A/N; Hello friends! First and foremost, I'm going to apologize for the amount of angst in this chapter, because wow it ended up more intense and full of that than I thought it was going to be. Also there's a shock, so yes, don't hate me for what happens, I love yooouuu. I've been working on updates for my other stories as well, but this one came to me first, so lucky you guys, I guess!

Always, always, thank you so much to my lovely followers/reviewers/beautiful people who read this story. You make my day :)


Chapter 11-

The first thing James became aware of was how much space there was beside him. Blindly, keeping his eyes closed still in his half asleep state, he reached around for the smaller body that he was expecting to be there beside him. He frowned as his hand slid along cool, empty sheet, his brow furrowing as he slowly opened his eyes. He blinked a few times in quick succession, the bright light streaming through the blinds causing his tired eyes to sting momentarily. It didn't take long for a slight panic to kick in. The last time he had woken up in Logan's bed alone hadn't been a great time. James barely gave himself a moment to stretch before hurriedly clambering out of bed and out into the living room.

Logan was sitting on the couch, on his laptop. James breathed out a sigh of relief, seeing him there. For whatever reason, his mind had let him believe, even just for a moment, that he was gone again. Logan's brown eyes flicked up toward him as he noticed him in his peripheral vision, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"Hey there, sleeping beauty." He greeted, teasing lightly.

James swallowed and managed a somewhat groggy smile as he scratched at the back of his head. "How long have you been up for?"

Logan shrugged. "A couple hours. I thought about waking you up for breakfast, but I figured you could use the sleep."

Curiously, James finally glanced at the clock, eyebrows raising when he realized it was quarter after noon already. Evidently he had been even more drained and exhausted than he had been aware of. It occurred to him that in the last week, on top of the day before taking a particularly large toll on him, he had had a few restless nights. As groggy as he still sort of felt, still in the waking up process, he could at least acknowledge that it was the first time all week he felt even slightly well rested.

He moved around the back of the grey couch, lifting up Logan's laid out legs for a moment before sitting and letting them fall back down across his lap. Logan wasn't looking at him, his eyes on the screen of the laptop in front of him, but there was a small, fond smile on his face.

"What are you doing?" James asked curiously.

"Looking at plane tickets." Logan answered.

James kinked a brow. Logan glanced up for a second when he was quiet, sighing.

"You didn't actually forget about going back to New York, did you?" he chuckled slightly.

"No," James mumbled. As if he could forget. "I just wasn't aware you were so quick to be rid of me again."

Despite the sullen tone of the brunette's voice, the shorter boy rolled his eyes with a shake of his head. James should have expected it, if he were honest. If anyone didn't play the pacify James game, it was Logan.

"Yes, James, I'd love to get rid of you. In fact, please go grab your clothes and head out now." He muttered sarcastically.

James sneered with just a tinge of playfulness, moving his hand to pinch the underside of the other boy's thigh. Logan flinched and quickly reached to swat at James's bare shoulder, narrowing his eyes at him.

"The sooner you go, the sooner you can be back, alright?" he raised his eyebrows, as if challenging the brunette to question him.

James bit his lip anxiously. As sweet as he was sure the sentiment was supposed to be, he couldn't help but feel guilty. He wondered if that would ever wear off, for either of them, this thing they both subtly made note of about his leaving. He doubted Logan's intention was to throw it in his face and make him feel bad, but it didn't change the fact that he did.

He vaguely wondered what sort of things had gone through Logan's head in the last week since his return to Minnesota. James wondered if every time he left, even if it was just to go their separate ways for a night until the next day, if there was ever an underlying nervousness about his just being gone and not coming back again. Perhaps it was a stretch, a little arrogant of him to assume that the situation had that much of an effect, but the constant reminder of his leaving initially left him pondering the possibility.

