Shane slid the white cotton t-shirt over his head with a sigh. He looked around his bedroom and frowned slightly at the sight of his empty bed. It would take some getting used to, this whole 'being alone' thing. Sometimes it was nice, other times it was just, well…lonely.

It had been three days since Ashley walked out on him and he hadn't heard from her since. He thought about calling but he didn't. She made the choice to leave and he had to respect that. She obviously wanted time away from him and that's what he'd give her.

Plus, it was what Mitchie advised him to do.

She had been over every night since Ashley left but she had a life of her own and would leave every morning. They would keep up professional appearances at work since gossip travels fast and people were suddenly whispering about the two of them. He had Samantha to thank for that. On the outside, she looked so harmless when in reality she was just as gossip-hungry as everyone else.

Today was one of Shane's days off and he just didn't know what to do with himself. Mitchie still went in to take care of some odds and ends of various things for him so that ruled out any chance of her entertaining him for the day.

Yep, he was so lonely.

The last time he was this alone was when he first moved out to L.A. and didn't know anyone too well. He had a few friends and went to bars to meet people but he really didn't know anyone he would actually want to spend his days with. Thinking back on those days reminded him why he had moved to Los Angeles in the first place.

He walked into he and Ashley's walk-in closet and headed straight for the back. He smiled as he drew back a hanging coat to reveal one of his prized possessions: his acoustic guitar, which he called DG after one of his favorite singer/songwriters, Dallas Green.

He grabbed DG and went back to sit on his bed. He gripped the neck, not having felt this particular guitar against his fingers for a long time. Too long, he thought.

As he strummed a few chords he couldn't help but grin. He missed it. He missed playing music. He missed being the guy fighting to get signed instead of the guy signing people.

"You can barely support yourself, how do you think you're going to support the both of us playing in stupid coffee shops?"

He abruptly struck a wrong sounding chord as Ashley's words floated into his head. He didn't know why he listened to her. Or better yet, he didn't know why he didn't see that as a red flag right then and there. Someone who truly loved him, who was completely in love with him, wouldn't have cared if they were broke and on the street just as long as they were both happy with each other.

Ashley was just never like that.

"I tried to be perfect, tried to be everything that you ever wanted," He sang softly as his fingers plucked the strings.

It was then he realized what he'd spend his day doing.

…

Mitchie paused from the typing she was doing at her computer to look at the clock. Only two more hours, she thought giving her sore neck a roll.

She hated days she had to work without Shane. Besides Samantha, who was kind of a bore, there were no women around her age that worked at the office. There were some older women in accounting and the legal department but they just saw her as a child. And she was anything but. Just ask any of the guys that worked there.

She couldn't talk to her male coworkers because whenever she came around, talking was the last thing they had on their mind. A few of them have gotten a stern lecture from Shane concerning their behavior but they just took their bold comments directed to her and turned them into hushed whispers among themselves.

Without Shane, she was pretty much alone.

The same could be said about her personal life as well. Sure, she dated other men besides Shane but it was never the same. She knew she could be snarky, even bitchy, at times but that was just her personality and not many guys could handle it. Shane was different. Not only could he handle it, he often gave it right back to her. She found that out quickly when she first started working for him. In fact, their 'one-night-a-month' thing started off as a smartass comment from him but through their banter, turned out to be an agreement for an actual arrangement.

"Hey Mitchie, would you mind checking the file cabinet for the Jefferson contract?" Shane instructed her as he leaned back in his desk chair.

"Was that your attempt at to get be to bend over so you could stare at my ass?" She asked him with a tinge of annoyance. "You know very well those contracts are under that crap that you call a desk."

"Can you really blame me? You wear these outfits and it just makes a guy wonder what a night with you could be like."

"I don't think your wife would approve."

"Who says she'd even know about it?"

A knock on her office door took Mitchie out of her memory. She looked toward the door and a wave of emotions hit her once she saw who was standing in her doorway.

"Got a minute?"

"Sure," Mitchie had no idea why Ashley was here. Actually, she had a couple. She could be here to give Mitchie a piece of her mind concerning the whole Shane situation or she could be here to give her a well-deserved slap on the face. The reasons were endless.

Ashley walked in hesitantly and shut the door behind her. Great, she's trapping me in, Mitchie thought to herself.

She walked up to her and dropped a brown envelope on her desk. Mitchie just looked at the envelope and then back at Ashley.

