Season 20, Episode 3 Cave of Blunders
“Cave of Blunders”
My roommates were asleep when I crept in from calling the kids.
I was so sweaty from the irrepressible heat that Wallace thought I’d been swimming.
I was drifting off when feet padded across the tile, my eyes cracking to find Shawn crouched by my bunk.
I sat up only for him to messily kiss me, lips chapped, rum strong on his breath.
He’d been celebrating with the others earlier, but clearly more than I’d realized.
I was so dumbstruck I didn’t even protest when he crawled into my bed, that tiger tattoo somersaulting past me in the dark. “The ceiling cameras aren’t angled this way, I checked,” he whisper-slurred.
Perhaps the one thing that hadn’t changed about the show was the awkwardness of fitting two bodies on a bunk mattress.
Four nights prior, Shawn had aborted our almost-kiss, but now his mouth raced along my scarred cheek.
I almost yelped as he discovered my dick under the itchy sheets, clumsily massaging me over my boxers.
No one but Barnes had touched me like this since well before our wedding, and now it was happening at warp speed.
I pulled back as his mouth hungrily suffocated me, all the old demons awake.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, young and drunk but far from dumb.
I shook my head and prayed nobody heard us. “I’m just tired… Aren’t you?”
“You want me to go, got it—”
“No, I just thought you didn’t want to rush into anything physical?”
“That was before you saved me tonight.”
“Shhh, slow down, listen,” I urged, prickling with panic at his rising voice. “I’m trying to say that if we… get intimate, then we should both be sure. And probably sober.”
“Sober, right,” he repeated, volume mercifully dropping.
“Plus, hiding from the cameras… I can’t do that again.”
He rubbed his eyes, the implications finally settling in, rum be damned. “I’m an idiot. I didn’t even think…”
He dutifully moved to rise, but I couldn’t let him go like that, not so humiliated. “You’re not an idiot. It’s just a tricky situation. Like, if we had privacy and weren’t being recorded in a room of bunk beds?” I smiled half-heartedly. “I swear I’m saying no because I think you’re really special.”
“I’m nothing special,” he muttered. “Big old train wreck…”
“Shawn, that’s not true.”
He bit his lip, searching for words that didn’t come, and our sweaty chests grazed as he crawled over me.
Soon only his scent lingered, my sheets bathed in a cocktail of sweat, liquor, and (inexplicably) citrus.
I lay there after he’d left, convincing myself I’d made the right choice, even though my dick was harder in his wake than when he’d just been beside me.
We’d lasted a whopping four days as “friends,” but time moves so differently when you’re imprisoned with twenty people.
I never imagined when I left for Italy that some guy would kiss me a week later, and I didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.
Or was I just nudging Shawn into a vacant slot in my mind (to say nothing of my bed) because I didn’t know how to be alone?
One restless hour later, I sought refuge from the infinite heat in the kitchen. At least there I wouldn’t be caught spooning a drunken twentysomething. I opened the refrigerator for relief, just like when the AC broke every summer of my childhood. “Momentary reprieve?”
I peered through the doorway to find Erika in the dim lamplight of the living room, legs crossed and spine straight, defying the leather couch’s sunken cushions.
“I… I didn’t know anyone else was up,” I stuttered. “I’ll leave you alone.”
“No, come practice with me.” She waved me over, a jigsaw puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights sprawled across the table.
I willed myself not to see Arjun’s face in the warm light caressing her profile. The refined cheekbones, the arched nose, the vivid eyes… “Practice?”
“Why would production plant this if it didn’t eventually affect the game? They need someone to figure it out. Besides, you can’t dispute the theme.”
I eyed the contorted bodies and perverse monsters twisting through the pastel hellscape. “That one looks like Greta,” I said, tapping a blond woman who writhed nude on an amphibious blue cat. “Watch out for her, by the way. She encouraged the Devil girls to vote you in.”
Erika shrugged, unbothered. “She just wants the money divided amongst the fewest people. It’s strange anyone thinks I’ll make it that far though. I’ve never won a season.”
“What? You’re in amazing shape.”
“Rarely feels like it,” she chuckled. “I wasn’t a gym rat until a few years ago.
Once the network finally gave me a shot, I knew getting shredded was the only way I’d stay in the casting pool.
I’m hardly a drama queen, after all, and nobody ever has my back except Imogen.
Still, I’ve been training especially hard for this one.
