12. Gemma
TWELVE
GEMMA
Five years ago
The Kid
I know I said I’m fine
I lied
I lied
I lied
The texts are buzzing in while I try to focus on the road in front of me, but the lyrics catch my attention and I attempt to read them without crashing my Corolla.
How long can you live with a heavy heart
My guess is it won’t be long before I depart
The doctor said I’m fine
He lied
He lied
He lied
Okay, he left out a few lines of the song there, but now’s not the time to nitpick. This is an SOS text from him if I’ve ever seen one, so I ignore the hands-free law, pick up my iPhone and dial him without giving myself time to wonder what’s wrong.
“I need you.” His voice is so quiet, so weak, I wouldn’t recognize it if I didn’t know it was him on the other end of the line.
“I can come over tonight, but I can’t miss this class right now, kid.”
The silence is deafening, and I know what he’s asking. And he wouldn’t be if he weren’t really struggling right now. I know what I have to do, and it’s not even a debate.
Seventeen minutes later and I’ve made it to his new house. The one he bought with his first big paycheck. It’s nothing too over the top, but for a nineteen-year-old to own it outright? Having purchased it with their own money that they made? It’s pretty sweet.
The car is barely in park before I’m launching out of the open door (I didn’t bother buckling up, this is an emergency situation, spare me the lecture about safety) and running to his front door. Fumbling with the key ring to find my brand new key to this bachelor pad, I let myself in and run straight to the back of the living space, where the floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the outdoor living space and backyard. Did I say it was a boring house? It’s definitely not. It’s just not as fancy as you might expect an up-and-coming TV star to live in, but it’s way cooler than anything either of us grew up in. Picking this place out together was one of the highlights of our lives so far.
Sure enough, there he is. Sitting in his favorite leather chair, staring out into the courtyard, seemingly frozen in space and time. I slow my pace to a gentle jog so as not to alarm him (I’m going for being a calming presence here), and plop down to my knees at his feet, settling in between his Vans where he doesn’t have to move a single muscle for us to make eye contact.
“Hey, kid.” My voice is almost as soft as his was on the phone, but hopefully more soothing, not so frightening.
A small, relieved grin breaks out on his face as soon as our eyes meet, and I rest my hands softly on his jean-covered knees, where his own come to cover mine.
“Thanks for coming. My little Gem.” Something inside of me dies in the best possible way when he says that. It’s so rare he uses that particular nickname for me, but I’d give anything to hear him call me his day in and day out. I try to push the flutters out of my insides and focus on getting him back to himself.
“I’ll always be here for you,” I whisper, meaning every word of it. He looks less stressed already, and I know I made the right decision. Even if my professor threatened to drop me from his syllabus if I missed another class. Who needs a degree when your best friend is famous, anyway? Not like I even know what I’d do with a degree if I had one.
“So what happened?” If he’s not going to start, I’ll ask, but a large part of me doesn’t want to know what set him off this time. There’s no staying impartial for me when my best friend, this incredible, kind soul in front of me, is turned into a shell of himself by the actions of stupid, selfish and greedy people who don’t deserve to know him and the joy he brings to those who do.
“I couldn’t breathe.” His chest begins rising and falling rapidly at the memory of his panic attack, and one of my thumbs runs soothingly over his knee automatically.
“You can now. Breathe for me.”
Aaron takes a few deep slow breaths, following the rhythm I set with my own inhales and exhales, and after a minute he opens his eyes again. He lifts one hand off mine to reach down beside him and pick up a magazine that’s folded open, already on the page he wants to show me. It’s one of those “spotted around town” photo spreads, where stars are caught in the act of everyday shit, and it’s supposed to count as news or something. Before you know it they’ll be reporting that celebrities, too, have to shit and piss, and pretend it’s groundbreaking information.
I use both hands to take the magazine from him, my eyes rapidly scanning to see what set him off this time. It’s a picture of Aaron, looking adorably boy-next-door as he’s leaving a restaurant, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the door open behind him for whoever is walking out next. He looks great in the photo, like he’s just had a good meal, a small smile on his face, and I’m not sure what about this could have triggered an episode, but then the caption catches my eye.
Aaron Stone, 19, looks like he’s staying distracted from his pain after his recent breakup with budding socialite Mara Graves, 20, by having lunch out on the town with a mystery guest. Psst! Turn to page 142 to see what our exclusive insider has to say about the latest drama in Aaron’s life!
