Justin was trying to work out whether the deathly silence was because of the previous evening or the impending job interview. It was of course possible that it was both. Or maybe thinking the previous evening would be a factor was giving himself too much credit.

Whatever the cause, Reese had padded downstairs in her t-shirt and sweatpants in silence. She proceeded to help herself to coffee and cereal without a single word spoken. His presence had been acknowledged with a brief nod. The rest of the time she was flicking through things on her tablet. The last minute cramming seemed to have resumed. She was hunched over the table, backlit by the daylight streaming through the bay doors behind her, and he didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody look so intent before. If a mariachi band had marched on through she might not have noticed.

The kitchen was one of the few areas of the house where he’d masterminded the design as opposed to her. That wasn’t to say he’d been uninvolved or that she’d imposed her taste on him in the other rooms, but they’d all been based on things she’d found or ideas she’d had. This room was all Justin. Reese simply looked at the brochures and nodded her agreement. Everything was very clean and modern, white tiles and a slate coloured floor. Marble counter tops gleamed, and little cluttered the surfaces. His mother joked that you needed a schematic just to find a cupboard, there was clever yet unobtrusive storage tucked into every available corner. The only thing his bride to be picked was the oak table; she’d said the room needed warming up. Seeing her sitting at it now, Justin had to wonder whether a piece of furniture could perform that task.

For a while he left her to it. Being prone to the same single-minded focus himself, he understood that interruptions needed to be necessary and brief. (Usually he disappeared into his basement studio for that – when they’d lived together there was an unspoken agreement that if he went down there she wouldn’t disturb him). Eventually however he had to. He needed some idea of what if any further part she expected him to play.

“Reese?”

“Uh huh?” She glanced up at him only briefly, just long enough to indicate her attention.

“How you planning to get there? And then to the airport after?”

“I booked a taxi,” she said. “Least conspicuous for me to leave here. My girl Lucy’s still on reception and she said she’d babysit my stuff for me while I go in. I’ll go straight to LAX from there.”

“Oh, okay.” Illogically he’d imagined them sitting down to chat over it afterwards, dissect how it went. Perhaps it was still a little early to expect that kind of thing. At least he felt better now – she was much too breezy for her silence to have been about the previous evening. “What time you got to go?”

She checked the clock. “Interview’s at eleven. How about you, what’s your plan for the day?”

“Laundry and conference calls. Exciting, I know.”

“Superstardom just gets more glamorous.” Her eyes moved towards him again and she smiled. Finally she turned off her tablet and sat up properly. There was little else she could do now; she needed to get ready soon anyway.

“How you doing?” He asked as he continued spooning his cereal up. He preferred to eat his leaning against the counter – she’d always told him it was strange. “Nervous?”

“Yeah. Not bad nervous, just jitters. Honestly, I’m less worried about the interview and more about what’s going to happen if they give me it.”

“Uhh… you take it, presumably.” Justin looked at her critically, trying to read her body language. “Isn’t that why you even interview for a job?”

“I want to, obviously, but it’s a little more complicated than that. This happened so fast I’ve barely had time to think about moving and giving notice and everything, and working around the honeymoon arrangements. Plus I have somebody else who gets a say and Drake’s not keen on LA. He prefers the vibe of a small town.”

“Big surprise.”

It wasn’t hard to read her body language now. Reese was incensed. She’d tossed her hair back, hands folding tightly together on the table top, and she was glowering at him. Inwardly he was beating himself around the head for the comment. It was knee jerk sarcasm and it had come out on impulse. The words fell out so quick he hadn’t had a chance to phrase it with some diplomacy.

“Meaning?”

There was a sharp edge to that comment and every chance he could slice himself on it. He wracked his brain, trying to come up with something to get him out of the hole.

“I only mean that Drake…” He trailed off, searching for the next words.

“Drake what? Please, do tell me all about my fiancé that you spent three whole minutes with.”

