A/N: I'm blown away by how much attention this story has received, especially given the fact that this show hasn't been on TV for at least 5 years. You guys really came through, checking out the stories and leaving your reviews. Like I said, blew me right away.

Anyway, chapters should be coming fast and furious now, given that the holidays are approaching and I'm going to have a lot more free time not spent researching and worrying, so keep reading! I haven't given up on this story yet, and neither should you.

Disclaimers: Don't own anything. Characters belong to Disney, the song is Evan and Jaron "You Don't Know Me" Which is, incidentally, the only holdover from the original version of the story. So there, put that in your mouth, enjoy that.

Chapter Six

For all the time it takes

I run these stories through my head

Of her comin' home

And Us, just staring at each other

And we'll both know

Yeah, we'll just know

Tyler woke up to the sound of his own name playing on the alarm clock radio.

"…And in our top news story today, local KHS math teacher Tyler Connell gained national notoriety after rushing to the aid of Val Lanier, whose arrival at Kingsport Executive Airfield last night was interrupted when the Ward star collapsed on the airport runway. Though WAPE tried to contact her publicist following last night's incident, as of yet no comment has been issued from the troubled starlet's camp regarding the cause of her collapse, or of her relation to Mr. Connell…"

It was at this point that Tyler, now wide awake, slammed his hand down on the snooze button, interrupting the morning DJ's laughing speculation as to the cause of Val's "exhaustion." Lying back in his bed in the 15 minutes of silence allowed by his snooze button, he stoically forbade himself to think of the events of the previous evening. It was a heroic effort, one that entailed locking away any and all memories associated with how it felt to again hold the fragile, real weight of her in his arms. Luckily for him, he already had a fairly large section in his mind especially set aside as a clearing house for repressed Val-memories.

He wondered if it was true, what they said about severe repression causing brain tumors. If so, he had a walnut-sized tumor that he'd like to dedicate to a certain bleach blonde TV star.

And I won't care that she took me through a maze

A left me there for days

Until she made

Her mind to go away

Careful to keep his mind blank, he rolled out of bed and methodically set about preparing himself for the school day. Stretched. Yawned. Scratched his head.

Pulled out his faded Kingsport EMS t-shirt to wear with his dress pants.

He shook himself out of his daze and frowned at the t-shirt in his hand. He couldn't wear that to class; he hadn't, as a matter of fact, worn that particular shirt in years.

Shower. He let the water run cold and tensed his muscles against the chill, because if the morning talk radio was any indication, he was gonna be tense all day anyway. Lather. Rinse. No time to repeat.

He allowed himself to puzzle over something inconsequential as he shaved. Like how there had been something familiar about the way she smelled last night. Over and above the trendy perfume and the smell of wine on her breath when she sighed.

Strawberry lip gloss. He'd always liked that sticky, sweet scent.

He recalled liking the way it tasted too.

You'd think I'd know by now

You'd think I'd wash this down

Did you think I'd hurt her now?

Just to heal my heart?

As he padded barefoot into the kitchen to grab a Red Bull and peel a grapefruit for breakfast, he ignored the sound of his name on the morning news report.

"Sources say that the man was Kingsport resident Tyler Connell…"

His home phone rang, he ignored that too, let the machine get it.

"CONNELL!!! It's Jerry. Pickuppickuppickuppickup. I know you're home, it isn't even 7:30 yet. Pick up the goddamn phone! You're on page A-1 of USA Today!"

The answering machine cut him off, but apparently what Jerry lacked in sensitivity he more than made up for in persistence. Tyler's seldom used cell phone startled him as it began to vibrate wildly on the kitchen counter. He glanced down at the cracked digital display.

47 missed calls.

The tinned voice of his landline answering machine announced rather matter-of-factly. "You have 10 new messages."

Finally forced to react to the extraordinary amount of attention he was receiving, Tyler grabbed the kitchen phone off the wall and dialed the number for the KHS main office, and, upon getting the automated answer service, made the second important decision of his day.

He called in sick.


Then you don't know me

You don't know me

You don't know me

She don't owe me anything

If Val had to choose her least favorite thing about passing out from exhaustion, it would have to be this: That no matter how obscene a sleep deficit one's body had yet to pay off, it was still almost impossible to control the when's and how's of waking up.

On this particular day, she greeted the wrong side of dawn.

The suite that she didn't recall checking into came equipped with a quaint wind up alarm clock and a malicious coffee maker, and a quick glance at the first proved the necessity of the other. She scalded herself twice before finally producing a grainy cup of Maxwell House mud-caf. Singed but triumphant, she padded silently into the living room, intent on familiarizing herself with her oversized suite.

