Her Head v. Her Heart
(Caution: This chapter contains "mature" content.)
A/N: Jesus, this turned out a lot longer than I expected. Um, I probably should have broken this up into two chapters, but there was really no place to put a chapter break. I hope you guys don't mind. I should let you all know that the Chain Gang has really stepped up and made their voices heard in the reviews after the last couple of chapters, but Dave is still dominating the popular vote. Probably because Stratusfied voted for him seven times in one review! I'm not bitchin', though - I think you're fanatic support for the couple is bad ass! Keep showing the love. I don't usually do individual thank-you's because I don't want to miss anyone and make them feel like their reviews aren't important to me - but, despite the death threats over the ending of my last story, I want to say that Little-Miss-Rachel, RKOxLegendKiller, and TrishOrton have been great to review everything I write on a totally consistent basis. Check out their stories, a'ight? But not until after you've read, and reviewed, this chapter, of course! And y'all know that I don't own Trish or Dave - I just play with their emotions for my own sick and twisted pleasure.
Being the Women's Champion was fun for Trish. Not just because it meant she was the best female wrestler in the world, or at least the WWE, but because she got a chance to meet real heroes. She got to go to hospitals and meet people who really fought for their lives on a regular basis. She got to talk to junior high and high school girls about being strong women. And she got to show her appreciation for all of the fans who allowed her to be everything she had always dreamed of being.
What was not fun for her was sharing a limo with the World Heavyweight Champion, a thick cloud of suffocating silence hanging over them as they rode from the WWE headquarters to the children's hospital of the day. When they had met in the lobby, Dave had greeted her with a handshake and a quick "hello," but then went about saying his good-byes to his new girlfriend, Mandy. Or was it Sandy? Maybe it was Bambi? Trish couldn't remember and she didn't really care.
It wasn't so much jealousy of his new relationship, as it was a preservation of their old one. When she broke up with him, she had known that he would move on eventually, and she was glad that he had. It didn't mean that she wanted to watch the lovebirds in wide screen surround sound. She didn't want to see him touching this new woman, saying things to her, kissing her, and looking at her the same way he had always touched, talked, kissed, and looked at Trish. It was disrespectful to everything they had shared.
Of course, thinking it in her head was completely different than saying the words out loud. So, instead, she settled for pouting in the limo as they headed for Long Island. After only fifteen minutes, though, she pulled out her cell phone. Fuck this awkwardness. She was going to talk to someone who actually still enjoyed her company.
The phone rang twice and then went to voice mail. But before Trish had a chance to leave a rambling message for her man, she felt a large hand taking the phone from her ear. Turning confused eyes to Dave, she saw him smirk and flip it closed.
He licked his lips and nervously patted the belt over his knee while handing her cell back. "Not today. Please?"
She nodded in agreement, still stunned at his previous actions. She had never seen him do anything so forward in all the time she had known him. "Is something wrong?" she asked.
Dave shook his head and let his gaze drift out the window. Nothing was wrong. In fact, nothing had been this right in a long time. He was talking to his daughters nearly every day on the phone, and they were calling him when he missed a scheduled check-in. He had an amazing girlfriend who understood his love for family and a regular life, because she had a son of her own to think about. He was in the place he had always wanted to be. He just wasn't in it with the woman he loved.
"Then are we gonna talk?" Trish asked, interrupting his silence once again. "Because this silence sucks ass."
This time, he laughed. He had nearly forgotten how much she could sound just like his fourteen-year-old daughter sometimes. "Um, sure," he agreed with a nod and another smile, which she returned, opening an old wound that he thought was finally starting to heal. "How's it goin' with you?" He inwardly kicked himself for bein' so damned idiotic.
Trish felt like the limo had slowed to a crawl. How's it goin' with you? That's what they had come to? Jesus. "Um, good. Busy, but good," she answered, and then mentally rapt herself in the back of the head. "And you?"
He nodded in response. "So, Randy and Stacy, huh?" he tried again, but knew that he just ended up sounding like a bigger dolt. Ten months in a relationship with this woman and all he could think to ask her now was something about their friends? His kids were right – he was the lamest guy in the world.
Trish rolled her eyes though, and looked out the window at the passing scenery. "For now," she said flippantly and then turned, picking an imaginary piece of fuzz of the hem of her dress. "Randy's month of fidelity is almost up, though," she added.
It was true – Randy wasn't really all that good at the whole "commitment" thing, but Dave knew that it would be different this time. "I think it's for real this time," he stated. "I mean, he fucked it up before and he knows that. He's trying," he defended his friend and then shook his head when Trish raised an eyebrow his direction. "What?" he shrugged. "It's all the kid fuckin' talks about anymore. It's annoying, really," he added with another smirk.
