When Reese walked down the street and through those glass doors, it was with intention. Her heels clicked a rapid staccato against the sidewalk and then the marble floor. People passing by had barely been clocked in her peripheral, so focused was she on the moments ahead.

Now it was done. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to feel, only knew this wasn’t it. The sun was just as warm as earlier, the sky just as clear, but now instead of striding out like a woman in charge she was meandering. The heels were swapped for comfortable pumps. Her bag swung slightly at the end of her arm as she peered all around herself. She was noticing people and buildings. The interview hadn’t gone badly yet still ‘we’ll be in touch’ felt like an anti-climax.

Maybe it was reality hitting her. To the naked eye Trace Ayala might not look like much of a sage but he frequently made a good point. She was in trouble. There was little doubt in her mind that she wanted the job if it was hers, but did she want it enough to override Drake if he objected? In the harsh light of day she was less certain that he’d be amenable. By the end of the week another human being would have equal say over her life choices and she wasn’t sure they were on the same track. That was worrying.

It would almost be better if they turned her down. At least that would take the decision out of her hands.

What was the matter with her? A few short weeks ago she’d been scoffing at the idea of employment and telling Jenna that she wanted to follow in her footsteps. Standing in the busy hustle of a Los Angeles street that seemed absurd. The sharp corners, the gleam of glossy wooden desks, the concentrated buzz in the air, even walking into the office was energising. It was like shooting whiskey, it hit the back of her throat with a sharp tingle that promised things to come. Everything she and Drake had planned felt much further away. Not gone, but one for the road ahead.

Reese wondered if Nadine had been right. Maybe she had been rash when she moved back to Tennessee. Maybe it was hiding. Despite all this hopping back and forth she’d been doing between the two places in the past week, the distance felt impossible to navigate.

You thought of the devil and she called your phone – she could tell by the ringtone. Nadine was of course another person she’d lied to.

“Hey.”

“Hey you! I thought we’d have heard from you by now, got a little worried. When we expecting you back?”

Horror struck, Reese’s teeth dug into her bottom lip. If her hands weren’t already full they would have flown to her mouth. “Oh shit.”

“Don’t tell me you forgot… how? What did they do, drug the air in the steam room?”

Nadine sounded astonished and she couldn’t be blamed. Forgetting that she was supposed to have her final dress fitting this afternoon was an enormous flub for a bride to be. That went double for one who’d been as much of a stickler as Reese Bennington-soon-to-be-Turner. It really should have been factored into her little secret mission.

“I’m sorry, I got completely distracted.”

“No need to apologise to me, it’s your own hide on the line,” Nadine said. “I can still pick it up but she already told us she didn’t have any more time this week, so if it’s uneven or whatever you’re living with it.”

That was one small mercy – the only alteration that had been left to do after the last fitting was to take up the hem a little. She doubted it could have gone too badly wrong. The more complicated pieces were long since complete. Even so, she was muttering obscenities at herself under her breath. What was wrong with her? How could she have forgotten something so important?

“Thanks, hon, I owe you,” she said. It was an automatic reaction; her mind was disconnected.

“Yeah, yeah, your debt’s pretty sizable by now. Seriously, sweetie, you got me worried here. You’ve been weird all week, you disappear to hide at a spa because you’re so stressed, and now you go from Perfectionist of the Year to forgetting a major appointment? And by the way, you’re clearly not at a spa any more because I hear traffic. What’s going on?”

“I… I…”

“What?!”

If she had ever wondered what Wile.E.Coyote felt like when he smacked into that false tunnel, this must have been it.

“I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

“What? No!”

Her pleas went unheeded. Reese had already hung up and was throwing her arm out to hail a taxi.

**

“So what’s your initial reaction?”

Justin leaned back in his chair, scratching at the back of his head.

“I don’t know. I mean, you know I like doing those size shows, but it feels a little surplus to requirements.  What have I got to promote?”

“I wouldn’t look at it in terms of promotion,” his manager replied. “I’d look at it more as a little prestige thing and what a big deal it is to be asked, or just keeping things warm with the fans without committing to new music. Plus it opens up avenues to have them sponsor us in future.”

“Hmm.” He twisted back and forth in his seat. Pretty much the only reason he had an office was as an excuse for this big black leather chair. Maybe some part of him wanted to be a tycoon. “I’m not sure, Johnny. I was actually leaning more towards reviewing some scripts and looking at a movie.”

“Well you don’t have to decide right now, so if you want to think on it that’s fine. I don’t need to give them an answer for another couple of days.”

“Yeah, I think I will.”

“Alright, so if that’s everything then…”

“Sorry Johnny but I got to run, someone’s at the door.”

