A/N: Hello everyone! It's around that time for a new story! :P

I've had the idea for this story for a while now, and finally got around to writing it for fun, so here it is! This story will be on the shorter side, but I hope you all enjoy! :)

I'd been so blind to so many details of my own life. Things I should have been aware of, things that were right in front of my face for years. But one day had blurred into the next until they were a wash of gray. My weeks were filled with work and friends, and so much utter bullshit that I was left sailing through life, riding the status quo…

That is, until everything changed, and suddenly the status quo was a faint memory in the distance.

XxX

The Lower Deck was packed, which wasn't an unusual occurrence for this particular bar, even midweek, but being Friday night, every inch of the place was wall-to-wall crammed.

It was the perfect place to let loose after shift since it was a short walk from the station, and the bartenders tended to forget to run the credit cards for those employed at Firehouse 28.

I'd stopped drinking hours ago, long enough to sober up and drive home. My bed was calling me. It'd been a long week, made longer by unplanned overtime and a couple of shitty calls that I hadn't yet been able to shake.

"C'mon Knight." Jett insisted."You gotta stay for one more." His words slightly slurred as he swayed like a seasick sailor.

I steadied him with both my hands clasped on his shoulders, preventing him from crashing sideways into the girl beside him who wore a sparkly tiara.

"Nah, I'm done. Gonna settle up my tab and head home in a few."

"When'd you get so fucking boring?" He poked his finger into my chest. "You're one of the youngest guys on the team and you act like you're sixty fuckin' years old. So. Goddamn. Boring."

I laughed, pulling his hand away and then catching him as he pitched forward, apparently thrown off balance.

"I'm not old. And I'm not boring. I'm dead-ass tired. While you spent the last block off lounging in your backyard, drinking shitty beer and eating food your poor wife cooked for you, I pulled four overtime shifts."

"Bo-ring."

Before I could snap a comeback at him, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was a little before two in the morning and the only people who would call me at this hour were standing in the bar right next to me.

I grabbed for my phone, my sense of urgency pushed into overdrive as I checked the screen. I'd missed it, and from the notifications I could see it hadn't been the only one.

Hurriedly, I tapped Stephanie's name, my heart ratcheting up as I waited for her to answer. She wouldn't be calling this late unless it was an emergency, and my brain immediately launched into the worst case scenario. I'd seen enough of those during my time with the Seattle Fire Department that my mind had plenty of options to pick from.

"Steph?" I yelled, trying to speak over the intense noise of the bar as I dodged people on my way out the door. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay."

I could hear the tears in her voice, the constricted sound made my heart hammer.

"Is it James? What happened?"

There was a pause and then a wrecked sob. "We broke up."

I was immediately relieved no one had been killed or something, but that reprieve was directly followed by bone-deep confusion as her words finally registered. "What?" I couldn't possibly have heard her right. It was loud in the bar, and I couldn't…

That wasn't-

"It's over."

Her words hit me harder than if my rig had plowed into me. There was one constant in my life, one thing that never wavered, and that was James and Stephanie. I'd watched my other friends go through a thousand breakups, hookups, and fleeting relationships, but James and Stephanie weren't like everyone else. Anyone who'd ever met them was counting down the days until they ended up married with little rugrats running around.

"Fuck." I muttered as I grappled for my keys, retrieving them from my pocket without conscious thought. "What happened?"

"You need to talk to James." Her sobbing was softer now, but it did nothing to make her assurances that she was all right any more believable. "I'm gonna stay with my mom for a while. He's at the house, though. Kendall… he needs you."

"I'm already on my way." I'd reached my car by then, and with a swift click, I had it unlocked. James would be in pieces, and I didn't know what he needed, but whatever it was, I'd be there. He and Stephanie had been together since we'd been barely old enough to notice the opposite sex. After almost a decade as a couple, things had just fallen apart.

The ten-minute drive to James' house took six, and then I was letting myself in with my spare key I'd had for as long as they'd lived here. The house was quiet when I entered, the lights off, but even in the darkness, everything looked exactly the same as the last time I'd been there. Both James and Stephanie's shoes sat neatly lined beside the coat rack in the front hall. Photos of them, all black and white, hung on the wall over the table in the hallway. Stephanie's book, open and facedown, was set on the table beside the couch.

