?"

She was studying me again for a moment as if I was the most simple and perplexing person she'd ever met. "What if I was crazy?"

Raising an eyebrow, I said, "Is that your way of telling me that backing away slowly to the door would be a good idea, right about now?"

"I was just thinking. You came home with me, but what if I was crazy?"

"What if I was crazy? You took me home."

"Touché." She smiled.

I smiled back. "I don't usually do this."

"You're handling it like you do."

"That's because I have this really annoying ability to be good at everything."

"Hmm. Well, humility must not be a part of that."

I opened and closed my mouth, just watching her with a smile lingering. "Why did you do it?"

"Are you gonna tell me why you did?"

"I'd have to be able to tell myself first."

She nodded, licking her lips. "There's something weird about celebrities. I didn't think I'd be one of those kind of people. Those kind of girls. The girls who get all gooey because some guy with fame attached to his ass paid them a compliment. You were so lame, but I ate it up."

"Lame? That's a little harsh, don't you think?"

"That was me being nice." She grinned a slow grin. "You're not even one of the celebrities I'd be dying to meet. As soon as I saw you and my brain started working properly again, I immediately thought of my BFF. She's in love with you."

"So people really do say BFF casually in conversations."

"She's gonna hate me for this."

"Then don't tell her." I shrugged. "Would make my life a lot easier."

"She's the only one I'd tell. I don't broadcast my sex life." She frowned at me, like I'd implied something so ridiculous. "So you don't have to worry about that."

"Not to doubt the strength of your word, but I'm gonna have to believe that when I don't see this in the next tabloid."

"I wouldn't do that to Cameron. I actually like her."

Before I could open my mouth, she added, "And I realize that doing you isn't exactly the most logical way to show that I like Cameron. But it was one night. One drunken night. It meant nothing."

I nodded, recording that clichéd excuse in back of my mind in case I'd need it for later use.

"I just wanted to make sure we're clear."

"Crystal."

Patting my pockets to make sure I had everything with me that I'd walked in the door with, I glanced into a nearby mirror hanging on the wall to make sure I didn't walk out the door with anything on me that I hadn't walked in with.

"But if we do see each other again," She started, just as my hand gripped the doorknob. "It doesn't have to be awkward. I mean, it won't be, will it?"

I sighed, the thought of seeing her again made me weary and strangely light-headed at the same time. "Are we gonna see each other again?"

She just shrugged at first, small smile tugging at the corners of her thin lips. "It's a small world."

It's amazing how small the world can get when you're not paying attention.

*^*^*

Flash bulbs in a semi-circle in front of the Ivy's window sent bursts of light aimed at my table for two.

Cameron was running her mouth, as usual. I was usually much better at pretending to pay attention, but even looking around the room, sighing, checking the time didn't perturb her.

I had decided on being the honest asshole. And honestly, I had no idea how to even start this conversation. Or even how to turn this monologue into a conversation.

"...so I was thinking that since you're gonna be going into rehearsal mode for your upcoming tour soon that we should try to spend as much time together now as we can..."

"I cheated."

Her mouth hesitated for about half a second, a trip in the steady stroll of her words, before she had them march on determinedly. Cameron had always been quite good at ignoring things, pretending she hadn't heard or seen things until she wasn't able to ignore them anymore.

"I know there's not a lot of time, but I'd really love to just get away somewhere. Just get lost for a few days even."

"Last night. I can't remember for sure, but I think I initiated it."

"You know, if you don't want to do that, we could just lose the world entirely. And hole up indoors on the local tip for awhile."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I think that's a better idea, don't you?"

"Cam! Listen to me for a goddamn second. I'm trying to tell you..."

She winced at my tone. The sure-fire way to get her to pay attention was to make a scene, she was all about keeping up appearances, even if it was all crumbling in her hand like sand she was trying to push together without any cohesive element. She glanced around the room, looking to see if anyone close enough to overhear the conversation had done just that.

When she felt that the proverbial coast was relatively clear, she learned in towards me and whispered, "This is because of the...marriage talk, right?"

"What?" I frowned, completely thrown off by her turn in the conversation. "No."

"Yes, it is. Ever since we went to my cousin's wedding and I casually mentioned how I can't wait to get married and have kids, you've been weird. We've been off. I wasn't saying we had to do that now. Or tomorrow. Or even next year."

I'm twenty-six years old, the thought of marriage didn't send me running to the hills like it would have when I was eighteen and commitment was a dirty word. What it did do was put us on pause, made me mull over where was this relationship going? Before then I'd just been going with the flow. Four years later and it was looking like her flow was going to take us down the aisle and I would be lying if a big part of me didn't start thinking of ways to dam that path up.

But just the mere idea of marriage didn't scare me anymore. But this for the rest of my life? The same boring conversations about her friends or whoever who were doing the most mundane things. The same arguments over simple things like, why was I so anal about all the clothes being put away but I couldn't clean a damn dish? Or even about the way I put the toilet paper on the holder.

Sad to say, but the best part of our relationship had always been the sex and now even that was fucked up. It was all so mechanical now. We'd gotten to the old married couple stage of penciling in sex and then rescheduling, so now our routine was to plan for sex and then re-plan for a later date that rarely seemed to come.

Is that how I wanted to spend the rest of my life? Even if that's how my eventual marriage turned out as, I at least wanted to go into it riding on the high of the throes of passion under the delusion that it would always be just this fun and exciting.

I wanted, no needed that person I was giving my freedom up to, to be someone that when I was away from her, she was the one I tried to remember conversations or the random things I'd heard just so I could tell her about it. It didn't have to be all screaming orgasms and spontaneity, but it damn sure had be to someone I could do boring ass, mundane things with, but with her it all didn't feel so boring or so mundane.

"That's not what this is about."

"Of course it is." She rolled her eyes, like she already had it all figured out. "As soon as a woman mentions weddings or wee-ones, it's a problem. It's always a problem. But I already told you, if I never get married that's fine too."

"Obviously though it's not fine since you can't wait to get married."

"I can wait. I've been waiting! I've been waiting four goddamned years."

I didn't know what to say that. Until this moment, staring into her white dress-eager eyes, I'd never realized just how badly she wanted to get married. She'd always been so carefree about that. Her cousin's wedding last month wasn't the first time we'd went to a wedding. It wasn't even the first time that she'd talked about marriage and kids, but she'd never talked about it so longingly and so pointedly like those were things I'd purposedly denied her.

If we broke up over this, I could never tell my mother that this was why. She would revel in her I told ya speech like a pig in mud. "So...you do want to get married."

"No." She frowned at me, shaking her head, like everything she'd said and done had been perfectly clear and I was just being slow.

"Right." I nodded.

For once, she didn't feel the need to follow that up with another comment or a segue into another story about shoes or whatever she was always going on about. For once, she just let there be silence. And that's when I realized just how awkward silence was with her. Four years and we still had awkward silence.

I pushed the food around in my plate for a moment. I hadn't eaten much of it. She'd ordered it for me. I hated when she did stuff like that, little things that to her meant nothing but to me felt like she was emasculating me on the sly. She did stuff like that when we would hang out with her married couple friends. Little actions or comments that let me know that the age difference she so adamantly claimed didn't matter to her, did matter even if it was just a little.

I let my eyes bounce around the room for a bit, before I forced them back to her. "I cheated on you."

She was avoiding my eyes and focusing on her napkin. Folding. Unfolding. Folding.

"And I'm not ready for marriage or kids. I'm not ready, but I didn't do it because of that. I just..." I sighed, because I really wish I could say why I did it. I had never cheated on her before. Never. And I've cheated on a lot girls over the years, but for some reason the thought had never occurred to me to do it to Cameron. "You're great. We're great. Things, life, the world is great. Or it's supposed to be. All those things are supposed to be. Ideally. And you're pretty enough, you're smart enough, you're funny enough. So don't make this about you. It's really simple, I'm an asshole. But I'm trying to be better at it, if that makes any sense."

She kept fiddling with her napkin, kept not looking at me, kept biting her lip. And then she released her lip in a long sigh, put the napkin to the side and finally looked me in the eye. For a solid moment, she just stared at me. And everything fell into a surreal haze.

"Say something. Please."

A surreal haze that I was dying to get out of.

She still wasn't saying anything. She was still just staring at me. And then she shook her head, a tiny smile playing on her lips as if she might laugh this all away. And then she said, "So the quickie vacation is out?"

Chapter Three: When You're Not Looking

"So did you see him today?"

It was the same question. The same question I'd been rushing back to my dorm everyday after class to ask Jules. I figured by the end of the week, this would be more than annoying and she'd stop answering my calls entirely.

"You really make me wish I'd never told you."

"And sometimes, when I'm thinking about that instead of writing a paper or taking notes in class, I really wish you didn't either. But you did, so deal with it."

"Just because we had…� She trailed off with a sigh. “Just because that happened doesn't mean we're gonna do anything more than that."

"But the way you said you left it, with that whole 'it's a small world' thing, you made it seem like maybe you would see him again."

"And if I did, so what? It doesn't mean anything, like when a man tells you he'll call you."

"That you better have been a general one."

"And even if it wasn't, it still would be true." She laughed. Alone, because I didn't find that the least bit humorous.

"So," I said, not so smoothly transitioning. "You did see him."

"Maybe," was her coy reply.

If this was anything else, I might have begun to lose interest. Hell, I would have lost interest a long time ago and threatened to hang up on her if she had wanted to talk about it even half as much as I needed to talk about this. It was the Justin factor. It was the her meeting him, her cozying up to him, her, her, her, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia factor that I was driving me insane.

I've drooled over the man's hands. Found his freckled shoulders dreamy. Tripped and fell in love with the awkward way his voice rose and cracked when he was thrown a curveball of a question that made him nervous. I've taken it as a personal mission to recruit as many new people as possible over to the Justin side. But somehow it had never worked on her. No matter what half-naked picture I'd shown, the master-minded music I'd played, the concerts I'd dragged her kicking and screaming to, it had never worked on her. She was the uncrackable. The fortress impenetrable to all things Justin-y. And I'd tried. Lord knows I had.

And the moment she'd gotten the real deal she'd cracked and folded like cheap patio furniture.

"Girl, don't play with me."

I can't say I blame her. But I can't say I don't hate her by way of a tiny elephant-sized bit of jealousy gift wrapped in whataboutme-ery whines.

"I did but..." She trailed off and I could hear her moving around now. Like she'd decided now was a good time to get up and shuffle around every piece of paper she could get her hands on. "It was nothing. We glanced at each other a few times from across the room. We didn't even talk or anything."

"Why didn't you go over and say hi or something?"

Pffting, she said, "What would I look like walking over to Justin who's sitting with Cameron and just saying hi?"

"Like someone's who at a dinner party and is mingling." I had managed to hold back a very valley girl "duh" from the end of that sentence. "Meeting new people."

"Well, maybe I'm tired of meeting new people. Maybe..." She trailed off, shuffling and crinkling more paper to the point that I was on the verge of yelling at her about it, but then she stopped crinkling, stop shuffling papers and simply said, "I'm tired of mingling."

"Get real, Jules. Remember who you're talking to. You're the people person of the millennium. If there’s a new face to be cheesing into and cheesy small talk to be made, you're all over that."

"Well...maybe I'm..." She sighed. "Maybe I'm just different here. Maybe I've learned to be different. Different is good."

She didn't even sound like she'd bothered to try to convince herself of that before she'd tried to pawn it off on me.

"Sure it is, Jules. Sure, different is good, great, just peachy when the different is getting a different sandwich off of a Penn Station menu, but this isn't a new sandwich. You're across the country. Alone. You're all by yourself over there, because you were so sold on this 'different is good' crap."

"So what are you saying?"

"Nothing." I sighed, defeatedly, ready to backpedal my way out of this potential argument if need be. I didn't want this conversation to turn into some bitter rant on my part. I could be bitter later. "The same thing I'm always saying. Absolutely nothing."

Too bad Jules was usually the type ready and willing to pedal, full speed, into arguments. "If you didn't want me to go so bad, why didn't you try to talk me out of it?"

"Oh, right." I laughed. "So then I could be happy knowing that I talked you out of your dream."

"So why," She whined, as if she'd been holding that back for awhile. "can't you be happy for me when I'm chasing that dream?"

"Because..." I huffed, blowing a strand of my dark brown, nearly black hair out of my face from where it usually fell into my eyes. "That's no fun. You can't expect me to be selfless and supportive."

She chuckled. "Of course not. What was I thinking?"

"You weren't thinking. Just like you weren't thinking when you slept with Justin. Just like you weren't thinking when you went over to say hi, or make some kind of awkward conversation, because you just couldn't let it go that he'd seen you and hadn't approached you already."

"I told you we just glanced at each other from across the room and that was it."

"And now I'm telling you that I know you're full of shit. Different can be as good as it wants to be, but some things never change."

She sighed and paused and usually that meant I'd won. Usually. But this time I didn't know what was at stake to even know for sure if winning was what I wanted.

She said, "It's usually those stubborn stains of change resistant fibers in a person's being that you try to scrub and scrub and scrub, but they just won't come out. Because maybe they aren't supposed to come out, maybe you're just looking at it all wrong."

And before I could ask what the hell she was talking about, she'd already hung up without so much as a goodbye, talk to you later, or toodaloo.

*^*^*
You say
You like to sleep alone

What did I care about the opening of a new boutique called The Boulevard (LA wasn't exactly in need of a new one anyways)? I didn't care. I didn't care, but that didn't stop me from being there at the dinner party.

Enter the reason I'm sitting at a table full of people and am more alone than if I'd gone stag. Zora and Leslie. Guess I should've said the reasons. They're Cameron's friends. Cameron's single friends who couldn't wait to set her up with someone and then couldn't wait to watch it all fall apart. Which all of the relationships eventually did. Some of that was their fault, most of that was Cameron's fault for listening to them.

If you wouldn't listen to a broke man's financial advice, why would you listen to a couple of serial can't-get-past-the-first-daters on how to snag and reel in a man?

Trying to reason with Cameron when it came to them was a waste of time and effort. They were her Archille's heel, only she wouldn't allow herself to see that. So twiddle D-block and twiddle dumbass stayed whispering in her ear all of their ever so helpful "advice." And after the first time they'd come onto me and I'd promptly rejected them not so diplomatically (I believe my words were, 'I'd rather have my balls twisted and yanked off first, which really is probably the exact urge I'd get the morning after if I'd been depressed and drunk enough to say anything but a hell no), their whisperings had not been so flattering when my name was brought up.

But I didn't care what they thought. I just cared that Cameron seemed to still care what they thought. And after the first time she'd blown up at me when I'd even so much as hinted at what Zora and Leslie, respectively, had tried to do, and she'd nearly dumped my ass for it, I learned to keep it to myself.

And now I was getting a brand new lesson on learning to keep to myself, seeing as how at my end of one of the many long rows of tables, I could have burst into flames and still not one of them would have acknowledged my presence. Not even Joel and Maddie, who despite having a new baby, which was also one of the sparks to Cameron's sudden fixation with her eggs outside of the breakfast table, even they, Mr. and Mrs. Extra Friendly, were on board to ignore me. But they were her friends. Just like Drew and Lindsay and Carl and Jaz and Rick and Veronica (aka Roni). They were all her friends and when she decided that I wasn't worthy of being seen or heard, then they silently agreed.

I couldn't even get so much as some slight eye contact from any of them. Cameron, who was sitting right next to me, close enough to rub elbows, was ignoring me the best. It was effortless. If I tried to add a comment into the conversation, she talked over me as if it was an Oprah conducted interview. If I tried to get in the conversation just by laughing, she laughed louder and longer to drown me out.

