Hey :) Thanks everyone for the follows and nice reviews, I hope you'll keep liking this until the end! And the end is coming soon! After this chapter, there will only be one big chapter and two smaller ones to conclude the story and they will be posted at the same time. It should come soon enough but it still might take a bit longer than usual so I have the time to proof read it and maybe make some last minute changes.
This one is a bit different from the others, hope you'll enjoy it anyway and I'll be back with a lot more talking in the next chapter!

After barely three hours of sleep, Jemma wakes up sad, tired but determined. Even though she knows that this is going to be complicated, she has decided that she will not let go of Fitz so easily. Unfortunately, their last day of shooting is even more intense than they predicted and every time Jemma tries to get away from set for five minutes in the hope to find Fitz, someone calls for her and she has to go back. When the director yells cut for Jemma's last scene at the end of the day, everyone is here to applaud and congratulate her but as she scans the crowd present on set, there's no trace of the one face she wanted to see all day. Of course that does not surprise her, the look he gave her before leaving the previous night showed how much he was hurt. And not knowing the whole story, he has every right to feel betrayed that she never mentioned her boyfriend when they had been so close for the past two months. The only sliver of hope she gets from this whole situation is that now she's pretty sure that Fitz has strong, more than friendly feelings for her.

As she's considering leaving to try and find Fitz now, she realizes it's already 8 pm and she's supposed to meet Will for dinner this evening. So she leaves the set, goes back to her room to get a quick shower and gets out to join him at the hotel restaurant, the only available in a thirty miles radius anyway. As she's making her way down, she's thinking of Fitz and tells herself that it's probably better she talks to Will before she finds Fitz to try and salvage their relationship. When she arrives, Will is already waiting for her at a table in a quiet corner of the restaurant. As he gets up to greet her, she can see that he's going for a kiss so she makes the quick decision to go for a hug instead, hoping he won't realize just now how awkward it feels to her. Before the shooting began, Jemma had been with Will for about six months. It was a nice, comfortable relationship but she wasn't feeling very passionate about it anymore. So when she learned that they wouldn't see or talk to each other for two months, she decided it would be a test. Will was going to be on a secret mission for the US Army and she would be in the desert shooting a movie. If she had somehow missed him during this time, she would have given their relationship another chance. But as time passed, it was more obvious everyday that she didn't miss him. And it's only when she had the fight with Fitz that she realized that, with no intention of hiding his existence, she didn't even talk about him once in all the weeks they've known each other. At this point, the decision of breaking up had already been made.

And then came Fitz. At first, it was nice to have someone from home to talk about all those things she couldn't talk about with most people. Then she started to realize how sweet and funny and overall adorable he was. And then came the massage and the night they spent in the same bed. Everything became a complete mess in her brain. Did she want to break up with Will because she no longer loved him or did she want to break up with him because she wanted to be with someone else? She changed her mind a hundred times about how she should handle things but when she learned that Fitz would probably come to Los Angeles, she decided that the best course of action was to break up with Will as soon as she came home and then she could have a lengthy discussion with Fitz. She supposed he wouldn't be very happy about the fact that she failed to mention her boyfriend but with her explanations, hopefully he would understand and then they could start on a new base, see where this could go. It's only when Will arrived unannounced that it all became cristal clear to her. When he kissed her, it was a really chaste kiss, their lips barely even touching each other but it felt weird. Not only because she hadn't seen him in a while or because she didn't feel anything but friendship and and some kind of tenderness for him. It felt weird because it felt like cheating on Fitz when it was her boyfriend she was kissing.

"Jemma, are you listening to me?" Will says, interrupting her in her musings.

"Oh no sorry Will, I'm just so tired, I think I really need a good night's sleep." She says with a smile she hopes is convincing.

"Okay ... but are you sure that's all there is? Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been ... strange since last night. I feel like you're not so happy to see me, are you mad at me for something maybe?" He says, a worried tone in his voice and she can't help feeling a little guilty. She had thought that the right thing to do was to wait to see him face to face to break up. In a moment of weakness, she did almost break up with him over the phone but she is glad that she didn't. But now that he's come here especially to see her, she starts thinking that maybe it would have been better to tell him sooner.

"Oh no, I'm not mad at you Will, you did nothing wrong ..." She says, her smile faltering."... but there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about ..."

"... Oh..."

The "night" that followed Will's arrival, Fitz didn't sleep at all. He didn't even try to. When he made it to his room, he stupidly went for the mini bar and downed the mini bottle of whisky he found there in one gulp. After that, he sat on his bed, blankly looking at the wall while replaying pretty much every moment spent with Jemma in his head to try and understand ... everything. When it didn't bring him any sort of explanation, he went for the minibar again and downed another small bottle of liquor. Just when he was starting to doze off, his phone buzzed and signaled him that it was time to wake up and go back to work. So he took a shower and the strongest coffee he could find and went back on set with the worst headache he ever had. Not that he wasn't used to drinking but that much alcohol coupled with the lack of sleep and everything going on in his head, made a deadly combination.

Fortunately or not, the day is hectic and he doesn't really have any time to talk to anyone, less to Jemma since she is, after all, the lead actress and present in every scene. He wants to talk to her and see her to understand everything but he's not sure if he is ready to hear what she has to say. When the day is over, he doesn't feel like celebrating with everyone else so he goes back to his room to try and get some sleep. But it is a lost cause because he cannot put his mind at ease. Every time, he tries to think of something else, his mind manages to go back to her somehow. So he decides to get down to the lobby to get some coffee and the courage to go talk to her. As he's gathering his thoughts and mentally preparing himself for what's coming, he hears the elevator doors open and sees her get out of it. She looks so lost in thoughts that she passes only a few meters away from him and doesn't see him at all. He wants to call her out but he hesitates and by the time he finally decides to do it, she's at the entrance of the restaurant and he sees "him" gesturing for her. When he sees her hug him, it feels like he physically can't move. His headache and his extreme state of tiredness are nothing compared to how that sole sight makes him feel. When his legs decide to work again, he walks back to his room like a zombie.

When he opens the door, he sees the contract that Trip sent to him and that he's supposed to sign before sending it back to him. When he got the call from Trip about the job, of course he was really flattered that his work was so appreciated. He also honestly really liked working here for Phil Coulson. So even though, he was kind of tempted to say yes, at first he was also really scared and he kind of missed home. But it's when he talked about it to Jemma that he made the final decision to accept the job. She was so excited about it and about the idea of seing him there that it became obvious to him.

And then there was last night and Will and everything changed. He thought that the signals she sent him were pretty clear, especially this past week so how could he interpret them so wrong? There was always a small part of him that wondered how such a beautiful, smart and overall wonderful person could ever be interested in him. And even if she really never was interested in him and only ever saw him as a friend, why did she never even mentioned her boyfriend? Weren't they close enough to share this kind of information or were they, on the contrary, too close? Whatever the reason, she should have told him. There are so many emotions in him right now that he feels like his brain could explode any moment. He's angry, sad, disappointed, lost and utterly, desperately in love with her. It's like their relationship slowly evolved from casual acquaintances to friends, to really good friends to a bit more and someday, without warning, it decided to take a huge step forward and here he was, loving her more than he ever loved anyone. As his eyes remain focused on the contract, he realizes that it's not so tempting anymore. Whatever the state of their relationship is, he knows he'll never be able to live with her and see her with him everyday. He still hopes they can somehow stay friends because never seing her again sounds even more horrible than seing her with him. But first, he needs time away to think and recover. Away from this world that never was his to begin with and away from her. So he puts the contract aside and opens up his laptop.