And I Thought I Loved You Then

xxxxx

Sidney,

I just want you to know that you're the most pathetic asshole on the planet! You couldn't even tell me to my face that you were fucking some slut behind my back? I had to find out from the stupid bitch herself when I called your cell phone? What the fuck is that about? I thought that we had something amazing. That we shared something so unique and powerful that would last forever! I believed that you loved me just as much as I love you! I can't believe you'd go and throw something like me away for some cheap, nasty whore that doesn't know you like I do! How could you do something like to me? We belong together! And one day you'll come grovelling when you realize what a horrible mistake you've made.

Love, Meghan

xxxxx

Autumn's eyes widened as she read the hastily prepared letter clutched tightly in her hands. Done in what appeared to be charcoal grey eyeliner and on a wrinkled and used envelope that Meghan had either found in her purse or discarded somewhere in the parking lot, the writing was smudged and barely legible. Sidney, upon finally joining her forty five minutes after their ordeal with the reporters had began, had tossed his equipment in the back of his SUV before reluctantly snatching Meghan's present for her from underneath the left wiper blade. He'd initially been stunned at what he'd read, and then shock had been replaced by amusement and he'd been unable to hold back hysterical laughter. While the words themselves were full of vehemence and hate, the fact of who they were from - an obviously emotionally and mentally disturbed and extremely immature young woman- had made the situation humorous.

"Whoa..." Autumn breathed, as she sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover in her driveway. The SUV was parked behind her own car that she'd driven home after a neighbour had called to say the someone had called the police, who in turn had scared the media away, and she'd been ready to head into the house when Sid had paused before climbing out of his own vehicle and had waved her over instead.

"Un-fucking-real..." Sid gave a dry laugh and shook his head. "Can you honestly believe that? That she'd act like that?"

"Hell hath no fury," Autumn said with a sigh, and folded the envelope in half. "This girl's a little..."

"Messed up?" Sid offered.

"That's one way of putting it. I mean, I've heard of girls going insane and stalkerish when they've been dumped but..."

"I didn't dump her," he interjected. "I didn't dump her, I didn't break up with her. There was nothing to break off from. I've never even been alone with her let alone in a relationship with her."

"Well the way she's talking it sounds as if the two of you were pretty serious about each other," Autumn observed.

"Please tell me you don't believe that bullshit," he stared at her disbelief.

"It sounds pretty convincing. No woman would get that pissed off unless they had a reason to be."

"So now you're siding with her and you're thinking that I lied to you when I said that I was never even interested in her," Sid angrily stated

"No..." Autumn chose her words carefully. And patiently. Reminding herself that while there was only five years age difference between the two of them, she was essentially dealing with a kid. Who had almost zero experience when it came to relationships and who was, in all accounts, immature when it came to matters of the heart in general. Not that that was any fault of his. It had been difficult for him to have a life outside of hockey since he was kid. "I'm just...I'm a woman and I've seen letters like this before. Friends of mine back in high school wrote letters like this and shoved them in their boyfriends' lockers when they'd been busted for cheating. So unless there was more to you and this Meghan girl then you're letting on or she's come crazy, delusional..."

"She's fucking insane!" Sid snapped, and snatched the envelope out of her hand. "There was nothing going on between Meghan and I. There was never going to be anything. She's just crazy, okay? She was into me and I wasn't into her. Plain and simple. What is so fucking hard to understand about that?"

Autumn blinked; taken back by the harsh, agitated tone in his voice. "Okay...I think you're being just a little too sensitive about this whole thing," she said, holding her hands up in surrender. "I'm not accusing you of lying to me about this girl. You told me that you were never with her and I believed you. But everything that she's written in that letter..."

