Chapter 2
Hours later, as the rest of the day crew shuffles off to their cars, Puck returns to the front porch and their now borderline-inedible croissant, plucking off the pocket lint in a futile attempt to make it appetizing again.
But the new PA seems determined to keep them from eating it.
He reappears just as Puck starts into the pastry again, his greasy brown hair slicked back, beanie clutched in his hands like he’s a Dickensian street urchin approaching an industrialist for a spare farthing.
“Hey, I, uh, just wanted to tell you that was incredible today,” he says.
“What’s your name?” Puck asks, after swallowing a bite.
The kid has earned that by now, even though he’s still firmly on the bottom rung of the Homewreckers ladder. It takes more than a day’s worth of good work to distinguish yourself here, but he worked miracles earlier, somehow securing that pair of binoculars with only a minute’s notice.
“I’m Nick,” he introduces himself.
“Well, today was all thanks to you, Nick,” Puck says, not bothering to cover their mouth as they chew. There were six hours of follow-up interviews after the poolside fracas, and they need calories right now more than they need to look delicate. “I asked for a lot and you delivered.”
There are ways in which Nick reminds Puck of themself when they got hired on Homewreckers as their first real job after college: young, eager to help, awed by how easily they could extract emotions from a bunch of twentysomething human guinea pigs.
It’s a heady feeling when you first exercise power over the contestants, and Nick has gotten a taste.
But unlike Nick, Puck never carried themself with such meekness.
They acted like a producer even when they were first hired as a glorified coffee-fetcher, and these days they act like the showrunner, which, for all intents and purposes, they are.
“How do you come up with that stuff?” Nick asks, shuffling his feet like he wants to sit down next to Puck but is too skittish to ask for an invite. “I mean, how did you know what everyone was going to do before they did it?”
Puck shoves the rest of the croissant in their mouth, crumpling up the wax paper. “Let me tell you something about people, Nick,” they say between swallows. “They don’t actually want what they say they want.”
Puck grants the PA mercy, patting a spot next to them on the porch. Nick hurriedly sits, but he looks skeptical. “So they’re liars?”
“Worse,” Puck tells him. “They’re fools, and they think we’re fools, too.”
Nick’s face goes blank. He’s not following.
“Take Jason,” they continue. “During his entry interview, he tried to convince us he was a ‘changed man.’ He thought we’d buy it, too.
He kept blathering on and on about wanting a family with Monica.
He couldn’t wait to have kids, a house, a dog, the whole kit and labradoodle.
To quote the Bard, he doth protest too much. ”
“What does that even mean? ‘Protest too much’?”
Nick may be helpful when it comes to arranging pawns on the board, but he’s not destined to become a grandmaster, is he?
“It means Jason was selling it too hard, past the point of believability,” Puck explains. “He doesn’t want a mortgage with Monica—he wants to put his face in Erica’s ass.”
Nick, taken off guard by the crude remark, makes a sputtering noise somewhere between coughing and laughter.
“And Jess,” Puck proceeds, unbothered, “she thinks she wants Micah, but she doesn’t.”
“How do you mean?” the PA asks, still not understanding.
“Jess uses male desire to shore up her ego. It almost doesn’t matter who it comes from.
If she actually got Micah, she’d be like a dog catching up with a car.
She wouldn’t know what to do. The fact that Micah wants her even though he’s technically with another woman is what makes Jess feel real.
Like she exists outside the borders of her own insecurity. ”
Nick mimes an explosion coming out of his ears. “Wow. Did you study psychology or something?”
Maybe it’s because they’re tired, but Puck decides to let some honesty slip out: “No, I’m just a queer person who’s spent my entire adult life watching straight people live theirs.”
Nick laughs. “And you think we’re that predictable?”
“More often than not,” Puck answers wearily.
They really should head home if they’re going to drive up to North Carolina tomorrow.
“Look, to get places on this show, you have to remember that everyone is lying about themselves constantly,” they continue through a stifled yawn.
“And it’s up to you to figure out what they actually want.
Once you crack that, predicting how they’ll act on those desires is the easy part. ”
If Nick were smarter, he’d ask Puck if they were lying about themself, too.
He’d ask if what they thought they wanted in life was what they really wanted.
If they were ignoring something inside themself by constantly pulling on other people’s strings.
And if Puck hadn’t hit their limit on truth for the day, they’d say they don’t know.
That they can see through other people, but their own heart remains frustratingly opaque.
Instead, Puck stands up and brushes the crumbs off their pants.
“Ron mentioned you were leaving for a few days,” Nick says, suddenly sounding forlorn. “Something about a wedding?”
Is the kid trying to make small talk? He may be “Nick” now, but they’re far from being friends. Puck is this close to demoting him back to anonymity.
“Yup. For a week, actually,” Puck says, leaving it at that.
“Who’s getting married?” Nick asks anyway, undeterred by the curtness.
Puck briefly considers answering Nick for the hell of it, detailing the whole saga of their college friend group.
It might feel good to tell someone how much they’ve been dreading this week in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But with the beautiful havoc they just wrought together back at the pool, there’s more than enough drama for Nick to handle already.
Telling him about Mia, Zander, Damon, and Lena would be drama overload, and he should stay focused on Homewreckers.
Besides, Puck has already lingered on set too long.
At this rate, they’ll only have about half an hour back in their Decatur apartment to cram a suit, their formal Docs, and, somewhat optimistically, their strap-on into a backpack before sleep takes them.
Then they have a five-hour drive to the resort in the morning.
“The question isn’t who’s getting married,” Puck says, opting to remain elliptical, “but should they.”
“And should they?” Nick prompts.
“Well, if you have to ask, they probably shouldn’t,” Puck tries to joke, but they can hear the anxiety in their voice.
They turn to leave, weighing whether they need to stop and buy any travel toiletries on the way home.
With the filming of Homewreckers and all of its sundry spinoffs, it’s been years since Puck has taken real time off work—not that this trip feels like a vacation.
If anything, this wedding will be a watered-down version of the show, full of drunk straight people making bad decisions, but with all of Puck’s authority checked at the door.
“At least it’ll be nice getting away from all these lunatics, huh?” Nick says, gesturing at the house.
Most people would feel relieved to get some time away from a job this stressful. Puck can only pretend to be one of them.
“Yeah,” they tell him. “Should be nice.”