It was something –on a list of several somethings- that made him dread going back to the city again even more. Things were a whole lot different this time, he knew that, but he couldn't shake the overall nervousness. Nervousness about explaining himself to Grace, nervousness about him and Logan, about what his life was going to be now that so much was changing in a direction he hadn't been anticipating. He couldn't very well just not go back to talk to Grace, and he knew that. This kind of thing was definitely a face to face matter, not to mention the fact that he was about ninety percent positive that she wouldn't take his call if he tried. He couldn't exactly blame her. He didn't really want to have a lot to do with himself at the moment, either.

"James?"

The brunette shook his head once quickly to clear it, having spaced out for a moment, and looked at Logan expectantly.

Logan's brow twitched into a furrow. "Are you okay?"

"To be determined." James mumbled, pursing his lips a moment later.

"Hey," Logan frowned slightly and moved to set his laptop down on the coffee table before inching closer to him, his hand moving to rub comfortingly at the back of James's neck. "Talk to me, let me see if I can help."

James let his eyes roam over his best friend's concerned face for a moment before he sighed.

"I don't know if even you can help me right now." He winced as Logan immediately stilled his movement and looked down. "That came out really wrong. I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Logan murmured, but his voice indicated that it was actually anything but fine.

James let something of a whine out, more in frustration toward himself than anything else, and tilted his head back against the back of the couch.

"I can't do anything right, lately." He thought out loud, staring up at the ceiling.

He heard Logan breathe out a sigh, but he didn't look at him. He almost felt like he suddenly couldn't. Logan was someone he felt like he wasn't doing right by recently, or even not recently. Two years probably didn't count as being particularly recent, especially given what had already been going on in the several days just prior.

"You know I just want you to be happy, right?" Logan murmured quietly.

James practically scowled up at the ceiling before looking at Logan to scoff at him and shake his head.

"Don't even start that with me." He said seriously.

"James, I mean it."

"I said don't." James snapped, voice harsher than intended.

He moved to push Logan's legs off of him to get up, but Logan –stubborn and demanding to be heard- pushed a hand firmly against the taller boy's chest and moved even closer, half sitting in his lap at this point. He grabbed onto James's chin, forcing him to meet his eyes when James tried to defiantly look away from him.

"Don't pick a fight with me right now. I get that you're going through a lot, but don't. I'm not letting you pick up a habit of fighting with me right before you take off for New York."

James cringed.

"If you don't want to talk to me about whatever, that's your choice. Just- Don't fight with me and then leave. You can't do that to me again."

Jaw tightening, James breathed in deeply and nodded his head once stiffly. His earlier wondering about Logan's fear of him leaving felt somehow proven suddenly. Logan brushed his hand from his chin along his jaw, stroking his fingers gently over his brown hair for a second.

"Do you think it'll ever get easier?" James blurted, unthinkingly.

It seemed like there were a lot of plausible answers to what he was asking about. Would things ever get easier for him? Opening up, being smarter about the decisions he made, making up for the plethora of mistakes he had managed to make? James knew he wasn't asking about things getting easier for himself, however. He was asking about Logan. If it would ever get easier to let things go, to not worry, to trust him again.

Logan wasn't an idiot, he knew what the brunette was referring to. He bit down on his lip instead of giving a verbal response, but James got the hint.

He didn't know, either.

James ended up on a red eye flight back to New York. Which, of course, he felt was incredibly stupid considering it wasn't as if he was going to be doing a whole lot of talking to anyone when he landed in New York at 4:30 in the morning. He really didn't want to check into a hotel, given he technically had an apartment half under his name there in the city, but going to crash in the home that Grace was probably still at didn't seem like the brightest idea, so he did what he had to.

Unsurprisingly, he didn't get a lot of sleep, maybe an hour at most. He opted for texting Logan to let him know he was landed and checked in all fine instead of calling, both because it was early and because typing out words seemed easier than saying them at the moment. Otherwise, he spent a couple hours flipping hotel room channels and barely dozing in and out of consciousness.

When he decided it was a good time to haul himself out of the queen sized bed, he showered and got dressed sluggishly. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror, the rugged stubble that he hadn't been bothering to take a razor to recently, the dark, tired bags lingering under his slightly glassy hazel eyes. He looked how he felt, drained. The worst part was that he was already as exhausted as he was and he hadn't even seen Grace yet.