"Everything she's written in this letter is a bunch of crap. She's a crazy, unstable bitch that Michelle kept trying to set me up with. And no matter how many goddamn times I told her that I want nothing to do with Meghan, she kept pushing it and pushing it and it drove me insane. So I agreed to go out with her once. To shut Michelle the fuck up. But that was after you never called me for an entire week and I thought you were never going to call. So I thought that I'd kill two birds with one stone. Shut Michelle up and then go out with Meghan and tell her afterwards, right to her face that I didn't want anything to do with her."

"And..." Autumn pressed gently. "Did you end up going out with her or..."

"No!" Sid sighed exasperatedly and ran his hands over his face. "Because you called me two days before so I told Meghan that I couldn't make it. That something came up and that we'd have to go out some other time. But I only said that in case you went out with me and thought I was a complete tool and didn't want to see me again."

"Okay...." she nodded slowly as she put the pieces together. "So what you're saying is that if I didn't want anything to do with you, romantically speaking, you were going to just jump into something with someone you didn't want to be with but who you'd settle for just because you were lonely."

"Yes!" Sid exclaimed. "I mean no!...I guess...I mean...I don't know!" he buried his face in his hands and gave a frustrated groan. "I don't know what I was going to do, okay? I was prepared to take a chance with you and that if it didn't work out I was going to try and see if I could ever learn to actually like Meghan. So maybe I was just going to be settling. Maybe I was going to use her. I don't know. All I do know is that things did work between us and I never thought I'd have to give that crazy ass bitch an explanation."

"It would have been nice to give her some sort of warning," Autumn concluded. "You didn't owe her anything, but...I guess her finding out about me the way she did wasn't the best way to go about things."

"It wouldn't have happened that way if you'd just minded your own business and not bothered checking her number out on my cell phone," Sid retorted.

The second that the words slipped out of his mouth, he would have killed to get them back again. They'd tumbled out so freely and easily; a by-product of irritation caused by Meghan's bullshit, the media's intrusion into Autumn's life because of her own jealous ex and incessant calls from his father and agent that he'd been ignoring the entire drive to Autumn's house. And when he saw how her eyes narrowed and how her lips pursed together, he knew he'd just succeeded in digging the first hole of his own grave.

"Autumn..." her name just managed to escape his lips when she reached for the handle on the door and tossed it open. "Where the hell are you going?" he asked, as she slipped out of the SUV, then turned and glared at him before she slammed the door furiously and stomped up the driveway.

Muttering profanities under his breath, Sid hurriedly unclasped his seat belt, snatched his keys out of the ignition and tossed open his door. "Autumn! Wait!" he called to her, as she stormed up the small flight of cement stairs at the side door of her house, where she paused, her hands shaking, as she attempted to locate the proper key out of several on the key chain in her possession.

"Just fuck off!" she screamed at him in response. "Just leave me alone!"

"I said I was sorry!" he yelled, as he slammed his car door shut and rushed up the driveway after her. "I'm sorry..." his voice was quiet and calm as he joined her at the door, standing in the driveway with her three steps above him as he grabbed a hold of her left elbow. "I never meant to say that."

"Leave me alone," she hissed, and yanked her arm out of his grasp. "Just go away and leave me alone."

"I can't," he shook his head and tightened his hold on her. "I can't leave you alone. I don't want to leave you alone. I'm sorry that I said that. About Meghan and checking my phone and calling her. I didn't mean it the way it sounded."

"You shouldn't have said it in the first place!" she retorted, and struggled in vain to wriggle away from him.

"I know that. And I'm sorry, okay? It's just that...this is all a little too wild and crazy for me. I've never had to deal with this kind of thing before. I wasn't expecting the fans and the media to go this insane over the fact I have a girlfriend and I didn't think about telling my family or my agent first and now my dad's calling me constantly 'cause he's pissed that he had to find out through a reporter and..." he sighed heavily. "And then there's all of this shit with Meghan and your asshole ex. And when you started accusing me of lying to you, I just snapped. And I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean it."

