I don't write a lot of Stevie/Alex fics--in fact this is the first one. It is a bit different to my usual style as it is reflective. I look forward to seeing your feedback. I promise to update the rest of my fics as soon as I can!
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Love Lived Down The Road
I can honestly say that I didn't see it coming. I didn't see any of it until it was too late; until I'd married a woman who I believed was the one for me. God, I was so wrong.
We'd been mates forever. Been through rodeo's, argued like cats and dogs…we'd done everything together. I knew her so well, and yet I didn't realise the way she felt about me. I didn't realise what was right in front of me, right under my nose. Stevie Hall was in love with me.
Thinking about it now, all the signs were there, jealousy now quite obvious to me. I don't know how I missed it. I let it all pass me by. You think I would've learnt after Claire—it was exactly the same; Christ it took fifteen years before I figured out I loved her. How could I have made the same stupid mistake with Stevie?
Stevie hated Fiona. Now I know it was with good reason—she didn't trust her, which is more than I can say for myself. I walked straight into her little trap, didn't I? Gullible is a bloody understatement. She not only sucked me in, she lied. Kids—that's what it was all about…she should have told me that she couldn't have them. It wouldn't have made a difference. There are options…well there could've been. If I'd known from the start. If she hadn't covered it up. If a lot of things.
That wasn't all. There was more. Fi wanted my money, my status. Fi wanted Killarney. I well and truly had the wool over my eyes. I really believed that she was everything I'd been looking for in a woman; everything I wanted and needed for the rest of my life. I was bloody wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of things. Her father had been involved with fraud, gone bankrupted, and almost gone to prison until he did a runner. Fiona had nothing. She'd led me to believe that she was wealthy, that everything was hunky-doory, when all along she had her sights set on my bank account…my life.
The worst of it was that I married her. Thought the sun rose and set with that woman. I thought she was the real thing. But the real thing was down the road, and had been there all along, waiting, hoping, sitting in silence because she didn't want to wreck what Fi and I shared. Things would've been easier if she had…but in reality I probably would have pushed Stevie away. Like an idiot I would've defended Fiona 'til I was blue in the face. I loved her…at least I thought it was love at the time. There are so many kinds of love, that sometime's it's hard to tell which is the good kind, and which is the love that you need to be weary of. There's a difference between the two. It took a long time for me to work that out.
At least I woke up. At least I realised who Stevie was, what she'd been waiting for. She'd sat through five years of Fi and I, listening to me, giving me advice. All the time she spent pretending that she felt nothing, when all along she felt something.
Never mind the bad thoughts. It all came out in the end. Stevie had stood by me when it all went wrong with Fiona, comforted me when I'd filed for divorce. She had been there through thick and thin, and one day I realised what that had meant. I realised that she loved me, and what I felt for her was love.
Twenty years on and we have the perfect life. We both have everything we've always craved for; each other, and a couple of kids for good luck.