“No problem, talk to you soon.”

“Thanks, bye.”

The doorbell rang again before he’d even left the room.

“Alright, I’m coming,” he grumbled. He resented the visitor. The plan was always to have a quiet day today, sorting out the domestic things that had piled up since he’d been gone and taking some business calls. That plan looked even better now Reese was gone. Alone time was in order and uninvited guests were not part of the deal.

Did the deal change if it was Reese standing on his doorstep? When he saw her his mouth fell open, giving him a gormless look. She was breathing deep, her shoulders rising and falling with each breath. There was a harried and agitated air about her, a wild gleam in her eye. The hair that had been so precisely pinned back now fell messily around her face.

“What’s wrong?” A greeting seemed unnecessary, so he dispensed with it.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Justin was dumbfounded for a moment. “Huh? You surprised me on my doorstep to ask me why you surprised me on my doorstep?”

“No, no… I mean, I…” She was shaking her head in an odd weaving motion. Her face screwed up in confusion. “Here. I don’t know what I’m doing here. Or what I’m doing at all. I disappeared to the other side of the country with my ex-boyfriend and I didn’t tell anyone and why the hell did I do that?”

All he could do was freeze. Knowing somebody for so long made it tough for them to surprise you, but this was certainly unexpected. In her own subtle way Reese was quite a powerful personality. She was intelligent, authoritative and careful (though not without a devilish streak). Those qualities made her the kind of person who formed a plan and executed it with drive and competence. Her choices were not typically random or impulsive. So when she turned up looking lost and bewildered with no idea which way was up it was alarming.

Finally some sense snapped into him and he pulled her inside – it was unlikely but not unheard of for paparazzi and their zoom lenses to get inside the complex. Unthinkingly she dropped the bags and then turned to look up at him again. Hazel eyes beseeched him to answer her questions for her. She didn’t appear to see any more need for opening small talk than he did.

“I was supposed to be getting fitted for my wedding dress today,” she said. Hearing it was unpleasant for Justin, but he tried not to react. “I totally forgot. I’m supposed to be back home, getting ready for a wedding and all of it and instead I’m in LA taking secret meetings and hanging out with you, not thinking about any of that. Why?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

Though he tried to be as gentle as possible it was hard to keep exasperation out of his voice. He’d already been on edge most of the day on her account, and she wasn’t making sense.

“If you don’t who will?” Her hand went to her forehead, which she rubbed in fretful circles. “I need advice and you know me better than anybody, so if you don’t get this nobody will.”

Justin folded his arms tightly across his chest, lips pursing together. Was this woman determined to kill him? That was the only explanation he saw for the emotional uppercuts she’d been landing all day long. Surely nobody could be this on point inadvertently?

“You know, peanut, sometimes I think that’s exactly our God damn problem,” he said with a bitter tang. They hadn’t even moved away from the front door.

“What?” She was breathy, disoriented.

“You and me know each other better than anybody and it makes us forget that we still can’t know everything. We’re not psychic, some shit we still have to open our mouths and speak.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning how am I supposed to know what’s going on in your head if you don’t tell me? I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know why you’ve done anything… in about a fucking year,” he spat out. “I don’t know why you didn’t want to marry me, I don’t know why you abandoned LA to go home and play housewife, and I don’t know why you’re suddenly doing another one eighty back the other way. I would love to though so please, tell me! I would fuckin’ love to understand!”

“God you are such an ASSHOLE!” She threw her hands up. At least it seemed to have yanked her back into the moment. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to come to you for help after this past year? You wanted my friendship back, well now you got it and I need you. And within seconds of me begging for your support you’re being an ass to me? What is that?”

“What, you thought you could just waltz out, then spring yourself on me again rambling like a crazy person, and I’d just be all cool and calm and read your mind? Well sorry if it makes me an asshole but you’re confusing the crap out of me!”

“Waltzing out? What do you mean waltzing? God, is that why you were so frickin’ weird with me this morning? Which, by the way, really hurt my feelings.”

“Well you leaving hurt mine, so…” Something about those words flipped an internal off switch. In a blink his temper died as quickly as it had flared; now he was overcome with embarrassment. The heat of the blush was creeping up the back of his neck, and he’d bet it was visible in his cheeks too.

“You are unbelievable. Unbelievable! Just when I think things are settling back down you pull the Jekyll -Hyde act on me again!” It was maddening. One moment he was rude, the next sweet, she couldn’t keep up. “GOD, these days I don’t know if I want to slap you or…” The sentence ended abruptly.

“Or what?”