“They couldn’t just say I was having lunch. Or that I was out with a friend, or that I looked fucking happy . No. It had to be that I was ‘distracted from my pain.’ Literally everything gets spun by these people. I don’t think I can do this, Gem.”
I throw the magazine back to the floor and curse Mara for the seven hundredth time in the past six months. I’m not sure he’ll ever get back to who he was before she infiltrated his life and his trust. The fact that the fallout of her publicity stunt is making him doubt his dreams, the path he’s worked so hard to be on, makes me see fucking red.
“How’d you even get this magazine?”
Aaron’s gorgeous deep blue eyes fall to the ground and he actually looks sheepish. “My publicist sent it over, she thought it was good exposure and she wanted me to see it.”
“Fuck her,” I spit out vehemently.
“No—” he starts to make an excuse for her, but I’m not listening.
“No, fuck her, Aaron. We’ve told her already not to show you shit like this, that it isn’t good for your mental health. You employ her , not the other way around. There’s absolutely no reason you need to be focusing on what strangers think of your lunch that they weren’t even a part of, Stone.”
His shoulders relax a little, and I keep going. “I’m going to call her. And if she does drop another one off, you put it right in my room, where you won’t see it. And I’ll take care of it when I get here, okay?” I can guarantee she will not make the mistake of sending more crap his way after I get off the phone with her. So what if she’s twice my age and has a twenty-year career in Hollywood? She’s fucking with the wrong client, thinking she knows what’s best for him, his boundaries be damned. But she won’t make that mistake again.
He does a little nod, which makes his hair fall forward into his face. He’s got more on his mind, I can tell. It doesn’t take fifteen seconds before he spits it out. “Another fucking anonymous source is feeding them shit.”
“We don’t know that. Just because they’re saying it doesn’t make it true.”
“I can’t stand not knowing who I can trust, who’s using me to make a few bucks. Did my delivery driver last week tell them what my favorite Chinese food order is? Was it the gas station attendant around the corner? My old neighbor with the yappy dog? Or one of my ‘friends’ in the industry, making shit up because they’re jealous I landed the part we were both up for?”
It’s this side of him that pulls out my fiercest protective nature. Nobody who isn’t in this position can even begin to understand the level of self-doubt, the absolute psychosis that goes on inside someone’s head when you can’t accept anyone or anything at face value. I think it was Aaron’s second major role where it finally hit me how isolating this life is for those in the industry.
The tears brewing in his eyes are about to have me threatening shit there’s no way I can make good on, but I’d do whatever it takes to make him feel better right now. Luckily, he attempts to lighten the mood before I offer to whip out a machete or something.
“Do I need to find a new takeout place? That would really suck, nobody else gets the sauce just right. Will you check and see?” If he didn’t pull the puppy dog eyes out on me right now, I mighta been able to say no. Alas, there’s no denying him like this, so I turn to page one-forty-whatever and scan the trash column for whatever bullshit it’s spouting about my bestie.
He chews on his lower lip nervously while I do a quick half-read of what’s printed and scoff at the end. “It’s nothing, Stone.”
His eyes dart up to meet mine again, and I know what he’s asking without him voicing it.
“It says that you are getting ready for a role. They’ve got nothing on you, kid. We got ’em. We cut their one source out of your life, and you’re safe now. Of course these magazines are going to keep making crap up about you, the bigger you get, the more they’re gonna wanna talk about you, but we know they’ve got nothing useful on you. Who cares if they talk about your favorite childhood stuffed animal or the fact that you used to get wedgies in school. No one who’s currently in your life has anything but great things to say about you, and they’re not even saying that to these fuckers.”
“It was my assistant , Gem. The person I brought in to help me deal with this madness that’s supposed to be my life. How am I supposed to trust someone else again?”
My head falls for a second, while I struggle to keep my own emotions in check. The lump in my throat is hard to swallow down, but I manage, saying yet another silent curse to the sons of bitches who’ve wronged this young man and made him scared of his own dreams.
Eventually, I bring my arms up, bent and folded like wings, resting my elbows on either of Aaron’s thighs with a level of familiarity and comfort that only exists between the two of us, so I can maintain both physical touch and eye contact while I work to reassure him.
“Look. For one thing, we caught Marcus. He’s gone. And he’ll never get another job in your circle. Karma got him, and it will continue to get him. He can go be a fry cook or whatever the fuck he wants, but his career in this industry ended when he started selling stories about you to the press.”
