Page 52 of Green
12
Gemma
While Ben was out at a bar in Palm Springs with Annabel from wardrobe, I was sprawled out in the queen bed of my Best Western Plus hotel room, in my favorite old Snoopy sleep shirt, staring at the TV. It wasn’t on. I was tired. I had come back from the set and tidied up all the clothes and makeup that my roommate had tossed around before she left. When I don’t know where to put all of the dirty messy thoughts that are flying around in my head, there is never a shortage of items that can be put away in drawers and artfully displayed on flat surfaces. For me, two hours of yoga had nothing on twenty minutes of decorganizing.
I was sharing a room with Julia, but she was with Jason, in his room. All around me, people were hooking up and moving into new apartments and being normal twentysomething humans. But there I lay, unable to completely get over the best friend that I was legally married to, and unable to get under him.
If I hadn’t been so tired, the knock on my door would have scared the panties off of me. It was so deliberate and loud. I wasn’t expecting a visit from the Assistant Director, but he was the kind of guy who banged on hotel room doors at eleven-thirty without texting first.
When I looked through the peephole I wasveryglad that my panties hadn’t been scared off of me, because I really needed to keep my panties on around the person behind that door. Because he kept making me flood them.
I didn’t open the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Let me in.”
“Theo, I’m at work!”
“Right this second?”
“No, but I can’t —”
“Gemma. Open the door.”
I opened the door and Theo Walker came crashing through it, grabbing my face and pressing me up against the wall behind me, towering over me, enveloping me, burning through my soul with his eyes and kissing me so feverishly you’d think we’d been on the verge of kissing like this for years.
My lips responded to his with five quick kisses and one breathless question: “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done the night I met you,” he said, as he continued to pin me to the wall and pepper my face and neck with kisses and questions of his own: “Did I break your heart?”
“What?”
“Did I ever break your heart?”
“No.”
“Good. Thank God. If I had I don’t think I could forgive myself.”
“Why did you—”
“Did you get together with Ben?”
“No.”
“Good. Thank God.”
“Theodore, what are you doing here?”
“I had to see you.”
“You drove for two hours and didn’t even text me first?”
“I made it here in less than two hours. Fuck, you smell good. You were wearing this shirt when I met you. You look so hot in this.” His voice was husky and his kisses were very convincing, but I still didn’t believe him and yet I couldn’t seem to pull myself away from him.
“Hah.”
“You do.” And then he asked the question that I needed him to ask, but he still didn’t stop kissing me. “Do you want me?”
“Theo.”
