Chapter Eleven Hell Is Sharing a Bed with Your （Hot） Nemesis
It must be Sunday is my first thought when I wake up. I can already tell it’s going to be one of those pleasant, syrupy-slow mornings that makes you feel all warm and loose. I don’t open my eyes because I just know, deep down, that I have all the time in the world. Mornings like these are rare, and I luxuriate in the feeling of sleeping in and cuddling with my boyfriend.
I have a hazy sense that I’m just emerging from a series of weird dreams, but his arm draped over me is a comforting weight. When I feel him stretch behind me, I push my hips back into his, so that we’re spooned together. I can feel the satisfied hum he lets out, the sound reverberating through him as he shifts closer to me. His hand runs down my stomach to my thigh, and I arch into him, wanting—no, needing—him to dip his hand between my legs. A soft kiss is dropped on my neck, and I moan.
“Mmm, Chase ,” I say, turning in his arms, hands reaching up to curve behind his neck. I press into him and—
“Alice?” rumbles a bleary voice, and I freeze. Oh shit. This isn’t Chase.
It’s Daniel. In bed with me. And I’m all over him.
I shriek and push roughly back, shoving Daniel in the face with my palm and tumbling off the bed all in one go. I look up at the ceiling, my heart racing as I try to piece together the jagged edges of yesterday and last night into some semblance of sense.
Daniel peeks over the edge of the bed, throwing everything into startling clarity.
Chase is with Selena. I’m with Daniel. Daniel and I are pretending to be madly in love. And we shared the same bed last night.
“You okay? You nearly took my eye out.”
“I—You—” I sputter. “What happened to the pillow wall?”
Daniel glances from me back to the bed. “The pillows are all at the foot of the bed. One of us kicks in our sleep,” he says. “Pretty sure it’s you.”
Chase never mentioned whether I kick in my sleep, but he sleeps like a baby, and even if I was sleep-kicking enough to wake the dead, he wouldn’t have noticed.
Not that it matters.
Because Chase isn’t here. And not only has our entire relationship gone up in smoke, but I’m left trying to win this competition on my own. Everything I knew about Chase, every experience we shared, every little detail about him, right down to his sleeping habits and how much sugar he takes in his coffee, is irrelevant now—and I have to win this competition without that edge.
“It’s okay if you kick,” Daniel says. “I can overlook it for the sake of our fake relationship.”
I throw a pillow at him.
Now that I’m fully awake, I discover that I’m ravenous. Luckily, we ordered room service yesterday since Leah had mentioned that filming was starting early today. There’s a tray of food outside our door—breakfast burritos and little plastic cups of honeydew. I’d give anything for a mug of hot soy milk and a purple rice fantuan right about now, but I’ll take whatever fuel I can get.
As I inhale my breakfast burrito, I flip open my suitcase.
“Is that what you’re planning to wear?” Daniel asks as I pull out a Cindy-approved outfit.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, it’s great. I just figure we should coordinate. You know, pretend to be on the same team?”
Fair point. I have to admit, matching will make Daniel and me look like we belong together. Like Tarun and Kendall’s matching foodie outfits, or Brittany and Jaxon’s cowboy boots. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll become “Reasonably Fashionable Nerds” instead of “The Asians.”
“It’s not a terrible idea,” I admit. “We could try it.”
“As always, your words of praise mean everything to me.”
I ignore that. “Do I need to change anything out?”
“No. I have something that’ll work,” Daniel says, and he grabs clothes from his own suitcase.
He takes off his shirt, and I realize that I need to be anywhere other than here. I rush into the bathroom to change. When I come out again, Daniel is putting sunscreen on. He’s dressed in white shorts and a blue-and-white-striped shirt that complements the deep-blue romper I’ve chosen for the day.
He glances over at me and breaks into a smile. “We look nice.”
“Almost like we’re a real couple,” I say. “Ready to head downstairs and flaunt our new relationship?”
He takes my hand, and I’m proud of how steady my heartbeat is as I lace my fingers with his. “Ready when you are, darling .”
—
I must have slept in later than I thought, because Daniel and I are the last couple to leave the villa. Leah is already waiting for us at the foot of the winding staircase, tapping her toe impatiently on the pristine marble floor.
“There are my winners,” Leah says when she spots us. “How was the suite I snagged for you? Did you get a chance to connect ?” she asks, looking over the two of us.
“Working on it,” I say at the same time that Daniel says, “Never been closer.”
