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As if Oliver guessed, he slapped an arm around Aaron’s shoulders and held on for a few seconds longer than usual. “You want to eat, or you want to walk?”
“I’ve kind of lost my appetite right now,” Aaron replied. “Can we walk and talk?”
“Sure.”
Oliver’s shoes sparkled in the midday sun. He would have buffed them this morning, his daily habits like clockwork. The shoe buffing would happen after his kilometre swim at the beach and jogging home for a black coffee. For once Aaron didn’t care, because Oliver’s clockwork precision had got his brother here exactly when he needed him.
Where to start? He cleared his throat and managed a stilted, “Thanks for coming at short notice.”
“No problem, I was only editing a chapter of the book. It can wait. You sounded—” Oliver was choosing his words carefully.
“Completely fucking confused?”
“That’ll do for starters.” There was a smile in Oliver’s voice. A kind one.
Aaron took a deep breath. Watched his feet move. One step in front of the other.
“The thing is, Alice and I have been, kind of… dating.”
“Ah-ha.”
“You guessed, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Well, it’s got complicated. There’s this really bad thing going down at work, seriously messy stuff, which I guess I should tell you about as background…” Aaron paused. “So, anyway there’s this woman—my boss’s P.A.” He felt Oliver stiffen and rushed on. “It doesn’t involve me. Archie Bendt, my boss, seems to be having an affair with her and his wife turned up and…”
Oliver made an exclamation. Now the words came tumbling out. All the sordid details of the Archie-Lauren debacle, and then he struggled to find any words at all to explain his fight with Alice. It stung to all hell, reliving what she’d accused him of.
When he’d finished, Oliver stopped and swung round to face him. “So, I’m assuming you’ve enlightened Alice as to what really happened?”
Aaron ground to a halt, even though his feet wanted to keep on walking. He watched his shoe scuffing at the gravel. “I tried, but she wouldn’t listen to me and then Carts—who, it would seem, also has a thing for her—came to find her and that kind of put a stop to it.”
Should he explain the whole fake dating deal? The flirting? The friends with benefits? Not now, it would take too long.
He ran his fingers through his hair. Christ. Why did he feel so out of his depth? Soself-conscious? Like a kid owning up to his first major crush.
“Well, that’s fixable.”
“Oh yeah?” Aaron’s lip curled at Oliver’s seeming lack of concern. “How?”
“Explain what actually happened, then tell her how you feel about her.”
Aaron dug his hands into his pockets. “That’s the problem, I don’t know how I feel about her.”
Oliver’s dark eyes were boring into him. “The way you’re acting, I’d say you’ve got a fair idea.”
Aaron fisted his hands and said nothing.
“Okay, use me as a sounding board. What’s going on inside you?”
Where to start? “I guess I think about her a lot. To be honest, I think about her all the freakin’ time. I can’t work properly, my billable hours are dropping, I keep getting distracted. Even going to the gym and running my arse off doesn’t help. And I just want to spend time with her.Shit—I can’t believe I’m owning up to this… and kiss her and… you know… the other stuff…”
“Yep. Sounds like you’ve got it bad.”
“It’s just a phase, right? It’ll pass. And then what?” He stared past Oliver’s shoulder to the city buildings silhouetted against a clear blue sky.
“And what if it doesn’t?” Oliver said. “What if that feeling gets deeper and stronger, so all you want is to spend your life with her… what would you do then?”