Instead she tripped over an already familiar roommate hunkered down on the living room floor.

"Royce!" she shrieked, dropping the scalding hot mug near the vicinity of what she hoped was his feet. The bodyguard leapt to his feet with a roar, brushing scalding hot coffee sludge off of his pajama leg. "Jesus! I didn't see-What the hell are you doing on my floor!?" she yelled, even as guilt and panic drove her to run back into her room in search of a towel.

"Apparently subjecting myself to medieval forms of torture." He hollered, still frantically brushing the molten gruel away from vital parts of his anatomy. "What the hell is this?! This shit sticks like napalm." Val hurried back out of her bedroom, repentantly holding out a towel made of fluffy yellow cotton.

"I made coffee."

I'd love to think that she

Was out to hurt me

And given the facts still maybe we

We could, you know, we could try again

With all spills wiped up and burns properly salved, Royce and Val sat quietly on the couch in the living room watching a Law & Order rerun as a fresh pot of coffee (this time successfully made by Royce) heated on the machine. "The coffee machine is sexist." She grumbled quietly, nevertheless taking a long satisfying sip from her mug.

"Yeah, but it also does tend to work better when you use a filter." The bodyguard shot back, taking his eyes off the screen long enough to shoot her an ironic grin. Val stuck her tongue out at him in response and emptied her mug. She stood and stretched, frowning when she felt a pull at her lower back.

"I think I'm going to go for a run… get some oxygen flowing into my creaky bones." She said decisively, ignoring the dark sky that still sat on the other side of the window. Royce shrugged, not getting up to join her.

"It's cold." He said, concentrating on the plot line instead.

"Yeah. They have seasons here. This one's Fall." She walked into her room and began opening closets and cabinets in search of the contents of her now empty luggage. "Who unpacked all of my stuff? Where are my MBT's?" she yelled, ducking under the bed in search of her trainers.

"Helen did it. Stuff's put away in the clo-"

"Found them! Bye!" A blur of blonde hair and blue track pants and Val sprinted out the door of the suite. "See you in an hour!" The door slammed and locked, leaving a bemused Royce alone in the living room- holding the room key.

"I guess I'll just wait here for you to get back then…" he announced to the empty room. Outside, the sky lightened to a streaky indigo as the clock finally made its way to 5:30, and Royce's mood lightened considerably as he realized that he would be left at peace (and out of danger) for at least the next 45 minutes inside the inn's nicest suite. Bunny slippered size 12's clattered onto the coffee table as he sunk into a rapidly forming butt groove on the down filled sofa. "Room service, anyone?"

But she didn't mean the harm she put me through

And I could never go to her and trust

That she would ever care


She was running through the streets of her hometown as the sun climbed over the tree tops, and in 6 years not a thing had changed. It was like being the central character in a Nicholas Sparks novel, except that Val wasn't altogether fond of the nostalgia brought about by passing the familiar store fronts of Jake's Hardware and Sammi's Dog Grooming.

You'd think that in 6 years the community could manage to support a Target or something.

This thought, which had sprung into her mind completely unbidden, showed just how much she wasn't the "aw-shucks" small town sweetheart that Helen insisted she still pretend to be.

Fact of life: People change much, much faster than towns.

In the window of Jake's hung a maroon banner, on which "Go Cobras, Beat the Bulldogs!" was printed in blocky yellow paint on the fraying silk. She froze in front of the window, and very deliberately placed her hand on the glass, lining narrow fingers up precisely with those of the smudgy yellow hand print in the banner's upper left hand corner.


Hands calloused from catching the grimy leather football wrapped securely around her waist from behind as she bent down to dot the exclamation point with a cutesy yellow handprint. Startled because she'd thought she was alone, she stumbled forward, instead planting a smudgy yellow mark on the pristine maroon silk. Frowning, she spun to face her accoster, her yellow hand held up in a threatening "I'm going to mark your face up with this paint" gesture.

"Asshat! That was the actual banner!" she shrieked, dive bombing to run the paint smudge hand through the offender's dirty-brown hair. Tyler laughed and twisted away from his girlfriend's dripping yellow palm, but post-practice he was sore and showed none of the famous Connell agility that had gotten them to the regional play-offs this season.

