Hi!

This is something I've been working on for quite some time now, and I'm really excited to share it with you! It was originally supposed to be a one-shot, but it grew so quickly that I had to split it into three chunks.

Here's the thing: I haven't really watched season 4 yet. I'm waiting for it to hit Netflix so that I can binge watch it before season 5 starts. I know, generally, what happens over the course of season 4, but I'm not secure enough in that knowledge to write it. So this piece diverges from canon starting at the end of season 3. If that bothers you, I'm really sorry! Let's call this AU. :)

I had a really hard time finding information about Nick and Caroline's history as well, so I sort of made it up. I went back and watched a few episodes of season one and found tiny kernels of information Nick would mention in passing, and a few of those kernels contradict what I have written here. For instance, in canon, I'm pretty sure Nick and Caroline started dating while Nick was still in law school and lasted up through when he dropped out and then she broke up with him shortly after. That's not what I have written here. Again, if that bothers you, I'm very sorry. It wasn't intentional!

I'd like to give a shout-out to the fic One Day One Night by Mrnickmiller for being an awesome inspiration to this fic. It's extremely well-written and I highly suggest giving it a read if you have the time :)

I don't own New Girl or anything else you might recognize! Title and summary inspired by "I Always Knew" by The Vaccines (which is the song they play at the very end of the Season 2 finale)!

It's Always You

Chapter One

November 18, 2015

The first time Nick ever sees Caroline, he's at work.

He's just gotten this new job at Clyde's, the bar he frequents with Schmidt and Coach. It's not far from their apartment so his roommates are in all the time and together they enjoy the benefits of free alcohol. He meets lots of pretty women and interesting men, and for the first time since quitting law school he feels like his life is finally headed in the right direction. Or at least it's headed in a direction. Better than lying around on the couch all day, he reasons.

Caroline is there with a group of women whom he would later learn are all her coworkers and they're all eyeing Nick. If he isn't completely mistaken, he might say they're cat-calling him from their booth every time he turns his back to them. Heat creeps up the back of his neck but it isn't entirely unpleasant. He still jumps a mile in the air when he turns around and finds them all suddenly seated at the bar, though. The look Caroline is giving him is sultry and it makes his stomach do flips.

They all ask for fruity concoctions his old roommate Winston would have died for and Nick makes them quietly, suddenly intimidated by the amount of pure estrogen looking him up and down on the other side of the bar. His gaze always lingers on Caroline when he gets the courage to look up at them from his work. He's never really been into blondes, but for some reason he's incredibly attracted to this one.

They all leave together two hours before close and Caroline is the last of them to file out. She lingers at the bar, fiddling with something in her purse that Nick can't see, before looking up at him. The sultry look from earlier is gone, leaving behind a clarity that startles Nick. She smiles and opens her mouth like she's going to say something, but one of her coworkers calls out to her from the door, so instead she leaves with a rather wistful smile.

She comes back the next night, this time with only a few friends, and manages to introduce herself. She's back again the next night, and the night after that, until Nick learns to expect her every night at eight o'clock on the dot.

The first time Nick ever kisses Caroline, it's a little after two o'clock in the morning.

They're standing in the parking lot outside the bar and he's rubbing the back of his neck in frustration. His stupid car won't start and he has no way of getting home. He could walk, but who wants to walk ten blocks at two o'clock in the morning in a seedy neighborhood in Los Angeles?

Lucky for him Caroline always hangs back long enough that he's already driving away by the time she gets in her car, so she's there when he discovers that his engine has died. She trots to his car rather meekly, raising a hand in a timid greeting, and asks if he needs a ride home.

He isn't sure what possesses him to do it on the short walk between his car and hers, but he has her pinned to the side of her car making out with her rather fiercely in just a few seconds' time. He breaks away to catch his breath and she manages to gasp, "You wanna come home with me?"

The first time Nick ever sleeps with Caroline, he wakes up naked in her bed.

