Tyed - Chapter 55: Chapter 55

It's a large building in the business district of Melbourne; a side street Tyler never bothers to visit, a few roads across from Pandora and between streets with important places Tyler cares about, like the shopping centres and the clubs and... probably other places Tyler cares about too. Tyler feels like he's been here before, and he can't name why: it's a building mostly used for office work, consultancies and lawyers and probably accountants and shit.
He's standing outside looking up at the windows, wondering what Kali might be up to in there, when he feels a gaze boring into him. It's out of the corner of his eye that he sees it, and through the windows he does catch a pair of eyes that quickly look away. It's hard to squint through tinted windows, but could it be-
It's not Kali, that's the first thing he notices; this woman is pale and she's wearing a pencil skirt that it looks like she actually fits. Tyler almost doesn't care, assuming it's some random woman he doesn't give a shit about, until he properly sees her.
"The fuck is Scarlett doing here?" Tyler mutters.
Nancy stares at him. "Excuse me? What's going on?"
Tyler points, not so subtly, and Scarlett holds up a hand to block her face, as though he can un-see her now. "Colby's ex-wife. What the fuck is she doing here?"
"Oh, shit," Nancy whispers. "The one who says she still loves him? Who had a go at you?"
Tyler had told her most of that interaction at some point. Just not the bit where he realised he loved Colby in that exact moment; he pretended that moment came later, something he was good at doing, stewing in denial for a while before admission came. "The only one," he says. "Why the fuck...?"
"I hope it's unrelated," Nancy mutters. "I assume it's unrelated."
"It better be," Tyler says, unable to stop himself from moving forward. Nancy may have tried to stop him, but her boots on the path behind him ultimately keep pace, to follow and back up, not to prevent.
Scarlett's arguing quietly with a man in a business suit that's a tad too large for him, and she pretends not to see Tyler at first, despite it being her gaze that caught his attention in the first place. The business man looks at Tyler like he's crying for help. He's got sandy hair and no features of note, and he opens his mouth to speak, before Scarlett hisses something at him that shuts him up.
Tyler is predictably a wrecking ball in this conversation. "What are you doing here, Scarlett?"
The man points weakly at Tyler, looking more disgruntled than anything, and says to Scarlett, "is this who you were looking for?"
She ignores him. Her eyebrows are drawn together in- less anger, and more frustration. Her make-up looks like it was perfect this morning, but now mascara is slowly travelling around her face and her lipstick is smudged slightly.
"Now is not a good time," she tells Tyler tightly. "I am sure my reason for being here is irrelevant to you."
She's looking for someone, someone who could be Tyler. So not Kali, probably. Tyler strongly doubts she could've stalked him enough to track Kali down the same day he'd tracked her down after years. "I'm sure it is," he says. "Fine. Whatever."
"I don't suppose you could make my life easier," Scarlett mutters, "and give me some good news?"
"What, that you can have your ex back? No. Fuck off."
Scarlett sighs. "Predictable. Why are you here, then? Following me? I'm sure you've got no business here."
"I'm looking for a friend, actually." Tyler looks around this lobby of brown wood and polished marble; he's been here before, he's sure of it, although the when and why still isn't coming. Did Kali work here then? It was long enough ago that Tyler barely remembers it, so probably not. But they walked this same hall. They probably walked a lot of the same halls at different points. They've probably both been to the coffee shop at Flinder's Street, the food court at Melbourne Central, the long escalators at Parliament, Fed Square and the bridge across the Yarra River. He wonders if once he walked past her and wasn't looking up, didn't notice.
If he's running into Scarlett here, anything's possible.
"I presume a different friend to mine," Scarlett says, "if anyone at all would point me in the right direction to his place of work. Does your friend work at DAE Solutions?"
Then it clicks why Tyler's been here before. Just once, because Saxon had something- a credit card?- he needed, that his mother sent him to pick up. "No. But my stepdad does."
"Do you know where it is?"
Tyler considers spitefully refusing. "Are you going to threaten my relationship again?"
She looks almost sad, confused. When they first met Tyler didn't get the jealous vibe he did when he got insulted outside Colby's office. He doesn't get that vibe now, either. What the fuck. "No."
Tyler sighs. Just because the vibe isn't there. "It's on the fifth floor. I think it's down the hall. I hope you find your friend."
Scarlett softens. She nods. "Thank you for helping," she says, and truly seems deflated after Tyler's one jab. He wonders how it could've possibly been such an effective line of attack. It was incredibly petty.
When Scarlett heads off, the man looks awkwardly at the Tyler, and then at Nancy behind him. Nancy gives Tyler a sideways look, like he's forgotten the obvious, and asks, "did she tell you the name of who she was looking for?"
The man thinks for a moment, then sighs, and says, "uh, Saxon Sutterfield."