"I wasn't accusing you of anything," Autumn informed him, and managed to finally pull her arm away, then use her elbow to shove him away from her. "I was just trying to find a reason for why she's acting like this! I believed you when you said you'd never been involved with her. That you weren't interested in her. And then I read something like that..."

"It's all bullshit, Autumn!" Sid's fingers curled around her wrist in hopes of preventing her from getting her key into the lock. "Nothing in that letter is true!"

"Let go of me!" she growled, and fought once more to escape. "What is wrong with you? What the hell are you doing?!"

"Would you just listen to me?" he pleaded, snatching her keys away from her with one hand and turning her around to face him with the other. "Meghan's crazy! She's always been crazy! And you calling her and telling her off just made things worse!"

"Don't blame all of this on me!" Autumn angrily jabbed her finger into his shoulder. Maybe I shouldn't have snooped and gotten the number off of your phone and maybe I shouldn't have called her back! And maybe it makes me look like some pathetic, immature, possessive, jealous insane girlfriend..."

"I never said that..."

"But I have to protect myself!" she continued. "I can't be just blindly jumping into something and then finding out you weren't being exactly truthful with me!"

"So you don't trust me," he stated, hurt by her admission.

"I don't trust anyone! And that's nothing personal against you. It's the way I am and I...I don't even trust myself half the time so how can I have faith in anyone else? I told you that this was going to take some time. Me being able to open up to you completely and trust you with not just my heart but with Ryan's and..."

"I'm not going to hurt you, Autumn. You or Ryan. I don't know how many times I have to tell you that."

"It's not about telling someone, Sidney! It's about showing someone! And the first time I trusted you when you told me something personal about you...well look what's happened."

"I didn't lie to you about Meghan. Everything I sad was the truth. Why are you...?"

"You and I must have two completely different ideas on what the truth is," she interjected. "Because what you just told me in the car five minutes ago is completely different than what you told me in the hospital."

"No, it isn't," he argued. "What I told you when we first met was the truth!"

"Just not the whole truth," she retorted.

"Okay...so I didn't tell you everything and I may have kept some things back. But I barely knew you and I'd already told you tons of stuff about me and I'd already gone far enough and I didn't see a reason to tell you anything more."

"So what am I going to find out next?" Autumn asked, and crossed her arms over her chest. "That you've got some girlfriend or fiancée back home? A couple of kids?"

"What? No. There's nothing like that in my life. You know everything there is to know about me."

"Well now I do," she snorted derisively.

"Don't act like I'm the only one that keeps things back. There's a lot of stuff that you haven't told me about."

"I have told you my entire life story!" Autumn informed him. "You know I was married, you know about David, you obviously know about my son. What more is there?"

"You haven't told me about what the deal is with your parents. Why you don't talk to them. Or about how your husband died."

"Because maybe I'm not ready to talk about those things yet," she reasoned. "What happened between me and my family and how Quinton died are painful, traumatic things and I don't want to talk about them yet. You keeping the real story about Meghan from me? That's entirely different and you know it."

"But I told you. In the end I told you."

"So better late than never is your philosophy? And you only told me after you got busted and way after you got into my pants. Look..." she sighed and placed a hand to her forehead as she struggled to compose herself. "You got what you wanted, okay?" her voice was quiet as she regarded him. "We both did. And maybe we're both just fooling ourselves into actually thinking there's more to this than just..."

"Than just what?" Sid asked, interrupting her. "Sex? You actually are going to stand here and tell me that you think that's all I was after? To get laid? Are you kidding me?"

"Maybe we both just need to realize sooner then later that we're stupid to think there could ever be anything else to us than that," she gently explained.

"Are you serious?" Sid couldn't hold back the laugh that erupted from him. "You know that that's a total load of shit! You know there's more to us than that. And no offence, but if my main goal in busting my ass trying to hook up with you had have been just for sex? Well I could have just gotten it anywhere and not bothered with pursuing you like I did."

