Page 4 of AJ’s Fire

“AJ? What’s going on?”

What was going on? I couldn’t process it. Didn’t know. So I ignored my weird feelings and went with the facts instead. “Katy seemed into Jamie. You weren’t trying to hit that, right? You’re my best friend, and you know you can count on me to be your best wingman. But he’s my brother.”

“Yeah, no. I got that. I’m not interested. Just dropping off the drinks. Making small talk or whatever.” He trailed off and followed my gaze, which was back on Darren and Merrick.

I snapped back to Jackson as if I’d been caught.

“Dude, are you all right?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing, Jax! You looked like you’d seen a ghost when you walked out of the kitchen. Did that Merrick guy upset you?”

Jackson was quiet for a long time, which helped keep my attention on him. Finally, he answered, “No.” Pretty sure that was a lie. “What he did say was that his friends would probably be down. So you know, bro code, should we head back in and talk to them?”

He sounded like it was the last thing he wanted to do, so I responded, “I think I need to focus on Jamie tonight. Make sure he’s okay. I can … we can … bro code, we can go back in if you want, but I’m good.”

“No, no. It’s cool. Let’s just hang out. We’ll save the code for your actual bro if he needs us.” Jackson mumbled something about more drinks and vanished on me again, and that’s how I ended up spending New Year’s Eve around a fire in a barrel in the suburbs while my brother snuck upstairs and my best friend sulked.

After that night, the weirdness continued right through to the end of the summer, with Jackson spending less and less time going out with me and less and less time hooking up. An old family friend that he’d gone to boarding school with, Emily, moved to the city after the New Year, and I attributed some of the change in Jackson to her arrival. The mystery was confounded by the fact that for months, I never managed to meet the elusive Emily. I figured something was going on between them, but Jackson never said a word.

I was surprised at the notion of Jackson settling down. It felt … wrong. Jax and I had met five years earlier, and he’d been right there with me for all those years, going out, being the life of the party, having a good time. Not once had either of us dated a woman for more than a few months, and never seriously. We were both adept at finding women like us, who weren’t interested in a relationship, only in having a little fun.

Losing my bar mate wasn’t something I’d seen coming, and I missed our camaraderie. It made me realize a few things about our relationship. Sure, Jackson was my bro code buddy. We’d spent countless evenings going out and picking up women. But what I didn’t realize, until it was gone, was that since meeting Jackson, in actuality, I’d spent most of my time with him. We worked together, we went out together, we talked on the phone or texted constantly. It was almost like the only time we weren’t spending together was when we’d separate and go off at the end of an evening with different women.

Without realizing it, Jackson had taken up a great deal of my life, and when that ended, I missed my best friend.

Chapter Two

Jackson

Things had been weird between AJ and me since that night at Freeda’s on New Year’s Eve, the night Darren’s soon-to-be boyfriend Merrick casually mentioned what a cute couple AJ and I were and how in love we seemed. All we did was walk in the door and chat with him for a few minutes. But what he’d said had made all sorts of thoughts churn in my brain, thoughts I didn’t want to face and didn’t think I could handle. After the New Year, I decided the best way to ignore them was to double down on my partying lifestyle, which meant spending lots of time with AJ, but it also meant getting laid a lot. The winter and spring went by as usual, though the tension always seemed to be there when I was around my best friend. And the thing was, I was always around AJ.

About the beginning of the summer, I basically stopped going out with AJ at all. I might not have realized I was doing it at first. But in the fall, sitting on the opposite end of a couch from him in the fire station lounge, I knew it to be true. I thought back to the night that had been the catalyst for that …

It felt like Emily Wyecrest and I had always known each other. Even before they thought about getting into business with each other, our families socialized, and Emily and I were thrown together a lot. She’d spent a few years as a tween on a popular TV show for one of her parent’s stations but had given that up by the time we attended boarding school together.

We got along and enjoyed each other’s company. We’d never dated, but we were so close that more than one person thought we had, possibly even my parents.

Emily announced that she was moving back from the West Coast to head up Wyecrest Entertainment’s New York division, and we got together shortly after her arrival.

“I love that you gave it all up, Jax. I mean, I love it for you. I remember that summer you started working at DE, you hated every minute of it, escaping to Cedar Lake every chance you got. I thought you and I would have so much in common when we both started working for our parents, but you”—she punched my arm lightly—“you’ve created this whole other life, dude. You’re your own man.”

“But what about you? You’re practically in charge of Wyecrest’s East Coast operations.”

“No, I am in charge of East Coast productions. Don’t tell anyone, but we’re looking to build a studio, maybe out in the suburbs or in Jersey. You know, take advantage of East Coast talent.”

“Wow, Ems. That’s really exciting.”

“I’m gonna ask this once. Get it out of the way, okay?”

“Okay,” I responded hesitantly.

“You’re not about to give this all up and go back to DE, are you?”

“Ems …”

“No, no. I meant what I said. I’m happy for you, and it’s obvious how happy you’ve been. I just, I guess I had this vision of you and me running the two companies together. How perfect would that be if this merger goes through? It just would have been nice to work with my old friend again, for us to take over the companies together. We’d be quite the power couple, don’t you think?”

“Ems? Are you saying …” I’d spent months focusing on my relationship with my current best friend, but was my first best friend, my oldest friend, saying she wanted something more?