Her married friends at least had the decency to look awkward in this situation every now and then. To slip and nearly respond to something I'd said or done. To almost recognize my existence. Even Roni and Ricky who sometimes fought like they were trying to win the golden ticket to an episode on Cops looked occasionally uncomfortable. But Cameron was firm.

Because Zora and Leslie were firmer, even though sitting directly across from me, they were the only ones to intentionally look my way, but that was only to glare at me. Letting me know that Cameron might not have told everyone, she might not be talking to me anymore since I'd fessed up, but she was damn sure running her mouth to those two. Every well-placed glare my way was proof of that.

After a while of getting ignored, you give up fighting it. Or at least I had. By an hour into this dinner party to celebrate the opening of Zora and Leslie's boutique opening, I'd given up. I'd resorted to looking around the room, hoping something interesting would catch my eye.

That something turned out to be a someone, as I just happened to glance down the long table to the other end and spot Jules perched over there.

And I say
I miss the way you breathe

She was surrounded by people I'd find out much later were all her co-workers, and of whom she had their full attention. No sooner than I'd realized I was staring, I looked away and once again tried to follow the line of conversation at my end of the table, which was something along the lines of whether time-out was too stifling to a children's development of a sense of independence and self. I might have tried in vain to inject that a good ass whooping wasn't abuse and is probably what little Tommy needed to stop drawing on the walls with whatever he could find, especially when the 'whatever' included his own feces. I didn't bother saying any of that, because 1) they wouldn't have listened anyways and 2) they'd already lost my attention a second after I figured out what they were talking about.

You say
I get away with murder

And right back my eyes went to Julie. Luckily, she still hadn't noticed me, noticing her.

But you know

The more I looked the more obvious it become how wrong Julie would have been for me if we'd gone any further than we'd already had. Clearly, she was all wrong from the way she held her salad fork that she was using to eat the entree to the way she chewed with her mouth open.

She was all wrong. In so many ways. From the crooked way she tended to talk out the side of her mouth to her terrible hunched posture to her ever-running mouth with its thin lips to the way she threw her head back when she thought something was really funny right before she actually slapped her knee, occasionally punctuating her laughter with a snort (or a series of snorts).

Back on my end of the table, the conversation had shifted to breast-feeding and when enough is enough. And when the kid has teeth and can hold the breast themselves, I think it would be pretty obvious, but when it came to Drew and Lindsay's Clara, Lindsay didn't seem to be too sure.

Ignoring the current topic, I found myself watching, studying Cameron as she spoke. The wild hand gestures, the pin straight posture, the slight frown lines between her eyebrows as she listened, the way she chewed on the inside of her mouth before disagreeing.

I've paid for hurting
Someone I can’t leave behind

I scooted a little closer to her, putting my hand over her hand as it rested on the tabletop. Leslie sucked her teeth at this. Zora rolled her eyes. Cameron went still under my touch, then slowly eased her hand from under mine, then slowly scooted away until the original distance was restored. Leslie smiled. Zora smiled. Cameron went back to yammering with her hand never taking the chance of settling on the table again. I went back to looking around the room.

Do you feel something
Pulling you back in

That’s when I felt eyes on me. That creeping feeling that someone’s watching you. Without thinking, I turned and stared down the other end of the table, my eyes meeting the hazel eyes of Julie.

Do you see something
You wanna see again

Realizing she’d been caught, the red rushed up into her face and her head immediately turned away. I laughed softly to myself and it was like she’d heard, because her head rose from staring at her hands in her lap to look back at me. She wasn’t embarrassed this time, so her eyes met mine confidently. A slow smile curling the ends of her mouth. I smiled back.

I could be the one

And that was it. She went back to her end’s conversation. And I went back to being ignored.

If I wasn't so oblivious ninety percent of the time, I would've known something was up when Zora and Leslie both decided to make a run for it to the Ladies’ Room and then one by one the other inhabitants slowly but surely wandered away from their half-eaten meals, mumbling about fresh air or needing a smoke.

When we were relatively alone on our end of the table, Cameron licked her lips, sighed and turned to me for the first time that night and said, "What was that about?"

I fought down a smile that nearly flashed and beat down the urge to ask who she was talking to, because she couldn't be talking to me, I didn't exist anymore, remember? Instead, I tried to remember I was still the asshole in this and said, "What was what about?"

"That. The shared smiles. The moment."

"There was no moment."

She nodded, pulling her bottom lip in before letting it go with a pop. "Of course not. I must be just seeing things in my old age."

I could make it up to you

I watched her watching me until she looked away and I was staring at her profile in confusion. Watching as she pulled her bottom lip in, biting it, licking it, biting it and then releasing it in a soft, barely audible sigh in the still fairly crowded room.

All around us the party winding down to a close, seeing as everyone was filing out or at least beginning to mill closer to the exits. They'd had their food, listened to the excited babble of two hags going on and on about their new boutique, they'd done their time.

I sighed. "What do you want me to do? What do you want me to say? Because you not saying anything to me except the random snide comment isn’t working."

She exercised her right to remain silent.

"Why won't you talk to me? There's something to talk about other than shoes or clothes or other people's babies and now you've run out of words."

"Justin." She exhaled my name like it was the hardest thing she'd ever had to say to me. "You just don't get it."

"Yes, that's exactly it. I don't get it. Help me get it."

Take me back, I’m the lonely boy who

"I just wish..."

"What?"

When she started to shake her head, I thought she was trying to duck and dodge out of the conversation as was her usual way on anything that really mattered, but instead all she did was get up from the table and walk away slowly, as if she just knew I'd follow.

I guess she was right, because now we were standing in the nearly empty lobby. Her on one side of the room, me on the other. A few people strolling slowly like they had nowhere to go, they were the only things between us besides space and opportunity. I might have tried to step closer, but she started talking and all but put a stop sign in her tone.

When the lobby was empty, save us, she began without any preamble, "Three months after we first got together and we'd had the whole Zora and Leslie episode and we nearly broke up, I was pregnant. I was pregnant, but I didn't know if it was yours, so I never told you." She was avoiding eye contact now. She was walking more, pacing the side of the room she was on. I didn't move, didn't say a word. I'm not sure if I was truly still breathing at that point.

Staring out the doors, she continued. "And then as some time went by and I was going crazy trying to figure out what to do, who to tell first or who to tell at all, then..." She said, chewing on the inside of her mouth. “It happened again. The dizziness. The weakness. The pain in my shoulders. No matter what I was doing in the bathroom, it would hurt for it to come out. It was happening again. And after the first time…� She took in a shaky breath and made eye contact for the briefest of moments. “After I let them cut me up, when I was just barely eighteen, I had nearly lost my tubes then. Lucky, is what they'd called me. They said, I was really lucky that it was just damaged, because I could have died. They said that maybe I could still have kids and then they started going over other options.

"But I was barely eighteen; I didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place. And then I was, and then I was dying and then I wasn’t dying and I wasn’t pregnant, and maybe I wouldn’t get the chance to be pregnant again. And even before I met you, I was dying to get pregnant again.� She licked lips, smiling weakly. “And then I did. And it all happened again. It was like I was eighteen again, or worse because I could hear that damn biological clock ticking away and I could feel my chances of getting the stretch marks, putting on mix-matched socks because I couldn’t see my feet anymore, waddling, feeling the alien sensation of my baby kicking inside me for the first time, cursing my husband out during delivery for doing this to me in the first place...all of that, that I'd been dreaming of since I was a little girl was just slipping away from me.

"But I didn’t want it. Not that way. Not the way that it was happening then. That wasn't the way it was supposed to happen.� She looked at the doors, at the walls, at the ceiling, then finally, when she'd run out of things to look at, her eyes settled down wearily on me. Shimmering as her mouth twisted, doing all the work at keeping the tears at bay. "So there's not really much to get. You might be the asshole, but then that just makes two of us."

Who loves you

She walked away and I did nothing. I didn't say anything. I didn't yell, I didn't curse, I didn't try to stop her. I didn't do anything.

I stared at my shoes. I don't know how long I stared at them, but when I looked up Cameron was nowhere to be found, but a pair of hazel eyes were watching me.

Julie was coming my way. But there were people now. A crowd of slow-to-get-out-ers that were standing in her way, so I took advantage of that and tried weave through the crowd that was causing more and more of a back-up at the door. It was like they'd just wanted to all huddle together and admire the doors rather than actually walk through them.

Someone ran into me on my left, brushing against my shoulder, but I was so close to the doors now that I hardly paid any attention. That is until that someone jumped in front of me.

When Julie looked like she wasn't planning on moving out of my way, I sighed and took a moment to try to pull myself back into myself, because it felt like a good chunk of me was just floating over my body watching me like I was a character in a movie.

"Normally," Julie started, licking her lip. "I'm a little better at taking a hint. So you nearly sprinting to the door after all the eye contact tonight is a fairly big hint, but..."

"I really need to..."

"I know you're busy. Busy probably isn't even an adequate word to describe it. You're hot right now. Not to say that you won't be in the future, but everyone wants a piece of you. Everyone knows your name, sings your songs, and buys the expensive concert tickets, so you're hot. You're important in ways that the average person will probably never get to be."

"I just...I had a really bad night. And I..."

"My point is, without rambling too much, that you're not who I thought you'd be. I'm not sure who I thought you were going to be, but whoever that is, you weren't that. And..." She licked lips, twice. "And I liked it. You. The little bit of you that I got to be around. I liked it, you. I liked you and..."

I was shaking my head. And I only realized I was when she stopped speaking in mid-sentence and a slight frown rippled her brow. I stopped shaking my head and held it for a moment; it was throbbing like Beckham had used it for soccer practice. Dropping my hands to my sides with a sigh, I said, "You spent time with me because I was cheating on my girlfriend." I paused, looking into her eyes, trying to make sure that she was understanding this. "So I don't know who you thought I was going to be, but I'm glad that finding me to be a cheater was to your liking."

When her mouth opened, my feet went back into motion, propelling me forward and out the door. I didn't wait to hear the "ooo, ahhh" from the crowd of people who were still basically barricading themselves by the doors, when they realized the doors could be more than a pretty thing to stare at.

*^*^*

You say
My broken heart becomes me

I was hanging up the phone on the wall over my desk, from where I'd been trying unsuccessfully to write a paper before I'd made that call, when my dorm room door opened. Christopher Price, God's gift to womankind, or so he thought, strolled into my room without knocking. I must've left the door unlocked. I quickly made a mental note to get better at locking the door as I watched him come over and plop down on my bed.

I say
I'd sell it cheap to you

He lay on my bed on his side, facing me, making my bed look warmer and cozier than it ever had. Chris was made for moments like this. He was drool-worthy eye candy from his boyish grin to his muscles that rippled through the dark chocolate of his 6'1" frame to his broad shoulders, sexy back and the oh so lickable v-cut of his pelvis.

He wasn't baring too much skin today. Just a wife-beater and sweats, but sometimes he'd walk in straight from practice all sweaty and shirtless with his basketball shorts hanging low on his waist and the only thing that saved me from becoming like every other foolish girl when they saw him was the fact that he'd eventually make his way towards my bed. And gorgeous or not, I didn't want him sweating all over my sheets and making them funky.

Propping his head on one of his large hands, he smiled a dimpled smile at me and went into his usual routine. "What do I have to do to get you to go out with me Friday night?"

That was my cue to roll my eyes. "Ask your girlfriend, Raedel, for permission."

You say
I should
Wrap all the lies I've told in

This only made him smile wider. "You know me and Rae have an open relationship."

"Yeah, and that's why Toni is walking with a limp now."

10 dollar bills and smoke the

He winced at that. For as much as he wanted to be that playa, playa type, under all the bullshit he was the good guy, the one-woman man. "That was a misunderstanding."

"I think Toni understood it all very well after Rae head-butted her."

money doesn’t burn so clean

"So Raedel’s got some anger issues..."

Do you feel something

"Chris, shut up. It's not gonna happen and the only reason you even like to bring it up is because you know it's not gonna happen." I frowned at him. "You get some kind of sick enjoyment off of flirting with girls who you know you don't have a chance with."

Pulling you back in

"So I don't have a chance with you?" He sat up then, the frown overtaking his features making him look suddenly serious now. "With how cold this bed is, I wonder who does have a chance."

Rolling my eyes, I said, "Spreading your legs doesn't make a person less lonely."

Do you see something
You wanna see again

"So you're lonely?"

"Don't you have something better to be doing? You have a girlfriend. You're an athlete. Go dribble a ball. Run a lap. Swim a lap. Juggle your balls, I don't care."

I could be the one

His dimpled grin was back as he sat forward, kicking his legs out in front of him, planting his feet on the floor and slipping them back into his flip-flops. "First admit that you like me always coming over here."

Last year, I'd made the mistake of letting Jules drag me to one of the football games and then the next day, when Chris and I were in class together, I made my second mistake by saying 'good game' to him. And pretty much from then on, he was the lost little puppy that followed me home and I couldn't shake him. Jules used to say that I couldn't get rid of him because I didn't want him gone and he'd agreed, and I'd never hesitate to tell them both to lay off the crack.

"I thought you didn't like liars?"

"And who says I like you, Miss I Don't Have A Chance?"

I smiled. It was hard to look at him for long and not smile, but I always gave it a good try. "So once you're rejected you just give up?"

"Are you asking me not to?"

I could make it up to you

He'd leaned in a little more to say that. My bed wasn't that far from the desk, which was close enough that he was brushing up against the side of it now.

I did the safest thing and just turned back to my computer. Back to the white screen and the black cursor that was blinking from where I'd left off at. My name. It was a ten page paper on two books, one of which I'd read half-way through, the other I'd read the title. It was due on Friday. Today was Thursday.

Take me back, I’m the lonely boy who

I could feel him still watching me, but I was trying to ignore it. It was a different kind of staring contest. I could only win if I managed to not look over at him. Two minutes later, the white screen was still too empty, the black cursor was blinking at the bottom of the paper. But the page was still blank. I'd only hit enter until I'd gotten to the bottom of the page, pretending that doing this was going to connect some dots in my head. Maybe if I'd read more then there could be some dots to connect.

I lost when I glared at him and he just smiled, rolling over onto his back, laying down, making sure to be shoeless before he'd done so. I'd already screamed at him about that before and he was a quick learner. Staring at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, he was silent for awhile. So I clanked on the keyboard to keep us afloat in the silence. Then after awhile he said, "Who were you talking to before on the phone?"

I opened my mouth to spill the whole my best friend hooked up with Justin Timberlake story, but I didn't feel like having to show the pictures as proof when he inevitably didn't believe a word of it and somehow the thought of getting lectured about how I was being a good for nothing friend cause I just couldn't let it go and be happy for her, somehow that just wasn't very appealing to me.

Instead, I said the next best thing to the truth, "One of Dionne Warwick's psychic friends."

Rolling onto his side to watched me again for a moment, before he said, "And what cosmic wisdom did dey b'stow 'pon ya, sista girl?"

"Always remember to lock your door. You never know what whack ass Jamaican accent producing freak might walk through it when you're not looking."

Who loves you
________________________________
This chapter featured: Black Lab – Lonely Boy

Chapter Four: Staying There Gets Pathetic

"Justin!"

I snapped my head up from where I'd been staring at my feet. I hadn't even realized I'd been doing that until that moment.

"What?" I said, glancing up and finding Frankie Daphne "Daffy" Flores standing a few feet away from me.

