A/N: Thanks for all the reviews, enjoy the chapter! :)

"I brought you some coffee."

Stephanie looked up and gave Chris a small smile. "You didn't have to do that. I could have gotten coffee on my own, you know."

"I know, but since we talked last night and you said you had to come in super early, I figured I would bring you a coffee since you might not have had the opportunity to get one," Chris explained to her as he set the coffee down on her desk. "I hope you still like what you did back in the day, I couldn't remember even though I know we've gone out for coffee."

"A girl never changes her coffee," Stephanie joked as she reached for the cup and took a life-affirming sip.

Chris took a sip of his own coffee and sat down. After Stephanie had told him she was willing to give what they'd had a chance, a real chance, he'd decided to back off just slightly and not come across like a crazy stalker guy who wouldn't take no for an answer. He explained that he would do this slowly and let her heal from her break up with Tim, but that he was going to be around and wanted to be there for her. In order to do that, he'd decided that he was going to come visit her in Connecticut, which she didn't oppose to and he was staying at a hotel so it wasn't weird for her, but he was definitely insinuating himself in her life.

"Good, I didn't want to come in here only to have hot coffee thrown on me by an irate, crabby person," he winked at her over his cup and she rolled her eyes and flipped her off. "Wow, do you act that away around everyone now?"

"No, just you," she told him, giving him a coy look. He wanted to say that he was making progress, but he really couldn't tell if he was or not.

He didn't want to scare her off and after his impassioned speech to her, he was left feeling slightly embarrassed about how he'd laid everything on the line. She hadn't run away though and that had to be a good sign and she was very open to hanging out together so he figured she was coming around and all that talk about her moving on and not feeling it, he hoped that kind of talk would disappear soon.

"Well, then I'm going to take away my invitation to lunch," he teased her.

"Is that why you came down here with coffee?"

"It's one of the reasons, yes, I came up here to be with you and I want to be with you and I figured that we could go out to lunch and maybe hang out after work. I could get a pizza and we could watch a movie at your place, does that sound good?" He didn't want to push and he felt like this wasn't pushing.

"That sounds good," she said, "I have to admit, it's nice to know that I won't be coming home to an empty house."

"Don't act like you're an old maid or something," he told her, "you're anything but, you're a gorgeous, beautiful woman and you will not be alone ever because…well, just because."

"You can finish your thought, you know," she said and she was always throwing out things like that, which only bolstered his hopes that things were indeed going his way. He knew that whenever she was over Tim and realized that, he, Chris was the guy for her she would let him know. He just hoped that she rediscovered her feelings for him because the more time with her, the more he fell in love with her even more than he had been back when they were actually dating.

"You won't ever be alone because I wouldn't let you be," he told her and she actually ducked her head a little bit. "Don't act all demure with me, Steph."

"I'm sorry, I can't help it," she told him, the left side of her mouth quirking up into a smile. "Sometimes I feel like that 16 year old girl who blushed every time you complimented me. You have no idea how big my crush on you was."

"You were adorable back then," he told her, ducking his own head as he thought about her. "I thought you were the cutest thing, what with those bangs and everything, you were so rad…"

"Oh my God, rad, we were so incredibly lame," she shook her head at herself. "What did you ever see in me back then? I mean, I had nothing going for me at the time. I was awkward and gawky and-"

"Sweet and funny and a friend to me when I really needed one," he told her, looking at her dead in the eye to make sure that what he said was the absolute truth. Every word he was saying was the truth. "You have no idea what you and your brother's friendship meant to me at that time. I was just starting out really, I had never had that kind of responsibility and suddenly I'm thrown in with the big dogs and yeah, I was just a jobber, but I was still surrounded by all these guys who saw me as nothing but someone to make them look good and you and Shane actually treated me like a human being."

"You're one of the best people I know, Chris, no matter what happens between us, believe that at least."

"Has Tim been by to grab his things?" he asked, hoping that it wasn't going to be a sensitive subject. It wasn't like he was trying to push her to get over her ex-boyfriend, but he just wanted to know how things were progressing.

"Not yet, I've got everything pretty much packed up and sitting in a box by the door whenever he wants to come by and get it, it's really on him though," Stephanie shrugged. "I told him that he could drop by whenever he wants to so I'm sure he will at some point."

"Have you talked to him? I mean, really talked to him?" Chris wondered.

Stephanie shook her head, a few wisps of hair clinging to her lip-glossed mouth. "No, because I've thought about it and there's really nothing to talk about anymore. We just wanted different things and it's better that we got that out now instead of prolonging it. He wants a housewife, someone to come home to, who will cook and clean and have lots of babies. He wants that traditional life and I don't. I want to travel and run this company and be onscreen and that's my life and yeah, I think the marriage and the babies and the cooking will come later, but that's later."