“Okay, maybe work on that ,” Leah says, circling her index finger in the air between us. “But hey, you’re dressed nicely and holding hands. I’ll take it.”
Daniel and I walk hand in hand the whole way down to the beach, and thanks to our practice yesterday, I manage to relax into it and just enjoy the sun on my skin as we make our way over to the rest of the contestants.
“Oh, so it’s true,” Ava says, eyeing the pair of us. This is the first time we’ve been seen together since Dawn Taylor’s announcement yesterday, and it feels like Ava is staring daggers at us. Daniel squeezes my hand.
Game on. I squeeze Daniel’s hand back and plaster on my best “talking to parents at Open House” smile. “Yep,” I say breezily. “I can’t believe it either. I feel like I’m in paradise.”
“I think it’s so beautiful that you two found true love from the ashes of heartbreak,” a lilting voice says. “I’m Firefly,” the woman adds when I glance at her. I realize I’ve seen her before—or, at least, I’ve seen the back of her head before. She was the one making out with her partner on the first night. Today, she’s wearing a sari that matches the bright green of her hair. She still has on the black combat boots and the fingerless black gloves from the first day.
When she sees me taking in her clothes, she makes a face. “My producer asked me to wear a sari today. I guess they’re playing up the ‘we have an Indian contestant’ angle. Something about trying to bring in the Indian Matchmaking demo? But I’m not going to throw away the rest of my style.” She links arms with the handsome Black man next to her. “Oh, this is Bacon, by the way.”
He’s still in full Burning Man–style desert gear, with a black vest and black goggles on his head. “Hey,” he says.
“ Bacon? ” Ava asks. The judgment is dripping from her voice.
“Because he’s so hot and tasty,” Firefly deadpans, and then bursts into laughter.
“She’s ‘Firefly’ because she’s the light of my life,” Bacon says. “Also, she likes to light things on fire.”
“We like to go by our Burning Man names,” Firefly explains. “It started out as a bit, but then it just stuck. Anyway, we’re totally rooting for you and Daniel. It’s giving true love, you know?”
“True love?” Ava says with a snort. “More like a true loophole. I know you guys got together so you wouldn’t be eliminated. Normally I’d file a complaint, but you’re not worth the effort.”
With that, she stalks away from us. Bacon shakes his head. “Don’t let it get to you. There’s always going to be people who doubt your love. Firefly and I had a hard time when we first got together, too.”
Daniel makes a sympathetic noise. “Yeah?”
“My parents were convinced that he wouldn’t be able to get Bengali culture. And his parents thought I was a bad influence.” Firefly smiles up at him. “But you like my influence, don’t you?”
“I never would have discovered welding—and myself—without you,” Bacon says, punctuating it with a kiss. Firefly bounces up on her toes and pulls him in for a longer kiss.
And we’ve lost them. They’re full-on making out again, oblivious to the people around them. I glance up at Daniel, who scrunches his nose at me. I let out a quiet laugh and turn back to the challenge at hand.
Two long tables have been set up in a shallow V formation. Each table has twelve plates covered by red domes painted with flames. In retrospect, maybe eating that breakfast burrito was a bad idea. I drop Daniel’s hand and start jogging in place, hoping that I can hurry along my digestion and make room for more.
Once the producers explain our cue to us, Dawn Taylor arrives in a swirl of filmy red fabric, and filming begins.
“Hey, babes,” she says, winking and blowing a kiss to the camera. “It’s Dawn Taylor, and today we’re descending to the next circle of hell—gluttony!”
The cameras circle us as we step up to the seats labeled with our names. There are four couples at each table, and three plates in front of each pair of us. Tarun and Kendall are to our left, and next to them are Brittany and Jaxon. And to our right are Selena and Chase. I turn away, unwilling to look at Chase. It’s too soon, and I have to push down the flickers of anger and grief I feel just hearing his voice. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Daniel shift so that Chase is blocked from view.
“Today,” Dawn Taylor continues, “each of you must work with your partner to finish every last bite of food on the plates before you!”
“Wait, the Gluttony Challenge is to participate in gluttony?” I say under my breath. “Shouldn’t we be not eating if this is the circle for people who overeat? She does realize that Dante’s Inferno wasn’t, like, an instruction manual, right?”
“I’ll level with you, I’m not sure Dawn Taylor has actually read the source material,” Daniel says.
Dawn Taylor gestures, and eight crew members dressed as waiters step up to the table. “We’ve got three delectable dishes for you. Feel free to eat them in any order and however you want. The only rule is that each couple must clean their plates. The last couple with food remaining on their plate is out. Now let’s take a look at what’s on the menu.”