Aaron’s eyes haven’t left mine even once during this little speech, and I continue holding them with my own as I keep going. “For another, we learned how important it is to have people on your team sign NDAs, and we won’t make that mistake again, hmm?”
I don’t know whose job it should’ve been to help prepare him for life in the limelight, maybe his parents? But they’re hardly older than us, and they have less than zero experience in the industry. Maybe his manager or his agent could’ve done a better job preparing him for what to expect, but nobody cares about this kid the way I do. I don’t think they even believed he would blow up as quickly as he did, they didn’t give him the level of guidance and attention he needed, and he was kind of on his own in this.
So when Mara went to TMZ and did her little interview, prompting Marcus to try to make a quick buck off of Aaron, too, this time by hitting the tabloids as an anonymous source, I went into mama bear mode. I kicked everyone questionable out of his life, cut it down to only those we knew we could trust, and started doing some research.
Turns out, his staff should’ve been under legal requirements not to speak about anything they see or hear, and we just didn’t know to do that yet. What eighteen-year-olds do? Unfortunately, we learned that lesson the hard way. Fortunately, we should be able to keep Aaron better protected in the future. We won’t be naive when letting someone into the fold again.
Even with all that, he’s still been too scared to bring anyone else into his life, and with the recurring panic attacks, I can understand him being extra sensitive about allowing some random person to witness his weakest moments. But he’s got too much going on now to handle it alone, and with school, I can’t help him out as much as I wish I could. He’s gotta let someone else in eventually, I just hope I’m helping him get there sooner rather than later.
One of his legs starts jiggling anxiously, and he’s back to chewing at his lower lip again, his eyes darting around nervously. One of his hands comes up and starts playing with that lip, and then all the motion ceases. His eyes slowly track back to mine and freeze there. That hand that was on his mouth reaches out and clasps my face, and apparently it’s my insides’ turn to start jiggling and wiggling. My stomach is flipping and flopping, my lady bits singing at the intimate contact of his skin on mine.
“I should’ve picked you,” he breathes out.
My head nods automatically, because this is something I hear him saying to me in my daydreams every single day. Mara was using him; I knew she wasn’t right for him from the start. The girls before her weren’t a whole lot better, either. But if he’s seen the light, we could be absolutely everything together.
“No one looks out for me like you do, Gem.”
My head nods again, and it’s almost too good to be true. He’s finally realized what I’ve always known, and now we can be what we should’ve been all along.
“Why did I ever bring in anyone else?”
That’s kind of a weird way to put it, but I keep nodding anyway, afraid to do anything that will scare off this unavoidable moment we’ve been heading toward since we first met in homeroom all those years ago. I close my eyes and swallow, soaking in the sensation from every single cell where there’s contact between us, still in disbelief that my dream is really coming true.
“So you’ll do it?”
My eyes shoot open at that. “Do what?”
“What we should’ve done from the beginning. You’re already everything else for me, anyway, Gem. Let’s just make it official.”
If he doesn’t hurry up and spit out the words I’ve waited years to hear in the next fourteen seconds, I might get violent here. My eyes tell him to keep talking, and hopefully they leave out the violence part. I’d rather our first kiss not be tainted with my impatience, or the promise of blood. Though I have heard I should expect blood my first time having sex, but that’s not what’s about to happen, is it? A thrill runs through my veins, lighting up every single part of me from within. My thighs clench absentmindedly, and I readjust my legs underneath me to try to cover it up.
“Oh?” I try to sound demure, but it came out a little croaky for my taste. Maybe he didn’t notice?
“Yeah!” He looks genuinely enthused now, leaning forward so our faces are close together and swiping my cheek with that damn thumb. “You should just be my assistant. I should just pay you, and then you don’t have to go to school, and you can get paid to hang out with me all the time. Then I know I have an assistant I can trust, and all our problems are solved.”
I don’t know what I’m thinking, but I let him talk me into it.
Wait, yes I do.
I know exactly what I’m thinking.
Us, together twenty-four-seven.
Us, in the same space day in and day out, realizing our feelings for one another go a lot deeper than friendship.
Aaron, finally making a move on those feelings.
Me, watching his back and keeping him protected from the vipers in this world at all costs.
It’s the future I’ve always dreamed of. And I know the sacrifice of my education, my own plans will be worth it, because I’d pay any price to have this man as my future. A future without him is one I want no part of.