Fall Out Girl

The arena was almost empty, most of the ring crew and stagehands and technicians had already departed, most of them passing right by the tiny blonde without noticing her at all. Nessa Wall sat on the hood of Shawn Fox's car - nearly the last one in the garage now - with her feet on the bumper, hands clasped between her knees as though she was deep in prayer. At the scrape of shoes on the asphalt, she looked up, pushing her hair behind her ears as she hopped down, moving from the shadows to lean against the driver's' side door.

Shawn was jingling his keys in his right hand, the strap of his gym bag resting heavily on his shoulder. He wasn't much feeling the throb of the headache yet, just marginally aware of it, just as he was marginally aware of a figure near his car. Too small to be Stone, he didn't stop walking towards it.

"You were right," she said softly, knowing her voice would carry well enough in the silence and she tried not to flinch when Shawn froze in his tracks.

"You did not have your ass on my car." His voice came out low, tired from the exertions of the match and then the waiting in the trainers as he was hardly the only one that needed to be seen right away. As far as he knew, at least one person was rumored to have been sent on to clinic for an x-ray or two. "Nessa, what are you doing out here. Go home."

She closed her eyes for a split second, pulling in a deep breath. "You were right," she said it again, this time with a sigh to punctuate it. "I need to unburden myself and it's not some dingy confessional booth I need or a bunch of hail marys and a recitation of the Lord's prayer to cleanse my soul. I need to be honest. With you. With myself. So," she looked up at him, holding her ground even though she could feel the tension radiating from him. Great idea, waiting for him in a deserted parking lot. The plot of a thousand awful horror movies went pretty much like this. "Can we talk? For a few minutes?"

He sighed hard, an exhale of breath as he squared his shoulders. "I'm not your priest, Nessa. But you've got three minutes. Don't waste them." He slipped his hand in the pocket of his jacket, checked his phone a second and then looked at her. "Seriously. I'm tired, Nessa. Let's hear it."

"I asked Matt to hurt you and I honestly and genuinely wanted him to." She paused for a beat, licking her lips. "I figured I should tell you the truth. I'm glad he didn't. I'm glad you're standing here right now, looking… well…" she averted her eyes, sighing. "I wanted to be forthright. You deserve that."

For a second his eyes narrowed and the look he shot her was mildly incredulous, then he shook his head and his expression went blankish again. "I don't even know why I expected anything else, Nessa. Every time I think you've dropped all the baggage there's just one more carry-on with you. Like this. You were pissed off, because you fucked up and I didn't try and pat you on the head and tell you what you did was alright, when it wasn't. So what did you do? Ran to Matt. That's pretty telling, Nessa. As much as I hate the guy? I wish I could feel jealous about it, but that's not what this is at all. He's a tool." A hint of a smile for a second. "But he's also a tool and you need to stop and think a little harder Nessa. I don't expect you to get it, as smart as you are."

He looked at his watch. "You get an extra minute for that."

She blinked. "You keep trying to assign some meaning to my feelings, keep trying to say I'm angry I got caught being a selfish cunt… like I don't know that. You keep trying to act like you're the only one hurting here but you're the one still swinging the knife, Shawn. You're the one who keeps trying to cut me, hoping if I just bleed out, I'll go away and prove that you're right, that nobody's worth trusting. That's what it boils down to. I fell off the stupid goddamned pedestal you put me on - never should have done that, by the way - and you can't stand the thought that maybe I'm human. Maybe that means you have to be too, instead of being this know-it-all bag of smug dicks all the time." She shook her head, taking a step away from his car, keeping herself out of arm's reach. "I made a mistake. I admitted it. I even did it publicly so that you couldn't try to say I was avoiding it and all you keep going on about are consequences and how I'm mad about that. No." She shook her head again. "You know what I'm mad about? This," she gestured vaguely at him, "this right here. This is what makes me want to hurt you, Shawn. Just so we're crystal clear."

"Move, Nessa. Go on. I don't want the security cameras thinking I tried to back over you. Let me be crystal clear here, Nessa. I didn't ask you to do any of that. I didn't put you on a pedestal, no one deserves that. What I expected from you? It wasn't to never make a mistake, because yeah. Humans make them all the time. What I expected from you was not to do what you did. And yeah, I'm assigning some sort of feeling to it because you posture and yell and try and shift the blame on me, because it's easier for you if you look less culpable for being so selfish. But I never asked you to humble yourself in public, just like I didn't rake you over the fucking coals in public. What I wanted was a little common courtesy, Nessa. A little human decency towards someone you acted like you cared about." He kept out of her reach as he moved towards the car. "So there you go. You want to fix this? You want to fix yourself? Your first step is admitting the truth about all of it, to yourself. Don't make it some huge weird…" his turn to gesture, more towards the roof of the parking garage.

"Just don't. It's like trying to slap a bandaid over a machete cut that's gushing out with every pulse, Nessa. Sometimes? Time is the only thing. And you're out of it."

Nessa took another step back from the car, wanting to rewind the moment and just go home instead. "I came back." She said the words softly, shoulders slumping slightly as she looked down at the ground, "I thought that's what you wanted. Actions. Not a bunch of words and I…" she hesitated for a second and then said the words regardless. Might as well gut herself fully. "You don't love me anymore at all, do you?"

He opened the door to the backseat, slung his bag in and shut it with a thump before moving up to the driver's door, opening it and sliding behind the wheel. Before he shut the door, he gave her a look. "You know the real hell of it, Nessa? I thought I could actually love you. That you might be that one person that I could connect with, that wouldn't…" he gestured sharply. "So there you go." He shut the car door, turned on the engine, carefully backed out of the parking garage, and left.

She stood there for an eternity, watching the exit, trying to tell herself that she'd heard him wrong. Finally, she picked up her own bag from where it rested against the parking block, slinging it over her shoulder before following the same path Shawn's car had taken. She'd walked here almost twelve hours ago. Now it was time to go home, go to bed and put an end to one of the worst days yet.