Page 37 of Behind the Scenes

Alexis nodded, but she secretly thought it wasn’t their trip to Atlantic City that made her feel so good. It was Hunter and how he treated her.

First, he protected her, and then he defended her.

And he liked what she did for him with his new bedroom.

But she didn’t want to share what she thought just yet with Lauren, so she chuckled to herself and leaned over to get her bag from the floor to pull out the white box of peanut butter fudge.

Shaking it in front of her, she giggled. “This calls for some celebratory fudge, I say!”

“Definitely! To hell with the calories. We’ll just have to spend more time at the gym,” Lauren said as she stuffed a big piece of fudge into her mouth.

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she moaned, “Oh, God. This is so good. We have to get back to the Boardwalk again just for this fudge.”

“Agreed,” Alexis said, taking a bite of the candy. “But we do have to find a gym too. I haven’t done anything in all the time I’ve been here in New York. If I keep slacking off, I’m going to blow up to the size of those balloons they have in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

Grabbing another piece of fudge, Lauren said, “Well, we can always ask Paul for where to find a gym. That would probably smooth things over with him a little. You know how he loves to be in control.”

Alexis didn’t want to deal with Paul at the moment. Now that she’d been treated like an adult, she wasn’t in any hurry to go back to being treated like some kind of responsibility he had to worry about all the time.

Ignoring her friend’s suggestion, she took another bite of fudge. “First, I have to find a gym that doesn’t require a three hour trek to get there. Just another reason I miss the house in LA.”

“Yeah. There’s no way you can fit a home gym in this apartment. Well, unless you redo that bedroom you gave Hunter into one,” Lauren said.

Shaking her head, Alexis vetoed that idea immediately. “Nope. That room is his, so he can keep it. We’ll just have to find a gym somewhere around here.”

“Okay. I can do that today. I’ll find a few close by and we can go look at them to see which ones have what you want,” Lauren said before swallowing her piece of candy.

Moving the box of fudge away from her, Alexis joked, “Maybe you should look for gyms a couple miles away too. That way, we can get a run in before our workout because we’re going to need it if we keep stuffing our faces with this fudge.”

A guilty look washed over her assistant’s face. “Okay. You’re right. No more. My stomach already is beginning to feel distended.”

“As soon as you get the names and directions to those gyms, we’ll go check them out. We’ll take Hunter too,” Alexis said, looking forward to getting out again and with him.

Her mention of Hunter surprised Lauren. “But what about Kyle? He’s always the one to go to the gym with us when we’re not in LA. He knows what to look for in the equipment since he used to work at a gym himself.”

Alexis shrugged, not caring much about who came other than Hunter. “I guess he can come too, but it’s not like we can’t figure out if there’s a treadmill or stepper machine in a gym. It’s not rocket science. I’ll probably give him a break from going with us every day, though. If Hunter’s going to be there anyway, I don’t see any point in dragging another person along every time.”

“Okay. Give me an hour and I’ll get you the names of those gyms,” Lauren said as she stood from the bed.

When she got to the door, she turned around and looked at Alexis with concern in her eyes. “You were kidding about running to the gym and then working out, weren’t you?”

“Sort of, but just find any in a ten block radius. That way we can be warmed up by the time we get there every morning.”

“You do remember we’re in New York, Alexis. In just a couple months, it’s going to be too cold to walk ten blocks first thing in the morning. Think Minnesota, not LA.”

She had forgotten the dreaded winter that lay before them in just a short time from now. Running or even walking ten blocks in frigid temperatures, or God forbid snow, made her cringe.

“Well, don’t exclude ones closer by. If it turns out I like one further away, we’re going to have to get rides to and from there when it gets too cold to walk. Sound good?”

Lauren still didn’t look completely convinced, but she nodded and faked a smile before leaving to go start her research on the local gyms. She’d never been as fond of running as Alexis, but ten blocks wasn’t much.

Plus, it would be good for both of them to get to know the neighborhood while at the same time getting some exercise. At least until the temperature dipped below fifty.

Then again, she could probably handle forty degrees.

As all of this ran through Alexis’s mind, she thought back to them growing up in Minnesota and how they used to be so used to the cold and the snow. Back when they were kids, they spent hours ice skating and happily building snow forts until their fingers grew numb. It was nothing to stay out in the frigid cold for an entire day having a good time. They always knew a cup of hot cocoa waited for them when they finally decided to go inside to warm up.

Those were good days for both of them. Now as she sat in a luxurious townhouse in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she knew they’d gotten spoiled by living in LA all that time. But they weren’t delicate flowers who couldn’t handle a little tough weather. They were two women who’d braved the winters of Minnesota for the first seventeen years of their lives.

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