Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or real people portrayed in this story. The characters belong to WWE and the real people own themselves.
A/N: Okay, here's the sequel as promised. It picks up the next day after At Least He Tried. I could've just tacked this on to At Least He Tried, but I felt like that story was over, and this one has a different plot altogether, so yeah, different stories.
Please leave a review and tell me what you think. :)
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He hadn't really tried.
Chris had never lied to Stephanie, not once in their entire friendship. He prided himself on that. In their long tenure together, he had not once told her a lie. Not if she looked bad, not if she had spinach in her teeth, not if she was making a fool out of herself in front of people, he never lied to her. He knew she wouldn't respect him if she ever found out he had lied to her. Stephanie was special like that; she could handle the truth, and always wanted to hear it.
Yesterday, Chris had lied to Stephanie…for the very first time.
He woke up next to her, the plate of cake they had been eating sitting between them, nothing but the few stray crumbs decorating it, the cake having met its demise hours earlier. They had finished up their sugar high and crashed down back to Earth and into their beds. And this morning, the morning he should've woken up next to Trish, his new wife, instead, he was waking up to the face that he had always woken up to…Stephanie's.
And that was just what he wanted.
He loved Stephanie. When he had realized it, he couldn't pinpoint, and made no attempt to. He just knew it to be true. He hadn't kissed Stephanie just to get out of his impending marriage, he had kissed her for a bigger reason, a more extravagant, worst romantic comedy kind of reason. He loved her. Maybe it was the combination of all their years, or maybe Trish had been right when she said that a girl and a guy couldn't be friends and that was it, that there would always be this underlying sexual tension.
Or maybe his brain was just starting to hear what his heart had been saying for years. No, he hadn't loved Stephanie for years, not like now, not when his heart felt like it was going to burst if he wasn't near her. But he had loved her like a friend. She was his best friend, and so he had lied because maybe she didn't want to be more than friends. How would he even proceed? Could he just ask her out? He had no idea.
"If I wake up and have cake smeared all over my face, you'd tell me wouldn't you?" Stephanie mumbled, turning to face Chris, though her eyes were still closed.
"Yeah, I would tell you," Chris said. "I mean, I wouldn't want you to go through the embarrassment of going down to breakfast looking like you fell face first into a pile of dog crap."
"Oh this is just the lovely morning conversation I've been dreaming of…waking up to think about dog crap. You are quite the romantic there Snooks."
"I have to talk to Trish today."
"You have to do a lot of things today, it makes it the same as any other day, you just have bigger things to do. It's like building blocks or something, you build them and build them, bigger and bigger and then you knock them down."
"That makes no sense at all."
"I'm not paid to make sense!" Stephanie said, sitting up, one side of her hair flaring up. "God, what the hell time is it?"
"Ten."
"Yuck," she said, falling back down against her pillow. "What a crappy night."
"I'm sorry a night with me is crappy Stephers."
"No, it's not, but I think I rolled over onto that plate like fifteen times, I'm going to have a slipped plate or something. Get it plate, and I rolled over onto the plate," she said, laughing to herself. "I need coffee."
"You want me to go downstairs and get you some."
"What if you run into Trish?"
"I didn't think of that," he answered, mulling over the probability of actually running into his now ex-bride-to-be.
"See, what would you do without me? You would run into her, and then she'd yell and you'd yell and nothing would get solved, and then you'd do something stupid like run to Vegas and marry her, and then everyone would be like, 'Why did they do that when they had a perfectly good wedding set-up?' and then everyone will think you're crazy, and it'll all just go to hell," Stephanie mumbled, burying her face into her pillow.
"I don't think I'd marry her."
Not when he was in love with the woman lying haphazardly on the bed in front of him, her pajama pants hanging off one of her hips, showing off her cute pink panties with the words, "No peeking" printed all over them. Her hair was splayed across the pillow and down her back against the black tank top that just seemed to hug her. Stephanie turned on her side and squinted up at him.
"Are you the coffee fairy come to give me coffee so I may function normally?"
"I'll go get you coffee," he chuckled.
"You're my hero," she said, in the exact same voice that Ferris Bueller's friend, Cameron, had used on him.
"I better be, risking my life like this, might run into Trish."
"If you do, tell her I thought she looked pretty yesterday. She may not appreciate it, but I don't think I got to tell her. Too bad she can't use that dress again. Do you think there's anywhere else appropriate enough for a wedding dress?"
"I don't think so. I think that it's one of those one-time kind of things. I mean, when are you going to where it, to your kid's graduation or something?"
"That would be something," she said. "When I get married, remember to tell me that I want a simple dress. And a simple wedding, very simple. Like ten people kind of simple. Like you, I just want you there."
"What?"
"You can be my witness. I just want a small one…coffee please."
"Why don't you get dressed and we'll find some café nearby and go to breakfast," Chris told her. "We can feel like we're transported back into the 70's and have Alice serve us and then get told to kiss grits."