"Well maybe you should have done that," Autumn told him. "Seeing as there's tons of little puck sluts that are so ready, willing and able. So how about you just fuck off and go and find one of them and stop wasting my time!"

"You're not listening to me!" Sid snapped. "I don't want sex! I mean, I do, What guy doesn't? But I don't want meaningless sex with some random girl that's probably done half of my team mates. I want more than that. I want you. And everything that comes with you. And sex...well that's just something extra right? It's not the be all and end all."

"You're right," she agreed. "It's not. But it's a big part of a relationship and I don't want that to be the only reason why you stick around. 'Cause I put out."

"Holy fuck, Autumn!" he fought the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. "Have you heard anything that I've said? And how the hell did we get onto this when it started with Meghan? Are you always this random or..."

"I think that you should leave," she grabbed her keys from Sid's hand. "We're both upset right now and we're defensive and taking things out of context and we're overreacting to everything. So you should just go and we'll both clam down and talk later, okay?"

And with that, she turned her back on him and set to the task of unlocking and opening the door.

"Don't fucking dismiss me like that!" Sid moved up onto the bottom step, and reaching around her, grabbed a hold of the handle on the door, slamming it shut before she got open it all the way. Then held it firmly shut. "You may think I'm just some stupid, immature, inexperienced little kid. But..."

"I have never said that!" Autumn cried, and wheeled around to face him. "I never once said that about you! And judging by what everyone else is saying and thinking, I'm the only one who doesn't feel that way about you!"

"I get that you've got this whole bitchy, smart ass, tough girl act going on, Autumn. And you know what? I've been just sitting back and humouring you and letting you go for it. No harm, no foul, right? You've probably always gotten away with it because no one's wanted to get on your ass about it. Face your wrath. So they let you pull this bossy, assertive and aggressive shit on them. Let you freak out and treat them like shit instead of making things worse on themselves but sticking up for themselves. But I see right through it. All of it. Everyone else probably does too. Only difference between me and them? I'm the one with the balls to call you on it. To tell you exactly what you are."

"Oh really..." she laughed dryly. "Okay then, superstar. Humour me. Enlighten me with your wise and all knowing diagnosis of my personality."

"You're a scared little girl who's afraid of getting too close to someone and allowing someone to get close to you because you don't want to get hurt. Because you're afraid to let someone realize how vulnerable you actually are. Because you think that it makes you weak and that they'll take advantage of that. And you're afraid to love someone because everyone you have been that way with has left you. One way or another."

Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips together. "You don't know shit about me," she hissed. "You don't know me."

"I do know you. And maybe you're just in self denial about everything that went down between us last night and this morning. Maybe you don't want to admit that there was more to what we did than just sex. That things happened between us. Moments that went far beyond just the physical things we were doing. And you know what? It's okay to be freaked out. I'm scared shitless about it. About how intense things were outside of the sex. But isn't it better if we're freaking out together? Instead of you denying it and acting as if it never even happened? Isn't it better to not hide it, Autumn?"

"I'm not hiding or denying anything. Maybe you're just reading too much into it."

He shook his head. "You know I'm right. You know that everything I'm saying is true. You're just too afraid to admit it. Because you hate not having control over everything. You hate the fact that I'm right and that I'm not afraid to stick up for myself. Or tell you like it is. Because you're used to always getting the upper hand with guys and you know this time that that isn't going to happen. I may not have a lot of experience, but I'm not about to let you walk all over me either. You talk about protecting yourself? Well I have to protect me. And if I have the stones to tell you exactly how I'm feeling..."

"You're talking a whole lot of shit is what you're doing," Autumn argued, and laying her hands on his shoulders, shoved him back off of the bottom step. "And you need to just walk away before..."

"Before what? Before you actually tell me how you're feeling about me? Before you finally open up about something instead of me having to drag it out of you? What the hell are you so scared of?"

"I'm not scared of anything," she fought back tears. "I just...I just want you to walk away and leave me alone."

