While Hailey looked through her things for something decent to wear, Lita sulked to her hotel room down the hall. As she slipped her card key in the door, she heard foot steps stop behind her.
"What are you up to, Red?"
Lita turned to meet Randy Orton eye to eye, "Um…nothing much, I guess. I'm kinda headed to bed…"
Randy saw through Lita's pathetic plea to be alone. "You can't sleep this early in the day you'd be up all night." Randy platonically extended his hand, but Lita refused to go.
"I'll be okay, Randy."
With that she closed the door, leaving Randy standing in the hallway.
#&8
Completely dressed, Hailey took the last curler out of her hair and threw her Coach bag over her shoulder. Like clockwork, John opened her hotel door. "You look…"
Hailey smiled, "Cute, nice, professional, darling…awful?"
"Stunning, Ley…absolutely beautiful." John took Hailey's arm and led her down to the cab he hailed earlier.
"So, where are we off to tonight?" Hailey situated herself in the taxi as it whizzed through the inner-city to a quiet looking Bistro on the corner in the Avenues.
The cab driver, having reached the destination answer her question, "Palmer's on 125th…that'll be fifteen twenty."
John got out, opened the door for Hailey and paid the impatient driver.
'Well,' Hailey thought to herself, 'he's being charming…' It hadn't been that John had changed since their relationship had started some year ago; it was just that things had changed between them. It seemed the longer they dated, the less they talked, and they less time they had for each other. Both Hailey and John had blamed the separation on work…and injury; but neither of them thought the lack of substance in their togetherness was enough to end what they had. To John, 'they just needed work' and for Hailey, they just 'needed time'. It had been evident to those around them, Mickie and Lita especially, that neither work nor time would bridge the difference between them.
As the dinner carried on at Palmer's, things fell apart back at the hotel. A scorned Randy shot up to his room where he aimlessly plopped on a couch, evaluating earlier aloud. "God I'm an idiot. I mean, she doesn't need me to tell her what to do!"
Lita was in her room doing the same, "Why am I feeling like this? Am I broken?"
Randy decided to turn on his TV to get him to think about something, anything other than the Xtreme Diva. The football game would have to suffice. He watched as the Flacons and their red jerseys recovered a fumbled football.
"And the Falcon's stole the heart on the St. Louis Rams!" John Madden seemed pleased, not knowing he had just allegorically described Orton's situation. Randy turned off the game and made his way to his kitchenette.
Lita, downstairs, was searching for a way to figure out how she felt and why she felt that way. She rested her head in her hands as she let the massage replay in her head. All she could remember was the way it felt to have her best friend in her arms. Alarmed by her realization, she flopped back on the couch and pulled her hair.
Simultaneously, Randy brushed through his fridge, but had no appetite. Instead he sat on the counter and picked for the reason he felt so...weird. Immediately, he saw Lita in his mind. The night before, she had sat on the couch out in the suite's common room, biting her finger and tossing her hair. More that anything he wished he had crossed the room and – just touched her.
"Ugh…I'm sprung! Like a big dummy, I'm hooked on a girl who hardly sees me! I'm Randy Orton, girls line up to see me and I' stuck on one I can't have…"
--
Lita turned off all the lights in her room and crawled into her bed. She though about all the times she had shared a bed with Hailey, all the times they stayed up all night and talked, all the moments they shared and she agonized over why they meant so much more to her than they had meant to Hailey, "God…I'm in love with my best friend…."
