Lindsay swirled the amber coloured liquid in her glass morosely

Disclaimer: All characters owned by CBS, not me!!

A/N: I know this has probably been done before, but here's my stab. Song is Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats.

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Lindsay swirled the amber coloured liquid in her glass morosely. When had her life become such a dead end? Getting up after a night of little or no sleep, plastering on a well practiced façade of cheerfulness, forcing herself to work on auto-pilot, pretending he wasn't there, escaping home to a good stiff drink before going to bed to spend yet another night tossing and turning, thinking of how things could have been… it had become an unending vicious cycle.

She had always prided herself on being independent, on being able to keep her heart sealed away so it couldn't get hurt, on being the one who could sail through the end of a relationship with a few tears and a moan, but not much else. She was the one in her group of girls that the rest came to cry on when they'd been dumped. She was the one that helped them clean up the mess the last guy had made of their hearts. But now she had no-one to help her. All her girls were down in Montana, and she was up in her 5th story New York apartment, her phone sitting beside her, painfully silent. She stabbed at the remote for her CD player fiercely, desperate for something to drown out the silence. It wasn't until after she had done it that she remembered what CD was in.

"Right now he's probably slow dancing with a bleach blonde tramp,
and she's probably getting frisky..."

Lindsay closed her eyes tightly against the tears she could feel forming. She didn't even want to think of the dance Danny would be dancing right now. Choking back a sob, she downed the rest of her Southern Comfort and slammed her glass on the coffee table before her. She could feel the first tear of the night slip down her check, burning a path down her face as it went. She had MET Rikki… She had even liked her. And it just hurt to know that Danny chose Rikki over her.

And he don't know...

That I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats...
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...

She couldn't stop the pained grimace that crept across her face at the words of the song. She could picture the mess she would reduce his Harley Davidson to. She had imagined it so often that the image was imprinted on her brain like a tattoo; she could see it all in vivid detail. The light hanging off the front, swinging on a wire. The seat with its stuffing spewing out over the garage floor. The wheels saggy and flat, sliced in more places than she could count. She could even picture the expression that would be on his face when he found it. Realistically, it probably wouldn't hurt him as much as he had hurt her, but it would help. It would help.

Right now, she's probably saying "I'm drunk"
and he's a thinking that he's gonna get lucky,

How she wishes he had blamed it on alcohol. Because if he had done that, she could have persuaded herself that it hadn't been Danny that had cheated on her, but the drink. She could even have blamed Rikki, pretended that Rikki had plied him with drink and then seduced him. But it wasn't any of those things. It was Danny. Danny and his guilt. And that made it so much harder to bear. Instead of coming to her, and letting her help him, he turned to Rikki, to Rikki's body, and shut her out.

I might've saved a little trouble for the next girl,
Cause the next time that he cheats...

Oh, you know it won't be on me!

Ohh... not on me...

But what she hated most of all was not Rikki, not Danny, not even her tears. It was the fact that she couldn't help but feel that if she could have Danny's arms around just her one more time, she would let him have sex with Rikki as much as he liked. Her head would never let that happen, but her body… her body ached for his touch. And that scared her more than anything.

Cause I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped up 4 wheel drive,
carved my name into his leather seats...
I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights,
slashed a hole in all 4 tires...

She couldn't stop the avalanche of tears that cascaded down her checks as the words reverberated around the inside of her skull. Because she could never do that to him; couldn't even wreak his bike to ease her own pain. As much as he had hurt her, as much as she wanted to take out her anger on something, she knew that she could never do anything that would hurt him. Especially not now, when she could see his heart breaking every time he thought of Ruben. The image of his mangled motorbike faded away, quickly replaced by that of Ruben's pale and lifeless body lying out on the mortuary table, then of Danny's face as he struggled with tears, forcing himself to look at the body. She could see Ruben and Danny, giving a high five as they passed in the corridor. She saw Rikki, smiling from her doorway as she watched Danny talking to Ruben. She watched as Danny's heart broke as he realized he had to tell Rikki that her son was dead. And she felt her own heart shatter as she realized that she didn't blame him at all. She didn't blame Rikki either. She blamed herself. Because if she had tried harder, listened better, been there more, maybe he would have let her help. Instead, she stuttered out some appropriate sounding phrases, thought only of herself, and scurried away like an injured rat the moment he pushed. She had known he was hurting; could see it in her eyes, But she still let him go, let him drift with nothing to hold on to. So how could she blame him for finding someone else to be his anchor?

She had let herself fall in love with him, and now she had to do what she had told so many others to do. She had to lock the pieces of her heart back into a box, throw away the key and hope that it would find some way of stitching itself back together. But if it didn't, she was just going to have to let them die in that box, because it was altogether far too painful to open it again. She would simply have to live with the consequences of her mistakes.

Even if that meant living without Danny.

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