Damn that smirk. It turned Trish's insides to a goopy puddle of sap every time. But she held to the fact that he seemed far more interested in Randy and Stacy's relationship than he had ever been in theirs. "Yeah. I'm sure guys that talk about their relationships piss you off, huh?"
"What does that mean?" He knew that he sounded angry, but he was more confused than anything. What was she talking about?
The words weren't supposed to come out of her mouth. Those thoughts were living in her head – never to see the light of day. He was supposed to figure out why she had left him all on his own. He was supposed to see the error of his ways and find a way to make it up to her. They were not supposed to have this fight. "Nevermind."
He found that he couldn't let it go, though. The look on her face, coupled with the biting nature of her words, made him wonder if this was the answer to all of his questions, the key to the mess that was the end of their relationship. "No, wait a minute," he turned his body toward her, leaning against the door of the car. "You want to say something? Say it, Trish."
Fuck it, Trish thought as she turned also, flipping her hair behind her shoulders. "You're not exactly the most gregarious individual on the planet, Dave," she shot. "I mean, you don't like to talk all that much," she started to explain.
He shook his head and held up a hand. "I know what 'gregarious' means, Trish," he informed her. "I talk," he added.
"No, you don't. You don't talk. Not about important stuff, and especially not about relationships. You're like Fort Knox when it comes to your feelings." She could feel her voice rising, but she was no longer trying to conceal her emotions. Maybe he needed to hear this. "It's not that you don't say things the right way, or the wrong way. You just don't say shit, at all. You don't even try."
He absorbed the verbal thrashing, the accusations rattling around inside his head. Normally, he would measure his words and make sure that he didn't say anything that he would later regret. But he was tired of censoring himself, and he was tired of letting his head do all the talking. He raised a fist and then lowered it to the seat beside him. "So I don't say a lot," he admitted. "You know why, Trish? Because words are bull shit. Because people who talk about their feelings only do it so they don't have to act on them. Because people lie," he gritted his teeth and watched her eyes grow wide.
He wanted to put on the brakes, but found that shattering a dam nearly ten years in the building wasn't possible. "People that say they love you, leave you. People say that they'll do anything to make sure that your relationship works out, but then they bail when it actually gets hard. Words like forever, and commitment, and support are fuckin' easy to pronounce, Trish," he watched her slink back in her seat and noticed that the driver had raised the privacy window between his passengers and himself. "There's people that talk about it, and people who be about it, right?"
Her stomach fell to her toes as he used her boyfriend's patented catch phrase, but then it jumped into her throat as she looked at the pain in his eyes. "Yeah," she tried to retaliate, knowing that her words were shakey, "well, I think people who don't let their partner know how they're feeling are just as weak as people who talk too much," she spat.
His face started turning red and he raised a finger, his voice a hissing whisper. "Don't you dare ever imply that you were not the center of my world. I may not have said the words, but I busted my ass to show you that I loved you. I did things for you that I have never done for any other woman on the face of the planet. I have been married twice, Trish," he clenched his fists at his sides again and narrowed his eyes in her direction. "Two times to two women who I never, NEVER, let as far inside me as you got." He punched the back of his seat with enough force to make the leather creak loudly and then looked back at her with a firey expression she had never seen before. "I have thought about our break up a hundred times over the last three months, Trish, and I know that I have fucked a lot of shit up in my life. But you and I were not one of them. I didn't do this – I didn't ruin this. All I ever did was love you, more than anyone I have ever met in my entire life, and you walked away. Do not blame this one me."
Tears sprang from her eyes without any warning. She couldn't look at him anymore – she couldn't bear the anger that was penetrating her through his gaze. Drawing her knees up to her chest in the seat, she wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face, trying her best to stop the pain. He wasn't supposed to see her like this. It was an admission of guilt, and she wasn't ready to admit that this empty ache in her soul was her fault. She wasn't ready to admit that the void still existed.
"Trish," Dave's voice was sweet and hushed all of the sudden. She refused to meet his eye, even when he reached across the seat and put a hand on her knee. "Trish, don't do this," he pleaded.
She knew he hated it, more than anything, when she cried, but she couldn't help it. She was trying to stop, but she was beyond the point of no return now. It was stupid. She was happy with John and their life was good. She was where she wanted to be. She had no reason to cry about anything, and yet. . .
"Baby," his voice was next to her ear now as she looked down and gave an involuntary chuckle through her tears. The World Heavyweight Champion, all six feet and five inches, and all three hundred pounds of him, were seated on the floor of the limousine, leaning against the door and pulling her tiny body into his embrace. "I thought you couldn't do this to me anymore," he whispered as she leaned back and looked into his dark eyes.