The crew member closest to me whips off the cover of the first and smallest plate, revealing several wrinkly peppers.
“Chiles rellenos de queso de cabra,” Dawn Taylor says with careful enunciation. “In other words, peppers stuffed with cheese. Our chefs have added habanero chilies to the mix. A real treat…if you can handle the heat.”
“Ooh, my grandma made these for me once!” Selena says, clapping her hands together.
“I can do those, easy,” I say to Daniel. “My mom raised me on her homemade garlic chili oil.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been eating my grandmother’s buldak since I was a baby,” Daniel shoots back. “And she does not hold back on the spice.”
Dawn Taylor flourishes her hand at the second round of dishes. “Next up, we have…cow eyes!”
The second cover is lifted to reveal a plate with a single raw cow eye staring back at us. I’m viscerally reminded of high school biology class. Except I’d much rather dissect the eyeball than put it in my mouth. There’s a puddle of something slimy beside the eyeball, and I really don’t want to know what it is.
“We’ve had cow eyes before, sweetie. Remember the tacos de ojos?” I hear Kendall tell Tarun.
“That was at a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York,” Tarun hisses. “These are raw and prepared by rank amateurs, Kendall!” Their designated “waiter” glares at them.
“And last but certainly not least, I hope you’ve saved room for dessert,” Dawn Taylor says.
Off comes the final cover and there, sitting on the largest plate, is a huge, skull-shaped chocolate cake. It’s big enough to serve an entire class of voracious eighth graders. It’s the kind of cake that one kid in Matilda had to eat as a form of torture.
As we’re all staring in shock, the crew members light each cake on fire. There must be some kind of liquor soak on them, because the skulls ignite instantly. I hear Brittany squeak, and Noah swears at the flaming cakes. Firefly, on the other hand, is in her element. She starts twirling and waving her hand over the flames.
“And as a special prize, whoever finishes first will be treated to a four-course meal with wine pairings from a personal chef. And whoever finishes last is out of here. Your time starts now—give ’em hell!”
Daniel turns to me. “So, how do you want to do this?”
My gaze snaps to Chase. He’s already dug in and is covered in chocolate frosting. But here is Daniel, strategizing with me. I could get used to this.
“We should start with the peppers to kill our taste buds,” I begin. “Swallow the cow’s eye whole. Then split the cake.”
“Not a bad strategy.”
“But?” I prompt.
“But, what if one of us ate the cow eye and the peppers, and the other one ate the cake?”
I narrow my eyes. “Is this some kind of misguided attempt to spare me from eating the peppers and the eye? Because I could do both of those right now without breaking a sweat.”
Daniel taps the plate of cake. “We should minimize our risks. Your plan splits the load evenly, which would be great if every dish had the same challenges. But the peppers and cow eye test your spice tolerance and gag reflex, while the chocolate cake is a simple matter of volume. If we both ate the peppers and cow eye and started feeling a bit off, eating the chocolate cake would be that much more difficult.”
Right. Battling nausea from eating something raw that we don’t eat every day, or indigestion from something spicy without any drinks to wash it down, could make finishing off the cake tricky, and we can’t afford that.
“I can handle the peppers and the cow’s eye. Can you handle the cake?” he asks.
“I told you, I can handle anything. I could do this entire challenge myself.”
“Okay, then handle the cake,” he tells me, then grabs the peppers and downs them like it’s nothing.
“ You handle the cake,” I snap at him. Screw the strategy. I snatch up the cow’s eye before Daniel can react and swallow it whole. It’s slimy, raw, and extremely gross, but I’m able to choke it down with a few deep breaths. Years of chugging horribly bitter Chinese herbal medicine has trained me for this, and when I’m sure I’ve kept the eyeball down, I flash Daniel a peace sign.
He gives me an exasperated look, and then we both turn to the cake.
I realize that production has very intentionally not given us any utensils. I use one of my hands to scoop up a handful of moist chocolate cake. Daniel follows my lead. The cake is so over-the-top sweet that I almost gag, but at least it’s masking the taste of the cow’s eye.
“Chase is taking that cake down ,” Dawn Taylor observes as a camera zooms in on Chase wolfing down handful after handful.
Beside him, Selena is almost finished with her peppers, but she offers the last bite to Chase. “Babe, this is delicious. You have to try it.”
Chase doesn’t hesitate before he takes a bite—and I know exactly what will happen next, because Chase can barely handle my mom’s mildest chili sauce. Almost immediately, Chase’s face goes red and his eyes bulge. “That’s fire,” he chokes out.