I searched for James, and when I came up empty, I headed into the backyard where I found him sitting on his back porch. His shoulders were hunched forward, his legs crossed at the ankles. He stared off into the darkness, and empty glass held loosely in his fingers.

When I walked over to him, he looked up at me, his bloodshot eyes glassy, making the hazel even more vivid. The pain radiating from him was almost palpable. Without a word, I sat down beside him on the weathered gray steps. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. Gently, I reached over and took the glass, setting it down next to one of Stephanie's flowerpots.

Sliding my arm around his shoulders, I pulled him in. At first, his muscles were tense and unyielding, but little by little he began to relax into me, his body curving against mine until I could feel him begin to settle in. I rubbed my palm in slow strokes up and down his arm.

"I'm so sorry, James."

For a long time, he didn't say anything. We sat there, him leaning into me as I waited, passing the time until something happened, though what, I wasn't sure. My brain flew in a thousand different directions. Despite the fact that I was witnessing the aftermath, the idea that James and Stephanie had broken up still seemed completely surreal.

I held him tighter, tilting my head to rest on his.

"I'm numb." The words came out barely louder than a whisper and I almost didn't hear them over the sound of the rush of traffic in the distance. "It's over. I can't believe it's over… I can't believe I… It's done, Ken. It's just… over."

Those words echoed what Stephanie had said earlier, but coming from James, they sounded so fucking broken it was all I could do to hold it together. I took a silent breath. Both of us losing it wouldn't do anyone any good.

"I know." I didn't know what else to say. There was nothing to say. Nothing I could tell him, at this point, would help. I'd seen grief like this hundreds of times. At work I'd witnessed the fallout of countless tragedies-people forced to face the worst day of their lives, sometimes with no warning-but never had I ever felt so completely useless.

James lifted his head, still staring straight ahead. "How did you… Did she… Steph called you?"

I nodded.

"She didn't…" James took a deep breath in and raked his hands through his hair. "She didn't tell you what happened?"

It sounded like a question more than a statement. "She told me that you two broke up and that you were here. I got here as fast as I could."

The "thank you" in reply was nearly inaudible.

I stood, pulling James up with me and wrapped my arms around him. I held him to me, one hand buried in his hair. I don't know how long we stayed like that, standing on his porch, time marching past us. It could have been minutes or maybe hours. He clung to me, his face buried against my shoulder, but I couldn't hold him tight enough to stop him from shaking.

I needed to do something more than this, and being here, in this place he'd shared with her for years, definitely wasn't helping. With reluctance, I loosened my grip and took one step back.

He looked at me with red-ringed eyes. "Go get in the car. I'll be there in a second, okay?"

He didn't ask where we were going, just nodded silently and trudged into the house.

I watched him go, then hurried to his room. When I walked in, I looked at the space from a new perspective, through the lens of James' loss. Stephanie's presence was so prominent here-more than anywhere else in the house-that I could almost feel her. The cheerful yellow walls seemed out of place now. Evidence of her was everywhere, and I wondered if it would even be possible for James to extricate himself from the life they'd built together without it imploding completely.

Tucking that thought away, I moved around the room, gathering clothes and toiletries and shoving them into the first suitcase I could find. I'd planned to bring James back to my place to give him a few days away from all the reminders of his life with Stephanie, but the more I turned the idea over in my mind, the less brilliant it seemed.

Sharing a house with two other guys-loud, obnoxious ones at that-meant my place was probably the last place James would want to be. I scrambled to come up an alternate plan. He couldn't stay here.

And then it dawned on me.

I grabbed my phone and shot off a quick text to my grandpa. It was still way too early to call-Bill probably wouldn't be up for a few more hours-but I couldn't imagine a single scenario where he'd say no.

When I got to my car, James was already sitting in the passenger seat, staring out the window. He sat unmoving as I climbed in and started the engine. "You okay to get out of town for a couple of days?"

Finally, he looked over. "I work Tuesday."

There was more than enough time for me to call his boss and arrange for someone to take his shifts. Even if he'd stuck around, he'd be useless at work. "I'll take care of it." I assured him, navigating my car out of the street.

He nodded, blinking slowly as though the act of keeping his head upright was too taxing to manage.

"Don't worry about anything. I'll take care of it." I repeated.