Consequently, he was now blinking up at her from his new position-laid out on his ass on the floor, where he'd landed hard on his back two seconds earlier. Dropping down to her hands and knees, Val stalked towards him, a predatory grin on her normally sweet face. "You're a rude little boy, sneaking up on unsuspecting artisans like that." She said, straddling his lap to effectively pin him underneath her. She twined her arms around his neck and pressed her small form against his now tense one. One furtive glance down to hall to make sure no faculty was roaming about after class, and she moved in, nuzzling his cheek with her nose before closing in to bring her lips inches from his. Tyler closed his eyes, breathing heavily in anticipation and marveling how his gangly, perky little blonde could instantly flip a switch and turn from cheerleader to seductress in an instant.

He was the luckiest man alive.

He yelped as something cold, wet, and definitely not tasting of strawberry was slapped across his face, and then was bereft as he felt the small weight of her leave his lap as she tore away down the hall, giggling madly. Rivers of yellow paint crept down his cheeks and below his collar, but he was grinning even as he leapt to his feet and took off after her down the hallway brandishing her discarded paintbrush and shouting. "You're gonna pay for that!"


Every morning as he walked to the high school for his first class, Tyler stopped in at Shelby's to pick up a sandwich for lunch and have his morning cup of coffee at the counter, where Shelby herself kept the morning paper waiting for Kingsport's favorite son. Having absolved himself of any work-related activities for the day, and completely unwilling to sit at home and listen to his phone ring off the hook until bedtime, Tyler saw no reason why he should buck tradition. So at quarter to 6 he threw on his jacket and walked out the door into the still dark November morning, strolling down the still empty Main St. towards Shelby's 24 hour haven, conveniently located two doors down from her husband Jake's hardware store.

Tyler, like most people forced to be up at dawn for their day jobs, pretended to covet the loneliness of the wee hours of the morning, when shops remained closed and the streets were still empty. At the very least it was quiet time, the last thirty minutes of his day without teenagers or pesky co-workers and their stilted interventional pep talks. Just him, streets swept clean of the previous evening's trash, and empty sidewalks. Or, in the case of this morning, nearly empty sidewalks.

Tyler frowned and pulled his collar up to obscure his face as he approached the solitary figure admiring the display in the front window of Jake's store. A town as small as Kingsport, where a majority of the citizenship had attended at least one of your birthday parties, had its mandatory social pleasantries. Today in particular, Tyler was in the mood to sail on by without speaking to anybody. That is, until her soft curse stopped him in his tracks.

"Well, bugger all for ironic timing."

You'd think I'd know by now

You'd think I'd wash this down

Did you think I'd hurt her now?

Just to heal my heart?

He'd pivoted at the sound of her voice and now stood staring at her with an ironic, almost hysterical grin on his face. Meanwhile, Val was busy picking at her cuticles and staring in any direction but his—and with good reason, because for that split second after he turned, for that moment just after she'd resurfaced from her meandering down high school memory lane only to find the object of her musings strolling down the god damn street in her direction, she'd caught a glimpse of his eyes. Blue eyes that, like the rest of this God-forsaken hell hole, had remained almost completely unchanged. And something in her stomach dropped and fluttered.

Butterflies.

Val's throat tightened and she felt the corresponding twinge at the corners of both her eyes.

She had had just about enough of omniscient deities and their sick senses of humor.

Then you don't know me

You don't know me

There was every reason to drop his head and keep walking. To pretend he hadn't heard her and continue onward, to a warm, solitary bar stool and an equally welcoming cup of coffee. She wasn't even looking at him anyway; she just continued to stand there, muttering at her cuticles. He could just move on like he'd never heard her, and she'd walk off in the other direction, and they could both continue their morning activities and remain in the land of the sane.

Then he saw the sliver of white as her top teeth caught her bottom lip, nibbling it in a gesture that was so characteristically Val that it made him swallow hard, shudder, and finally jump right off the bus to sanity.

"Coffee?"

You don't know me

And she don't owe me anything.

"This is badness"logical!Val screamed "Run…run now…NOW! RUN!"

"Coffee." She rolled the word over her tongue, weighed the idea for a moment, and finally smiled. "Coffee sounds great."

If time is all it takes

Then I've got plenty of that

Plenty of that

And I'm a better man

For all the time it takes.

Did you think I'd hurt her now?

Just to heal my heart?

Well you don't know me

And she don't owe me anything…


A/N: Yeah, so I figured I couldn't put off the inevitable meeting forever… so there you go.

The end? Not by a long shot! Review, tell me who you are, whatcha think, whatcha want. I'm a whore like that.