He thought about calling his mom or even any one of his three best friends, just for one last possible vote of confidence, but then he decided not to. Leaving the Manhattan hotel, he waved down a cab as he stood at the curb, feeling ill when he slid into the yellow car's back seat.

Grace had always been a relatively early riser, so James wasn't entirely surprised to see the apartment light on in the window as he glanced up at the building after getting out of the cab and paying the driver, even if it was just nearing nine. He took the stairs up to the second story apartment slowly, feeling more dread with each step he took. He hesitated outside the front door, debating whether or not to knock before he huffed out a sigh and pulled his key out of the pocket of his jeans. His teeth worked at his lower lip as he quietly stepped into the familiar apartment, closing the door as softly as he could manage. Despite having lived there for a year, his things still mingled in with Grace's around the place, he felt somehow like he was intruding.

"Cat?" He heard Grace call from the bedroom.

His chest felt tight as he continued to stay quiet for a moment, moving to set his keys gently on the kitchen counter, standing in the open space between the kitchen and living room. He kept his eyes on the cracked door to their bedroom, teeth digging into his lip.

"I thought we said we weren't meeting up until this after-" Grace's voice cut off abruptly, catching in her throat as she realized who she had thought was her sister was far from her.

She was wearing her pale pink bathrobe, having been in the middle of towel-drying her damp blonde hair when she had come out of the room. The towel had since fallen to the tan carpet when her eyes had caught on James. He was struggling to come up with anything he could possibly say to her, but before he even had a chance to get any kind of word out of his mouth, Grace was stepping in front of him. An instant later, her palm collided with his cheek, his face turning slightly with the force of the slap. His lips parted and he breathed in slowly, blinking a couple times as he flexed his jaw for good measure. His cheek stung, but he couldn't really say that he blamed her for slapping him, all things considered.

"Grace-" He slowly started to turn to look at her, but once again she slapped him. "Ow. Okay, okay! I get it, you're mad, stop hitting me!"

"Mad? You think I'm mad?" The blonde seethed, shaking her head.

"I'm great with understatements, you know that.." he mumbled.

She scowled at his nonchalance, her hand flying up like she was going to hit him again, but he swiftly caught her by the wrist –saying a silent thank you to his quick reflexes.

"Stop." He growled. "You wanna yell at me, then yell, but hitting me will get you nowhere."

Grace glowered at him and yanked her hand out of his grasp. They both seemed to glare at each other in a tense silence for several moments before the blonde finally huffed, shaking her head as she turned away from him in frustration.

"You completely ruined everything. You humiliated me in front of friends, in front of family. Hell, there were strangers there I didn't even know who were looking at me oddly after you ran off to God only knows where!" she raised her voice and tossed her hands up in the air before turning to look at him again. "Don't even get me started on how furious my family was."

James noticed the way that, despite the strong and angry bravado the blonde was working hard to maintain, her jaw was trembling, her blue eyes brimming with tears that through her shouting she blinked to keep back.

He kept his voice calm, trying to bring her back down to that level, too, by not having some kind of screaming match with one another. "Grace, your family didn't want us to get married anyway, you know that. They didn't want me."

"But I do, James!" She cried, tears falling freely now as she shoved at his chest. "I do. Me. The one you were supposed to be getting married to. You weren't marrying my mom, or my sisters, or my dad, you were marrying me."

James swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat and hesitantly lifted a hand from his side to brush some of her tears away. Unsurprisingly, Grace swatted at his hand, shaking her head. Biting his lip, he tried again, and this time she let him, a soft sob breaking out from between her tightly clenched teeth as he cupped the side of her face with his hand and ran his thumb along her damp cheek.

"Baby, you know it's not that simple…" he murmured softly, sadly.

"But it could be." She whimpered, instinctively leaning her face against his palm. "We could go somewhere else. Florida, Jersey. I don't care. It could be just us."