XxX

After grabbing a few days worth of clothes from my place, we headed out, leaving the city lights behind us in exchange for the winding road toward Pine Bluff. All the loose ends of our sudden escape from Seattle could be tied up after we'd gotten some rest. For now, I just wanted to get James away from the city and somewhere he could relax and not have time to think for a while.

I tried to relate to what James was going trough, but I had no frame of reference for that kind of heartbreak. It wasn't that I hadn't been through breakups before-more than my fair share, in fact. I'd been with Jo for a few years, on and off, though it tended to be more off than on, especially lately.

If I was honest with myself, I'd known for a while it probably wasn't going to work out, not in the end, anyway. We didn't have all that much in common anymore, but she was fun to spend time with, at least when we weren't fighting, so whatever her reasons were for being with me, it suited me fine most days. My schedule could be erratic, and I picked up overtime where I could. It was nice to have someone to call at the end of a shift to meet for breakfast or hang out with on my days off.

Our last breakup had been the week before, but I'd barely thought about it since it happened. The first time Jo had dumped me, it had stung a little. Now, it was just routine. In all likelihood, we'd be back together the following week, so it wasn't worth getting worked up over. I was happy either way.

But James wasn't me. He was built differently when it came to the way he approached love. Stephanie had been his one and only. They'd never even had so much as had a fight. Not a real one, anyway. I hadn't, not even for a second, imagined a reality where they wouldn't one day walk down the aisle and pump out a bunch of kids.

I still wasn't totally convinced that outcome was off the table.

This had to be a blip, a little bump in the road, and a few days from now, they'd patch things up and everything would go back to normal. They were meant to be together. Other than me, no one got James like Stephanie did.

Being best friends with a guy for almost two decades forged a kind of love I'd never experienced anywhere else. We were closer than brothers, and now that he was hurting, I'd do whatever I could to take care of him.

XxX

I drove for two hours, James asleep in the passenger's seat next to me, until the morning sunlight peeked over the hills as the car climbed up and over the summit. I was exhausted, but exhaustion was something I knew how to manage. I'd had plenty of practice. I just needed to get us there, and then we could both sleep.

Pulling onto the long winding dirt road that led to Gramps' cabin, I slowed, trying to keep the car steady enough on the uneven driveway so as not to wake James up just yet.

Finally, we were here.

The cabin was set back from the road, down a long, curved driveway. The cabin had been built sometime in the fifties, and the wooden structure had more than held up over time. Even the wraparound porch was still sturdy and level.

I wished the circumstances were different, but I couldn't help the feeling of excitement at being back here again.

After parking close to the cabin, I popped the trunk and grabbed our bags, setting them on the front porch before grappling around the top of the doorframe. Gramps always kept a spare key there. Probably not the most secure, but I was grateful for it now as I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Inside, a fine layer of dust covered every surface, and the air was stale. I wasn't sure how long it had been sitting vacant, but if I had to guess, I'd say more than a year.

As I looked around, memories flooded back. This had been the right decision, I was sure. James and I had spent some of our happiest times in this place, and I knew it would be comforting to him to be somewhere familiar.

Once I'd made the beds and taken care of as much of the dust as I could, I headed back to the car.

James was still asleep, his brunet hair fanned against the window where he leaned his head. Through the windshield, I could see his mouth hung slightly open, and I couldn't help remembering our past trips up here.

I didn't think there'd been a single time James hadn't passed out moments after buckling up. It was as though the white noise from the road had some sort of magical hold over him. Once upon a time, I'd delighted in waking him up in the most horrible ways I could think of. Pulling the door open suddenly so he'd nearly fall out of the car, ice cubes down the front of his shirt, and one year James had worn the word 'dickhead' across his forehead for three days when the marker I'd used to write on him didn't wash off.

It almost felt like a different lifetime.

Now, he looked so peaceful that I hated to wake him up. Sleeping for too long at that angle wasn't doing his neck any favors, though. I leaned over the driver's seat and slid my hand gently along James shoulder to give him a little shake.

"Come on, Jay, wake up. We're here."

Done! So, it looks like James and Stephanie have broken up after years of being together. But the question is, what was the cause of the breakup? Any guesses? :P

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the chapter, as well as if you happened to have a favorite part/moment!

The next chapter of this should be up by Wednesday, so you won't have to wait too long for it.

Until next time!

-Epically Obsessed