"I've been doing some thinking and I think this is the right decision." Ashley said with a hint of irritation. "They're divorce papers."

"Why are you giving them to me?" Mitchie asked confusedly.

"I figure the cause should be handing out the effect." Mitchie bowed her head shamefully. So Ashley knew the 'mystery woman' was her. "You know when I first read the texts on Shane's phone it didn't make any sense. I just thought he was seeing random women but then I realized if it were multiple women, I would have found out way sooner. And then once I narrowed it down to one woman, I tried to think who it could be. I knew it couldn't be a random. Shane isn't that daring to just go out and pick up a random woman and keep up a relationship with her for this long. And then I thought of people we knew. All of my friends were out of the question, they would have told me. It couldn't have been one of the female artists here. I would have heard a song about it, I'm sure. Pretty sure Samantha's too scared of me to try anything and then it all clicked. Pretty little Mitchie. It wasn't until he hired you that Shane suddenly had all of these 'overnight' conferences. After he hired you, he wouldn't even look at me let alone touch me. You know it's been at least three months since we've had sex? I thought maybe he was just never in the mood but then I thought, 'wait a minute; he's a guy; he's always in the mood'. The only explanation was he didn't want any from me because he was getting some from someone else. I feel so stupid that this whole time I didn't even realize the reason my marriage was failing was right under my nose."

Mitchie sighed and waited to respond. She had so many things she wanted to say to Ashley, all of them containing many expletives, but she didn't want to say them to her, not now. Ashley was clearly pissed and cursing at her would surely only make it worse and the last thing she wanted was Shane finding out that his wife and mistress had a smack down in her office.

"You're upset, I get it. But to say I'm the reason your marriage is failing is not fair. It was only a matter of time before this happened. I was merely a scapegoat for Shane. I gave him a reason to not feel so bad about realizing he didn't love you anymore."

"Don't you dare try and put this on him. He was perfectly happy with me until you came along and fucked our relationship up." Ashley said through gritted teeth. She didn't swear often but she couldn't help it. She was completely enraged. "How do you even sleep at night knowing you ruined a marriage?"

Right next to Shane, in your bed. Mitchie wanted to badly to retort with what she thought be she held her tongue.

"How he could think being with someone like you is somehow better than being with someone like me is beyond me." Ashley spat at her.

That was it. Mitchie had a reputation for not letting people talk to her any kind of way and she had let Ashley get away with too much. She slowly stood from her desk chair and exhaled deeply.

"You know why Shane threw everything he had with you away for me?" Ashley seemed a little surprised she was actually responding. "Because unlike you, I'm not a controlling bitch. He can actually be himself around me. I don't make him act a certain way just because I think it's better. You make him feel like he's an embarrassment. You treat him like crap around your fancy lawyer friends. And you discouraged him from doing what he really wanted to do with his life. You could have kept him, Ashley, you really could have. All you had to do was listen to what he had to say. Because the moment he fell for me was when I listened when you wouldn't."

Ashley nodded, her lips pressed together tightly. She was absolutely fuming. There was no way that was true. She loved Shane and Shane loved her. Mitchie was only saying those things to validate her wrongdoing, to make herself feel better about stepping in on a marriage.

Ashley wasn't about to let her do that.

When she couldn't find the words to say, she resorted to a different tactic. Before she knew it, she had slapped her. She never intended the conversation to turn physical but she also didn't plan on getting so worked up.

Mitchie held her cheek and stared at Ashley with a look of unbelief. She had only ever been slapped one other time in her life and that was during a stupid fight over the quarterback's affection in high school. Back then she was a lot more immature than she was now. She completely tore the other girl apart, thinking that was the right thing to do. Now she was smarter. There was no way she was going to even lay a finger on Ashley.

"Okay, maybe I deserved that," She said rubbing her throbbing cheek. She picked up the divorce papers and shoved them at Ashley. "But Shane doesn't deserve this. If you're going to end things, you do it. Regardless of what you think, he's actually been pretty broken up about you leaving. The least you could do is break up with the guy face-to-face."

Ashley rolled her eyes. She hated to do it but she agreed with Mitchie. It would be pretty cowardice for her to hand him divorce papers via someone else and since she was not a coward, she'd give them to him herself.

…

Shane kneeled in his closet mounting the wall mic to the back of the closet. He had gotten back from the music store an hour ago and bought the equipment necessary to turn his closet into a recording studio. As soon as it was up and running, he'd mess around and record some stuff. He had a similar set up back at his parents' house in New Jersey and he loved it. The raw sound it made was exactly what he wanted.