"Do you see anything wrong with this picture?"

Frankie, or Daffy as I liked to call her even though she hated it, especially since she hated it, was nowhere near as delicate as her last name might lead you to believe. FYI, Flores means flowers, which is kinda ironic since she's allergic to them. Breaks out into these awful hives, has to get rushed to the emergency room, it's just not a good look for her.

Frankie's a punch first, ask questions later type of girl. I can't tell you the number of times she's gotten me in trouble when we were growing up. I was always the cautious, are you sure we should be doing this one, while she'd just laugh at me, tell me to stop being a little pussy and drag me along towards something that I'd always be hoping wouldn't end with the two of us behind bars.

And usually when a person is so tough all the time, it's because they're trying to protect their little gooey marshmallow center. Frankie doesn't really have one. The only soft spot she has really is for me. Took me a while to figure that out, but once I did it definitely made things more interesting. Not that I would take advantage of Daffy, I mean, I love the girl. We grew up together. We're good friends.

But soft spot for me, good friends, childhood memories or not, when it comes to dancing, Frankie is all business and right now I was the flaw in her routine.

"Perhaps," I started, avoiding her glare. I've been told I give a pretty mean glare at times, but I'm sure whatever look I give can't hold a candle against the way Frankie is staring at me now.

And if it had been anyone else asking me this, I might have allowed myself to get pissy in reply. But this wasn't anyone else, this was Frankie and she was the queen of pissy. So instead, I just looked around the room, only to find the rest of the dancers on the other side of the stage, leaving me alone on this side save Frankie who was impatiently awaiting my answer. "I wasn't exactly paying attention."

This wasn't the first day of rehearsals. This wasn't even the first time that she'd had to stop everything and come over to me like this. I was distracted. Being dumped on your ass after finding out that woman you'd been in love with for the last four years or so had cheated on you and was at one point potentially carrying your child but had not thought it necessary to mention this until less than a week ago, well I guess that can make a man's mind wander to things beyond learning his dance routines.

"Perhaps not." She sighed before adding, "And perhaps this isn't the first time it's happened."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'm going to get it this time, promise." I said, crossing my heart and just as I was going to complete the gesture, she spoke again.

"Please don't finish that, with the way you're going today, I'd have a dead pop star on my hands because of it. And somehow I don't think the executives, your mom, or the crazy mob that is your fans would appreciate that very much."

When I all could do was manage to give a half-smile, she sighed and said, "Alright, let's take five, people."

"We don't have to." I said, but it was like I'd said nothing because everyone just continued to walk off in different directions, all murmuring over how long this would take to get through. They'd probably already taken bets out on it. "I said, we didn't have to."

There were just two of us now. Frankie said, "Yeah, we did."

*^*^*

It's amazing all the work you can get done when you stop procrastinating. Seriously, I've tried to stop before and it never worked, but this time it stuck. This time I was dead set on redirecting my attention. I figured the daily, sometimes more than that, calls to Julie and obsessing over the Justin thing wasn't exactly the most helpful thing in the world for me or her. Go figure. So in order to ensure the redirection would work, I've stopped calling entirely.

Cold turkey, sucked, but sometimes it's the only option. It had only been a week since I'd last talked to Jules, so it's not like my willpower is praiseworthy or anything, but I'm still proud of myself. And it wasn't just the calls about her brush with greatness that I was trying to get away from, that was just a part of it, just a snag in the yarn of a lot of built up resentment and jealousy I'd picked up throughout my friendship with Jules.

Holding it in had worked for the most part, but you can only hold stuff in for so long. We'd had a few, more than minor explosions due to that and even though I wasn't sure if this new jealous episode was going to be another trigger, I really just didn't want to find out. Julie and I knew too much about each other, so any argument of that level was bound to rip at wounds with salt covered claws--that was just the downside of letting people in. But it was a risk I'd learned was worth taking every now and then, lest I turn out like my dad. And maybe it's just me, but old, bitter and lonely just didn't seem like very compelling adjectives to have attached to yourself.

So I was learning to let go, partly thanks to my random decision to take a psych class as an elective this semester, which had caused me to diagnose everyone I knew with nearly every mental disorder I'd learned about, and partly thanks to Chris. Even though I'd still yet to tell him the full story with the Justin encrusted bits, I'd told him enough that he got it. He'd sat there for a while in silence and when I couldn't take it anymore, he finally just said, "Let it go."

When all I'd done was frown at him, he repeated, "Let it go." I frowned harder then, thinking somehow he'd missed an important part of the story so if I went over it again, slower, maybe he'd get it. But he'd already gotten it, so again he said, "Let. It. Go. Let it go, woman!"

Of course I wouldn't admit that he was right, so instead I told him, "Thanks for nothing. You can leave now."

And of course he didn't just leave. He had to laugh in my face first and when he was done with that and I was still frowning at him, he sighed, the last traces of his nearly constant smile fading away at the edges. "I am going to go now, not because you asked...."

"Told."

"Whatever. I'm going because you know I'm right and me staying here or not staying here doesn't change that. Plus, I can always come back."

I didn't hesitate to fall for the bait. "No, you can't."

He smiled at me, and leaned in towards me. I'd known he'd moved from the chair to sit on the bed with me at one point during the talk, but it wasn't until then that I became so acutely aware of how close he was and how good he smelled and how...oh, god.

I licked my lips and fought not to back down, not to scoot away like I wanted to, while simultaneously fighting not to scoot forward like I wanted to. He'd leaned in so close that I couldn't look at him without it being a strain on the eyes, but this kind of closeness was nothing about looking and everything about feeling, touching.

His lips hovered dangerously close to mine, so close one breath could have drawn either of us in. When he moved, I twitched slightly from the growing anxiety of trying to just hold still. He smiled at this, moving up towards my eyes, which I automatically close. This time he let those full soft lips of his brush my skin, grazing ever so slightly against my eye lids. His nose rubbed against mine for a moment as I was beginning to lose my grip on sanity and was leaning in to switch gears from the Eskimo kiss to one that was more satisfying, when he drew back and just watched me for a moment.

His lips were lingering by my ear as he whispered, "I think I made my point."

I was still working on trying to get my pulse to not feel like it was trying to make the cut it get onto an Olympic Track and Field team. He'd been nearly out the door and I still didn't have my heart rate back at a normal feel, but I couldn't just let him leave. Even if technically he was right and technically he had won, it always felt like if I at least got in the last word, at least then I didn't lose. Petty, nonsensical—that's me.

"Tell Raedel I said hi."

He just smiled and shook his head at me, making sure to close the door behind him. He'd been yelled about that before. And as I said previously, he's a fast learner.

*^*^*

"Was I a...bad..." I glanced up from my wringing hands to look into her brown eyes for a moment. "Was I bad for you when we were..." Waving my hands about I searched for the words that I wanted as if they were hidden in pockets of air. "When you and I were..."

"When I was young and dumb and thought that there was something about you worth falling in love with...?" She said, smiling at me before shoving me playfully when all I'd done in response was sit quietly, lost in my thoughts. "You're not so bad. You're just a guy with options. More options than most guys, so there's more temptation and you're fairly good at avoiding 'em...when you want to."

Her 'when you want to' was the four most bitter words I'd ever heard.

"I know you didn't cheat on me. Even though that's what you told me. I know you didn't do it. I didn't know at the time, but I found that out a few weeks later."

I was gaping like a fish out of water, my mouth just flapping wordlessly in the wind. She wasn't supposed to have figured that out. But then again, I was also supposed to have had the balls to tell her how I was feeling, or rather the growing lack thereof of feelings. And I was trying, honestly I was. I was trying to be the good guy and break it off before I did something stupid and careless and completely ruined any chances of her not hating me after we were no longer a we. But in the middle of trying to tell her, while I was staring into her brown eyes, it just donned on me that I couldn't do it.

I knew that I wasn't in the right mindset to be in a relationship at the time. I knew that the more times I got approached the more likely that one of those times I'd take one of those girls back to a hotel with me. I knew that even though I loved her at the time more than I'd ever loved anyone, I was going to eventually fuck it up. I knew that. But I couldn't just say that. I couldn't just be that open and honest about it. So I lied. Said something quick and easy that I knew would push her away.

"I think..." She sighed, pushing out a long breath of air. "I think sometimes you get confused. About yourself. Who you want to be. Mostly you want to be the man your mama raised you to be. Respectable, faithful, dependable. But every now and then when you feel like the waters have gotten too still, you decide it's time to stir it up and you turn into the guy that tabloids love to write about.

"But that's too easy. Being a slut is easy. So you can't even stick with being easy, cause for some reason you like life when it's hard, when it's complicated, when you're walking a tight rope. If you're just with one woman, or you're just bouncing around...choosing to do one creates routines, so you do whatever. And it's when you get into the whatever mood that you're bad for me...or whoever you're with at the time, because that's when you're so close to not caring at all. And indifference is worse than hate."

"But I'm not..."

"I know." She nodded. "I've been unfortunate enough to be around you enough to find out that you're just an oscillating fan and don't even mean to be, so it depends when the new woman walks into the sway of your life to find out whether or not they get the man to fall in love with, the man to just fall in bed with, or none of the above."

She stared at her kicking legs, which were dangling off the side of the stage where we'd been sitting. She let her hair fall down into her face, covering her expressive eyes for a moment. And for a moment, she just watched me through that curtain of thick hair that she was always dying (it was red today). And for a moment, I saw that old Frankie. The pre-pubescent, awkward Frankie, who stared at her toes more than she looked anywhere else. The one I'd grown up with, living only three houses down from. The one whose window I still crawl into whenever we're both in town. It was the same house she'd grown up in. Her parents had planned on selling it when they'd decided to move down to their dream home in Florida to retire, but Daffy wasn't having any of that and had bought it from them, even though she rarely makes it back to Millington herself.

"So...in other words, you are saying I was a bad boyfriend."

She smiled, a slow upward curl of lips. Placing a hand on my shoulder, she gave it a gentle squeeze and said, "I wouldn't say bad. I could've always done worse than you."

For as cynical as Daffy could be sometimes, she was also a firm believer in fate and destiny and all that crap. So in the fourth grade when all the girls were playing with those paper fortune tellers that they loved to make, and she'd done it several times, each time with it coming up with the same result, that I was the one she was going to marry, she'd resigned herself to that fate and went out to get us matching ring pops.

When I'd used my elementary school wisdom and told her that that's not how it worked, that the man was supposed to get the ring and propose to the woman, we spent the next few hours arguing about what women were supposed to do and what men were supposed to do and whether or not I counted as a man back then or her as a woman. She'd ended the fight then like she always did back then, with a punch and a 'I said, you're wrong.'

Rolling my eyes at her, I said, "Thanks, and you have done worse." I smiled back. "Karl was..."

"...never to be mentioned again." She giggled, shaking her head. "But you know you can't even talk about my bad choices in men, your taste in women is usually questionable."

"I know, when I was dating you...I don't know what the hell I was thinking." I laughed, a second before she popped me upside my head and started laughing right along with me.

"We're joking and all right now, but on the serious tip, if you're serious about being done with Cameron and weren't just looking for an excuse to give up or looking for one for her to use to do the same, I think you need to have an honest moment with yourself and figure out if this is what you really want." She said, all traces of her previous smile and laughter washed away. Licking her lips slowly, she added, "Just because I was willing to make mistakes with you for a second time doesn't mean she will too."

We looked at each other for a long quiet moment. And for a moment I could have sworn that my tough girl Daffy was showing that she had a little gooey marshmallow center to protect just like the rest of us, and I'd been the one to scrape away at it. And just as I was about to fumble with words that could probably do more damage than the damage control that I'd be going for, she blinked, smiled, smacked me on the back of the head as she jumped to her feet in one fluid motion, and said, "Now that I've done my good deed for the day, I can stop pretending like I care. So now you gotta stop your belly-aching, cause I'm about to make you pay for all those earlier screw ups." Then she walked around behind me, bent down and pouted out her lip and waved goodbye to my ass. Literally. Before I could frown and ask, what the hell that was about, she added, "Oh and you might wanna say goodbye to the little thing too, cause I'm 'bout to have you dance it right off." She laughed, slapping it before she skipped away, barking at the others to come back in.

*^*^*

When my cell phone went off, I didn't even bother to check the ID. I was so sure it was Chris calling for the umpteenth time that day. "Chris, you really need to stop acting like you're getting my number confused with those phone sex hotlines. You call me one more time talking crazy and I'ma..."

There was just laughter on the other end of the line. I was about to frown and considering just hanging up, when I recognized the snort filled giggles. "Julie?"

"If you're so tired of talking to that boy, why don't you ever get rid of him?"

"Short of putting a hit out on him, don't you think I tried?"

"No," she said. "You haven't. That's the point. Yeah, sure, you act a little bitchy to him every now and then, but when you think it's him calling you still pick up, when you look out the peephole on your dorm door and see his goofy ass standing outside, you still open it. Or you just leave it unlocked and in he comes."

"You know I don't leave it unlocked for him. That's just a bad habit of mine."

"Yeah, but you're not trying to change it. So he keeps getting to come back."

I was really not in the mood for this. Sighing, I said, "What do you want? Hopefully, this wasn't why you called."

"You go from calling me everyday to no calls for a week and you ask why I called? I was starting to wonder what had happened to you."

"Nothing happened to me. You should know that nothing ever happens to me, good or bad."

Her end of the line suddenly went quiet and I began to wonder if she had hung up on me, tired of me complaining. Just as I was about to ask if she was still there, she spoke again.

"I was wrong. I'm sorry."

What in the hell is she talking about? Frowning, I said, "What?"

"You know." She sighed, as if it was going to be some kind of hassle for her to explain.

"Really, I don't."

"Me and Justin. I was wrong...so, I'm sorry."

My frown was just growing and growing. "Why?"

Pffting, she said, "Because..."

I had to laugh at her well thought out reasoning. "He's not mine."

"In your delusional head he is and as your BFF I was supposed to honor your invisible ties."

I ignored her BFF comment, I'd tried a long time ago to get her to stop speaking like that. And though she was saying less of the oh em gee's and LOL's than she once had been, it was still no stopping it entirely. "No, I should've been happy for you."

"Why? I knew how much you liked him, LOVED him and then I turned around and decided at the last moment to brag about it instead of simply telling you. If I were you, I would've made a special trip across the country just to kick my ass."

Laughing, I said, "That would require me to find it first."

"Justin seemed to have found it alright," was her quick smart ass answer.

When I chose not to respond to that, she said, "Sorry. It's just..." She sighed.

"What?" I said, holding back a sigh of my own. I had a bad feeling this was all leading into the type of conversation that we usually had once a week about how she'd just found the newest love of her life (and the love always came after great sex), which was the reason I'd been avoiding talking to her for the last week or so.

"He's..."

The annoyance was on the tip of my tongue this time. "What?"

"The main reason I wanted you to stop bringing him up is because I was trying to stop thinking about him my damn self."

Got-dammit! See! Do you fucking see?! I just knew it. I just knew this shit was going to happen. Of course you can't just have sex with Justin Timberlake; you have to fall in love with his ass too. And now I've got to try to be the good friend who puts aside her crazed fan feelings, who's not jealous and listens to her bitch and moan about how hard life is post-Timberlovin'.

"You still there?"

"Yeah, I was just looking online for a cheap ticket to Cali to come kick your ass." I said. "Girl, please don't tell me you had sex with him one night and now you think you're head over heels."

"Wouldn't you be?"