There was a continuation but Reese was having a hard time with it. She couldn’t deny it (it was her brain, after all, she knew what she’d been about to say) but panic raced through her. If it was true she’d answered her own question, at least, but the repercussions were frightening. It didn’t make sense either. She’d felt and done things in the past year that simply didn’t tally with it.  

“Did the interview just go badly?” Justin was trying to calm down and get away from whatever this subtext was. It seemed to him the topic at hand wasn’t what they were really fighting about, but he couldn’t decipher that. “Did you just freak out and come back here because you’re worried?”

“No, no.” She wrung her hands, her own anger similarly cowed by her internal wrangling. “I think it went okay, they should consider me. I handled the awkward questions anyway.”

“Look, we’re being ridiculous squabbling by the front door like this,” he said. “Let’s just go inside and chill out for a second.”

Reese acquiesced, abandoning her bags and following him through into the sitting room. Neither of them sat down, both hanging nervously by the back of the couch. They wore identical expressions of shame.

“You wanna try this again?” He asked. A distant beep announced that a laundry load was done, but it could wait.

“I’m sorry.” Tears sprang to her eyes, but she successfully blinked them back. “Guess I really do sound like a crazy person rambling like this.”

“No. You’re right – you need help I’m supposed to be here for it, crazy or not.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with me. One minute everything’s fine and the next I seem to be having the world’s most crappily timed early mid-life crisis.”

“Is this wedding jitters?” It took everything in him to get that out and get it out neutrally. “It’d be natural.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure, it feels bigger than that.” She bit the inside of her cheek, and one hand unconsciously reached out to the back of the couch to steady herself. “I don’t know any more. I’m just starting to feel like maybe I made a mistake that I don’t know how to fix, and I can’t talk to anybody else about it.”

A spiteful little voice in the back of his head was marking a point scored against the mechanic, but once again he had to control his baser impulses. This whole saga really had brought out some of his less commendable qualities.

“What mistake?”

“You were right,” she said, eyes glittering again. “I left everything. I had some stupid knee jerk reaction because I was mad at you and now I want my life back, except it’s not that simple because I made other plans in the meantime and I can’t turn my back on them. Yet witness me, making futile attempts to run both at the same time.”

“Well…” Now there were several different thoughts wrestling in his brain, some trying to be selfish and others trying to be impartial. They were all so mixed up working out his real opinion was tricky. “Seems to me like it is that simple, peanut. If what you really wanted was my advice as the person who’s known you this long? You ought to be here, doing what you were doing, because it fired you up and even this morning I could see it firing you back up. I know you’re worried about what he’ll say and I won’t lie and say there’s no need, but if he loves you he’ll see you got to do this.”

“You didn’t though, did you?” She said in a trembling voice. It wasn’t accusatory or taking a shot. It was fearful. “And look how that turned out.”

“Actually I did see, which ironically is why it happened,” he said in clipped tones. “I kept agreeing to put off the wedding and not telling you how I felt because I wanted you to be happy. Like I said, I somehow expected you to know what I was thinking and magically see that I couldn’t take another setback without me telling you, because you do know me so well, and then I did something I’m going to regret forever.”

“God.” Reese had a lightning bolt moment. “That’s it.”

“What?”

“This is the same thing all over again.”

“Huh?”

Justin did not appreciate being likened to her latest fiancé. For one thing, he flattered himself that she would never sneak around if it was him. When she thought he wouldn’t like her plans she climbed onto his lap and tried to sweet talk him, she didn’t forge ahead without him.

“I have a guy who wants to marry me and settle down and have kids with me, all anybody could want, and everything’s about to fall apart because I got other ideas. So what do I do? High tail it in the other direction. I did it to you, now I’m doing it to Drake… God, what is wrong with me?” She clutched at her scalp, tugging on a handful of hair.

Justin grabbed at her wrist, partially to stop her yanking out any hair but mostly because of her words. He felt like his heart might stop. “Are you telling me that you kept dodging the date because you thought I wanted you to just start popping out kids as soon as we got married?”

“I guess I am.”

“No, Reese, no…”

She didn’t heed his words; she was simply looking into his stricken blue eyes while her face crumpled. Only as she said it did she realise it. Nadine really had been right.

“I wanted all of that with you, I did, just not right away. But you were always talking about it and I didn’t want to hurt you so… and then everything blew up, and I panicked because it was all gone. So off I ran and found somebody else who wanted it, only I’m still not ready am I? What am I going to say to him?”

