I don’t say, Well, maybe I want you to push it too far, because this is good right now, and my expectations have been the downfall for me in the past. I build up the moment, up and up and up until we’re floating among the stars only to find we both don’t have parachutes and Earth’s hurtling towards us pretty fast. If sex with Ayden Stone absolutely sucks, I’m going to lose my no and start flipping tables or something. Then maybe cry for a decade. I’ll eventually get over it, I think.

Maybe.

Ayden brings me along to the main set, inside a nondescript building I would have walked right on by just half-constructed pieces where furniture sits, and I’m disoriented by everything looking so unfinished and how it translates to what I see on the screen when the show airs. I’m looking at puzzle pieces thrown here and there, but somehow, when it’s all filmed and aired on TV, it makes up the whole. I let go of Ayden’s hand, trying to stay out of people’s way, no recognizable actors on set, just the crew wrapping up for the day. I walk around, afraid to touch anything, wanting to touch everything and take about a million pictures for my eyes only.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” I say, moving forwards to touch Chrisander Gage’s bookcase at the set for his private quarters that has beat-up paperbacks, yellowed with age and have that awesome old-book smell as I rifle through the blank pages. There are props, too, a special journal that is propped to the precise day and time where Chrisander writes his journal entries, a desk lamp that looks like it belongs in the Boston Public Library. Just because everything is now so up close and personal, details I’ve missed while watching the show because I was always so distracted by Chrisander’s—Ayden’s—beauty makes me feel like I’m lucid dreaming, like I’m watching someone else experience this. I’m in a place I know so well, a home away from home, and I’m seeing it half-finished, like only three walls of the house have been built. It’s almost perfect, but you still need the imagination to see it completely done.

I don’t know how to feel about it other than a little confused and queasy at the same time.

“It’s very different from what you see at home. This is Chris’s room. I had some input on which books to put on the shelf after getting a brief from the writers on what he should be like, and then I went from there,” Ayden tells me, voice soft, as if he’s afraid to break the spell I’m under. I don’t want to look over at him, because he fits here, even if he’s not in costume, but I sure don’t, and it’s all starting to feel more than a little surreal. I’m in the place that I’ve dreamed about, and it’s nothing like I imagined it, not at all.

I’m still going to get my picture taken in the captain’s chair though, and I don’t care who I have to beg.

“Oh, yeah? Which ones?” I take another step closer to the shelves and start examining titles and authors, running my fingers over the ones I’ve already read and loved, and the others I didn’t like so much. Man, Chrisander Gage would have been the perfect boyfriend, you know, if he existed and all.

Ayden points out a few of them, taking them down and offering them to me to hold and touch. I flip through some of them, and some snippets of script are actually in the book I’ve been handed, and I look down in awe for a split second before shutting it closed, fumbling it and throwing it at Ayden so I don’t accidentally spoil myself for a future episode.

Grinning sheepishly, I examine more of Chrisander’s private quarters, the way the bed is not really a bed but hard as freaking rock, the way the chair at his desk squeaks just as infuriatingly in real life as it is in the show.

I feel like I’ve been given the most amazing gift on Christmas morning. But then, everything kind of goes downhill after you end up opening all of your presents as you sort of inevitably end up breaking your brand-new toy from using it all day long.

I look up at Ayden, afraid of him, afraid for me, because this is a dream, and I know I’m going to have to wake up soon.

But hell, couldn’t this go somewhere if I’m dreaming anyway?

Dream big or go home, right?