Dryly, James breathed out a short laugh. "Grace, you weren't even going to drop your last name for me, I don't think you could leave your family."

Abruptly, she scowled at him and recoiled from his touch.

"Do not even act like this is my fault." She snapped.

He was getting really sick of people doing that to him, throwing his wrongs back in his face, making him feel even guiltier than he already did on his own.

"I'm not- It's not your fault. Not at all." He muttered.

It was Grace's turn now to laugh humorlessly. "You're damn right it's not."

"Grace, I'm sorry." He sighed, reaching to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"Great. Good for you, James. What does that do for me?" The blonde folded her arms across her chest, sniffling.

James pressed his lips together, at a loss. What could he really say to her? None of the explanations he had were going to do any form of reassuring. She had every right to be angry with him, and he knew that, but it was still hard to stomach, making it hard for him to process the entire situation. How had he done this to her? How had he been the person to cause the harsh betrayal, the broken heartedness to not leave her blue eyes? He resisted the urge to shudder as some kind of subconscious whisper reminded him this wasn't the first time, Grace wasn't the first person he had hurt like this.

It seemed wrong somehow, even just the instantaneous comparison. Finding similarities in the situations between him and Logan and him and Grace didn't make anything easier. At the end of the day, he was choosing one over the other, leaving whoever he didn't choose hurting. Overwhelmingly, he felt hate toward himself once again.

"What do you want me to say, Grace?" he barely recognized the sound of his own gruff voice.

Grace stared at him for a long moment, her arms tightening across her chest as if to distract from the fact that her jaw was once again trembling.

"I want you to tell me why, James." Her voice cracked, ruining her tough bravado. "And don't tell me it's because of my family, because I know that's not it. You had almost two years to break up with me and get away from them if that was what you wanted. So just.. tell me the truth."

James watched sadly as the blonde wiped at her leaking eyes, biting the inside of his cheek anxiously.

"I deserve an explanation." She sniffled.

And she did, he knew she did. His whole purpose in coming back to New York was to explain himself and to apologize. However, much like when he had gone to tell his mother everything, he had no idea where to begin.

"Grace, I-" He breathed in slowly and moved a hand to hold onto the edge of the counter he stood near, as if it gave him some kind of support. "When I first came here to the city, when we first met and you asked me why I had moved here, do you remember what I told you?"

Grace nodded hesitantly. "You wanted a fresh start."

A sad smile faintly crossed James's features. "Yeah… And- And that was kind of it, but I- More than anything, I was running away."

The blonde's brow furrowed slightly and he continued his explanation with a sigh.

"There was.. someone I had been with. It was more than I thought I was ready for then. I'd already had the thought, wanting to move to the city, get out of Minnesota, but this was just.. the final push, I guess. That's what I was running away from."

"Someone else…" Grace murmured softly.

James barely gave a nod. "When I met you, I remember feeling like maybe I had the chance to move on after all. Because you were everything I had ever wanted, you were what I thought I had been missing."

"But.. But I wasn't." It wasn't a question, more of a mournful realization.

"You have to understand, everything I told you, everything I felt about you, that happiness and that love, the want to marry you, it was all real. I can't- I do love you. I love you so much, I hate that I'm doing this to you-"

"Then why are you?" she choked out.

A pained expression crossed his face. Hesitantly, he moved towards her, gently running his hands along her arms. She tilted her head to look up at him, tears still in her eyes. James brushed a piece of damp hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. Grace squeezed her eyes closed, a few tears escaping as she did. Her arms finally unfolded, her hands moving to grasp onto the front of his tan colored t-shirt.

"Please," she whispered. "You can't- We can work through whatever it is. We can wait to get married until you're more sure, but, James, you can't leave me, please."

No matter how many times he heard it, saw it in someone else's eyes, that desperation for him to stay, for him to not run away –again- it didn't get any easier to choke down. Whether it was Grace or Logan, it hurt, every time. Worse than just reality coming and giving him a swift swat across the face, it felt like getting kicked repeatedly in the gut. He wanted to be sick, to cry, to curl in on himself and realize how much he hurt because of the even worse hurt he had been the cause of.