It was hard not to shrink back, but if he did she’d take it as a tacit admission of guilt. “Just an observation, but Drake seems like a small town kind of guy.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing bad! Small town people are our roots, Reese, that’s what we come out of.” He allowed himself a mental high five for throwing that in. It was designed to appease her, lessen any idea that he’d been taking a shot. Judging from the slight softening of her jaw it was working. (He had of course been taking a shot, but fortunately for him Reese misconstrued it. It was aimed at her rash decision to marry an obviously unsuitable guy and not at the inhabitants of small towns). “Happy to work local and raise a family and stay close to home. Like, I could see him running his own garage some day.”

Reese couldn’t disagree with that assessment. She was almost irritated by it because it was shrewd for somebody who’d barely met Drake. “And what’s wrong with that?”

“Like I said - not a thing. We know a lot of great people like that.”

“And yet you make it sound like a friggin’ crime.”

“Reese, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just not what you ever wanted. You, me, Trace, none of us did. Like, I’m really not surprised that you’re here for this interview. You’ve got things you want to do that aren’t going to happen in Shelby, you’re not ready to settle.”

“Who says? You just prefer to think I’m not ready to settle because then us not getting married wasn’t about you, it was about me.”

Justin breathed in sharply, holding onto it a second or two before letting it out. That was a low blow and it landed on target. His first instinct was to let rip, but his brain was screaming out reminders of where that had been getting him in the past few months. No. He had to breathe in and out a couple more times. Even if it killed him, he needed to formulate an adult response to this.

“I’m not talking about getting married. You can be married and still moving around and working on your career. That was what you and I always planned before we broke up, right? Few years doing what we wanted and then doing the family part? Nothing to stop anybody getting hitched and doing that.”

That one hit Reese hard. Electricity crackled painfully up and down her spine. Was that what they’d planned? She’d always thought he wanted to get married and launch into starting a family. When he’d talked about it he’d always waxed lyrical about their future. As she mentally flicked through a dozen conversations, however, she started to realise that he’d never vocalised a time frame. She’d simply assumed he meant an immediate start because he’d sounded so enthused. Reese had wanted exactly the same things, but not with the haste she’d mistakenly believed he did. She wasn’t sure why this little miscommunication bothered her so much but a gnawing feeling was in her stomach.  

“All I meant was that I think you and Drake have different outlooks on it, so it doesn’t surprise me when you say he might need convincing. I’m sorry if it came out badly.”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “Don’t be. That was a fair comment. It’s me; I’m oversensitive because I’m nervous.”

“Well… maybe you’re oversensitive because a month or so ago I would’ve been saying it to be an ass.”

That was another killer move and another mental high five. This time an actual giggle escaped as she looked down at her empty bowl. The self-deprecation seemed to do the trick. “Wow. He admits it.”

“See, I can grow.”

She unfolded her hands, propping her elbow on the table and resting her cheek in her palm. That was when he knew he’d saved it. Her face relaxed.

“You really were an ass, you know.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” He grimaced.

“Lucky for you, you got near enough thirty years of good behaviour to even it out.”

That was probably the most significant thing she’d said in terms of their recovery, and Justin did not take it at all lightly. A rueful voice in the back of his mind noted how little bad behaviour it took to nearly cancel all of that out.

“You’ve known I was an idiot since you met me, lucky for me you and T stick with me anyway,” he said, trying his luck with the present tense. “I’m an asshole but I’m your asshole. And wow that came out wrong.”

Reese creased up laughing. For a moment she couldn’t control it or draw enough breath in to speak. “You are so lucky Trace wasn’t present for that.”

He rubbed at his eyes, shoulders shaking with suppressed chuckles. “They just shouldn’t let me talk.”

“No disagreement here. And on that note, I’m going to go shower.”

“There’s no chance you’re going to forget I said that, is there?”

“None whatsoever.”

“You realise if you tell Trace you’re handing him a weapon?”

“You best be real nice to me then.”

**

Some people might have accused Justin of never being happy (namely Trace, if he’d been there). Instead of being pleased that he’d had another good moment with Reese, he was moping. Wasn’t he ever satisfied? Wasn’t it exactly what he had wanted? He’d been desperate to have some normal times with his peanut again. He’d had them. A bit of early morning silliness at the breakfast table should have been nothing but good.

The problem was that after she’d disappeared into the guest bathroom it hit him that this was the last of it. There would be no more breakfast table shenanigans. Maybe for the last twenty four hours he’d been able to pretend that nothing was changing, but the reality was a seismic shift. She really was going back to Memphis after this. The next time he saw her, she would be married. Her last name would not be Timberlake.