Sid shook his head. "I'm not going anywhere, Autumn. Ever. So you're either going to have to stand there and listen to me or you're going to have to be the one to walk away."

"If you'd let go of the fucking door I would!" she retorted, and angrily elbowed his arm out of the way.

"Fine..." he took a step back, hands raised in surrender. "If that's really what you want, then go ahead. Walk away. Just remember that it was your choice. That you did it."

Autumn shook her head and turned her back on him once more. "You're such an ass," she muttered, and opened the door a crack. Then gave a long, drawn out sigh and closed it once more.

"It's not easy, is it," Sid stated. "Just walking away from someone. Especially when its someone you know you want to be with even though you're being a stubborn bitch by not admitting it to anyone but yourself."

"Why are you doing this to me?" she asked, as her shoulders sagged in defeat and she laid her forehead against the door. "Why? Why won't you just walk away? Why won't you just realize that in the end, you'll be much better off away from me."

"Because I'm horrible without you and I can't live like that anymore," he responded.

She shook her head in defiance.

"And because I love you," he bravely admitted.

Autumn's eyes widened and her heart thundered in her chest as the last three words out of his mouth fought to get past the shocked that immediately registered. Tears burned in her eyes and emotion choked at her. It had been five years since a man had said those words to her. And she'd all but relegated herself to the fact that she'd never hear someone say them to her again. That she'd loved and lost and didn't deserve the chance to feel that way about someone again. Or have someone feel that way about her. And now here was that someone. Mere feet away from her, so open and honest about everything that was inside of him. And she knew, that if she didn't say something, anything, or react, that he would walk away and she'd lose the chance of ever hearing him say those words again.

She turned to face him, allowing the tears to flow freely down her cheeks.

"I know you're going to say that it's way too soon for me to feel that way," Sid continued. "But I know how I feel, Autumn. I'm not stupid. I know what love is. Just because I've never felt it before doesn't mean I don't know what it is. And you know what? I don't expect you to say it back. 'Cause the last thing I want is you saying something you're not feeling right now. But I wanted you to know how I felt. And that I'll wait for you to say it back. No matter how long that takes."

She opened her mouth to speak, but found herself to stunned to form a proper thought, let alone any words that seemed remotely acceptable.

"I know this is a lot to swallow," he said. "And I know you're probably really freaked out right now and you need some time to just let it all digest. So I'm going to go and give you some time to..."

Autumn shook her head, and reaching out and grabbing a hold of the front of his shirt with both hands, yanked him towards her and into a long, intense kiss. She felt one of his hands come to rest on the back of her neck, and the other settle on her hip and then slip around to the small of her back. He could taste the salt of her tears and feel her shiver against him as two of his fingertips slipped underneath the bottom of her shirt and skimmed lightly against the smooth skin of the small of her back.

"Tell me again," she said, after the kiss had left them both breathless and she wrapped her arms around his neck and placed her forehead against his. Their breath ragged and warm on each others faces, their hearts hammering in their chests. "I need to hear you tell me again."

"I love you Autumn," he pecked the corner of her mouth, followed by her cheek. Then enveloped her slender body in both of his arms and held her tightly against him. "I know it seems really soon," he said, his lips against her temple. "But I can't help it. I had to tell you. I love you."

She wanted to say it back. Desperately. She needed him to know that she felt the same way. But she just wasn't ready to take that kind of risk. To open herself up that last little bit. Instead, she pulled back and gave a soft smile and pressed a kiss to his lips.

"I meant what I said," Sid told her. "About waiting. No matter how long it takes. You believe me, right? You know that I'm not going anywhere?"

She nodded, then laid her head on his shoulder. Closing her eyes, she was relaxed and comforted by his strong body and his familiar scent. His arms were her safe place. She felt secure and protected, as if nothing bad could ever happen as long as she stayed right where she was, wrapped up in him.

For the rest of her life.