Dawn Taylor swoops in. “Selena, you might want to help him out there. Get that cow eye, girl!”
Selena looks like she had absolutely no intention of eating the cow eye, but now that the camera is focused on her, she delicately picks up the eyeball. She plugs her nose and pops it in her mouth.
“Get it down! Get it down!” Dawn Taylor chants. Selena chews and shimmies to the beat of the chant. For a moment it looks like she’s going to spit the whole thing out, but then she swallows and opens her mouth for Dawn Taylor to inspect.
“You’re good! You got it,” she tells Selena.
As I shovel another handful of cake into my mouth, I try to distract myself by looking around at the rest of our competition.
Brittany and Jaxon, once again wearing matching cowboy looks, have clearly started with the peppers. While Jaxon seems fine, tears are streaming down Brittany’s face.
“I don’t think those peppers wanted to be eaten,” she croaks.
“Meanwhile, Daniel is flying through the dessert!” Dawn Taylor cheers.
The cameraman swivels over to Daniel, who’s digging in with both hands. I take another bite, upping my pace. No way am I going to let it look like Daniel carried the team on this one.
“No, no, no,” Tarun moans to my left. “This cumin is killing my palate! I’m not going to have any taste buds left after this.”
“You still there, Slayer?”
The name jolts me back to my own partner. I look at Daniel, who’s licking some frosting off of his fingers.
“Yes. Doing great. Fantastic,” I say, but with my mouth full, it comes out more like “Mmmphfgh.”
He tilts his head at me. “You’ve got a little—” He gestures at me, which is hilarious because I’m literally covered in chocolate cake. What’s less hilarious is when he reaches up and uses his thumb to wipe away a bit of chocolate from the corner of my mouth, brushing my lip again for the second time in twenty-four hours. The brief touch is enough to send a bolt of heat skittering through me.
“There,” he says, like he’s actually done me a favor.
What the hell was that?
I glare at him as I take another bite. I’m definitely regretting the burrito I ate this morning. Now I’m fighting for every fraction of an inch of space in my stomach.
“Done! We’re done!” someone cries behind us.
Everyone turns to the power couple, Ava and Noah. Their plates are clean, and their mouths are open to prove that they’ve finished the job. They look like baby birds waiting for their momma bird to regurgitate into their mouths.
Dawn Taylor saunters over to them. “Amazing work! Babes, you have officially won our Gluttony Challenge.”
Noah and Ava high-five each other. As the rest of us double down on eating, Dawn Taylor takes the chance to interview them right there on the spot.
“Why do you think the two of you came out on top today?” Dawn Taylor asks.
“I knew I couldn’t let Ava down,” Noah says. “It’s just like this in our real lives back home. We both work more than sixty-hour weeks. We’re hustlers. We’re up at five in the morning, hitting the gym before work, answering emails through breakfast, that kind of thing. But we do it for each other.”
Ava wraps an arm around him. “It’s true. I see how hard he works, and it makes me want to work that much harder.”
“I’d do anything for Ava,” Noah says with an intensity I can’t help but find a little chilling.
Or maybe that’s just the competition jitters. I focus all my energy on wolfing down the chocolate cake.
Across from us, Mikayla and Trevor are arguing about who’s going to eat the cow eye.
“Trevor, you should do it. Remember how good you were at the cinnamon challenge?” Mikayla is saying.
“Mikayla, I threw up for hours after the cinnamon challenge!”
“Yeah, but like, after. All you have to do is keep it down long enough for Dawn Taylor to check our plates and then you can throw up as much as you want!”
I look down at my own plate. I’ve only got a couple bites left. We’re so close to second place, I can taste it—and it tastes like chocolate. I cram another bite into my mouth. Daniel scoops a big handful for himself. We both glare at each other as we frantically chew, each of us trying to finish before the other.
I swallow a fraction of a second before Daniel. I lightly punch his shoulder and point to my mouth. Daniel swallows and calls out, “Dawn Taylor, can we get a check over here?”
Our host sails over. “Second place! Congratulations!”
I’m so full I could burst. I flash a weak thumbs-up.
“Hello? Congratulations?” Dawn Taylor prompts us, and I realize that Daniel and I are meant to celebrate as a couple. I turn to him, raising my hand for a high five, just as Daniel goes in for a hug. I try to adjust to his hug, but Daniel switches to a high five, the combined effect of which is that Daniel ends up batting my face with his hand.