The silence in the apartment signaled that it was empty and Rylee breathed a sigh of relief.

She had spent the past couple of nights at Traces and ultimately avoiding the inevitable heart break she knew she was going to be handing out.  For the moment, Christina thought that Rylee was giving Trace another shot (Rylee conveniently didn’t correct her assumption) and that’s why she hadn’t been at the apartment lately.

The past couple of nights had been filled with disapproving looks from Trace whenever Justin would call or stop by.  He refrained from lecturing her, other than his initial “You did what!?” outburst.  He was as supportive as he could be, but he did make it clear that he didn’t want to be involved when the shit hit the fan.

Hurting her best friend was not something she was looking forward to doing, but as she thought about it, she had already hurt her best friend, she was just waiting to break the news to her.

For the first time since stepping through the door, Rylee noticed an emptiness to the apartment.  Nothing too drastic, there were still signs of Christina around, but…something was off.  The living room was clean, the sink was void of dirty dishes, there was no laundry sitting out in baskets.  The whole place was relatively spotless. 

Peeking her head into Christina’s room, Rylee noted that the bed was made and there was visibly less stuff.  She scrunched her face in wonder and made her way down the hall toward her own bedroom.  Where could Christina be, and why was everything so damn clean?

The note taped to Rylee’s door indicated that she wouldn’t be in the dark for much longer.

Rylee dropped the paper and it fluttered to the floor in a slow, arching motion.  It landed softly at her feet and she stood there, dumbfounded.

Christina was out of the state and there was no telling when she was coming back.  Rylee could either look at this as a very, very good thing, or she could look at it as an undetermined amount of time for her to bite her nails in anticipation of her return.

She padded into her bedroom and flopped down on the bed, picking a spot on the ceiling to stare at and getting lost in thought.

Rylee never imagined that she would be in a position like this.  She had always said that she would never cheat on anyone, and in a way, she had cheated on her best friend.  Actually, it was worse, she was the woman that had caused her best friend’s boyfriend to cheat.  Thinking about it made Rylee’s stomach slosh around in her abdomen and she closed her eyes against the sea-sick feeling.

She hated how things had happened.  She didn’t regret falling for Justin, she just wished that she’d had a little more restraint when it came to the sex part.  She would’ve been breaking girl codes if she had hooked up with Justin after he and Christina broke up, but that would’ve been nothing compared to what she had let happen.  It was sending her into this strange state of confusion about what she was feeling.

On the obvious front, she felt guilty.  But…she also felt elated to think that Justin returned her feelings and he had finally acted on them.  It had been such a long time since Rylee had felt genuine feelings for someone, feelings that passed platonic and dove straight into romantic. 

Was she supposed to deny herself the happiness of finding someone she truly connected to for her best friend?  Or had she sacrificed her right to happiness because of what she’d allowed to happen?

A knock on the door interrupted her pondering and she slowly rolled off the edge of the bed and shuffled down the hallway.  Justin’s somber face met her gaze as she opened the door, and despite her hesitation, she was happy to see him.

“Hey.”  She stepped to the side and watched Justin make his way into the room and toward the couch.

“Christina left me a message, she said she was going out of town.”  An awkward moment started to build between them.  Neither was really sure about how to act, or what the protocol for a situation like this was.  Rylee wanted to go over and cuddle up next to him, but there was still the looming fact that Justin and Christina were technically together.

“She left me a note.  She’s gone back East for a while, I’m not sure how long, she didn’t say.”  Rylee shifted from one foot to another, unsure of what the next step in this strange dance was supposed to be.

“I think she’s been avoiding my calls, because I’ve left her a bunch of messages but I haven’t actually talked to her since I asked her to move in with me.”  He glanced down at the phone in his hand as if waiting for it to light up with a call, expecting it to be Christina.

Rylee shrugged, still not sure of what she should do and she was growing more uncomfortable as the seconds passed. 

“Do you want a drink or something?”  Justin asked for a beer so she made her way into the kitchen and grabbed a couple bottles from the fridge.  She popped the caps off with the bottle opener on the counter and turned only to run into Justin’s broad chest.

“Whoa!”  She managed to save the beers and keep them from spilling.  Justin gently took them from her hands and placed them on the counter before grabbing Rylee and bringing her into him for a kiss.  He pulled back after a moment or two of her not responding.

“What’s wrong?”  His brow wrinkled in confusion as he watched Rylee take a step back.

“Nothing…I just…”  She trailed off, not sure of how to put her feelings into words.  Instead of finishing her thought, she grabbed the beers again, handed one to Justin and motioned for him to follow her into the living room.