Uh-duh!, I thought laughing. But that's beside the point. Me having wild, crazy sex with him and falling in love with him—that's good, that's great, that's goodly great. Her having wild, crazy sex with him and falling in love with him...

"He's just so..." She trailed off, her voice dissolving into semi-erotic moans and groans. "amazing."

That's just what I needed to hear—her going into a recount of their "amazing" sex with relived orgasms. Trying not to encourage that line of conversation, I said, "That's what I've been trying to tell you all these years."

"I get it now. I've got it."

"And now you want to get with him in a more permanent way?"

Say no, say no. Just say no, bitch!

She sighed. "I dunno. I mean, he has someone."

Before I could stop myself, I said, "Hasn't stopped you before."

"Make me wish I didn't tell you all my business." She scoffed.

"And most of the time I wish you wouldn't."

We fell into another trapdoor of silence. I glanced at the clock, then at the door. It had been two whole hours since the last time Chris had pestered me with a visit. New record.

"You know, my mom used to always compare me to you." She said, finally breaking into the mounting silence. "Always telling me how I should be more like you."

An eyebrow raised at this, cause my mother had said the same thing once to me on a Friday night when I'd taken over the family room armed with enough sugar to send me into a diabetic shock and as many old school slasher flicks I could find. Mom and Dad had wanted "alone time" and I had wanted to puke at the thought of what they'd be doing on that couch if I'd been more like Jules and was out somewhere partying.

"And what's more like me?"

"More head in the books, less giggling over boys."

"You make it sound like I was a nerd."

"Hey," She laughed, softly. "I'm only calling it like I see it."

"So what if I enjoyed a good book every now and then."

"And so what if you got straight A's every year, ran track at a varsity level for three years and was also first string violin in orchestra."

"And while I was doing that, you were dating cutie after cutie. Got to go to all those exclusive parties that even if I was invited to, my dad would've never let me go. And the more popular you got..."

"The more excuses you gave as to why we couldn't hang out as much."

I shrugged at this. "Your cool new friends didn't like me."

"How do you know?" She scoffed. She always got hyped up if I as much as implied that her friends were snobs. Go figure. "You never were around them for more than a minute or two."

"It doesn't take hours to know that you're not wanted."

"But I wanted you there."

Pushing out a long breath of air, I said, "We've had this argument before."

"It's not like after high school everything changed though. You do the same thing in college."

"Just because we're friends doesn't mean all your friends are going to be my friends or vice versa."

Silence filled the line again and I began to wonder if switching the topic back to her supposed new love of a certain Prince of Pop would be less annoying to me than this.

"I think," she started again. "I think your problem is that you like not fitting in completely. So you find it hard to be around people who do." She paused for a moment, and knew in that hesitation that a detailed account of her and Justin's fuckfest would have easily been the better way to go. "And you weren't always like this; it didn't start happening until after..." She trailed off; she always trailed off at that point when she was close to bringing up my mother.

So I helped her out. My voice completely deadpanned, I said, "After my mom died."

"Yeah."

I glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, before staring out the window. Birds were chirping. People were walking to and fro laughing and chatting and making plans for the next time they'll get alcohol poisoning via the next keg party they'd happily attend. And me, I got to talk about my dead mother. I said, "It's hard to be all sunshine and roses, when you feel like your heart's been ripped up."

"That's when you need a best friend the most. I could've..."

"You couldn't have done anything more than what you did. You didn't understand and the only way to understand is obviously something I wouldn't want to happen to you."

She went quiet again and I rolled my eyes at the silence.

"I'm really sorry about those earrings."

"I've told you a million times to stop apologizing. I'm trying to let the past be the past."

"So you've really gotten over that?"

You don't get over it. You fall down and stay there, until staying there gets pathetic. Then you hang around for a bit more and then you begin to pull yourself up and try to become someone other than the one who's so short-sighted that they can't see past the past. Try to become the person you keep claiming to be. The one who forgives and forgets. Or at least genuinely forgives and lets it go.

So I'm letting go.

"Not quite. More like trying to take a running leap at it, whether I get over it or not, I'm not sure, but the point is I'm trying now. Really and truly this time."

My mother and I was never buddy, buddy friends. We didn't giggle or smoke a joint together. I didn't tell her all my secrets. Sometimes I didn't even like being around her very much. But we were close, as close as a mother and daughter can get without becoming friends. And even though I didn't run and tell her everything, I told her a helluva lot more than most teenage girls would tell their mothers.

And when she passed away, it was the most surreal thing. I didn't even cry. Not once. Still haven't cried. My dad stuck me in years of counseling because of it. Death is a hard thing to grasp. Didn't matter that I wasn't five and didn't need to be told that my mother had gone on to a better place. Or that she was an angel watching over me now.

I knew my mother and she was no angel. And even dying in car crash, after being hit by a drunk driver wasn't going to change that.

I was a freshly turned seventeen and I knew that people died and knew that death was a permanent thing. But there's something about your lively, always laughing or yelling mother being suddenly silenced and shoved away into a wooden box that's hard to wrap your mind around and I don't care what age you are when it happens.

When it happened, I was spending the night over at Jules' house. While the reason I was breathing was taking her last breath, I was arguing over whether or not it was possible for a guy to be hotter than Brad Pitt. When I got home later that weekend, my father didn't even tell me what had happened. He'd shut down. I'd had to find out from a neighbor who thought I already knew and wanted to send her condolences for our lost.

As I listened to the second or third hand version that Mrs. Yagger had heard, I didn't cry. When one of my aunts finally told me the real version, I didn't cry. When I stared into the open casket, I didn't cry. When I sat in the pews and listened to my father sobbing, I was a rock. I was cold. I didn't cry.

When Jules about a month later did what she always did, borrow something of mine, but of course without asking for permission, I didn't even notice the earrings were gone at first. I didn't look in my jewelry box every day. I wasn't all that into jewelry, diamonds weren't a best or even good friend of mine; we were acquaintances at best and Julie was just doing what she always did, taking my stuff as if it was hers.

It pissed me off and she knew it, but that had never stopped her before and these earrings were no different, even her losing them was no surprise. The problem was they were my mother's earrings and the only thing I had left from her other than a few pictures. My mother hadn't liked getting her picture taken that much. And now, thanks to one Julie Drules, I had only pictures and memories.

It wasn't like Julie knew that it was my mother's earrings. I hadn't told her much about that part of my life. Even best friends aren't privy to every corner of your life and this was one that I only went to when things had gotten beyond bad and I always went alone. Sometimes just knowing I had it around was good enough, but now I didn't even have that. Julie had apologized so many times after finding out that those weren't just any ol' pair of earrings to me that it had gotten to the point that I'd nearly banned her from saying the word sorry around me.

And even then, I waited for the tears. I waited. I just stood there in the middle of my room and waited to fall apart. Even then I couldn't cry. Though according to my former shrink, that should be phrased as wouldn't cry, but I swear to the God that must not like me, that I tried. On that day, I honestly tried.

It took my shrink another two years to figure out what I already knew, that I wasn't benefiting from the hour long weekly interrogations. So eventually, he ended them, concluding that I was only going to deal with this when I was ready to.

Thanks Dr. Hensley, glad the money that had been saved for my college education went towards that insight.

"You know if I didn't have such a high tolerance for headaches, I would've ditched your ass a long time ago."

Jules giggled herself into a snort-fest. I laughed too for a moment, before re-directing the conversation towards the light and fluffy. And I knew that she'd know I was doing it on purpose so I wouldn't have to talk about everything I'd been trying not to even think about for years now, but I also knew that she'd back off the subject for now.

She'd learned a long time ago that pushing me to talk never wound up in heart to hearts. If you backed me into a corner, at least figuratively so, I only had one reaction. Fight my way out.

*^*^*

She tried to kill me.

I've never felt so sore in my life. Frankie wasn't joking when she said she was gonna have me dancing my ass off. And the thing that really bugged me about it was that while the rest of us were half dead after rehearsal, her ass was still smiling and bopping around like it was nothing.

It's a good thing I'd still managed to limp my ass over to my car and drive home. Just can't wait to come home every day now since Cameron's moved out.

If that didn't translate as sarcasm, let me assure you it was. I mean, it's my house, but somehow without her it just doesn't much feel like my home anymore. You know what I mean? It's like a chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sittin' there; but a chair is not a house and a house is not a home, when there's no one there to hold you tight. And no one there that you can kiss goodnight.

Whoa...oh...oh...oh...oh...oh...oh...

Luther knew what I'm feeling. It's easier (cause it's not easy) to forget that we're not together anymore when I'm out and about, running around, but once I'm home and I get a moment to just sit...

"A room is a still a room, even when there's nothin' there but gloom
But aaaaa room is not a house and a house is not a home
When the two of us are far apart
Aaand one of us haaas a bro-ken heart."

She lied, she cheated, she potentially miscarried my baby. So her dumping me, or taking a break from me, whatever the hell she called it shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did. I mean, yeah, I know I cheated too, but I came clean. I didn't wait years after the fact to be like, oh, by the way, I fucked around on you awhile back, might have been knocked up with your child, but lost it, so it doesn't matter and see there's not much to get, I'm an asshole too, hehe.

A woman like that is supposed to produce Cry Me A River, What Goes Around tracks, not have me pining away, wondering where the hell she is and who's she with. I was getting too caught up in emotions, I needed to focus on the facts. And the fact is, she's not someone to be missed. I'm not supposed to be feeling like I need to come up with a plan to get her back. Fuck, when I had her, I was wondering if I even still wanted to be with her, and now...

"Now and then... I call your name
And suddenly your face... appears
But it's just a cra-zy game
When it ends, it ends in tears."

I just wanted to call her. To hear her voice on the other end of line. To tell her I miss her and then proceed to tell her to go fuck herself in as many creatively explicit ways as possible. But thanks to her little confession, I was the aggrieved now. And the aggrieved was suppose to save face as much as possible. The aggrieved didn't call first. The aggrieved didn't miss the aggriever. And most certainly, the aggrieved didn't go home and sing into a swiffer that was laying around, like it was my singer version of the end of every Dancelife episode, when they'd do a solo dance to dance away their thirty-minute packaged frustrations.

"Pretty little darling, have a heart, yeah baby
and don't let one mistake keep us apart
I was wrong and I know it, but forgive me honey cause...
I'm not meant to live alone, oh, n-n-nooo, turn this house into a home
When I climb the stairs and turn the key
Oh, please be there, sayin' that you're still in love
you're sho' in love with meeee, yeah..." I pulled my voice down as low as it would go.

Ohh....I'm not meant toooo live alone, turn this house into a home
When... I climb the stairs, reach out and turn the key
Oh, baby, please be there, still in love
I said still...in...oooh love."

Please be still in love…with me, yeah..."

Seemingly out of nowhere, the phone was in my hand now. I just stared at it for a long moment. Then the punk ass in me got the better of me and one by one, I began punching in the digits. I hesitated on the last one for a few breathes, before punching that in and pushing send.

"Are you gonna be in love with me?
I want you and need to be, yeah
Still in love with me."

It was ringing. Over and over again.

"Say you're gonna be in love with me
It's drivin' me crazy to think that my baby..."

Putting the phone down, I hit speaker phone and just backed away from it.

"...wouldn't be, my baby wouldn't be, my ba-ba-baby wouldn't be
Still in love with me."

It rang one more time, then her voicemail clicked on. I hung up.

"Are you gonna be, say you're gonna be..."

Before I could stop myself, I was calling back. Just to hear her damn message again. She hadn't changed it yet. It was the same corny ass one we'd done together.

"Still in love with me, yeah...
With me, oh...oh...oh...oh...oh...
Still in love with me," Pushing my voice down into those deep notes, I pulled and stretched it right back up to higher ones. "Yeah...yeah..."

I don't know how I'd wound up on my knees on the floor. Must've gotten too swept away in the song—good music does that to you. And of course when I'm really caught up in singing, trying to hit all those notes like Luther, suddenly I hear a slow clap that quickly picks up. Turning around, I see Trace first. Who's doing a horrible job of not laughing at me and before I can get my first few curses out at him as way of a greeting, I see her.
___________________________________
FYI: the song in this chapter, in case you didn't know it (and shame on you if you didn't), is Luther Vandross "A House Is Not A Home." I wonder what Justin would really sound like singing this. Things that make you go, 'hmm.'

Chapter Five: That's What Friends Are For

"I'm not skipping."

Today had not turned out as planned. As planned, I'd woken up and made a decision:

Spring break, I'm making my move. Spring break, I'm going to New York.

Spring break, I will be all the stalker I can be!

Justin's new restaurant Southern Hospitality is opening two days into my break, how perfect is that? It's des-ti-freaking-ny.

Not everyone thought that was such a good idea though.

Smacking on her gum, Jules said, "What are you going to do, exactly?"

"Do you need a definition for stalking?"

"I'm just saying," She said, thankfully spitting the gum out. Or swallowing it, or whatever she did, I don't care, all that matters is she's not popping that gum in my ear. "Do you really want to be that girl? That crazy stalker fan girl?"

Rolling my eyes, I sighed. She didn't get it. Of course she didn't get it. How could she? She was never a fan and plus she'd met him, among other unmentionables. I said, "What the hell else am I gonna do? It's not like I have a best friend, who's met with him and is apparently semi-working with him, who could help me out..."

"I'm not really working for him. I'm..."

"You're helping with William Rast, yeah, mostly you're working with Trace. But still you're basically working with Justin. And you're basically not going to help me, so basically I'm going to do what I have to do."

Her end of the line was silent for several moments. Then she sighed, and almost begrudgingly added, "I'm going to be in New York with them."

"And?"

"And...I could help you. Introduce you to him, so you can be as normal as is possible for you to be."

The obsessed teeny in me was squealing and twirling and doing a lot of things that require way more energy than I have most of the time. The more realistic, some people called cynic, part of me wasn't about to get her hopes up just yet. "Jules don't play with me."

"I'm not joking. I'll help you. It's not like I have some kind of developing crush on him and selfishly would want to keep him all to myself or anything stupid like that."

"Right, Julie, whatever." The teeny in me didn't care for her sarcasm, the cynic just laughed and didn't care. Jealousy wondered if Justin liked her back, Logic knew it didn't matter. Well at least not yet, and if it did, it still didn't matter cause that had nothing to do with the situation at hand, which did matter. A lot. "All I know is if you don't come through on this for me, I will hunt you down and..."

"Alright, alright, enough with the death threats. I get it, this is a big deal for you."

Once this plan had been set into motion, even if only on a cognitive level, to say I was excited was an understatement. I was overjoyed, ecstatic, happy beyond measure. Then there was a knock on my door.

Not that I should have been surprised to find Chris standing on the other side, but when I saw Chris with a picnic basket and goofy infectious grin on his face I still wasn't getting any closer to surprised, but me and suspicion were having some words.

"But we're in a meadow. It's what you do in a meadow."

I don't know how he did it. One minute he was standing there, grinning at me foolishly, the next minute I'm laughing in his face after he proposed this ridiculous day date of going out into some meadow and having a picnic. Then I'm here, in the middle of nowhere, being asked to skip through said meadow with a guy who is not my boyfriend, with a guy who is barely even my friend, a guy who is dating a woman known for kicking ass and taking names.

"I don't skip."

He didn't bother to argue this point, instead he just watched me for a moment, the same smile he greeted me with still rosy-ing up his face. Then he took my hand and once again, I found myself one minute being myself and the next minute, skipping through a wild flower filled meadow, hand in hand with him.

