Disclaimer, etc., in prologue.

Part Five

Eve took a deep breath, the diva sitting in her rental car, her hands still locked on the steering wheel. It was turning out to be harder than she expected to go inside the arena... Strange, wasn't it... How excited she'd been about the prospect of returning to the WWE just forty-eight hours ago. Before she'd shown up to surprise the man that had at the time been her boyfriend, only to find that he was someone else. Before she'd rushed out there during a damned pay-per-view and attacked the woman that Punk had cheated on her with. Before she'd told Punk it was over and ended up sleeping with Dean Ambrose. Oh, yeah. Her life had changed a whole hell of a lot in the past forty-eight hours.

Shaking her head, Eve reached for the door handle, forcing herself to get out of the car, heading around to the trunk to get her things, the woman trying to figure out exactly where the day had gone. She'd thought she would have more time to figure out what to do, how to handle things... But here she was, preparing to head in for her first RAW in about nine months, and she felt like the time between this morning and now had flown on by without her having a chance to prepare herself at all.

Once she'd gotten out of bed that morning, gathering her clothes and putting on what was salvageable (the ripped strap on her bra had made it a lost cause and she hadn't even known it had been torn at the time it happened), the woman had hurried back to her own hotel room and gotten ready as quickly as possible, then headed on to the next city... She'd gotten phone calls and texts throughout the day, but she'd ignored them all, not wanting to know who was trying to contact her. She was pretty sure it wouldn't be Dean Ambrose; he didn't have her phone number as far as she knew. (He didn't seem the type to go through her phone while she was sleeping or anything, but she had it password protected.) But that still left plenty of others... Including CM Punk, who was the last person that she wanted to hear from. The truth was, she needed to stay the hell away from him. She needed to stay strong and keep her resolve and not be one of those women that took back a man that had cheated on her. And despite her anger, despite her hurt, part of her feared that if she actually listened to him, she might find herself weakening. That she might take him back.

She refused to put herself into a position where she might be talked into letting that happen.

"Eve! There you are!"

The diva stiffened at the sound of the voice, forcing herself to relax when she processed the fact that it was a female voice, not a male one, and that she recognized who it was that was speaking. Brie Bella, one of the Bella twins. A woman that she'd been both friends and enemies with over the years... One that she'd managed to make up with shortly after she left the company and Brie and her sister had come back to it. Now that Eve was back with the company again, she could only hope that the truce that they'd found several months before would stay in place.

Tucking some hair behind her ear, Eve managed a smile for the other woman. "Hey, Brie," she said, then took a deep breath. "Look, about last night... When I interrupted your match-"

"Hey, we're good with that. You didn't interrupt anything. You just made the aftermath a little less painful for me and Nikki, because I think we all know that Tamina and AJ weren't done, and while Nikki's able to train again, she hasn't actually been released to compete, so... Fighting could have been bad for her."

"Is she okay? Did she suffer a setback when Tamina went after her?" Eve asked, straightening up a bit, and Brie shook her head.

"No. No setbacks. She's probably going to be cleared to wrestle in a couple of weeks, and that still stands... I made her get checked out last night, just in case," Brie said, then cleared her throat, shifting her weight from foot to foot before speaking. "I... We were back there last night when AJ was getting her face looked at."

Eve looked down at her feet, not really wanting to look Brie in the eye at the moment. "I see."

"Her nose wasn't broken, which is kind of a bummer, because from what I understand, she would have totally deserved it," Brie continued, shrugging when Eve's gaze jerked up to lock with hers. "I call 'em as I see them. Anyway... As it appears that you have your own problems with the current divas' champion... And probably have a pretty decent reason to get a title shot against her since you never got a rematch for the title after you lost it back in January... Well... It seems that the two of us have been teamed up for the show tonight. Nikki will be at ringside for us."

"We're teaming up?"

"Yup. Tag team match against Tamina and AJ. I'll let you pick who starts the match, and if you want, if I'm in there and AJ tags in... I'll do my best to get you into the match, because I'm thinking that you have more of a reason to want to beat the hell out of her than I do. I mean, I'm mad about the stuff she said about all of us on Total Divas, and I know that she and Daniel had a relationship in the past, but that's just... The past. That ended well over a year ago, and what she did to you... Everyone knew that you and Punk were together, and she still..."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I'm sorry," Brie said quietly. "I just want you to get the chance to break her face if you want to. I kind of think that you deserve the opportunity."

"I totally lost my composure last night. Running out there, attacking her... I shouldn't... I wanted to just..."

"Hey... Not asking questions. Not my place, right? I know we've called a truce and all of that, but I know I'm not exactly your best friend. Just your tag team partner for tonight and all of that." Brie shrugged. "We used to tag in the past, you know. A long time ago, but we did okay."

"That we did," Eve said. She had teamed with the Bellas several times for six-diva tag matches, back before the twins had turned mean girl... A few years ago now, in fact. But they'd worked well together, and she knew that Brie really liked to win. "You know, coming back here... I've probably still got a lot of enemies, made more last night. I could really use a friend."

"Seems to me that you've got one. Two if you count Nikki."

"When has she ever counted?" Eve asked, and Brie let out a laugh.

"I'm so telling her you said that. Now, come on. We've got a match to get ready for."