She isn't there. Well, she is, but she's not in the bed with him. He opens his eyes to find that he's lying on his back, staring up at her bedroom ceiling. He can hear water running in a small sink somewhere off to his left; when he turns his head toward it, he can just barely see her arm working a toothbrush vigorously over her perfectly white teeth through the bathroom doorway. He sees her blonde hair bouncing in the reflection of the mirror, but her face is hidden. He smiles. He's happier than he's been in a long time.

Sleeping with her felt good. It's been so long that he wasn't sure if he would still remember how to do things, but as it turns out it really is like riding a bike. They moved quickly, ripping at each other's clothes in a dizzying passion, before tripping down the hallway and diving into her bed. He was spent and satiated by two-thirty, and he was dead asleep by two-thirty-five.

She smiles at him when she finally emerges, hands busily smoothing the collar of her weird shirt that might actually be a blouse and eyes soft and trained on him. She plants a knee on her side of the bed to better lean toward him and kisses him, just long enough to restart that searing heat in his belly that spurred him into action the night before, but before he can act on it she's already grabbing her briefcase from atop the chest of drawers next to her bedroom door and telling him that he's welcome to any food in her kitchen as she leaves.

He lays there for a while, contemplating whether or not he should call Schmidt for a ride home. The happiness he'd felt upon first waking up has evaporated, leaving behind a cold uncertainty. How was he supposed to get home? What was he going to do about his car? Was his cell phone even still alive? Also, where the hell did his boxers go?

He rolls as close to the edge as he can without falling off and cranes his neck to peek down her hallway. He spots them, strewn along the floor with the rest of his clothes, right in front of Caroline's front door. She very likely had to step over it all in order to leave. His face is flushed before he's even thrown the sheets off, and he bolts down her hallway, feeling more exposed than he ever has in his entire miserable life. He nearly topples over while he quickly shimmies everything on, but manages to catch himself with a hand on her wall. He pats himself down, mentally ticking off each of his personal belongings on his checklist, and fishes his phone out of his pocket. The little thing (completely and utterly out of date compared to Schmidt's fancy Blackberry) still mercifully has a twelve percent battery charge.

He only has a few numbers saved to his phone, and the vast majority of those numbers belong to members of his family. Two, however, belong to his roommates. Coach or Schmidt. Coach or Schmidt? Which one?

He highlights Coach's name and hits the green 'call' button. As the artificial ringing sound begins to echo through his phone, Nick shuffles awkwardly into Caroline's front room. Everything is set perfectly in its' place; not a single pillow ruffled or curtain wrinkled. He perches on the edge of her couch and tries to make himself as small as possible so as not to disturb anything.

"It's Coach, you know what to do." Coach's voicemail says cheerfully.

Nick curses and flips the phone closed. That knocks out half of his call list. Which sucks, because the other half of the list is the half that he really, really doesn't want to deal with at nine o'clock in the morning on a Saturday.

An internal war the likes of which Nick has never experienced before wreaks havoc in his brain. On the one hand, he really doesn't want to stick around Caroline's place without her there. It feels too much like a museum, like if he moves one thing he'll be arrested and put in some kind of weird museum prison. But on the other hand, Schmidt is always extra chipper in the morning, and Nick is definitely feeling some of the aftereffects of heavy-ish drinking from the night before. Namely, a churning stomach and a fairly mild headache. He considers searching through Caroline's medicine cabinet to see if he can find any asprin, but instinct tells him that it would probably be a bad idea to do so. So instead, he bites the bullet and calls Schmidt.

Twenty minutes later Nick is sighing in relief in the passenger's seat of Schmidt's Ford Spaceship Mobile (he's pretty sure that's not the real name. Like, twenty percent sure) while Schmidt alternates between worried glances ("I was up half the night waiting for you to call!") and sly, knowing grins ("Nick Miller, you dog!"). Nick can tune him out like a seasoned pro, since that's essentially what he's become, and he does, concentrating on staring out the window and wondering if he should have left his phone number for Caroline. Oh well, no matter. She'll be by the bar again, probably.

When he decides to pursue a relationship with Caroline, he's at the bar.