Then we stopped. Or he stopped and I stopped because of that and then I saw the blanket, the champagne, the red rose petals dropped meticulously across the blanket and trailing off into the surrounding grass. Chris, still holding my hand, gave it a little squeeze to nudge me back into speech, but all I did was look at him for a moment. Studied the smile on his face, the happy glint to his eyes; all I did was look back at the blanket, the champagne and the red rose petals.

Then I said, "You're confused aren't you?"

His smile flattered, I could actually see the moment when his confidence began to deflate. He took a moment to look around, as if checking to see if something was missing. Gorgeous idyllic something out of Sound Of Music scenery, check. The champagne, classy booze to hopefully get me giggly and my inhibitions lowered, check. The mandatory for every romantic gesture red rose petals, check, check, check. "I wasn't until right now."

"You must think I'm Raedel." I said, dropping his hand.

"No, I'm pretty sure you're you and I'm me and she's she. And we're we."

I shook my head at this, because if he understood anything, then this wouldn't be happening. "We're not we. We're not us. We're not anything. We're people, people with no relationship. People who don't even really like each other."

"I like you just fine." He said with half a smile.

"Okay, we're people that only one of us likes the other. So what is this?"

"It's food." He said, with a determined edge to his voice, as he began to open the basket of food and dish out our meal, which he'd made sure several times to tell me on the way over here that he'd made himself. "But with the way you've been eating lately, I'm sure you've forgotten what that is."

I sat down on an edge of the blanket, cause I wasn't sure what else to do partly and mostly because I could tell even if I tried to continue to ruin this, he wasn't having it. "I'm trying to get in a shape other than round this summer."

"You're not fat." He said so adamantly, as if he was the one being insulted.

"But I'm not fit either."

"Can't argue with that." He smiled, reaching over and poking me in the stomach like I was the Pillsbury dough-girl.

I sighed and tried to suck my stomach in for as long as I could hold it. Giving up, I said, "Well, we can't all be all-star athletes."

Licking his lips, he gave me a long considering look, before handing over my plate of chocolate chip cookies and PB&J. I might have laughed and joked about his culinary skills if it wasn't for the fact that I was still mad about his earlier comment.

With a soft sigh, he said, "I didn't mean it like that."

"Doesn't matter, like this or like that, you meant it."

"But you just said..." Sighing again, he shook his head. "I should've known better than to try to get anywhere in that conversation." We ate in silence for a moment before he said, "For what it's worth, I think your shape is nice as is and dieting and jogging isn't necessary."

If it was any other guy saying that, I might have smiled at that. If it was any other guy saying that, it might not have meant as much, but I couldn't show that--just being here was bad enough, liking it was a whole ‘nother level of trouble. Fighting the smile, I rolled my eyes at him. "Fool, I don't jog. Why would you think that?"

"Just the other day, I saw you and started to come over to say hi and then I saw that you were jogging."

Laughing, I said, "I saw you first and was running in the other direction. If you weren't falling for your own hype, you'd know when someone's avoiding you."

That was not a comment meant for serious contemplation, but I'm sure he would argue the same for his 'can't argue with that' poke in the stomach. Nevertheless, his face was wrapped up in a lot of unnecessary thoughts.

"Is that why you do it?" He started, a small frown working its way across his brow. "You keep holding me at arm's length because you don't like that I'm popular."

Even if he was determined in making this a serious issue, I refused to go along. "You're more than popular. You're a damn entity."

"I would say thank you, but that doesn't sound like a compliment."

"It's not." I smiled.

He didn't smile back or laugh or anything. He just went quiet, which was something I'd never seen him do. Whole minutes went by without a word out of him. It was the strangest thing. Then I was done eating and couldn't use that as a distraction to keep from drowning in the silence.

When I'd floundered around in the awkwardness enough, I said, "So you're not going to tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

Rolling my eyes at this, I said, "Why am I here? Where's Rae?"

"Honestly, I don't care where she is."

I just frowned at him in response. I was beginning to wonder if this whole extravaganza was just in response to one of his and Raedel's many fights. Rae pissed him off, he ran off to another girl. That other girl had just never been me.

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I care about her, but sometimes I just get kinda tired of it. Being the boyfriend. I just want..."

"To skip through meadows and have hidden away picnics with another girl."

His face broke out into a grin. "You're not just another girl."

"Uh-huh." I said, not able to help the smile that spread across my face. To make up for it, I shoved him. "Now tell me the real reason."

"She went on a date."

"With someone else?"

"No, with me and I decided ignoring her would teach her a lesson about that."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm allowed one dumb question a day, compared to your hourlies." I smirked. "So she went on a date and finally explored the openness of y'alls open relationship and now..."

"It wasn't just the date. It was the guy. She knows I hate him and he hates me."

"With the way you got her fighting every girl off you on and off-campus, can you blame her?"

His frown was strong and immediate. "Whose side are you on?"

"The side that doesn't get me in the middle of this."

"Too late."

He turned at the sound of the voice. I didn't, because I didn't need to see her to know it was Rae.

Today was definitely not going as planned.

*^*^*

"What are you doing here?"

Trace had already laughed his way into my kitchen and his head was currently buried in my fridge. He yelled something about where's the rest of the salami, as if he paid for something in there and had a right to be mad if it's eaten without his consent.

"I live here."

Wish enough, wise man'll tell you a lie.

Cameron was nice enough to ignore the fact she'd walked in on my not so manly, crying through song moment. And managed to explain away her just randomly appearing in my house by shoving the keys I'd given her into my face.

Window broke, torn up screens.

"No, you don't."

Rolling her eyes, she said, "It's an expression."

"No, it's not." I searched her face for a sign of where this was going. Was she going to say how horrible her life undoubtedly was like now without me in it? Was she just coming to pick up a few things she'd left behind, from when she'd been slowly and not very subtlety leaving things at my place and staking claim to her spot in my life?

Who'd have thought that you'd dream
Of a single tragic scene.

Her make-up was perfect. Her eyes looked like they didn't even know what tears were. Her face was carefully blank and filled with a steady patience, as if she just knew I was going to give her a hard time. And maybe she was right, maybe I was going to do just that. But it's not like she didn't deserve it.

Sighing, I said, "So what are you doing here?"

"I need a favor."

Trace was strolling back into the room now, his plate filled with my food. I glanced at him for a hint as to what the hell was going on, and to ask silently if he was in on it and then of course to immediately follow that with the promise of violence if this was going to turn out bad for me. But he was clueless, and just shrugged, going back to stuffing his face.

Smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt, Cameron said plainly, "We can't break up. At least not publicly. I don't want my new movie promotion to be all about the break up."

I just stared at her for a moment, wondering if she'd forgotten some key elements to the new conditions of our no-longer-a-relationship relationship. "You. Broke. Up. With. Me."

I just wanna sing a song with you.
I just want to take it off of you.

"I know," She said, the patience in her face strong and steady. "And I want to un-break up for a little while. We don't have to do anything, except be together in a for titles only way."

"Un-break my heart, say you'll love me again..."

I fixed Trace with a shut-the-hell-up glare. Then went back to squinting at Cameron, as if a narrowed view on her would bring her back into focus.

Cause blue eyes
You are all that I need.

"So that's the only reason you're here right now?"

A slight smile crept onto the left side of her face before she shook it away, her eyes looking into mine and saying, silly boy, of course that's it. What else could there be?

I sighed. What else could there be?

Cause blue eyes
You're the sweet to my mean.

She nodded and said, "Yeah."

Apparently the glare wasn't nearly enough.

"Undo the hurt that you caused when you walked out the door. And walked out my life...un-cry these tears..." He sang, his voice raising and cracking on an impossibly high note.

Cameron was waiting for an answer, staring unblinkingly at me. Trace was singing with a mouth full of half-chewed food, as if this moment just needed a soundtrack and it was his job to provide one.

I'd had enough and got up without another word and started to walk away.

"So what do you say?"

"Goodnight."

Once I was safely locked within the confines of my bedroom, which was shrouded in darkness since I'd decided sunlight would only bring out the pretty dark bags under my eyes, it wasn't long before the song arrived outside my door.

"I've cried so many niiights, un-break my... Un-break my heart, sweet darling! Without you, I just can't go ooooooon."

Then there was another voice that suddenly broke out into song. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, I couldn't place it. "Say that you love me. Say that you love me."

"Ooooooooon..."

Throwing my door open, which sounds entirely too dramatic and Incredible Hulk like--as if I could rip the thing off its hinges--I was faced with Trace, who was still holding out a God awful sounding note and Frankie, who immediately upon looking at my face burst into a fit of laughter.

Fess it up, dot on the palm of your hand.

This is what friends are for.

I can help you to stand

To this, I let the door speak for me, as I slammed it right back in their good for nothing faces.

"C'mon, J, even you gotta admit that was pretty funny. We harmonized and everything for you. And your face was..." Trace said, his voice dissolving into laughter.

Saved it up for this dance.

Sobering slightly, Frankie said, "We're sorry, we shouldn't have done it. But it was...you know how we all wish life was like a musical and that was just too perfect of a moment not to go there."

Sighing, I got up and opened the door again and just stared at her for a moment. Seeing as how the prolonged sight of me was wearing down her previous amusement into concern, I said, "What are you doing here?"

"I live here."

If she wanted to mock me, she was going to have to do it while staring at my closed door. Or at least that was the plan, but when I went to close the door, her foot was already there.

"No, really, I need a place to stay."

"Fine." I said, trying to close the door again, but again her foot was there just in time to block it.

"Don't you want to know why?"

Tell me all the things you can.

"Obviously, I don't care."

"Justin, I love you, too. I came here for you."

I almost smiled at that. Almost. "Grey's Anatomy references are not going to work in your favor this time."

"What she's trying to say is, we're here for you, man." Trace said, clapping a hand to my shoulder, reassuringly.

I just wanna sing a song with you.

And again the singing began. Frankie leading the way this time. "I'll be there for you..."

"When the rain starts to fall..."

"I'll be there for you..."

"Cause you're there for me toooo!"

I just wanna be the one that's true.
Cause blue eyes

Shaking my head at them, I went to close the door again. Her foot was still in the way and the urge to slam it on her foot was growing. Misery didn't always want company. Sometimes it wanted to curl up into the fetal position, figure out what the hell had happened exactly and then it could be free to be miserable in public.

You're the secret I keep.
Cause blue eyes

I said,"What do you want?"

"You to listen to my I Told You So speech, because it's really good."

Trace just nodded.

"Cameron is an old ho-bag, you don't mope over the old ho-bag. I told you when you met her that she was a skeezer, so let's go get drunk."

Trace just nodded.

"Goodnight." I said, succeeding in closing the door this time.

*^*^*

"It's not what it looks like. It's not what you think."

I'd put as much distance between myself and Raedel as I thought I could without it seeming like I was going to definitely choose flight over fight. I mean, don't get me wrong, if it came down to it, I was definitely going to choose flight over fight, but part of not letting it get there was appearing like if it does go there I'd stand my ground.

Apparently Raedel had been in situations like this one too many times, so she failed to find the humor in that. Clearing my suddenly dry throat, I said, "Sorry, I just always wanted to say that."

"What are you doing here?" Chris said, actually getting indignant with her, like she was the one in the wrong.

"Would you buy that I was just in the neighborhood?"

"If we weren't in the middle of nowhere, yeah, maybe."

"Okay, well in that case, I followed you."

Maybe she did have some humor about this after all, but with the look on her face and the defensiveness in her stance, it all looked to me like this was just the calm before the storm and I really didn't want to be here when the calculated calm demeanor erupted into something wild and ugly and bald Britney-like. Same difference.

"She followed you. Us. She followed us. Perfectly normal. Can we go now?"

"Oh, no, don't run off on account of little ol' me." She said, smiling and moving toward me.

Oh, god, it was like third grade all over again. Sheila, the giant, charging me and me frozen with fear, just bracing myself and hoping that if I peed my pants it would only be a little bit that I could later play off as spilled juice.

Then there was the hair pulling. Lots and lots of pulling hair. I think, pulling hair was the least of my worries today, but that was the last fight I was in and lord, I hoped if it got that bad this time, that I'd be able to figure out something better to do than pull her hair and pray for a teacher to come and stop it.

"No, no. You must have me confused with someone who wanted to be here in the first place."

That got me two confused looks. I sighed. "This doesn't have to be hard. It's really easy in fact. Me and him aren't anything. You and him are whatever the hell you want to be and I'm not trying to change that. So when I said it wasn't what it looks like, that was actually true."

They both just continued to stare at me, confusion etched into their brows. Apparently, this wasn't how it usually worked for them. "I would just leave, but I'm lost."

Okay, this was getting ridiculously. Neither of them were saying anything. Throwing my hands up into the air, I said, "Seriously, guys, at least point me in the right direction."

"So you really don't..." She said, still frowning at me, as she motioned over to Chris.

"No." I said, shaking my head too, so there could be no confusion.

"Not at all?"

"Not even a little bit."

Chris scoffed at that. "C'mon, there's at least a little bit of something between us."

Shaking my head again, I said, "Not even a little bit."

Rae was all smiles at this. Chris just stared at me, his face shutting down all emotion.

"So..." I said, really wanting to get to that flight part. "like I said, a point in the right direction would be helpful."

"Well in that case, I'll drive you back." Rae said, cheerily. "She's been the best so far. If you just had to cheat on me, I'd pick her." She smiled at Chris as she said that. He didn't say a word back, didn't even look at her, just kept staring at me.

When Raedel finally started walking away, I followed, determinedly keeping my eyes straight ahead.

Eyes straight ahead. Eyes straight ahead. Eyesstraightaheadeyesstraightahead.

Glancing back, I locked eyes with Chris for a heartbeat--one beat, then he immediately looked away, beginning to gather up the remains of romance.

I didn't walk, I skipped out.

Because somebody told me that's what you do in a meadow.

*^*^*

All the lights on and you are alive.

The next day found me laying face up, arms and legs spread out to take over the majority of the bed, leaving no room for anyone else, even if there was someone else. I cracked one eye open, finding the room suspiciously filled with light.

But you can't point the way to your heart.

Buckley's head was resting on the foot of the bed, staring at me. The door was wide open.

So sublime, when the stars are aligned.
But you don't know.

I sat up, getting a tail wag out of Buckley--at least someone around here appreciated the little things I do--before he bounded out the door.

You don't know the greatness you are.

Groggily, and still wiping the sleep out of my eyes, I walked down the stairs, making a beeline for the kitchen.

Cause blue eyes

A cloud of smoke greeted me at the entryway. Chars of things that I could only guess had once been intended to be edible littered the counter space in bowls, plates and skillets. Puddles of a greasy something or other filled in the holes the charred things had left open.

Brennan and Buckley were fighting over something with Frankie in the middle of them, struggling to wrestle it out of their mouths.

You are destiny's scene.

Glancing around the room once more, I fixed my eyes on Frankie again. "What are you doing here?"

Fanning the smoke away from her face she had the nerve to smile at me as she said, "How many times are you going to ask me this?"

"How many times are you going to try to burn my house down and poison my dogs when I'm sleeping?"

"This was supposed to be a nice gesture. I was trying to make us breakfast. Trace thought..."

"I'm going to have to stop you there, cause anything after 'Trace thought' can't be good."

Running into the kitchen with a fire extinguisher, Trace looked around confused for a moment, finding nothing drowning in flames. When he finally noticed me, he too had the nerve to smile at me, before he said, "We were trying to make you something to eat."

