49. 49
The rest of the night was a blur of being pulled in a thousand different directions.
After announcing us as winners, the show was quickly wrapped, and we were immediately ushered back into the green room where Harry, Ben, and three media experts from the network were waiting for us.
Even though we had literally just been voted the UK’s favorite couple, pleasing the public wouldn’t stop once we were out of the villa. We were to set out on a publicity tour immediately, starting the next day with an early morning talk show.
“We’re flying back tonight?” I asked Harry.
“In about an hour, actually,” he said. “We’re all traveling back together. Ben and I will be with you the whole way. You’ll do media training on the flight.”
I nodded, feeling the fatigue of the day catching up with me.
There was no time to rest, though, as we were instructed to head out of the villa and into a waiting sprinter van. Walking through the living room, I stopped for a moment to take it all in one last time.
Only now, the magic of the villa, the sparkle it had while we were living here, was noticeably dull.
As crew members worked to strike the sets both inside and out in the yard, I could see the cracks in the facade.
The white furniture seemed stained and tacky.
The neon signs on the walls felt cheap. It was like being at a club when they turned the lights on.
I turned away from the villa, bidding it one final, silent farewell, and walked outside to the van. Callum didn’t say a word to me as I climbed in, so I took a seat all the way in the back.
If anyone noticed the iciness between us, they didn’t mention it.
***
I spent the next six hours in alternate states of wanting to cry and wanting to crawl in a hole and sleep forever.
The only words Callum had said to me since we won were the ones we rehearsed with Ben, Harry, and the media team. As soon as they all deemed us worthy of going on live television, as if we hadn’t just lived our lives on camera for six weeks, they left us alone.
And then it was just Callum and me, sitting next to each other on the tiny private jet the network had sent to get us back to England in time for the morning shows.
I turned to him, hoping it would be the moment I could tell him what had really happened. But he saw me open my mouth to speak and stopped me.
“Let’s just get through this next bit, and then we can go our separate ways,” he said.
The sting of rejection hit me square in the chest, knocking the wind out of me. Anything I had planned to say died on my tongue, and all I could do was blink at him and nod. Without a word, I got out of my seat and headed for an empty one in the back.
I curled into myself on the plush recliner chair and silently cried the entire way back to London.
***
It turns out that the Brits love their talk shows, of which they have multiple broadcasting at all hours of the day. Panel shows, one-on-one sit downs, comedy round tables. Any interview format imaginable, there was a show centered around it.
Callum and I spent the three days after we won on a media tour that would rival Harry and Meghan’s departure from the royal family. It seemed that an American winning Bella Amore was quite the novelty.
“You lot are in high demand,” one of the network’s social media managers had very excitedly let me know.
I was shocked that anyone was still buying what we were selling. Callum and I had slipped into a sort of frosty truce for the time being and weren’t exactly the love birds we had been just days before.
His words on the plane, and the blatant rejection, played like a loop in my head, and something about it made a part of me shut down.
I desperately wanted to explain to him what had happened, to make things better and get us back on track.
But I also knew that I was at the end of my emotional rope.
I couldn’t handle another dismissal or argument, especially not when I was expected to get on live television and talk about how great finding love on Bella Amore had been.
So I shoved it all down and focused on trying to make it through the required press.
I was doing a good job at it, too. I really was. I hadn’t spoken to Callum other than to act the part whenever a camera was pointed at us. I was only crying every couple of hours, which was an improvement. And we had made it to the final stop of the tour, our last talk show appearance.
It was a late-night show that I had surprisingly heard of. The host was a hysterical British man whose comedic timing was impeccable and whose interviews had gone viral many times over, even across the pond.
Callum and I had been given separate dressing rooms backstage. Harry was sitting in mine, chatting away at me. I could tell he knew something happened between Callum and me because he had been glued to my side this entire time.
“I’m going to just pop out and see what our timing is,” he said, standing up and pulling the door open.
Callum’s dressing room door must have been opened as well because when Harry stepped out into hallway, leaving my door swung wide open, I heard a loud, booming laugh come from next door.
A laugh that I knew. A laugh that I had laughed along with many times until very recently.
Hearing Callum laugh in such a carefree way flipped something inside of me.
Suddenly, everything I had been holding back, every emotion and feeling I had been repressing for the last two days because of him, rose to the surface.
I stood up, walked out of my dressing room, and straight into his.
He was sitting there, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, laughing with Ben.
I stopped a few feet inside and waited until he looked up at me.
“We need to talk,” I said.
Ben immediately got the hint and walked out without questioning me or Callum, closing the door behind him.
For the first time in three days, we were alone.
He started, “Poppy, let’s just—”
But I cut him off.
“No. We’re not going to just get through another interview. We need to talk about what happened.”
“What happened?” he said, a spark lighting somewhere in him.
Good, it was better than the cold indifference he had reverted to.
He stood up as he continued. “What happened was the second your ex was back in the picture, you went running back to him. Was it some kind of a game you were playing? Have a bit of fun with me, win some money, and then go back home to him when it was all over?”
“Of course not! He came here. He kissed me.”
“You didn’t seem to mind.”
“I did! I don’t want him. It was all just bad timing.”
He was shaking his head, but I pressed on. “Yes, it was a shock to see him after all these months, and I know what it looked like. But it meant nothing. He means nothing.”
Callum was staring down at me, and for a moment I thought maybe it was about to all work out.
That his tense features would relax into a smile, and he would tell me everything was okay, that he knew it was all one big misunderstanding.
It was a scenario I had been hoping would happen for the past few days: that the ice would eventually thaw and we would be okay.
“I can’t do this,” he said instead.
Something cold and tight snapped in my chest.
“You don’t mean that,” I said, tears prickling the corners of my eyes.
Our conversation was escalating to a place I didn’t know how to come back from, and I needed to right its course.
He couldn’t be ending it. This couldn’t be it for us.
Callum seemingly felt the opposite.
“This whole thing was a mistake, Poppy. Coming on the show, making the deal with you, pretending to be together.”
I realized then, with sickening clarity, that I was too late. That the conversation was always going to end this way. That he had already made up his mind about us well before I walked into his dressing room.
I must have been a glutton for punishment because despite all of this, despite the end of us being so clearly right in front of me, I still pushed on. If this really was going to be it, then I needed to get everything out. I needed him to know he was the one walking away, not me.
“It wasn’t pretend. Not for me. Not in the end, and not for a while.”
“Well, it was for me.”
And just like that, our relationship splintered and broke apart.
He didn’t want it, and I didn’t have anything left to give.
Neither of us spoke again. We just stood there, staring at each other until Harry knocked on the door letting us know it was time to go to set.
I dabbed at my eyes, wiping away the tears threatening to fall, and followed Callum out of the green room.
As we wound through the television studio’s halls, as we walked onto the late-night show’s set, and as I took my seat next to Callum, side by side on an oval couch, I willed my brain to shut down.
To go on autopilot. To smile and wave and make the small talk I had been coached to make.
Another few hours. That was all it would be.
Then I could let myself fall apart.