"What are you doing?"

Shane jumped at the sound of the female voice behind him. His heart nearly jumped up into his throat when he turned around and saw Ashley standing in the doorway of the closet. He was so busy in his work he must not have heard the front door open or her footsteps.

"I could ask you the same thing." He snapped. "What exactly makes you think you can go AWOL for three days and just waltz in here and question what I'm doing?"

He stood up and pushed pass her to exit the closet. He grabbed a small towel that was on the bed and wiped his dirty hands. He stood with his back turned to her, waiting for her to respond.

"I'm sorry Shane but you have to understand what I was going through. I just found out my husband was cheating on me and I needed some time to think, evaluate things." She explained.

He turned to her and scoffed. "You could have called, at least once. I didn't know what you were doing, if you were all right. For all I knew you went and went and did something crazy like down a bottle of Tylenol PM."

"Does this count as something crazy?" She asked handing him the brown envelope.

He pulled out the papers inside and read the top aloud. "Marriage Settlement Agreement?" He processed those words for a moment. "Are you divorcing me?"

"Depends," She folded her arms over her chest and continued. "Can we work this out? Because I won't file if you're willing to work on things."

Shane nodded, slid the papers back into the folder and handed them back to her. "File them."

Ashley's mouth instantly dropped open. "You're just going to give up like that? You don't even want to try–"

"Why try to save something that's already dead?" He asked harshly. He softened his tone to continue. "I'm sorry Ashley. I love you, I really do but I'm just not in love with you anymore and it wouldn't be fair to make you think we can make this work because we can't. My heart isn't one hundred percent in this marriage anymore. If it were, I wouldn't have cheated. Besides, you deserve so much better than me. You need a guy that can keep up with you and I'm just not that guy. What we had was great for a while but it fizzled out. You know it, and I know it."

She looked away as she felt her eyes welling up. She wanted so badly not to believe that he was doing this for a good reason. She wanted to think he was only doing this because he wanted to keep things going with Mitchie but even she knew that wasn't true. He was being completely honest with her and she knew it. She had known it for a while. Maybe at one point she and Shane were good together but they grew apart. They both wanted different things.

Shane never liked to see anyone hurting and Ashley was no exception. He meant what he said. He loved Ashley. She would always have a special place in his heart but he just couldn't be in a relationship with her. Seeing her cry made him feel bad about this whole thing. He wished things were different, that they could actually work out but the reality was they couldn't. And they'd just both have to accept it.

He reached out and wrapped his arm around her, pulling her into a hug. He placed a kissed on her forehead and let her sob into his chest. Once she had calmed, he released her from his grip.

"So I guess I'll just sign them and send them to you for you to sign." She said wiping her face clean and composing herself. "I'll come back tomorrow to get my stuff. I'll just stay with my sister until I can find something permanent."

"No, Ashley," He looked around at the room, the house. "You mostly paid for the house. You stay here. I'll go somewhere else."

When she said nothing, he turned to the closet to pack a bag of clothes to last him the night. He didn't really know where he'd go but he had an idea.

…

Mitchie sat on the couch in her small apartment staring at Shane as he finished what was left of the sandwich she had made him moments earlier. He had showed up on her doorstep a while ago asking if he could stay. Of course, she said yes. The man was going through a divorce after all. She wasn't going to make his life more difficult by denying him a place to stay.

"Wow," Shane exclaimed patting his stomach. "That was a delicious sandwich."

"Yeah, don't get used to it. I'm not your personal chef," She said teasingly. "I'm just a girl who's lending you her couch for a while."

He nodded and looked over at her. He couldn't help but notice the red mark across her cheek. He reached his hand up and grazed his thumb over it.

"Do you regret taking your job?" He asked out of the blue. "I mean none of this would be happening if we never met."

Mitchie shook her head confidently. "I try to live with no regrets. If I would have never met you, I might have never known what it feels like to fall head-over-heels for someone."

Shane smiled. She was right. Granted it wasn't the most picture-perfect way to fall for someone but he did fall for Mitchie. He might regret a lot of things but he could never regret that.

…

So I really hated the end of this chapter but I think I got my point across. Shane and Ashley are done. So there's only one more chapter left! It's the epilogue and it's pretty darn cute if you ask me. Haha.

Thanks for reading and please leave me a review!