"I can see that trying is the operative word." I sighed, seeing that nearly every pot and pan had been used, for only God knows what, because there wasn't a piece of anything worth eating in sight.

"We haven't had the best results."

"Let's just..." I sighed, scratching my head. A big part of me wanted to yell at them the way I should have yelled at Cameron last night and then kick them out, but my misery was ready for a little company. "Go out to eat."

They shared a look between themselves, before they both just stared at me in silence.

"Okay, what now?"

"We just thought you'd enjoy your tortured brooding in a more private setting."

I shrugged. "I'm about to go on tour, might as well get used to faking it."

Cause blue eyes

Frankie sighed loudly, tugging her apron off. "I can't do this." She said and before I could ask what the hell she was talking about, I was already being pulled into a hug by her and given a tight squeeze. Still holding onto me, she said, "Now snap the fuck out of it. When we take cracks at you, don't roll over and take it. We're not Cameron, we actually care about you."

I just wanna be the one.

Groaning, I pushed her away from me. "Stop talking about her."

"What do you want to talk about then?"

"Why I'm going to be forced to live with your overbearing ass."

She smiled at me for a moment, before it began to fade. "Well...it's a long story."

The short version was she'd had yet another knock down drag out bout with her boyfriend and instead of ending in a visit from the police, who had started to know them on a first name basis, it had ended with her getting kicked out.

"Is it too early to start drinking?" Frankie asked.

We were sitting in a booth in the back of I-Hop. I was wearing the classic celebrity hide in the public disguise: sunglasses and a baseball cap. Nobody would ever suspect it was me.

"It's only ten in the morning, but I'm ready for a drink."

"Am I now the only non-depressing person at this table?"

"Pretty much. I hate being single, you're used to it."

"Thanks, Frankie."

"You know what I mean."

"Whatever, you both should be happy to be single. Justin, you're free to sow your wild oats, figure out who you are and who the woman of the moment is before each walk of shame. Frankie...you and Alex made about as much sense together as any decision Britney's made since '04." Trace said, raising his OJ as if to propose a toast. "So you're both free, be happy."

I just wanna sing a song with you.
I just wanna get it on with you.

Slinging back a gulp of her apple juice, Frankie sang dryly. "Don't worry, be happy."

Which only sparked Trace to rousingly sing back. "Hakuna Matata, what a wonderful phrase. Hakuna Matata, ain't no passing craze."

This perked Frankie up, causing her to sing, "It means no worries for the rest of your days. It's a our problem free...philosophy..."

Cause blue eyes
You're the secret I keep.

I glanced around the room, trying to see how many people might be around to see this spectacle. When their voices started to raise, I tried in vain to shush them. But this only made them louder.

Hiding behind my hands, I sank into the booth, as the two of them continued to sing without a care.

"Hakuna...matata...hakuna...matata...hakuna...matata..." They chanted. Trace leaning forward for 'Hakuna' and then Frankie doing the same for 'Matata'

Cause blue eyes

"It means" I was so disappointed in myself for joining in this, but I did love this song. "No worries for the rest of your days."

Smiling, they blended their voices with mine. "It's our problem free...phil-la-so-pheee...hakuna matata."

I just wanna sing a song with you

They may annoy me. They may even make me wonder why I ever befriended them in the first place. But every now and then they reminded me why I loved their non-singing crazy asses in the first place.
______________________________________
This chapter featured: Cary Brothers - Blue Eyes

Chapter Six: You Dropped This

I've locked the door. My formerly double as a double, now double as doubly room for me dorm room is nearly always locked now. And when I hear the knocks on the door, all I have to do is check the time usually and I can know if it's him (Chris, that is) or not. Plus, I told anybody who might come and visit me that they'd have to knock and say their names before I was going to open the door. I was just too lazy to get up and check every time.

I've ignored every single one of his calls.

And even though we have one class together, I'm still not seeing much of him, on account of how he rarely shows up. And when he is there, he sits on one side and I sit on the other and since neither of us usually volunteer answers or further discussions, I don't even have to sit and listen to him talk in class.

Jules said this was stupid. That all I was doing was hurting myself, because Chris would move on, that guys like him are always going to move on. And when I asked her what girls like me always do, she'd said, exactly what you're already doing. Pushing everybody away.

I would've asked her who this 'everybody' was, but that might have only gone to prove her point more. And it was bad enough that I knew she was right without going so far as admitting to her that I knew she was right. Even though she was right, I had given Chris more credit than that. He was way too annoying, way too persistent to just give up that easily. So I locked the door. So I ignored him when he knocked or when he called. So what.

Maybe I act on confused behavior

One and a half weeks. That's all it took. Just one and a half weeks and the knocks stopped. The calls, the texts stopped. The random IMs stopped too. One and a half weeks and that's all it took for him to give up. Even though this was a definite sign that Jules had in fact been right, I nevertheless thought, or hoped stupidly, that his giving up didn't mean he'd moved on. Until a few weeks after that.

"Ay, wait up!"

I was walking to class or a dining hall or the library, I can't remember, but I was going somewhere on campus when I'd heard his voice call out. Over and over. I'd sighed and kept moving, deciding to just continue to ignore him--it had been working brilliantly so far--but after awhile I was tired of ignoring him--he can be pretty damn loud when he wants to--and I was tired of doing this because whatever this was supposed to prove to me about him and us had proved less about him and so much about the stupidity of me. So I stopped, turned around, finding him to be less than five feet behind me and jogging to catch up with one of his big goofy ass smiles plastered across his face. When he was close to me, he slowed his jog to a trot to a walk and said, "I know you heard me sooner than that."

And just as I opened my mouth to answer, a bus hit him.

Maybe waves crash like semi trailer

Okay, that didn't happened. But it sounds better than what actually did happen. Because what actually did happen was exactly what Jules had predicted. It was exactly what anyone with any kind of sense would have known would happen. Because it was actually what happens when you stupidly play hard to get with a guy like that. He'd moved on.

Maybe I'll spend my off time without you
It seems like we need our own space

And instead of my voice saying something, whatever that would have been, a voice not that far ahead of me, to which I had my back to at that point, said, "I did, and what I was doing was called ignoring yo' loud ass."

Chris smiled at the girl, who of course was cute, and having reached her side draped his arm around her shoulder as they walked off together, just like he'd always used to with me. And what did I do?

And all the time I wasted away
I don't feel good unless you stay

Did I call him on the fact that he had to know I was right there? Did I call him on the fact that I was more than a hundred percent sure that the arm over the shoulder bit was added just for my sake? Did I run into traffic and get hit by a bus?

No, that would be crazy. No, instead what I did was exactly what Jules had predicted. It was exactly what anyone with any kind of sense would have known would happen. Because it was exactly what happens when you play hard to get and find yourself playing it alone, because the thing that you'd been hoping wouldn't happen did. He realized you weren't worth the trouble.

And all the times I chased you away

I just stood there, watching them go.

Simply to catch back up with

*^*^*
Your solitude is welcome, welcome
Your attitude is welcome, welcome

Julie was on the other side of the room, making a call. Probably something for the fashion show that was coming up. She was throwing her hands about wildly and screaming into the phone, before turning to scream at one of the lower level interns. I didn't even realize there was a lower level of intern, thought they all came in the same basic gopher flavor. And, who knows, maybe they did and Julie was just making her own rules.

So while Julie and the interns were hopping themselves up on all the caffeine they could get their hands on, I was currently just chilling on the couch (I was calling this my break time, which only served to frustrate anyone who came up to ask me a question, because all I'd say during the fifteen minutes I'd allotted myself was "break time"), watching the whole scene play out with Frankie sitting beside me. She'd been unusually quiet the whole day, I had thought maybe the whole fashion show planning thing was just getting old to her, but when she did decide to speak, boredom wasn't the subject.

"Are you and Julie..." Frankie asked, making a hole with one hand and ramming her other hand's index finger into it.

Tour time had rolled around and I was rolling through the dates with relative ease. No matter the craziness in my personal life, the stage had always been my sanctuary. But at this moment, I wasn't doing anything music or tour related. Right now I was supposed to be focusing on the upcoming William Rast fashion show that would be held in New York just a few days before the grand opening of my new restaurant, Southern Hospitality. With a tour going on and Shrek 3 promos looming in the near future adding these two extras to the list of balls to juggle might have been good enough cause to either curl into the fetal position and wait for it all to be over or to run for the proverbial hills with my tail between my legs. But I couldn't afford to do anything less than pretend that I had it all under control and pray like hell that nobody (or more realistically, a few) noticed when/if/how much I fumbled.

But so far so good, right? Or it had been until Trace had thrown a curve ball in the form of a monkey wrench named one Julie Drules. When I'd first heard that Julie had been recruited to help with the WR fashion show, my first instinct was to try to find a seemingly legitimate excuse as to why this could not happen, but when I couldn't think of anything and even being honest with Trace about it all had only led to belly-aching laughter, I thought I had to go back to the drawing board. That is until we all had our first meeting to discuss the layout of the show and Julie proved to be nothing short of utterly professional. She never did anything that even hinted at the fact that her first encounter with me had led to a walk of shame the following morning or that the second one hadn't gone much better.

So once that fear was out of the way, I'd relaxed around her, assuming that the worst was over.

Frowning at Frankie, I said, "No! What? No. Well, once."

For a long while she just nodded her head like she didn't really need my response to know the answer to that. "Are you dating her or wanting to in the future?"

"No," My frown was growing. "to both."

"Well, maybe you should tell her that."

"What do you mean?"

"I know how you get into your little oblivious world sometimes, but she doesn't. So when you flirt with her the way that you do, it would seem that you like her in more than a buddy pal kinda way. Which you're saying that you don't, right?"

"Right." I nodded earnestly. "But you think she does?"

Frankie rolled eyes, laughed and then immediately started to mimic the way Julie had been acting around me. Things that had seemed so regular before now had a different flavor to it. Smiles weren't just smiles. Eye contact wasn't just eye contact. Leaning in to better see or show a sketch wasn't just leaning in. And yet I had missed each and every clue.

With my frown still ever-present, I said, "But we talked about this. As soon as I realized that Trace had hired her as extra help for the upcoming fashion show, I cleared the air with her on all that. So something like this wouldn't happen."

"Well, something like this did happen. Now what, Romeo?"

"This isn't my fault."

"I didn't say it was."

"But you're looking at me like it was. And it wasn't."

Then she mimicked the way I was around Julie and suddenly my smiles weren't just smiles. My eye contact wasn't just eye contact, my laugh wasn't just a laugh. And had I really been licking my lips that much?

"Of course, it wasn't." Frankie said, with a roll of the eyes.

But still, it wasn't my fault. Sometimes those things just sort of happened. A little flirtation here and there was a part of the whole I'm a charming entertainer, ain't I? get-up. It used to always have to be an intentional thing, but after awhile of having to use it so much in videos, interviews, on and off sets, the flirtation had almost become like a second nature for me. And usually even if I hadn't meant to do it, it wasn't much of problem.

All you see is red lights behind me

But Jules wasn't just some girl I was temporarily working with that I'd happened to smile at a little too much. I'd already crossed lines with her. Lines that I'd made clear that I wasn't going to cross again, especially now that she was essentially an employee of mine, even though she spent most of of her time working with Trace. Now it appeared like all my breath had been wasted in that effort, because with every lip lick and unnecessary finger graze, I'd given her permission to ignore everything I'd said before.

Maybe this isn't what you wanted baby

So still it would seem like it was all my fault. But it wasn't. Not really. Not completely.

Who knows what I might have done instead if it I hadn't agreed to break up sex with Cameron. Though I did have a hard time labeling it as break sex, given the fact that we were still doing that pretend not to be broken up thing that she'd insisted on. So somewhere in agreeing to this pretend relationship, I'd also agreed to pretend sex. Not to say that it wasn't really happening, because it definitely was, but it felt more surreal than actually real to me now.

I don't blame you falling backwards
No one's ever quite confused you this way

Now no sooner than she'd stopped twitching from an orgasm, barely catching her breath and without wiping the sweat away or taking the time for a shower, Cameron would jump to her feet and immediately start to get dressed as if the room was on fire. And every time I watched her do this, the little more real the break up became and little more I started to feel broken up about it all. And a lot more I started to feel like the bitch in this so-called relationship. Even if it was only a pretend relationship, I still was left feeling like a very real pussy-whipped bitch.

And all this time we wasted away
We don't feel good unless were gray, gray

And even knowing this, feeling this way didn't change anything, in fact the knowledge of this seemed to only fuel me in the wrong direction. The more casual she was, the more she didn't care, the more and more I did, which turns me into the typical don't-know-what-you've-got-until-it's-gone jerk. And being pussy-whipped was one thing, but being some kind of stereotypical meat-head dumbass on top of that was unacceptable. And isn't the first step toward healing, recognizing that you've got a problem? Well, I'd recognized the problem fairly early on and yet the more she treated me like I was just a piece of ass, the more attractive she was getting to me, when not that long ago, I'd started to nitpick at everything about her. From the way she held her fork to the way her nose moved sometimes when she talked.

Took me a few more times of playing the fool before I found my balls again and gathering them up, literally--I actually held them as I said to her, "This isn't going to happen anymore. So whatever you've done to give your pussy that voodoo magic--kudos--but it isn't going down like that anymore, because I'm a man dammit. And a man's gotta have balls."

That wasn't worded exactly the way I would have liked, but it got the basic point across. After that little speech, I'd been the one to hop back into my clothes and run out of the room like it was on fire. The sound of her laughter following me out the door definitely didn't make me feel as victorious as I could have, but whatever, I'd done it. I'd reclaimed my balls. I wasn't pussy-whipped anymore.

I had felt good about that, great about that at first. Until some days went by and I realized that couple or not, Cameron had been the only sex I'd been getting so by cutting her off, I'd cut myself off. But even this I thought might not be so bad, after all, I didn't need sex. I could do without it for awhile. I'd just throw myself headlong into the long list of things I had to do as Justin Timberlake: World-class entertainer. Sounded simple enough.

And all the times I chased you away

For a while there it had seemed like it was working. I was juggling all the professional balls in my life rather seamless. Or so I'd thought.

But apparently my dick was a sneaky little bastard and had gone recruiting a Cameron replacement without my knowing.

I was still sitting on the couch with Frankie. Jules was still across the room, hammering out some of the fine details for the fashion show. I watched her for a moment. Watched her yelling at someone who'd been unfortunate enough to be placed below her and have the nerve not the follow her orders precisely. She was in mid-rant when she accidentally made eye contact with me. And for the few seconds our eyes were locked on one another, her anger slipped away and a smile took its place. She waved at me, still grinning.

I smiled and waved back, then she turned and went back to her screaming and my smile immediately fell. Those were hints that even I couldn't miss. If my dick was a villain, it would probably be curling its long black mustache and laughing evilly right about now, since all of its plans were working out so nicely.

I groaned, sinking into the couch. "Goddamn it."

I simply don't feel good

*^*^*
Your solitude is welcome, welcome
Your attitude is welcome, welcome

The corridor had seemed to stretch on until forever, that is until I'd reached the door. Then it suddenly seemed to just end abruptly. I stared at the door number for a moment, trying to remember if it was the right one. But I knew it was the right one. I'd written it down and repeated it to myself the entire walk here. So I knew this was it. This 334 room was his room. There was no doubt about it.

I turned and walked right back the way that I'd came. This retreat only lasted for about ten steps before I forced myself to go back. Then I was staring at the door with my fist raised to knock, but instead I round up turning around and yeah, you guessed it, walking back the way that I'd came. This time I had gotten completely out of the building, before I was finally able to stop myself and force myself to just go through with it this time. And that meant going back inside and going back up all those evil flights of stairs and that meant going back to room 334 and forcing myself to knock.