Season 20 feels like a good one to win. Shawn and I have that in common, I guess, wanting to prove ourselves,” she said tentatively.
“You gave him a lot of confidence tonight. It was sweet.”
I stared at the puzzle, unable to respond.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she murmured. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry, Erika… I’ve spent days trying to find words to apologize for everything, for Barnes—”
“You don’t owe anyone an apology for him,” she interjected. “Yes, it’s complicated, but you’re not eternally responsible for every single thing he’s done. Not in my opinion anyway.”
“That’s much more generous than I deserve.”
“Luke, I saw your Advocate interview two years ago. When you said you’d love your kids whether they were trans or not? And wasn’t individual choice the foundation of the Republican Party? Other people might not have cared about that, but I did.”
I shook my head, even more ashamed now. “Erika, you should hate me.”
“Why?”
I wondered how she could ask that question as his name punched from my gut. “Arjun.”
“How could I possibly hate you for Arjun?” Her grimace of sympathy hurt more than if she’d screamed at me.
“I ruined his life. I drove—”
She leaned forward, gripping my hand. “You didn’t drive him to anything. Did you pour all his drinks every night? Did you lead him to that balcony? Yes, you outed him, and that was obviously awful, but Arjun put you through hell. Even he admitted it.”
“He talked about that night in Alaska?” I somehow managed to ask.
“Not to me,” she said quietly. “When he got home, he told my parents he’d led you on. He called it a mistake, an experiment, said it wasn’t your fault. He swore it would never happen again, then moved back to London two weeks later… I barely saw him after that.”
So he hadn’t told the truth, everything the cameras hadn’t caught. “Erika, there’s—”
“Luke, I remember when you came to our house.”
“What?”
“Neither of you was looking for a kid listening behind the patio door.” Her voice trembled, as if she needed to confess something as much as I did. “I wanted to say something to him after, but I didn’t know how. Sometimes I still wonder what if I had.”
“You were so young. You don’t know how scared he was…”
Her eyes flashed the first hint of anger I’d seen.
“I know exactly how scared he was. Of our parents, their expectations… After he died, I swore I wouldn’t be like him, inventing some fictional version of myself for a TV show.
Brave people don’t lie like that—or make the people they love do it for them,” she said.
“When I finally told my parents about… being Erika? It was hard, but they got there. Arjun never gave them that opportunity. Or me.”
“Please don’t be so hard on him,” I replied, barely audible. “He adored you so much, and he’d be so proud of you. Don’t ever doubt that.”
“Still protecting him,” she sighed. “Honestly, you probably knew my brother better than any of us. It’s all over the Season 1 footage. With you, he just bursts to life.”
I considered my words, knowing the dangerous place they might lead. Would it hurt even more if I told her the whole truth? “Erika, I don’t know if that’s right, but that first summer he made me happier than I’d ever been in my life up until then. Truly.”
“Why do you think I spent high school with those DVDs on repeat? Watching you all in the Caymans is the best memory I never lived. The day I turned eighteen, I battled to get on Endeavor. Took a while with Gone Bollywood off the air, but I needed to experience this. My parents thought I was doing it to feel closer to Arjun, but crazy as it sounds, this genuinely fills something inside me separate from that.”
“I heard your folks ended the show. After he died.”
She nodded. “My whole childhood, the world lived in our house, like we were everyone’s dolls. Now we’re actually ourselves, even if we lost a lot to become those people. My parents have grown so much since you met them.”
“I’m glad,” I replied, though I had a hard time imagining that.
“Well, I’m glad we finally got some time alone off camera.” She smiled. “Now, can we stop tiptoeing around each other and trust nobody’s going to have a nervous breakdown?”
“Deal,” I replied, feebly hoping I was protecting her as much as myself by not revealing more of what happened with Arjun.
If she wanted to believe there was some shred of grace still clinging to that cruel history, wasn’t it kinder to let her?
And if I did all I could to help her now, might I somehow make amends for how I’d hurt her brother?
“Erika, out of curiosity, how do you feel about the phrase ‘totally doomed’?”
She cocked her head, amused. “Are you about to threaten me with a good time?”
Erika and I stayed until sunrise reconstructing Bosch’s masterwork, sometimes talking, sometimes not.
By the end, a handful of pieces remained missing, nowhere to be found, taunting holes in the wicked absinthe hills.
The puzzle would never be finished, though it’s possible it was never meant to be.