Stupidly, he breathed out a short, humorless laugh. "I don't think it's quite that simple."

Grace's eyes opened again to look at him questioningly.

"It's not- I can't just.. move on. It's not working.." he murmured.

James expected her to move away from him at that point, but surprisingly she stayed where she was, her jaw tight as she looked up at him.

"What changed?" she asked quietly. "A few weeks ago you seemed so.. so happy, excited even for this wedding, and now-" She cut off as he averted his eyes to the floor. "This is because you went home… Isn't it?"

James's brow twitched into a furrow, but he didn't say anything, didn't look back at her.

"You saw her back in Minnesota, didn't you?" Her voice was almost accusing.

"Him."

His hazel eyes widened quickly as the correction left his mouth before he even took a second to think about it. He quickly looked at Grace as she inched away from him, looking even more confused than she had before –if that were possible. Her hands moved from his chest, one falling down to her side, the other lingering held up in the air in the few inches between them.

"Him." She repeated, as if to clarify that she had actually heard him right.

"Grace-" She shook her head at him to cut him off.

"This is about- It's about Logan, isn't it?" Her voice was getting louder again, her anger obviously flaring.

"If you'd just listen-"

"Don't." Grace snapped, lifting her hand up further to jab a finger in his direction. "That's why you never told me anything about him. Why you looked the way you did when he showed up at your mom's for dinner. Oh my god, I'm an idiot." She turned away from him angrily, shaking her head.

James stayed stiffly where he was, feeling frozen, paralyzed. There had been no cushion, no delicacy to that reveal at all. The fact that Grace easily jumped to the correct assumption that he was referring to Logan made him feel sickly transparent.

"He's my best friend…" he said softly, his voice sounding distant to him.

Grace snorted out a sarcastic laugh. "Oh, I'm sure you two are great friends."

Suddenly on the defensive, James narrowed his eyes at her. "How mature of you, Grace, really."

"Oh please, James. Like you know anything about maturity. Clearly you have a habit of running away the second things get too serious for you. You're like a child, running and hiding." She snapped, stepping closer to him.

"Like a child, says Daddy's little princess." James snapped back, voice cold.

"At least I know what I want!" She shouted, practically in his face.

"Well, congratu-fucking-lations, Grace. Want a damn prize?" he glowered.

Unexpectedly, her dark gaze darted to his lips before back up to meet his glare. "Yeah, actually, I do."

Before James could get even another quick breath in, the blonde was standing up on her toes, leaning up to kiss him hard on the mouth. For a moment, just an instant, even, James felt as if his body flooded with white hot heat, from his head to his toes. Maybe it was the anger, the tension, the feeling that he suddenly had something to prove. Maybe it was the fact that it took him all of about a second and a half to go from thinking with his upstairs brain to his downstairs one. Maybe it was a combination of the two. Whatever the case, a moment after Grace's lips crashed against his, he growled under his breath and kissed her back, hands gripping tightly to her hips.

They were shoving and tugging at each other, angrier than James could ever remember them being at any point. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he should stop, especially as his t-shirt was tugged off, Grace's fingernails raking down his chest as their lips worked heatedly against one another. It took next to no time for her robe to be discarded too, then James's jeans. Then he was lifting her up, securing her legs around his waist before tumbling onto the couch in a hot tangle of limbs.

.

Even more than before, James felt a crippling weight of exhaustion. The stinging pink lines down his chest, the gently throbbing bruises along his neck, they served as a reminder of part of the reason for that feeling. His bare chest was rising and falling slowly as he stared blankly up at the ceiling from the living room floor. Grace was lying beside him, curled up in the crook of his arm. They had been laying there in silence on the carpet for so long, James wasn't sure he could actually speak. Idly, Grace traced her fingers along his chest, causing him to wince when the pad of her fingertip brushed along a scratch.

"Sorry.." she mumbled, turning her face to brush her lips against his collarbone.