And I did just that. Well, except for the knocking part, because I'd gotten back to the door had raised my fist as I had earlier and this time I was intent on knocking--I swear I would have done it, except--the door opened before I could knock with Javier standing on the other side.

Chris's roommate, Javier. He smiled at me. We hadn't met but once. And I hadn't been in the best of moods at the time, but Javier was always smiling. So that didn't really count for much.

Through his smile, he said, "Chris isn't here."

"Why did you think I came here looking for him?"

He raised an eyebrow at that. "So you came looking for me?"

"Well, no."

"So it's like I said, Chris isn't here."

"I can see him sitting at his desk." I said, rolling my eyes.

Still smiling, he laughed and turned toward Chris and said, "I did my part. Don't ever say I didn't ever do anything for ya, bruh."

All this time, we heard alarms

And with that, Javier took his smile and left the room. I just stood there at the threshold and Chris just kept his back to me. This went on for a minute or so before he finally turned around to frown at me. "Why is my door open and you're standing there in the doorway just staring at me?"

I stepped into the room and closed the door.

Come to find, we fell apart

"Why is my door closed and you're standing on this side of the door, just staring at me?"

I sighed, kicked at nothing and said what amounted to nothing, "I'm not good at this."

"At what?"

"I'm guessing you want an apology."

"For what?"

Again, I rolled my eyes. "You're going to make this hard aren't you?"

With his arms now crossed he said,"You don't like your men easy."

"You aren't my man."

He'd been close to smile a few seconds ago, now he was back to scowling. "So then why are you here?"

"You're my friend though!"

This whole thing has crashed down, crashed down

"Right. Cause that's just what I need is another hot and cold woman in my life."

"Well, I wouldn't say cold/cold. More like chilly/cold. Or nippy/cold. Or cool-ish/cold." When all he was doing was just frowning at me now, I sighed once more and tried to start over. "Okay, maybe we were never friend, friends. Maybe we never hung out in a way that I didn't find annoying to be in your presence. Maybe we didn't just talk for shits and giggles. Maybe..." I bit my lip, groaned and then proceeded to throw in the towel. "Fuck it. You're right. You don't need another woman like me in your life and we weren't even friends. So no harm, no foul."

And out the door I went. Out the door, down the hall and then right back to his room.

"Um, in case you missed it, this is the part where you chase me down and don't let me leave."

"Because I'm supposed to want you to stay."

I frowned at this, because I had stupidly never really considered this as a strong possibility for something he wouldn't want. "And you don't?"

He said nothing to this, just stared at me and through me like I was nothing. I licked my lips, bit them and let them go with a soft pop. Of course it was more than a strong possibility, it was reality. This is what moving on entails after all.

This kind of stupidity on my part was uncharacteristic, but then this whole coming here was too. I was trying to be someone different in order to win...or something. I don't know even know anymore, but what I did know I said aloud, "And you don't."

All this time, we heard alarms

I was out the door again and down the hall again and outside the building again, before some sick part of me must've realize I could use a little more kicks and back I went.

"Is there a reason why you don't? Other than the whole, I'd be more trouble than I'm worth, we were never really friends, yadda yadda thing?"

"No, that's it."

Your solitude is welcome

I just nodded for awhile, because I didn't know what else to do. "Okay."

I headed for the door, but turned around before I made it out this time. He did nothing but sigh, but that didn't stop me. And maybe it should've. Nevertheless, I said, "It's just... It's just that maybe you don't need any more friends. Maybe losing a pain in the ass kinda sorta friend isn't a problem for you. And I'm not saying it's a problem for me, but... I don't like this. Advil's about to go out of business because it's number one customer isn't getting the same amount of daily headaches as she used to."

There was a pause then. Longer than a moment's pause, but not quite long enough to be two moments, but just long enough to make me squirm.

Your attitude is welcome

Without a smile or a laugh, he just said, "Look, I've got a lot of work to do..."

I just nodded for awhile, while chewing on the inside of my big stupid mouth. "Say no more. I've probably said too much anyways."

I left. I didn't rush out. I just walked out. I didn't slam his door. I just closed it, even gently. I didn't cry or curse at myself for doing this. I just quietly made my way out. And just as I was about to push open the door and walk out of his building once and for all, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

When I turned around and found it was some random guy and not Chris, I shouldn't have been surprised. But today had been a day driven by hope and hope didn't know (or want) to know things like reality and reality right now was some random guy with his hand on my shoulder.

One good glare at the unwanted touch and his hand slipped away like it had actually been burned, but he didn't slip away entirely. Instead of leaving he said, "You dropped this."

I glanced down, looking for my dignity or my pride, because hope was stupid like that, but back in reality all he was holding was my room key that must've slipped out of my pocket. Though it wouldn't have mattered right away, anyways, since my door wasn't even locked anymore. But random guy didn't know that. And neither would Chris.

You. Are. Welcome.
Welcome, welcome
____________________________________
This chapter features: Alien Ant Farm - Attitude

Chapter Seven: Causing A Scene

Cameron's mouth was flapping soundlessly in the wind. Her eyes on me and the ring I was still holding up to her in offering, but they didn't stay there long, because this was a premiere, Shrek the Third to be more precise, and this premiere was the exact reason she didn't want us to break-up. She didn't want to talk about us. Didn't want all the coverage to be focused on us, so we'd been faking it. And I've never been so happily miserable, or miserably happy--I wasn't sure anymore--in my whole life.



"You make me miserable. You make me hate you and my life sometimes, but I hate being without you way more than I hate life with you."

"You can't be serious?" Frankie said, frowning at me.

I guess I should explain. That's not what I actually wound up saying and I guess it's a good thing that before I went to Cameron, I went to Frankie first.

"Are you crazy?" Frankie said, still frowning. "You're supposed to be trying to get her out of your hair. Remember? Fake it for a bit, then after the premiere, which is less than a day away, you get to be free. Remember, freedom? Remember that? Remember reclaiming your balls?"

Frowning too, I said, "Maybe I like her in my hair though. Well, if I had any, that is." I laughed, running my hands over my buzz-cut. "Maybe it took all this crap for me to finally realize that I was actually happy with her."

"Or maybe you're an idiot."

A small smile curled my lips. "And that's why I've got to do this."

"Because you're an idiot?"

"Because I'm an idiot I let it get this far. None of this had to happen if I could just be happy for once, I could just learn to be content and not always looking for something better. Because maybe there's nothing better. Maybe she's it for me."

"So you're going to propose to spend the rest of your life with her on a maybe?"

I nodded.

She sighed. "Maybe you really are an idiot."

*^*^*

It's not every day that you get a call from jail. But that day was today for me as I woke up to the phone ringing and later wound up accepting the charges for this collect call. It was Chris.

And just a regular, hey, how are you call from him at this point--and this was after weeks of not speaking, not even looking at each other when we happened to be in the same place--would have seemed odd and out of place, but to get a call him from saying he was locked up for a "public nuisance" charge was more than a little unexpected. To put it lightly.

The whole drive up to the station all I could think is, why of all people would he call me? Why not call one of his flavors of the week? Why not call Javier? Or one of his friends? Somebody, anybody but me.

This would've been the perfect opportunity to get him back for before when I'd put myself out farther than I'd had in a long while and he'd just shut me out without a second thought. He had no idea how hard it was for me to go to him and admit that I needed him and even though I couldn't be foolish/honest enough to just come out with those words "I need you" it was damn close. I'd tried my best and it had meant nothing to him.

And now I'm driving in the middle of night to pick his ass up from a damn police station. He better appreciate this.



"It's your fault this happened in the first place."

He was in the car for less than a minute before he had the nerve to come out his mouth with that. I should've socked him and then proceeded to kick him out, but instead, I just rolled my eyes and said, "My fault? So I'm the one who made you pee in public and made that cop come outta what you call nowhere, but was in fact the very police station that your dumb drunken ass was taking a leak on."

"Well," he said, smiling. "If you hadn't been ignoring me, I probably would've been over in your room."

"You know I don't do sleepovers, so no you wouldn't have been." I glanced over at him again. "And besides, it's not me who's doing the ignoring anymore."

He didn't say anything to this and I didn't try to fill the silence. The quiet wasn't bad, not like I thought it would be. It was just quiet. It gave me a moment to realize that I wasn't mad at him like I should've been for dragging me out of bed for this and then for acting like nothing had changed between us, while making small acknowledgments that it had. And even this didn't make me mad, which kind of made me mad.

I glanced at him at a red light, only to find that he was already watching me. I looked away, almost immediately, and stared at the road, because at least it had the courtesy not to stare back.

He said, "Maybe I called..." he trailed off with a sigh, before starting up again, "Maybe I called just to see if you'd come."

I frowned at him. "So you were testing me?"

He had no words for this and as I pulled into the parking lot, I glanced at him, finding him suddenly very interested in everything outside of the car. Turning the car off, neither of us immediately went for the doors.

I glanced back at him, he was watching me again. I said, "You're an idiot."

He shrugged. I rolled my eyes. Then as if that was our cue, we both went for our respective doors, exiting at the same time. We were walking in silence for awhile and I'd been doing a good amount of staring at my feet and staring at the stars. One nagging thought bouncing around in my head. Kicking at nothing, I sighed, and mumbled, "I missed you."

"What?" he said, looking over at me, a small smile on his face.

"You heard me, you asshole. So I'm not repeating it."

He smiled fully, ear to ear and draped an arm over my shoulder, casually pulling me into his side, like it was the natural thing to do. It wasn't anywhere near cold outside, just a little chilly, but I shivered.

"You cold?" he asked, taking off his jacket without waiting for an answer and slipping it over my shoulders before pulling me against his side again, this time rubbing my arms.

Maybe I should've just let myself enjoy this moment, maybe I would've if I could stop thinking about the day he'd completely ignored me in public and thrown his arm over that other girl just as casually as he was doing with me now, just as casually as he'd once done with Rae and pretty much every girl. This just happened to be my turn. Well, I didn't want it--yes, I did, but that's not going to help me to do anything but wind up becoming another link in his chain--so I pulled away, taking the jacket off and handing it back to him.

He frowned at me. I said, "I can't accept this."

"What? I wasn't asking you to keep it."

"I know that. But this...this thing we're doing. Or this thing we're dancing around, I can't do it."

He was still frowning at me, holding his jacket, probably thinking that that was what this was about. And I wanted to tell him all the little things that I would've told him if we hadn't been ignoring each other. Those little things didn't mean anything, but the fact that he was the one I wanted to tell them to did. Still I said nothing. He said nothing. We said nothing and just went back to walking.

"I'm single." he said, which brought my eyes to him, but his were looking straight ahead. "Truly, this time. No more open relationship. No more relationship at all. Me and Rae broke up a few weeks ago."

A few weeks ago was about the time we stopped talking, I noted, but didn't say this out loud. Out loud, I said, "I'm sorry to hear that."

"You are? Cause we both were happy as hell when it was over." He chuckled. "It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders."

Fumbling to think of something worthwhile to say, I said, "Oh."

He laughed, glanced over at me. "Oh? That's all you have to say?"

"What am I supposed to say?"

"I dunno. A confession of undying love for me, would be nice right about now."

That made me laugh.

"Or laughing at me works too."

"I mean, I'm sorry but you're not the type I would confess undying love to."

"So who's your type then?"

"I didn't mean it like that. I meant that you're not the romantic scene type. I can't imagine you in one of those ultra lovey dovey moments. You're the open relationship guy. You're the one night stand guy. You're always minimalist when it comes to dating or commitment or any kind of matters of the heart. And any sensible girl knows you don't go around professing undying love to a guy who's probably going to be saying stuff like 'it was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders' when you two break up. And you certainly don't want to already know that a break up isn't just a possible thing, but an eventual one."

He went quiet again, but this time it was different. He was so quiet now that I had to keep looking over to make sure he was still there.

"What?" I said, no longer able to stand his silence. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Why would something be wrong?"

I frowned at him, confused. "You're actually mad about what I said, aren't you?"

"What gave it away?"

I almost started to laugh again, but at the beginning of the chortle he glared at me and shut that down. Looking at him, curiously, I said, "I don't get you. I really don't."

"Sounds like my problem exactly." he said. We were close to his dorm now. Pointing to it, he said, "This is my stop."

"I know."

He didn't walk into his building and I didn't walk away. We both just stood there for a moment, waiting for the other to make their move.

"Aren't you going to go?" I said out loud, but could have just as easily been a question directed at myself.

Smiling, he shook his head and said, "You know, I couldn't see you in one of those romantic scenes either."

"What gave that away?"

Making no comment to that, he leaned in, hugged me, kissed my forehead and said, "Thanks, for coming to get me."

His eyes were smiling at me and rather than fall into a moment I couldn't get out of, even if I wanted to, I said, "That's what friends are for."

The smile in his eyes dulled, then he nodded, walking away.

*^*^*

"And then what happened?"

As soon as Chris had been out of sight, I'd run to my dorm, up the stairs, down the hall and immediately scooped up the phone and dialed those familiar numbers. While Jules and I hadn't been talking as much as we used to, she still wound up being the one I wanted to talk to when I really needed to talk to someone.

"What do you mean what happened? I told you, he walked away."

"You stupid bia!" she screeched, a little too dramatically if you asked me, but she'd always been a tad on the dramatic side. "What does the guy have to do? He's trying. You know he's trying and you're making it extra hard on him."

I just sighed, because I did know. I did know he was trying, but why? Why? Why? Why?! It was all I could think about, why was he trying now that it was me? I'd watched him with so many girls, so many times he had a chance to really try with them, to be a decent guy to them and yet he'd stuck to his usual routine and replaced them nearly as soon as he got them. And it's knowing that that makes me so very disinclined towards taking his trying seriously, because of course he's going to try now. He doesn't have me now. Now he'll put in the extra effort and then I give in and then he gets...whatever it is he wants from me--which leads to another series of why, why, why me--and then what? He moves on.

"And what's this he's not the romantic scene type? He gave you a picnic in a field of flowers...if that's not a romantic gesture I don't know what is."

"He had a girlfriend at the time."

"Barely."

"Still counts."

"Not anymore."

I whined, "So what do I do?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I asked you first."

"The only advice I'm going to give you right now is to just don't be stupid. For once in your miserable life accept the fact that the soundtrack of your life doesn't have to be played by a sad little violin."

What I meant to say was 'whatever' but instead, somehow I wound up saying, "You're right."

Then the silence came and I was so not ready for more silence tonight, so I said, "Jules?"

"I'm right? Did I really just hear you say that?"

"Whatever, weirdo. So what's been going on with you? Shagging any more of my dream men?"

There was a long pause on her end of the line and I groaned, not liking the sound of that. She just laughed, before eventually saying, "Of course not. You know me."

I did know her so that didn't make the long pause any less worrisome, but when she changed the subject, I went with her without any struggle. Plus, despite all my previous fanatical worry over that situation, she'd wound up being right. It was a one-time thing that had meant nothing and seemed to actually work in my favor since I was going to get to meet him because of it.

*^*^*

A lot of things had happened because I'm an idiot. But this was pretty dumb.

Before the premiere, before I made a public spectacle of Cameron and I, before any of that it was morning time. So early, the sun had risen just an hour ago and I'd been awake to see it. And right then I was sitting in the opposite corner of the room from the bed, shoveling cereal in my mouth. One foot propped up on the chair I was sitting in and the other was dangling down. I don't know how long I'd been sitting there, watching Julie sleeping, but now, still not knowing what to say to her when she opened her eyes, I just wanted her to wake up so I could say it--whatever it would be--and get it over with.