"Tempting," she told him, burying her face into her pillow. "Dress me and we can go. And nothing too raunchy, and nothing revealing, and nothing that you own. Do you think that you can handle that?"
"I'm not going to dress you Stephers, last time I dressed you, you got so mad at me and acted like I had done you a great injustice," Chris told her. He also didn't trust himself to touch her right now. He had touched her plenty of times before, but somehow, knowing what he knew, it was going to be different, and he wasn't sure either one of them were ready for different.
"You put me in hideous clothes I didn't even want to wear," she told him, her voice muffled from the pillow. "So do you want me to go out with you in the vain attempt to avoid the blonde bombshell? Are we going to have to sneak through the lobby, hide behind plants and go incognito like we're special agent spies?"
"Yeah, I've got our wigs and fake mustaches right in my suitcase. Do you want to be the blonde or the redhead?"
"Well, if you put on a blonde wig, wouldn't that not make sense since you are blond? Unless you're going for the, 'It's so obvious that it's him, it can't be him' vibe, in which case, I'll be the redhead."
"I just don't think I'm quite ready to talk to her right now," Chris sighed and this time, Stephanie turned away from her pillow. She grabbed his hand and pulled him down so that he was facing her.
He took her in without explicitly doing so. She was so beautiful, lying there with her hair around her face and a lazy, sleep smile on her face. He wanted to spend every morning like this. He wanted to spend naked mornings like this, but yeah, that would probably have to come later, after he asked her out. He didn't think Stephanie was one for casual sex, unless she was one for casual sex. But that might be grossly inappropriate to ask someone you weren't dating…or you know…anyone.
"Something's bothering you," she said quite plainly. "You're holding something back."
"I am?" he asked, surprised she could tell.
"I'm your best friend, we know these things," Stephanie said. "You can say it's like a seventh sense. See, the sixth sense was ruined by the movie, and since like everyone's favorite number on the planet is seven, then the seventh sense makes sense, hey, I made a funny."
He laughed softly and brushed some hair out of her face in an unconscious move. She thought nothing of it since he had done that many times before. "It's nothing, I'm just a little bit nervous about the talk I'm eventually going to have with Trish. See, the universe is conspiring against me. Apparently I offended its mother and we had a falling out. I tried sending chocolates over there, and nothing. So I think it's exacting its revenge."
"I told you never to cross the universe, he plays dirty," Stephanie said soberly.
"I know as soon as we go downstairs, she's going to be there, and I didn't exactly conduct myself properly yesterday."
"Yeah, I'd say skipping out on your wedding, then hiding for the rest of the day in my hotel room, and then taking the wedding cake to eat wouldn't put you on her favorite people list, unless she paid for the cake and really didn't want that money to go to waste, because it didn't, I quite enjoyed the cake, it was really good, she did a good job picking it."
"I mean, she was in her dress, you said she was in her dress," Chris said, frowning.
"Yeah, she was in her dress," Stephanie said. "Everyone was ready, and we were just kind of waiting on you. And then you didn't show up and--"
"Everyone ganged up on you," he said bitterly. "Like you would just know where I was or something."
"I did know where you were," Stephanie said.
"But I didn't tell you where I was, you just knew because you know me, but you didn't know where I had gone, you expected a wedding."
"Is that why you didn't want me there the night before?" she asked him. "Is that why you wanted to be alone?"
"I needed to think about things," he replied, and it was true. It hit him on that night. When he had been thinking and contemplating and preparing for his wedding, the truth had hit him like a banana cream pie in the face. It was there and it had always been there, well, not always, it had been there for a while. Chris needed that time, if Stephanie had been there, maybe he never would've realized and he'd be on his honeymoon, and completely miserable.
"Or you needed to tie all the bedspreads together so you could climb out of the window," she told him.
"Yeah, I even needed to use my underwear, I was pretty high up," Chris said. "Trish is going to hate me. She's probably going to develop super powers and shoot flames from her wrists at me, and it's going to burn me to a crisp."
"Well, at least you'll save on the cremation bill," she shrugged. "I think she's just going to cry a lot, I'd bring a raincoat when you talk to her, maybe some galoshes, definitely an umbrella. Not that I'm denigrating what happened to her, or that I'm not sympathetic, I am sympathetic, but Mom, Dad, and I, we just…we kind of didn't see it."
"So why didn't you tell me?"
"Then you'd be shooting flames out at me, and I'd ruin our friendship and you'd never talk me, and then years later, we'd be reunited on like The Montel Williams Show, and everything would just go to hell in a hand-basket. Now there's a weird saying," she giggled to herself. "Hell in a hand-basket…the things people come up with…"
"I love how nobody tells me things that could affect my future."
"We thought you were happy," she shrugged carelessly. "Let me go get dressed and we'll head down to breakfast."
"Yeah, okay," he said as she got up and he watched her walk away. He had a lot of things to do today. Cut off ties with Trish being the number one priority. He needed to be free to pursue the woman he loved, the woman who had just danced her way into the bathroom.
It was time to try again…
And this time, he was getting his woman.