"I'm glad you're feeling better."

"Yeah, I know, you're biased though because you want in my pants," she teased and Chris nodded eagerly.

"If there's any possibility of that, I'm not going to turn it down," he told her, wiggling his eyebrows lecherously. "I better let you get this work done though so you can eat lunch at a normal time and come home at a normal time so we can hang out. Hey, you know what, why don't I come over to your house, we'll go rent a video at the video store, grab the pizza together and then go back to your house."

"Okay, I'm all for that," Stephanie said. Chris nodded and stood up, intending to let her get back to her work. "Oh wait, Chris, hold on."

"Yeah?" he asked, turning back around to look at her. She stood up from her desk and went over to the couch in the corner of her office and grabbed her purse. She rooted through it and found her key chain, pulling it out and taking a key off.

"Here, this is my house key," she told him, "you can go hang out at my house if you want. You don't have to go back to your hotel room, which I imagine it probably horribly boring because it's a hotel room. So go to my place, hang out for a while, make yourself at home."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, of course," Stephanie told him, "You're my friend and…other stuff, so you should be able to go there and just hang out, I really don't mind. You can come find me for lunch if you want or we can skip lunch and just do the dinner/movie thing."

"No, I'll be back for lunch," he told her.

"If that's what you want," she told him.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, "It's what I want."

Stephanie grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze before she went back to her desk and sat down. Chris stood there for a moment watching her before he left her office and went down to his rental car. He knew the way to Stephanie's house since he'd been there everyday for the past few days and so he didn't get lost and arrived in good time. He had a few hours to kill before he could pick her up for lunch so he would just have to find something to occupy himself. He let himself in the house and saw the box waiting for Tim sitting by the door. Chris was tempted to look at it and knowing she wasn't there, he knelt down and pawed through it a little. There was nothing really of note inside of it, shirts, a couple CDs, but nothing that was at all interesting.

Chris wandered into the living room and just looked around. He'd been in here a lot over the past few days so he bypassed that and just went on a tour of the house, minus Stephanie's room because that was her private area and he didn't want to be that guy, the one that creeped around her things. Instead he went into her office, which he'd never been in before since they usually stayed downstairs and his eyes widened at the entire wall covered with shelves and shelves full of video tapes. He had his own massive collection, but this was insane. Chris went over to the wall and looked at them. They were all labeled and she had some rare stuff in this collection, wrestling from the 60's and 70's and he was in awe of what she had. If he hadn't loved her already, this would have done the trick quite well. He walked around the room and eventually came to a lowly bookshelf, which looked so out of place with the videotapes. There were various wrestling biographies and other assorted wrestling reading, which he found sweet and then he noticed something that caught his eye immediately.

He pulled the small notebook from the shelf and looked at it, his hand running over the cover. He couldn't believe she still had it after all this time. It was the notebook he'd given her for her seventeenth birthday, the day they'd started dating, when he'd kissed her for the very first time. His smile turned nostalgic and he opened it, seeing that it was filled with different notes and things, nothing too long and he picked a page at random.

Tell Dad that I think his new ideas are lame. Wrestlers shouldn't have to look stupid all the time.

If I were writing for the WWF, I think I would do things differently. Find a way to make Dad listen to your ideas so that he doesn't think you're a stupid kid anymore. I have better ideas than Shane anyways.

Chris laughed as he read over the notes in them. He flipped through a couple pages and saw it was much of the same thing. She had some proposed storylines, things that sounded like they would have made for great television. He wondered if she'd ever actually brought this up with her dad because she would have come up with some exciting storylines. He continued to flip through, impressed that she had so many ideas that went seemingly unfulfilled when his name caught his eye. He stopped and read it.

I wish Chris were here, I would put him in a storyline with Shawn Michaels. I've looked at his overseas matches from Japan and the stuff he's done recently in Mexico and he would've been such a perfect fit against Shawn. I miss him.

Chris closed the notebook and put it back on the shelf. He would have killed to have a program with Shawn Michaels, absolutely killed to have one. To have Stephanie have such confidence in him, even after he'd left and the fact that she'd watched his matches from Japan and Mexico had to mean something. She'd kept her own tabs on him. It might not have been traveling to see her graduate, but in her own way, she'd kept her tabs all the same.

"You ready?" Stephanie stood up later that afternoon when Chris came to pick her up for lunch. Chris walked straight up to her and grabbed her face in his hands and kissed her. He pulled away and she looked a little dazed. "What was that for?"

"Everything."