She's sitting on the other side of the bar, in her usual stool, watching him work with an easy smile on her face. He realizes that this is something he could get used to; the steady work, the beautiful girl, the semi-free alcohol. Not bad for old Nick Miller.

But it's the looks on the other male customers' faces when they spot Caroline that makes a kind of jealousy he's not used to rear up inside him. And it certainly doesn't help that he's caught her looking back a few times. Suddenly his pudgy belly and worn clothes seem very inadequate. So in a fit of insecurity he pulls her aside and asks (or rather begs) her to give it a shot with him. She smiles and stretches up on her tiptoes to kiss him and he melts into her, his insecurities suddenly far away.

The first time he ever tells Caroline he loves her, they're in her living room.

He's gripping the back of one of the chairs tucked neatly beneath her dining room table so tightly that he's almost positive one single flick of his wrist would splinter the cheap IKEA-brand wood beneath his fingers. His chest is heaving and he knows his nostrils are flared and he can feel the corners of his mouth pulled down hard, like some sort of over-the-top cartoon animal. He says it, or rather, he yells it, and then immediately feels himself wither. Did I just say that? Did I actually just say that?

Caroline deflates. She'd been screaming at him across the dining room table for ten minutes now, hands flying over her head in a kind of tornado of exasperation. He can't even remember what they're fighting about but it's quickly morphed into her usual threat – that she would leave him, that she deserved better, and she was going to go find it. And it was the fear she spawned in him coupled with a blind fury he's never experienced before that drove him to act on instinct, to try and salvage the only good thing in his life with the phrase he'd only ever heard his father whisper to his mother once when they both thought he wasn't listening on Christmas morning all those years ago. And now he's gone and screamed it at the top of his lungs. The first time I ever tell a girl I love her, I just have to scream it at her like a lunatic. Nick Miller! The most stupid boy of all the stupid boys.

But she deflates and his fury is gone, leaving only that fear behind. The exposure and vulnerability he feels now makes the way he felt that first morning in her apartment seem as though he was wearing a full skiing outfit. Oh God, what have I done?

"I love you, too," she whispers. He blinks. "Nick, I love you, too."

Oh thank God. He releases the back of the chair and rounds the table quickly, seizing the side of her neck with one hand and burying the other in her hair so that he can kiss her properly. She laughs into the kiss in a breathless sort of way and he's pretty sure the bubbling warmth in his stomach is joy. Maybe. Or maybe it's indigestion. Whatever. Nothing can spoil this moment, he's sure.

She's at his apartment for only the fifth time throughout the course of their relationship when she breaks up with him.

They're sitting down at the dining room table and Nick is fidgeting. He'd offered to make her tea, coffee, an omelet, anything to keep her from doing what he knew she was about to do. But she persisted and eventually he gave in and sat. But he sits on the edge of his seat. He's ready to bolt at a moment's notice. If I leave before she has a chance to say it, does that mean we aren't officially broken up?

A heaviness settles in his chest as she begins to speak. He hears her, but she seems far away, like they're standing on two sides of a very long tunnel. Denial takes over for a minute and he clamps his hands over his ears and begins to sing-shout over her, ignoring Schmidt's scandalized expression when he peeks out of his bedroom doorway down the hall to investigate. But eventually Caroline seizes Nick's wrists and wrenches them away, shocking him into silence just long enough for her to say it:

"I'm breaking up with you. It's over."

The devastation she leaves in her wake takes months to heal. He's just coming out of it (and also coincidentally just returning from Mexico with several peck marks along his arms that he refuses to talk about) when Schmidt announces that he's finally written an ad to fill the empty fourth bedroom reserved for Winston, assuming he ever returns from Latvia. Things with Malia seem to be heating up for Coach, which means he'll probably be moving out soon, meaning that Nick and Schmidt will have two empty bedrooms and a ridiculous spike in rent if they don't act soon. Schmidt's written it like a woman, Nick realizes as he reads the ad. He isn't sure if it's a stroke of genius or incredibly creepy that Schmidt can do that so well, but something in his gut tells him to just go with it. It couldn't be that bad to have a girl around, right?