An Unexpected Blog (An Aidan Turner Fanfic) (ON HOLD)

Chapter 8 -

Hi guys! Yeah, I know I had promised to update a few days ago... I was a bit busy and I forgot, sorry :$
Hope you will forgive me and I hope you'll enjoy this chapter!!!
Oh, and by the way... What the hell, guys? Seriously, what the hell... OVER A THOUSAND READS?! :D :D :D

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I was cold, soaked to the bone and all my muscles ached. Even Sierra didn’t have the energy to greet anyone or to even wag her tail. I hung my coat on a chair to dry and went straight for a warm shower. While the hot water ran over my body, I stared at my toes, checking if they were still there, since I couldn’t feel them.
‘Nicole?’
I jumped a little when I heard Aidan’s voice. ‘Bathroom!’
It was quiet for a while and I frowned. ‘Come in and I’ll throw a soap-bar at you!’ I added quickly, at the same time Aidan got a hold of the door-handle.
‘Taking a shower?’
‘Yep!’
‘Sorry!’
I couldn’t help but chuckle. I quickly rinsed my hair and dried myself. Just when I threw the towel on the ground and turned to put on my clothes, I realized I didn’t have any clean clothes here. Only the wet jeans and shirt I just took off. Shit.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Crap, crap, crap!
‘Aidan? You still there?’ I asked, hoping there wouldn’t be an answer. Of course there was.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Never mind,’ I said, although it probably wasn’t loud enough for him to even hear it. With a sigh, I wrapped myself in the towel – thank god it was a large towel – and opened the bathroom door.
Aidan was trying to fight Sierra off, who kept jumping on him, but her coat was still dripping wet. When I walked into the room, Aidan looked up to say something, but ended up frozen.
I didn’t look at him. I quickly walked to the small closet and hurried to pull some clothes out of it. I hold them close to my body on my way back to the bathroom, trying to cover up as much as I could.
‘Forgot my clothes,’ I explained when I accidently met Aidan’s stare. I threw the door shut and dropped the little pile of clothes on the floor while I leaned against the door.
Trying to calm down, I put on the clothes and roughly brushed my hair. I then took a deep breath and entered the other room again. Aidan was sitting on the bed, playing tug of war with Sierra and shyly looked up when he heard me. He clearly didn’t know what to say, so he just smiled at me, before returning his attention to the game.
I sat down at the table and turned on my laptop. Somehow, this wasn’t an awkward silence. At least, not for me, I couldn’t speak for Aidan of course. For me, this didn’t feel awkward, because we did this all the time. Him playing with Sierra and I would be editing videos on my laptop. Every now and then, we would talk a bit, but when I was working on the videos, I was really working, so I was usually quiet.
While the laptop was loading something, I looked at Aidan. As usual, there suddenly seemed to be a knot in my stomach. This was impossible. With an inaudible sigh, I looked at the screen again, but it wasn’t done loading yet. Automatically, I glanced back to Aidan. His black curls where still a bit moist – he’d obviously taken a shower too – and almost reached to his shoulders. He was wearing a khaki-colored shirt and dark jeans. Thanks to the rather low neck of his shirt, I could see his chest hair. I usually wasn’t much of a fan of chest hair, but damn, did it look good on him.
Sierra was starting to get more excited about the game and really tried her best to pull the rope out of Aidan’s hands. He was almost dragged off the bed because of Sierra’s sudden strong pull. He laughed, clenched his muscles and pulled back. The short sleeves of his shirt tightened around his biceps.
I found myself staring at him and when I felt something similar to that knot in my stomach, just lower in my belly, I quickly turned to my laptop and felt my face turn red. Holy shit. 