James continued to stay quiet, tired hazel eyes not moving from the ceiling. He couldn't even bring himself to really think, only staring at the bland whiteness as if it would somehow reveal some kind of answers to him.

"James," Reluctantly, he finally glanced down at the blonde as she rested her chin on his chest and looked up at him. "Please say something."

"What'd you want me to say?" he asked, voice low and gravelly.

Grace sighed. "I don't know…"

James's eyes moved back up to the ceiling. "I shouldn't have done that."

"In all technicality, we should be on our honeymoon in Hawaii right now, where we would be doing something like that." Grace muttered.

The brunette grimaced, feeling ill. "This- It doesn't change-"

"I figured…" She mumbled sadly, laying her head back down on his chest anyway. "Do you, um-"

James glanced down at the top of her head with a brow kinked in question.

"What exactly- How do you feel.. about Logan, I mean." She asked softly.

His hand stopped in its slow brushing along her arm and he took in a deep breath.

"We just-" James let an almost baffled expression cross his face even though she wasn't looking at him to see it. "We just had sex on your living room floor and you're asking me how I feel about someone else?"

"Our." The blonde corrected, her voice sounding sad as she barely curled closer to him. "Our living room floor."

"You know that wasn't the point, Grace…"

She sighed heavily. "Can you humor me, please?"

He really did not want to. In fact, he could think of at least five things off the top of his head that he would rather do than explain to Grace how he felt about Logan. Current circumstances with him and Grace aside, there was also still the fact that there was so much uncertainty between him and his best friend.

"It's complicated." He mumbled.

"As complicated as having sex with the fiancé you left at the altar, mid-fight?" she retorted.

James snorted sarcastically. "Wow. I'm doing a bang-up job lately."

"You still haven't really answered the question." She pointed out gently.

"Why do you care so much?"

She hesitated in answering, seemingly thinking about it. "I don't know that I care, in the typical sense. I- I just can't not know, alright? I'm trying to make some kind of sense of all of this, and you've only given me snippets of explanation."

James swallowed, his jaw tightening. "Logan and I- We've always been closer than I was with even Kendall or Carlos, which says something, I'm sure. It was about halfway through senior year when we started.. feeling differently."

"James," she tilted her head to look up at him again. "No offense, but I don't think I want to hear the play by play. I'm talking about now."

The brunette frowned and blew out a sigh. "I- I love him, alright?"

Grace stiffened slightly.

"Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Of course not, you jackass." She sneered, her glare slowly softening as she frowned and looked down at the skin of his shoulder. "But I think it's what I needed to."

She slowly sat up, pulling the fleece blanket from the back of the couch that was draped over their bodies up over her chest as she moved off of him. James's eyes scanned over her fair skin, noticing the splotches of purpling skin along her shoulders where his teeth had dug in not long before. He frowned, feeling a sickly turning in his stomach.

"I'm sorry.." he whispered.

Grace sighed tiredly and ran her fingers back through her knotted blonde hair.

"You know what sucks the most?" she asked thoughtfully, not looking back at him.

When he didn't say anything, continuing to just keep his eyes on her back, she decided to answer the question anyway.

"I'm mad, and I'm hurt. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I'm just fine, because I'm really not even close. But.." she paused, shaking her head slowly. "I really, really want to hate you right now and I just.. don't."

James cringed, letting out a whine that got Grace to turn and look at him finally.

"That's practically the same thing Logan told me."

Grace made a face that he couldn't quite read before she sighed softly and laid her hand against his chest. James swallowed thickly and watched her carefully, his teeth working at the inside of his lip. The blonde didn't say anything, even a moment later as she stood up and wrapped the blanket around herself. She paused on the short trek to the bedroom and turned to look at him with a pained expression just as James sat up stiffly.

"There's really no nice way for me to say this, but I'm not going to apologize, because- Well, because this all hurts, a lot."

James braced himself, holding his breath.

"I sincerely hope that one day someone breaks your heart, too, so you know what we feel like."

The use of the word 'we' made the sting of the words much, much worse.