Every nerve ending in her body came to life as she sat close to the heated body she still dreamt about at night. Not all the time – she was getting used to John, and missing Dave's caress less and less. But sometimes, when she least expected it, a longing would creep in. She did her best to shut them out, never entertained the fantasies anymore, but at that moment, it was impossible. She could feel his breath on her face, his chest against hers, his legs supporting her back. And she could feel him under her, hardening at the proximity, though his face said he didn't want it to happen.
Her body moved of it's own volition, as her trembling fingers reached to his face and stroked his cheek. "I know it was all my fault," she admitted.
He shook his head, but he didn't correct her. He didn't say things that he didn't mean – his conscious was clear. He had done everything he could do to make their relationship work. He was confident in the fact that nothing he could have done would have made it better. But he didn't want to see her shoulders sagging with that guilt that seemed to weigh her down completely.
"No, it was," Trish admitted, sniffling back a stray tear before she added her other hand to his face, now holding him completely still. "It was all my fault, Dave. Every bit of it was all me. I didn't mean to hurt you, but I wasn't," she started.
He cut her off the only way he knew how. By pressing his lips firmly to hers. It was so wrong – for both of them. It would only make things ten times more complicated. But he had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted Trish at that moment. She had never been so lovely as she was right then, sitting in his lap, her eyes rimmed red with the tears she had cried over the end of them.
She groaned as he wrapped his arms around her back and pulled her flush against his body. There was no time for the extensive foreplay and torturously slow pleasure, and it wasn't what either of them needed at the moment. She fumbled with his belt and then the button of his tailored dress pants. When she had conquered the more complicated of the fasteners, she slid his zipper down and snaked her hand inside his pants.
Dave threw his head back as Trish gripped him in her fist and then smiled in ecstasy at the sound of her pleasured moaning. He kept telling himself that he had a girlfriend to go back home to, but as his fingers held Trish's skirt to her waist and she slid her panties to the side, he didn't fuckin' care. He didn't care about anything as she lowered herself onto him and began to flex her thighs and rotate her hips. Nobody, not Brandy or either of his ex-wives, could do the things to him that Trish could do.
Trish leaned back and rested against Dave's knees as she let her body feel and stopped worrying about how wrong this was. It didn't change anything, really. She would still get out of this car, play the smiling diva for all of the cute little kids who thought she was all things 'heroic.' And in three days, she would meet up with John, and she would be his girlfriend again. But for now, she needed this. She needed to feel the passion that only he could give her. She needed the spark that only he could ignite inside of her, even after more than three months apart.
They had both reached a frenzied, and loud, climax when they felt the car slowing to a stop. Avoiding eye contact, they both straightened their expensive clothing and checked to make sure there was no "evidence" of their previous activity. There was a long silence as each tried to fathom the weight of what they had just done.
"I'm not going to apologize for that," Dave stated finally, looking out the tinted window to the large hospital beside the car.
Trish nodded and ran a brush through her hair. "I'm not, either," she determined.
"It's never gonna be like that with anyone else," he smirked again, trying to catch his breath as he finally turned and caught her eyes. "But it's just sex, right?" Trish nodded, her expression blank. "So if we don't tell anyone," he trailed off.
"Then no one has to get hurt?" Trish finally asked, knowing that it would never work. These arrangements hadn't worked for anyone she had ever known, and she had no reason to think that it would work for her. But, damn, it was good sex.
The limo driver opened the door for them, his expression stoic. It wasn't be the first time he'd heard the two champions using their commute time for something other than business. With a hand on the small of her back, Dave leaned over and whispered in her ear as a few fans snapped pictures of them. "I got some free time in about two hours."
A shudder ran up her spine at the gruff sound of his voice, mixed with the subtle scent of his cologne. "I don't know. I mean, sex in a limo is just so," Trish searched for the word. "Evolution?"
His face twisted for a split second as they walked through the front doors of the building. An event coordinator for the hospital and a rep from the WWE approached them and Dave took a quick look around the lobby as the two were given itineraries and a run-down of the afternoon's schedule. "So, if you'll come with me, Miss Stratus," a middle-aged woman in purple scrubs nodded toward one of the halls. "We'll meet up in the rec room in an hour?" she asked the other hospital employee.
"See ya in an hour, Champ," Trish winked at Dave, and then swallowed a screech as he gave her ass a pat and followed his tour guide down another corridor.
Biting her lip, she told herself that it wasn't that bad. It was just sex. Once they got back to Stamford, and Dave was back with Brandy, it would stop. Once she was back on the road with John, she would have no need for it anymore. Everything was under control. She could handle this. She could handle this.