‘So, who’s going to that fundraising thing next week?’ Graham asked while we were eating dinner. It wasn’t often that we were having dinner with such a large part of the group. Most of the cast and crew just went out to eat and of course, some wanted to eat early and some wanted to eat later. That way, it was always small groups shattered in the restaurant.
It turned out, not many of us were going. It was the one week where we had a few days off and most of us already had plans. I didn’t. I knew Aidan, Dean and Richard didn’t. It turned out bald Peter – yes, I called Peter Hambleton bald Peter, so people wouldn’t confuse him with Peter Jackson – James, Graham and Adam didn’t have any plans either. We decided to go to the fundraising party as a group.
After dinner, I took Sierra for a walk. Within a few minutes, James caught me up. Sierra already saw him and ran to him, immediately placing a stick at his feet, hoping he would throw it. He did and she whined in excitement as she fetched it.
‘Hey,’ I greeted him when he came up to me.
‘Hi. There’s really no way she’s ever getting tired, is there?’ he asked, pointing his thumb at Sierra, who’d brought the stick back and was now watching us expectantly.
I shook my head. ‘Nope. She would run herself to death, if you’d let her.’
James snickered, but his smile faded quickly. ‘Nicole… About the other day…’
‘Don’t,’ I interrupted him. ‘Just don’t. It’s fine.’
‘No, it’s not fine. I shouldn’t have said those things.’
I gave him a wry smile. ‘I shouldn’t have heard them.’
We started walking and I stared at the long shadows the evening sun was casting on the grass.
‘How much did you hear?’ James asked after a while.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Pretty much everything, I think.’
He murmured something I didn’t understand. ‘Did you hear that I thought it wasn’t going to work out?’
I nodded. I didn’t really want to do this right now. I’d only just convinced myself to not freak out about it too much. Now I had to get myself back on track and figure out what I wanted. I just couldn’t have people telling me it was never going to work.
‘I think I was wrong,’ James said, snapping me out of my thoughts.
‘What?’ was all I could say.
‘I was wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I thought it wouldn’t work out between you two, but lately… When I see you together, it already looks like you’re a couple. And I’m pretty sure everyone else is thinking the same.’
Huh. Okay, this was strange. Three days ago, I had no idea Aidan even liked me in that way and now apparently everyone already knew. Dammit, if I hadn’t overhead them that day, when would I’ve found out?
‘Nicole?’
I looked up. James raised his eyebrows at me, waiting for something. ‘What?
‘I said, what about you?’
‘What about me?’ Had I missed something?
James chuckled. ‘What do you think? About… well, you two.’
Whoa, what? I really didn’t know what to say to that, so I shrugged and threw another stick for Sierra. What did I think about Aidan and me?
‘I don’t know,’ I said when James didn’t respond to my shrug.
‘Do you like him?’
I nodded.
‘Do you like him that way?’ he rephrased himself.
Again, I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I guess.’
‘Well, maybe you should give the lad a chance. He’s a good guy, you know.’
‘I know,’ I answered. Yeah, Aidan really was a good guy. Maybe I should give him a fair chance. But how would I do that? Did he even know that I knew? I decided to ask James.
‘No, not from me, at least. But I don’t think the other boys would tell him either. The poor lad is already nervous as it is. If he knew, he’d probably go insane.’
I snickered at that and whistled at Sierra when she tried to drag along something that looked the size of a tree. The young dog looked up, gave another thoughtful look at the giant thing and then ran back to me.
‘Well, then let’s not tell him just yet,’ I told James and he agreed. 

The next few days of shooting were exhausting. We were filming on a spot where the helicopter couldn’t land safely, so we had to walk for a bit. That wasn’t too bad, but everything had to be moved too. All the camera’s, screens, and all that other crap. And after a long day of shooting, everything and everyone had to be moved back to the helicopters as well.
And so, every evening, I’d stumble into my hotel room, take a hot shower, feed Sierra – we had dinner on set, since we stopped filming so late – and then do some editing. I barely had time for my own blog anymore.
One evening, when I almost fell asleep in front of my laptop, Aidan suddenly walked in. Sierra was asleep and opened her eyes when she heard him, but didn’t bother to get up and greet him.
‘Hey,’ I said tiredly. ‘What’s up?’ I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms, trying to keep my eyes open.
He shrugged and stood behind me, hands placed on the back of the chair. ‘Not much. What’ya doing?’
I smiled at his funny voice. ‘Just editing. Getting all the boring parts of the day out of the video.’
‘It’s never boring on set,’ he joked, getting down on his haunches and resting his chin on my shoulder.
Even though my heart was suddenly trying its best to break my ribs, I tried to act normal.
‘It is when you have to watch it over and over.’
Aidan agreed and then frowned at the screen. He cocked his head a bit, causing his hair to gently brush my jaw. Holy freaking crap.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at something.
I fast backwarded the video a few seconds and he pointed it out again. There was something walking in the background and we couldn’t figure out what it was.
‘Isn’t it just Sierra?’
‘No, she is right there,’ I pointed at another place on the screen. This thing was far away from the group.
‘Maybe a different dog?’
‘What would a dog do there? Besides, I think it’s way too big to be a dog.’
‘Maybe a bear?’
‘Do bears even live here?’
We ended up googling it. It turned out, no bears lived in New Zealand. Then we started making up other explanations for the thing. Maybe it was a bear that had escaped from a zoo. Or maybe just a giant dog. Maybe a boar. Maybe a werewolf.
Within a minute, we were making up the dumbest things. When we decided it was probably a sasquatch – although those usually walked on hind legs and not all four – it was also time to go to sleep.
I shooed Aidan out of the room and changed into my pajamas. I kicked Sierra to the foot-end of the bed and switched off the light. It didn’t take long before I was dreaming about Aidan and me chasing bigfoot in the New Zealand mountains.

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Okay, really stupid, but I couldn't figure for the life of me if this was right or not: 'to fast backward' (a video)... Apparently, it is an actual verb, but I couldn't figure out if I used it right or not... Anyone?