Reese wasn’t trying to have a conversation about what had happened between them. She was trying to have a conversation about how afraid she was of repeating that history with Drake. This didn’t matter to Justin. Justin didn’t care anything about Drake at this point, so he kept trying to pull the focus back. That wasn’t helpful when what she needed was advice about the here and now, but he was too busy trying to understand why his relationship had failed. His grip on her wrist couldn’t afford to get any tighter or it would hurt.

“And how did you expect me to know that if you didn’t tell me?”

“God.” Her eyes shot upwards as if she was looking for the deity in question. “The one damn time in your life you couldn’t see right through me and it had to be about that?”

“This isn’t funny, Reese!”

“Who’s laughing?” She exclaimed.

“You do realise if you had just told me…” His face screwed up in misery.

“Ohhhh no no no, you do not get to blame that on me! You’re still the one who decided to deal with it with some other girl!”

“I’m not blaming you, I just… God, Reese, you realise that if you and I had actually talked to each other about shit none of this would have happened? We’d be married and not having kids right now!”

The thought stuck in her throat. It was too little too late, but as it turned out her life truly had been what she thought all along. A good deal of her pain and fury over the cheating was less about what she’d seen – which was, after all, only a kiss - than the feeling that her past no longer made sense. He’d been her constant for her entire life. If she was wrong about something as fundamental as him then nothing she’d ever known could be trusted; so she’d turned away. When she heard his explanation in the hut it helped her forgive him because it reconciled her lifelong companion with the man that wounded her. Things might have gone wrong, but they’d gone wrong in a way that fit the story of her life as she knew it. That knowledge slotted the rest of her world back into place.

It set off all the re-evaluation that led here. Now she saw that she’d had everything she wanted. Everything hadn’t been tainted; she’d done right after all. They’d been on the same page only hadn’t known it. She hadn’t needed to give up anything else. It burned, especially given her current dilemma with Drake. She loved Drake but she wasn’t so confident any more that they were of one mind. She’d thought they were, but as it turned out she’d been deluding herself about her own end – one more reaction to the break up. She thought she’d lost her chance at family so she’d prematurely run to find another. And all this could have been avoided, if…

“I know,” she replied bitterly. “But maybe things just work out like they’re supposed to.”

“Nothing about this is how it’s supposed to be, or we’d still be together.” To hell with impartial, he was going with selfish.

“Really?” Now she looked irate. “For someone who thinks that you got a funny way of showing it. Never even tried to get me back and then you were just a bastard towards me.”

“Bull!” He yelped indignantly. “I never tried? You never gave me the chance! You didn’t want anything to do with me; you wouldn’t pick up the phone!”

“If you wanted to talk to me that bad you could have, Justin, and we both know it,” she said. “I was not hard to find. But you never came, did you?”

“I stayed away because I thought you’d slam the door in my face, just like you ignored the calls. You telling me you wanted me to come after you?”

He stepped even closer, taking her face in his hands. His eyes bored into hers. Her fingers closed ineffectually around his wrists, trying to push them away. Taut arms held her there. Reese tried to turn her head away and break the eye contact, but he held her in place.

Justin was deliberate in his next choice of words. “Because if I’d known you were waiting on me to, the wait would have been over.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d used that line on her. All these years later it had the same effect, only now it was mixed up with everything else that transpired between them. It made her feel dizzy, heartbroken, infuriated and full of electric charge all at once.

“At some point in the last year you turned into the most infuriating person I ever met. Sometimes I don’t know whether I want to slap you or kiss you.” Finally she completed the sentence.

“Well.” The word was somehow a soft, low chuckle. It was too cocky for the situation yet irritatingly alluring for that. It was him all over, that tone. It was one of the qualities that encouraged the whole slap/kiss dilemma. “You tell me, Reese. No more assuming I know, no more expecting me to figure it out for you. This time you tell me what it is you want from me, peanut, and it’s yours.”

His arms had relaxed now. The fingertips were brushing around her face with a much more delicate touch, one thumb stroking her cheek. Her eyes shifted downwards but he was still scrutinising, trying to see her response there before it left her lips.

“And what if I don’t know?”

“Work it out. You wanted my advice as your best friend, so that’s it - work it out. No more reacting, no more running away, you decide what you want and you go after it on purpose. Forget hurting other people’s feelings, you do right by yourself, because if you don’t that’ll hurt worse for everyone in the long run.”

Reese thought he was about to kiss her, but instead he drew back. His touch didn’t drop but it did falter; she couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or disappointed. Worry lines masked his face, and his eyes searched hers. What he was looking for she didn’t know.

“I should probably go,” she said. “Already missed one flight and there are only a couple more.”

Deflated, this time he did drop his hands. “Okay.”

“I…” She hesitated. “Thank you for the advice. I’ll think about it.”

“Do.”