I just wanted it to be over.

I should've never done this. That much was obvious, but last night, it had only been a distant warning, a passing thought that had been easy to override and all the liquor and wine and such we'd raced to slide down our throats hadn't done much to help with our reasoning skills.

She stirred. Just a twitch of toes, but I froze and held my breath. I guess I wasn't ready for her to wake up just yet. She rolled over without opening her eyes. I sighed in relief.

What the hell am I going to do? I looked at the door. I could just leave, that's what I could do, I could just leave. And leaving would've felt great. That is, until the next time when I had to see her. Though I shouldn't have had to see her ever again. This was Trace's fault for hiring her in the first place and if he wasn't so deep in this fashion show wrangling I've kicked his ass for that twice by now.

Standing, I headed for the door, but not the one to get me out of here. Or at least not the one to get me totally out of here. I stepped out on the balcony. Told myself I just needed some fresh air. Though fresh air was harder to come by than real boobs in L.A. So maybe fresh air wasn't on the menu, but it felt a helluva lot better standing out here than it did in there.

I don't know why, but I've always liked to people-watch, but not just from anywhere. I always like it to be from a higher vantage point. So yeah, I'm literally looking down on everyone and that sounds bad, but it feels great. That's probably why God put heaven up, I mean, He could've put it down and under, but He chose up for a reason. So how bad can it be to like to look down on other people?

While I was busy feeling closer to God or more egotistical--not sure which one--there was a knock on the door. And not the door that leads out here with the semi-fresh air, but the door that required me to walk back inside to get to. The door that would've totally gotten me out of here.

I started to step back inside, but as I was doing this, Julie began to stir again. Toes wiggled, arms and legs slid about and it wasn't long before she was sitting up. I stopped moving and I just watched her. Watched her as she fumbled around, her eyes not really open, mind probably not fully awake, and just as her hand was on the handle about to turn it, she must've realized she wasn't dressed.

Softly cursing to herself, she scurried around, throwing things every which way, searching for her clothes, but finding only my shirt. The knocking began anew at the sound of all the new sounds. She yelled for whoever it was on the other side of the door to give her a second.

A minute later, she still didn't have anything but my shirt, but now at least she was sort of dressed, as she pulled the door open. It was Frankie.

And suddenly hiding out on this balcony had become yet another dumb idea to add to what would only become a staggering list of dumb ideas. What was I thinking? It's my room. If anyone should've been hiding out it should've been Julie, who shouldn't even have been in my room in the first place.

At the sight of Julie standing within my room, half-dressed, Frankie frowned and stepped back as if to check to see if she had to right room number. And God, I wish like hell she didn't. Or could somehow be tricked into believing that she didn't, but even if this was possible it wasn't possible for Julie to do at the moment. Because at that moment, Julie was too flustered and was too busy stuttering and stammering and generally making no sense to salvage this into a believable lie.

But still I didn't come out of hiding. It was too late. Frankie had already seen Julie in here. So I just waited for her to leave, which she did shortly after, and that's when I stepped back into the room. Turning from locking the door, Julie saw me and nearly jumped out of her skin.

"Shit!" She cried, clutching her chest, as if she was frightened that something inside it was about to be stolen. "How long were you out there?"

"Long enough to hear your great excuses for why you're in my room and dressed in my clothes. 'I couldn't find mine,' was my personal favorite."

"Well, if you could think of something better, you should've come out and said it." She eyed me for a moment, then held her head and groaned, "How much did I drink?"

"Oceans."

She nodded, slowly. "That sounds about right." she said, turning from me to look back at the crumpled sheets on the bed.

For a second, I hoped that she was just as confused as she'd told Frankie she'd been. That maybe she'd forgotten and I could find another way--you know, other than the truth--to explain her being here.

But either the sheets told her or she just plain remembered, because the next thing she said was, "We had sex again?"

My mouth opened and closed, opening with half thought out lies and closing before I could speak them.

She laughed, still staring at the bed with its crumpled, disheveled sheets.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all." she said, still laughing, but shaking her head occasionally now.

I stepped into the room a bit more, but not any closer to her, which was hard to do, but not impossible. "Generally speaking, laughing hysterically is usually a result of something being funny and not the other way around."

She turned away from the bed then to look back at me. And what I'd thought would be laughter on her face was sudden sadness. She said, softly, almost too softly, "I am that girl."

"What girl?"

Answering without answering, she shook her head again and said, "I must be a fame whore. What else could explain me sleeping with you again?" She glanced over at the bed again. Her eyes searching the room, for what--her missing clothes? I don't know. "Oh, god, I'm a groupie. A Justin Timberlake one, no less." she cried--a bit melodramatically if you asked me--sitting on edge of the bed now, her head fallen into her hands.

That wasn't one of those things where you wonder if you're supposed to be insulted, because you are insulted, it's just a matter of how much now. Watching her still crying, I frowned, slightly insulted, but tried to find some words to dam up the tears. "I wouldn't call you a whore or a groupie..."

"Then what would you call me?" she said, challengingly. She stood up, all her laughter and tears swallowed up into her anger now. I glanced at the door that would've gotten me out of this and wondered why the hell I didn't walk out of it when I had the chance. "We're not dating, right?"

"Well," I started, palms up, a gesture I hope she interpreted as 'I come in peace' or at the very least 'I'm not calling you a whore.' "We've been on no dates..."

"And you already have a girlfriend."

"Well, technically, no, I don't."

She paused for a moment; for a moment, she just looked at me. Then she looked away, licked her lips and said, "When did that happen?"

I answered with silence, so she looked for the reply in my eyes. I couldn't tell if she'd found one and didn't like it or hadn't found one at all and didn't like that, but either way, she was crying again.

I just stood there for a bit, letting her cry and hoping she'd stop on her own soon. I didn't do well with crying. Crying was like a dirty room and when people cried in front of you they forced you to wade through their mess. The tears practically begging you to pick up a broom or a shovel--depending on the size of the mess--and I could barely clean up my own messes, being that I was just so much more naturally inclined towards the making of rather than the clean-up crew.

My eyes went to both doors, both looking more and more tempting, but they finally went back to her. Her head back in the cradle of her hands. I went and sat next to her, figuring if I was going to feel awkward I'd rather do it sitting than standing.

She was still crying and I was still being useless. So in an attempt to remedy my uselessness, I put one arm around her, but didn't cuddle her to me, didn't try to really hold on, because I had a feeling if I did she'd turn out to be a clinger. And the last thing I needed was clinging and crying.

With my one arm draped haphazardly over her shoulder, I was still being useless and she was still crying, so I said something brilliant, something sure to inspire her out of her sadness. I said, "Don't cry."

I don't know how comforting all that was, but she looked up at me with no tears. The lack of tears was confusing, but then she started laughing so I stopped looking for tears. I just frowned and rose to my feet, wondering if that had all been a trick.

Taking a few steps back, I said, "Are you bi-polar or something?"

"I wish it was that easy." she said, wiping her face and getting to her feet. And that's when she started taking off her clothes...or my shirt, since that was the only "clothes" she had on at the moment.

I was really backing away now, with arms up like she was the cops and had a gun pointed at me. "Whoa, last night was..."

"A mistake?" she supplied with a nod, but still unbuttoning the shirt. "Yeah, I know. Can I take a shower, though?"

I stared at her for a bit, eyes narrowed as if this was some kind of trick. Nodding, I said an unsure, "Sure."

As the water turned on and she began to sing in the shower, I began to pace the length of the room. Slow at first, then faster and faster as if my feet could burn a hole in the floor and create a new escape route.

I still couldn't believe she was crazy, I mean the first night she'd asked me "What if I was crazy?" I thought it was just some bantering idle chitchat, but now...

Now she was in my shower singing, "Don't break my heart, my achy breaky heart..." and while that song was a guilty pleasure of mine, hearing her sing it at that moment was causing my feet to go into hyper drive.

I guess I can believe she's crazy. Women are crazy. Nearly insane most of the time and then turning completely certifiable once a month. Was it nearing that time for her? Was this just PMS? Maybe I should run out and get some midol for her...

She stepped out of the shower, the steam billowing out behind her like she was a female McSteamy--yeah, I watch Grey's Anatomy, occasionally, so sue me. She didn't say anything at first and like a dummy, I thought that might be a good thing. Maybe she'd calmed down in there, maybe a nice, hot shower was all she needed, maybe she wasn't crazy after all, maybe this wouldn't end badly.

Then she started moving toward me. I immediately backed away, stammering, "I...I..I'm going...I'm..."

I'm sure if I would've gotten a chance to finish that I would've said something brilliant and things would've turned out a lot differently. Only I didn't get much more out than that before her lips were on mine and mine were on hers and she was on me and I was on her and we were back on the bed.

To satisfy my conscience I decided as her lips were heading further and further south that after this round I'd give her her walking papers. In the nicest possible way, of course.

*^*^*

"You can't keep fucking her and then fire her."

Sure that didn't sound very nice, but I never claimed to be though, and besides what option did I have other than to get rid of her? This oddly emotional fucking we're doing now isn't going to bode well for our working relationship and the last thing I need is my personal life traipsing all free and willy-nilly like into my career...well, anymore than it was already bound to, given the Bloodhounds who were always hovering on the peripheral.

"Well, what else am I supposed to do?"

"I dunno, maybe something crazy like...stop fucking her!"

"If it was that easy, don't you think I would've stopped?" I said, frowning at Frankie. Everything was always so black and white with her. Right or wrong. Screw or don't screw. I liked gray. Gray was good. But gray in Frankie's world just meant that I had boundary issues. "But damn, if I thought break-up sex with Cameron was good, Jules is..."

Swatting at those words, Frankie groaned, "I really don't want to hear all the grimy details. I've seen enough to fill in the blanks."

"There's just something about her." I sighed, resting my chin on my fist. "I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it and I've put my finger on and in a lot of places on her."

Groaning again and louder, she said, "Please, just shut up."

And I did, for a while. Then a thought occurred to me that surprised me so much that I had to say it out loud to make sure if it sounded as crazy out of my mouth as it did in my head. "I need to get back with Cameron."

Yeah, yeah, it did.

Frowning at me, Frankie said, "What? You were just talking about how great Jules is, so why would you want to get back with Cameron?"

"Cameron is like your favorite food or drink that you've had one too many times. And while at first you thought there could never be such a thing as too many times, then suddenly there was and then you don't want it anymore. You want to avoid it, get away from it and into something new."

"Jules."

I nodded. "Exactly. Maybe Jules is only good to me because I just needed a little break from Cameron."

"So according to this theory, this means?"

"That I need to get back with Cameron."

"Because she's tasting good again?"

"Yep." I smiled, feeling better and better about this. Sure it sounds crazy at first, but I'm sure a lot of left of center, great ideas sounded crazy at first.

"But what happens when one too many times happens again and you want something new?"

When it turned out that I had no answer to that--probably because it was illogical and definitely wouldn't happen, so why worry about it--she sighed. Shaking her head, she said, "You're still doing the same ol' shit."

"No, this is different. It's different this time."

"Uh-huh." She nodded. "So what makes it so different? Why is it so different from every other girl you've ever been with? Why is it so different from when it was me?"

I didn't answer right away, couldn't answer right away, because suddenly my problem turned solution was turning into her problem which she was sure to turn right back into my problem based on my next words. In the end all I had was, "Because I'm different."

And while I'll admit I didn't say that with the most confidence in the world, I don't think it warranted an eye roll. She said, "Oh, yeah, I can tell. You're like a completely different person."

"No, honestly. I am. I'm finally ready to be happy. And I'll prove it to you."

"Prove it to me? How?"



We were both staring into the glass case that held the key to unlocking my life of future miserable happiness. I was giddy.

Frankie said, "Are you on crack?"

Still staring at the jewelry case, I pointed to the biggest, shiniest rock I saw--the jeweler pulled it out with a huge grin on her face, which I took to mean that even with my complete lack of knowledge of engagement rings I'd still went for the right one.

"Try it on." I said, holding it out to Frankie, who was staring at it with a look very similar to the one that jeweler had had.

"What?" She blinked, finally looking up at me. "No, I'm not going to further aide and abed this stupidity."

"Your hand is basically the same size as Cameron's." I said, reaching for her fidgeting hand. "I just want to see what it looks like on a finger, but if you don't want to help me, I can always just get it and then figure that out later."

For a moment it seemed like she was still not going to help me out, but then she sighed deeply, her chest heaving with the effort. With the exhale, she reluctantly held out her hand. Taking her hand into mine, I got down on my knee. Her face fell, her anger fell...for a moment, I could see it. It was the look that said she thought this was some kind of elaborate set-up for her.

And for that moment, I was thrown and almost started considering why it wasn't for her. But just thinking about thinking about that made my head hurt, so I didn't. Then pushing ahead with the original plan, I said, "You make me miserable. You make me hate you and my life sometimes, but I hate being without you way more than I hate life with you."

The surprise was gone and her face had fallen back into stoic lines. "You can't be serious?" Frankie said, frowning at me.

Standing up again, I frowned right back at her. "What should I say instead? I was trying to speak from my heart without being cheesy about it."

"Are you crazy?" Frankie said, still frowning. "You're supposed to be trying to get her out of your hair. Remember? Fake it for a bit, then after the premiere, which is only a day away, you get to be free. Remember, freedom? Remember that? Remember reclaiming your balls?"

"Maybe I like her in my hair though. Well, if I had any, that is." I laughed, running my hands over my buzz-cut. "Maybe it took all this crap for me to finally realize that I was actually happy with her."

"Or maybe you're an idiot."

A small smile curled my lips. "And that's why I've got to do this."

"Because you're an idiot?"

"Because I'm an idiot I let it get this far. None of this had to happen if I could just be happy for once, I could just learn to be content and not always looking for something better. Because maybe there's nothing better. Maybe she's it for me."

"So you're going to propose to spend the rest of your life with her on a maybe?"

I nodded.

She sighed. "Maybe you really are an idiot." She stared at the ring that was still on her finger, stared for awhile, like she was mesmerized, then she sighed again. And on the exhale, she shook her head and slid the ring off, placing it on the counter. Backing a few steps away from it, she said, "So what about Jules?"

"What about her?"

She smiled and nodded to herself as if something had just been confirmed to her. Whether it was good or bad, I couldn't tell exactly, since she didn't say anything else.



Speechless must have been the running theme of today, because Cameron's mouth was flapping soundlessly in the wind. Her eyes on me and the ring I was still holding up to her in offering, but they didn't say there long, and the longer she looked around at all the eyes on us, the more anxious I was getting. Plus, I was just tired of holding this on bended knee stance. When she looked back at me, her eyes swimming in emotions I couldn't even begin to read, I said, "Say you'll marry me, or I'll just have to stay down here and my knee is starting to hurt."

She smiled at this for a moment and for that moment I felt good. I felt like it was going to end well for me. I was going to get to rub this moment in Frankie's face. See, I wasn't crazy. This makes perfect sense. It was perfect.

If Cameron needed a big gesture to get her to understand she had me, it couldn't get much bigger than this. And it couldn't get much more publicity. And it was for that reason, looking back on it, I wish like hell that Frankie would've pushed that question: What about Jules? I should've given it real thought. I should've.

But who would've thought Julie would be there to see this first hand, let alone care so deeply? I guess I should've.