Foolishly, he’d somehow managed to associate himself with Los Angeles. In the same way he originally took her moving away as a wholesale rejection, now some idiot part of his brain had seen her sudden eagerness to move back as a reconnection. That delusion was easy to keep up when it coincided with a thawing in their relationship, but it was still a fantasy. They may have been based in LA for all of their courtship (at first separately but then eventually moving in together) but that didn’t mean she couldn’t live there without him. It didn’t mean that she couldn’t live there with somebody else.

Reese appeared to be finding herself again. That didn’t mean she would rediscover Justin.

Now the cheerful scene he’d been so eager to recapture was underlining what he no longer had. What he still wanted was to come downstairs every morning and eat his cereal at the counter while she resolutely sat at the table and refused to ‘condone the oddity’ by joining him. When she finished some important meeting at work he wanted her to walk back in the door to discuss it with him. He wanted to watch her laughing at him not with him when he said dumb things. That wasn’t on offer any more and the finality was brutal. So instead of being happy that she readily accepted his friendship, as he’d wished, he was buckling under the disappointment. His limbs were heavy, he felt sluggish and weary lines were aging his face. Lord only knew how he was going to concentrate on his calls later.

Reese had walked out over a year ago. It seemed incredible that it should only now hit him that it was over. The wedding wasn’t brand new information. It wasn’t like he hadn’t known she’d got a new boyfriend. He’d known she was engaged almost as soon as it happened. His mother had broken that to him fast (to spare him hearing on the grapevine). There had been ample time available to process this. Hell, for most of that time Reese cut him dead or only spoke to him in order to exchange insults. How could he only just be getting the message that they were done?

What ridiculous part of his brain had thought she’d be back after he’d hurt her so badly?

When he heard her moving around in the entrance hall Justin’s feet took him there on auto-pilot. He leaned against the door frame, watching her as she rummaged through her bags. Then she checked her face in the mirror that hung over the side table.

“Oh hey,” she said when she caught him in her peripheral. “Taxi’s here.”

“Okay.”

Reese’s eyebrows knitted together. She wasn’t sure what the monotone or the bloodless expression was about. She didn’t have time to worry about it though, as she was doing a last minute check of her satchel. Most of her things were in her holdall but she needed to make sure she had her résumé and everything else she needed to hand.

Watching her made it worse. Besides the bag at her feet, this was the usual routine all over. This was what she did every morning before work. She’d check she had everything, give her appearance a last once over and then give him a quick kiss before heading out. The way she moved was so familiar that he could have mimicked her perfectly. The brunette hair was pulled back into a sleek bun at the nape of her neck; the shift dress and blazer were crisp and professional. How she walked in those heels he didn’t understand but when she walked it was brisk and like she had somewhere to be.

This wasn’t the woman who’d run back home and got engaged to some other guy. This was his other half. For what felt like the first time in a long time he was looking at his Reese. And this would be the last time she was his Reese.

“So… wish me luck!” She turned to him with a nervous but bright smile.

“You’ll do great.”

Her face fell a little, confusion pulling it into a frown. Why did he make it sound so morose? The previous night he’d seemed all for stretching her wings.

“Thanks,” she said. “And thanks for everything, I really couldn’t have done this without your help. It’s nice to feel like you have my back again.”

“Sure, no problem.”

The robotic response rankled. How was it that only fifteen seconds ago she felt so great and now that had evaporated?

“Well. Bye then.”

“Bye.”

Okay, so she couldn’t expect him to wish her luck with the wedding. But couldn’t he at least wish her a safe trip? Say he’d see her next time she was in LA or he was home? He’d text her sometime? All she was going to get after all his pushing for her to resume talking to him again was this flat farewell? Without another word she picked the bag up and turned on her heel, marching straight out of the door to the waiting taxi and not looking back.

With the sound of the door closing Justin snapped back from the out of body experience he was having.  He began to loudly and viciously cuss at himself for the look on Reese’s face. Of all the times to turn into an unfeeling automaton he picked the moment that she needed encouragement? No wonder she didn’t love him any more.