Okay, I guess he’s just going to shower, then.
After a satisfyingly dramatic stretch, I manage to pull myself up off the floor and shuffle into the spacious chef’s kitchen to start making our coffees and breakfast. Once the fancy espresso machine is doing its thing and the pan is heating up on the stove, I grab a cup of water and attempt to rinse away my morning breath before Aaron makes it back out here. Just in case things pick up where they left off.
I make the usual: scrambled eggs, overnight oats with a handful of blueberries, one piece of dry Ezekiel toast, and slice up a piece of fresh fruit for us to share. Today, it’s a mango.
Even if I wasn’t his assistant by day, I’ve been making our breakfasts for so many years, this is a mindless activity that basically runs on autopilot by now, no conscious input from me needed. His chef preps the overnight oats for us every few days, and all I have to do is make the eggs and toast, pick a fruit, and plate it all.
Unless he’s on a cutting or bulking cycle for a role, or if the current producer he’s reporting to has him seeing a different trainer, this is his breakfast every day of the week.
Since he’s just over halfway through this season ofMidnight Empire, and his next role is a tortured artist for an indie film being shot in Romania in a few months, he doesn’t currently have to worry about looking like Thor. Not that he’s remotely built like Chris Hemsworth, but they did share a trainer for some time for a role Aaron had to get jacked for a while back.
For lunch, he’ll usually eat at craft services on set, I’ll run out and grab him a protein smoothie mid-afternoon most days, and then his fridge is full of gourmet selections for his dinners that fit his nutritional requirements, courtesy of, you guessed it, hischef. It’s a well-oiled routine that keeps him camera-ready year-round.
By the time Aaron meanders back into the kitchen, my morning alarm has gone off and been turned off, the coffees are ready, I’ve plated our breakfasts, and there is no tent in sight—sigh—but he is looking refreshed, awake, and absolutely gorgeous. His soft brown hair is casually styled, parted on the left side, and combed back, still wet from his shower. He almost never worries about styling it properly, as hair and makeup will take care of that when he’s on set. His uniquely—unconventionally—handsome face is clean-shaven, and his dark blue eyes shine bright, like twin gems of tanzanite, even this early in the morning. My eyes roam the sharp lines of his face, the curve of his mouth, before dropping south. He’s paired dark jeans with a short-sleeved navy button-down that’s patterned with little pink flamingos and daiquiris, a shirt I got him as a joke when he told me he could pull offanylook (after he was cast in a role that particularly surprised me) and I took it as a challenge. A shirt that currently has the top three buttons undone, showing off that chest that has become much more appealing over the years. The glimpse of it now makes me absentmindedly wet my lips. Okay, so joke’s on me, because he’s somehow pulling this shirt off, even though I thought he never would.
“What’s for breakfast?”
It’s a joke he makes almost daily. It started out as a way to lighten the mood when he was depressed about the strict food regimen his trainer put him on, but it’s become yet another one of our countlessthings.
“Eggs Benedict with salmon, homemade potato pancakes, and brioche toast with Nutella.”
He wrinkles his nose as he finally makes eye contact with me for the first time since his reappearance. “Ew, you paired salmon with Nutella? You can do better than that, Gem.”
I hold my hands up in defense. “I was under pressure.”
It’s true. My mind is definitelynoton breakfast right now, and I was not prepared to come up with a different decadent dish of the day for his silly question. I was still imagining what could’ve happened on that couch if he hadn’t had to pee so badly.
Rookie mistake, Gemma. Don’t get distracted by his D.
Like I haven’t been getting distracted by him for half our lives.
I silently chastise myself as he grabs the two lattes from the counter and hands me mine, where I stand at the smaller of the two islands in the center of the room, before taking a deep sip of his and looking about three times more awake for that one gulp.
He gives me that sweet, endearing smile that used to be just for me, but now half of the American youth swoons for on the daily. See, to me, he’s not Aaron Stone ofMidnight EmpireorRough and Tumble.
He’s Aaron, the boy who turned down the most popular girl in seventh grade to take me to our first middle school dance so I wouldn’t be embarrassed going alone, because no one else had asked little ole awkward and gangly me. He brought me peonies before the dance, because they were all out of roses at the shop he went to, and to this day they’re still my favorite flower. He’s the boy I spent every afternoon huddled up with in my backyard treehouse, playing made-up games and dreaming of our future together.
He’s also the man I’ve watched follow his dream, turning small acting roles into major ones. The man I’ve supported with all of my being throughout every phase of his life. I would follow him to the ends of the earth, and I have. Quite literally. Hislast film was shot in Tasmania, and the one before that was in Greenland.
We’re a pair that’s always been better together than apart. Unlike salmon and Nutella.
He takes a seat at one of the barstools behind the island we use for eating, not the one for food prep and cooking, and picks up his fork, poking at his eggs.
“So, Gem, I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Hmm?” I try to appear disinterested and follow his lead, taking a casual drag of my coffee, except I start choking when his next words leave his ridiculously gorgeous mouth.
“I want to introduce you to my girlfriend today. I think she might be the one.”
TWO
GEMMA
Aside from the burning coffee currently scalding my trachea and endangering my breathing, there is an entirely different pain gouging my insides right now. The one from my best friend—the man who I’ve always been absolutely positive is meant for me, the same way I was most certainly made for him—ripping away the chance for us to bloom into what we should be by telling me that he’s fallen for someone else.
I wave him off as he tries to help me clear my pipes, pretending this is intentional or some shit. I don’t even know what I’m doing right now. I just know that he can’t be close to me at this exact moment.
The fact that he wants me to meet her means it’s serious. It’s been ages since he’s brought a girlfriend into our lives. He stopped introducing me to his casual dates several years back, after one too many incredibly awkward meetings and group hangs where I got the stink eye more than he got the flirts and giggles. He saidthe ratio of action to reaction was all wrong, and it wasn’t worth the trouble, that they just didn’t get us, and he was going to stop trying to push it before the time was right.