Tyler just about screams.
He doesn't. It's internal. It's more of a gasp-slash-yelp. He stares at Nancy; he did forget the obvious, to check that of the four million people in this city, yet another unlikely connection was made. This world was so small. He wanted to scream.
Nancy takes him by the shoulder. "That's his stepdad," she explains to the man who doesn't care, "and that was his boyfriend's ex-wife, so we're going to have to untangle this mess later."
As Nancy leads him away, Tyler laments, "why the fuck can't I have time to process one thing at a time?"
"I don't know if this is a thing to process," Nancy says, "so much as be confused about."
"Figure out, then. It was so weird, because Saxon pulled me aside and said Colby was married. He knew. But he didn't know they were divorced and Colby didn't recognise them. So they knew Scarlett and she must've shown them who he was, somehow, but didn't tell them they divorced?"
"Well, she seems like she wants him back. Maybe she never wanted the divorce at all."
"This is so confusing," Tyler grumbles, "and I hate this. Why's she painting him as a bad person if she wants him back? Why does she want him back so bad if he doesn't even want it?"
Tyler finds his voice rising, and a gentle pats on his back brings his attention to the various white collars turned his way. He grumbles and turns towards Nancy, like she'll shield him. "Sorry," he mutters.
"You're stress out too much over this," she says. "It's probably not a big deal. She clearly doesn't know who you are, so she can't be that involved in your parent's life. She only knows your stepdad, right?"
"That's the other thing. Saxon doesn't have friends. Well, he's got friends, but like- I don't know, they're all boring nerds. I've never met them. Scarlett is not like them at all."
"Then let's not assume their relation to each other is anything important and focus on why we're here."
And she's right. Tyler takes a deep breath and considers the number of things that he could've learned today, and considers this not so bad all things considered. He'll have to figure out how Saxon knows Scarlett, but that's not important.
It's not important. Last night he had to ignore something important simply so he could make it through the night, and that was hard enough. Now he's here in the moment that it matters.
"It's easier to ignore the important things," Tyler mutters, unaware he's saying it out loud until halfway through the sentence. He sighs, and Nancy gives him the saddest look. He adds, "it's just that... I dunno. I don't want it to go bad."
Nancy looks at her phone. "She'll be out any minute. The good news is you probably won't have to wait very long."
"I don't want to wait. But also I do because I don't think I'm ready? I don't know what to say. It's not like it was ever normal. Being out with Kevin was different, irretrievably different. How different is it gonna be with her?"
"You don't know." Nancy states the simple fact like it's meant to make Tyler feel better. "You've got to try."
"I know that." Of course he's going to try.
They move to the side, just to try and get out of the gaze of others who watched the various small outbursts that just occurred. They've got an eye on the elevator or staircase that Kali's most likely to come down, based on where she works (a different acronym, JVA. Tyler honestly doesn't know what either acronym stands for. He also doesn't know what Kali's work does or what her job is there. If Nancy told him he forgot).
Saxon doesn't know what Kali looks like. He knows her name, though. Have they met? Taken the same elevator, waited for coffee from this building's cafe together, bumped into each other as they left? Could this crucial connection have been mistaken for a complete stranger? How close had Tyler come to finding her again, in a way that would've been missed if it hadn't been for Nancy's pure luck? Might he have found her years ago if he didn't know how to spell her name, and had guessed its English homonym, as her adoptive parents had?
Tyler second guesses the smallness of the world. It is small, but it's smaller than he thought. How many connections has he made like Saxon and Kali are, where something important was missed? A missing link? Has he run into Nancy's cousin, Kevin's best friend at school, Colby's brother before?
Well, he knows he's dating the ex-husband of one of his stepdad's "friends". That's one, he supposes.
Everything is just a bit too uncomfortable. His heartbeat is loud, his mouth is dry, his chest feels constricted, like he can't get a big enough breath. He might choke on dust if he's not careful. He's not sure where this- no, he knows where it comes from. He just didn't realise it was going to be quite like this.
He doesn't know what he's going to do when he actually sees her.
"How are you feeling?" Nancy asks at one point.
"Like I don't want to be in this moment a second longer."
His gaze starts to wander, around the lobby, finding people and wondering if they worked with her, if they'd recognised her face from the news- oh, over seven years ago now; if they even knew her name. If they'd be as kind to her as she deserved.
A hand touches his arm and he nearly hits the person who tried to touch him. It's an instinctual reaction, fight or flight kicking in and he's startled, but manages to hold it back, albeit with a big jump and a lean away from them, head snapping to focus on whoever thought it would be a good idea to surprise him.
Instantly, even under thick foundation three shades too light and artificially iron-straight hair, he recognises her.
She looks as scared as he is, and says, "Tyler?"