“Well, yeah, because a man in a well-cut suit is probably one of the sexiest looks available to your gender. Or even the female gender sometimes too. But this… this is not a good look.”
“It’s not a bad look,” I comforted her, trying to look at it as an objective third party, not someone who was expecting a Gemma that maybe didn’t exist as much as she used to. As much as it pained me to even think that, to find that the world had been too big, too bad, and too ugly to allow her to continue to be the girl we had all known and loved.
It really wasn’t bad.
The shirt was a little boxy, clearly bought off the rack, and not personally tailored, which would have softened it up a bit. And her hair pulled back did kind of let you admire the perfect porcelain of her skin, the charming smattering of freckles.
“Those clogs, though,” I added, shaking my head. “Those should be burned.”
“I can’t walk in normal heels,” she admitted, shaking her head at herself. “Jules has tried to teach me countless times, but my ankle kinda wobbles outward, and I fall like a baby giraffe just learning how to use its legs.”
“I can picture that,” I told her, lips twitching. And, come to think of it, while Jules could always be found clicking around the office in ankle-breaking heels for an ungodly long shift, I was pretty sure Gemma was always in sandals or fucking Toms shoes.
“You made breakfast?” she asked, brows moving together, almost insultingly surprised. Like she was shocked my caveman ass knew where to find the stovetop.
“Nothing fancy. Couple eggs, that seed-filled toast crap Jules insists on having sent here, some fresh fruit…”
“Considering I’ve been running on granola bars and pistachio packets for the past few months, that sounds like a five-course meal to me. Oh, oolong. That’s my favorite.”
“Honestly, don’t even know what it is,” I told her as I poured the boiling water into a mug.
“So, black tea is fully crushed. Green tea isn’t crushed at all. But oolong is half-crushed. So it is an in-between flavor. Not that you wanted that tea lesson,” she added, shaking her head at herself as she put the teabag into the steaming water.
“Sugar?” I asked, getting a brow raise from her. “Right,” I added, remembering some tangent she’d gone off on about the evils of white sugar and how if you had to sweeten things, honey and stevia and molasses were the only ways to go.
I wasn’t a junk food fanatic in general; you didn’t get to maintain a six-pack when you ate nothing but shit all the time, but I wasn’t exactly attentive to every minute detail pertaining to the nutritional content of every bite that went into my mouth.
Gemma was.
Gemma was someone I’d once walked in on in the office half-gagging as she tried to choke down some herbal tea that smelled like fresh-cut grass simply because It is good for me.
That was the kind of fanatical I could never understand. But could appreciate someone giving a damn about her body. I spent a lot of time on mine over the years, so I found the obsession with her food a little more interesting than someone who simply ate crap all day and night.
“Is that grass-fed butter?” she asked, casting a suspicious look at the back of the butter box that hadn’t found its way into the trash yet.
“If that is the kind Jules would buy, then yeah.”
“You don’t grocery shop for yourself ever?” she asked, more curious than accusatory like most might sound asking the same question as she loaded up her plate, heading over to the island to sit down.
“Not that I can remember. Not in years.”
“But you eat at home a lot, don’t you?”
“Probably about fifty-fifty if I am in town,” I said, joining her.
“Then how do you know how to plan your meals if you don’t even know what you have in the house?”
“Planning meals. I think you’re giving me a bit more credit than you should, sweetheart,” I told her, head tilting to the side at the way her head ducked, gaze avoiding mine.
“I guess you’re not always the one cooking the meals. And Jules isn’t always the one shopping for the household.”
Hm.
That was an odd comment. Almost probing. Yet hesitant.
I wouldn’t call either of those common for her.
Then again, it had been a long time since I had seen her. And that time between the last year of high school to your mid-twenties had a tendency to change you pretty quick.
For better or worse.
I couldn’t help but wonder if these changes in Gemma were for the former or latter.
“I maybe cook ten percent of the time,” I admitted. “I can’t claim I am very good at it. If I am left in charge, something is on the grill and a couple potatoes are in a pot on the stove. That is about as inventive as I get. Do you cook?” I asked, realizing it was something I didn’t know about her.