The sat at opposite ends of the couch, Rylee’s feet tucked under her body and Justin’s legs perched on the coffee table.

“I feel…strange, I guess.”  Blue eyes met stormy grey one’s as Justin turned to capture Rylee’s gaze.  “You’re still technically with Christina, and…I don’t know…it feels wrong.”

“It didn’t feel wrong at the studio.”  His anger was coming from his confusion and mounting guilt.  He didn’t mean to direct it at Rylee, but because she was a part of this situation, she was going to be on the receiving end.

“I know that.”  Her stubborn reply was accompanied by a flash of anger in her eyes.  They grew to an even darker grey than before.  “I’m not trying to blame you, Justin, or make you feel guilty.  It’s my fault too.  I just think we should slow it down until we can tell Christina.”

He stayed silent, his only motions were the moving of the beer bottle to his lips and the slight rise and fall of his chest.

“I’m sorry.”  Her voice sounded so small and so pitiful that Justin’s anger melted away into a lesser form of frustration.

“Don’t…please don’t apologize.”  He placed his bottle down on the table and then rested his elbow’s on his knees, his head hung down low.  “I don’t want to fight with you about this.  I  just want it to all go away so I can actually enjoy these feelings I have.”

Rylee nodded even though he wasn’t looking at her.  She placed her own bottle on the table next to Justin’s and moved to sit in a position similar to his.  Tentatively, she reached out and touched his forearm with her fingers.

“When are you going to tell her?”  Justin moved so his hand was now holding onto Rylee’s, and he moved back on the couch and tugged her body so it was leaning against his.

“I didn’t want to tell her over the phone, but I don’t really want to wait that long either.  I think the longer we wait the worse it’s going to be.”  Rylee’s head was pressed against his shoulder and chest and she could hear his heart beat as she nodded against him.

“She could be gone for months.  She said in her note that she wasn’t sure when she was coming back.”

“Yeah, she said something like that on the message too.  I think I was starting to scare her away when I asked her to move in with me.”

“Why did you?  Ask her to move in with you?”  Rylee looked up into Justin’s eyes as he shrugged and stared out the window next to him.

“I don’t know.  I think I was trying to prove to myself that I didn’t really want you and that I was serious about Christina.  It probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve done lately.”

“I can think of something worse.”  The grin in her voice let him know she was kidding about it and he chuckled.

“Yeah, but that discretion was a hell of a lot more fun than when I asked her to move in with me.”  Rylee smiled up at him and let herself be OK with things for the moment.  There wasn’t much either of them could do since Christina was MIA, so she was going to try and relax for the time being.

“Don’t get mad at me if I get distant with you.”  The slightly jovial mode left the room again and things went back to being serious.

Justin didn’t respond, instead he waited for her to elaborate.

“What we did is going to kill my friendship, Justin, you have to know that.  I have to get over all this guilt I’m feeling before I can be with you completely; otherwise I’m going to think about the pain I caused her every time you and I are together.”  She licked her lips, her eyes distant as she spoke.  “I deal with things by hiding inside of myself, that’s just how I am.  You’re going to have to be patient with me.”

Justin shifted on the couch so he was lying against the headrest and Rylee was half on top of him.  He ran his hands through her hair and kept her in close to him, liking the warmth of their bodies touching.

“I get it, I think.”  He wanted to be as understanding as possible, and really, it was his fault that she was going to lose her best friend.  For someone that wrote love songs that professed undying devotion and complete infatuation in eloquent and flowing words…Justin Timberlake really didn’t know what to say.

Rylee’s eyes traveled up Justin’s torso and over his face.  He looked as worn as she felt, and she questioned whether all of this was really worth it.  She knew that her feelings for him were strong, that she hadn’t felt like this about a man in a very long time…but was that enough?  Would they make it through all of the pain that was undoubtedly going to come and be able to build a relationship out of it?

She didn’t want to doubt it, and she didn’t want to question it.  She just wanted to allow herself to feel, to live.  She wanted to be able to let things happen and not worry about the consequences, but she’d almost entirely robbed herself of that opportunity when she made the decision to sleep with Justin.

“I don’t want to lose my best friend.”  She whispered into his collar bone and his arms tightened around her body.  She felt his lips press against her temple and she closed her eyes against the tears that were starting to blur her vision.

Maybe it would be better to stop everything right now and chalk it up to a bad choice.  Maybe she should break things off completely with Justin and pretend that nothing had happened between them, that way she would be able to save her friendship.  Eventually she could tell Christina about what happened, and hopefully they would be able to move past that.

Hundreds of thoughts moved through her mind at such a rapid pace she was starting to get a headache. 

This was why she had avoided relationships, because people always got hurt.