Chapter 4 #2
He never got that bill. He never learned about the dinners at the counter, the homework done in front of the television because at least then there was noise, how I’d taught myself to prefer solitude because it was easier than wanting company that was never going to show up.
Tyler-or-Travis was staring at a blank screen and hoping nobody would see that he had no one to text.
I picked up my tray and walked past every strategically superior option in the room — the main table where Derek was still performing, the secondary table where Julian was conducting his salad autopsy, the window seat where Mason had apparently adopted Sloane’s hydration as a personal cause.
And set it down across from the forgettable contestant who was one elimination from going home and pretending none of this had happened.
Tyler-or-Travis looked up, his expression cycling through surprise, confusion, and wariness. “Um. Hi?”
“This seat taken?”
“I— no? But there’s like, way better tables—”
“I’m aware.” I sat down and started eating with focused determination and no intention of explaining myself.
The silence lasted about two minutes before he picked up his own sandwich.
We ate without talking, — in the context of a mansion where every conversation was a performance and every silence was suspicious — the closest thing to honesty either of us had experienced all week.
At some point he stopped hunching his shoulders.
At some point I stopped pretending the sandwich was interesting.
We were just two men eating lunch in bad lighting, and that was enough.
Across the room, Derek’s eyes were logging this interaction for later analysis, probably calculating what angle I was playing.
Let him. The truth — that I’d sat down because the sight of someone eating alone had triggered a twenty-two-year-old ache that I’d spent my entire adult life pretending didn’t exist — was not information I planned to share with anyone.
The garden was supposed to be my escape.
The production team had called it a “romantic outdoor space” with “minimal camera coverage” — which in practice meant the natural acoustics made it useless for footage, so the crew avoided it unless a contestant was having a dramatically lit breakdown the editors could use for next week’s preview.
I’d been coming here every night since day three.
To breathe, for ten or fifteen minutes, in a space where cameras couldn’t follow and edited into whatever narrative the producers had constructed around my refusal to cooperate.
The jasmine was in bloom along the eastern terrace, filling the air with a sweetness that should have been cloying but wasn’t, and the stars were visible as they never are in the city, where light pollution turns the sky into permanent orange haze.
A production intern had strung fairy lights along the garden wall in an attempt at romance that was actually, reluctantly, effective — the amber glow catching the old limestone in a way that even I had to admit was competent design, and I did not use that phrase lightly.
I was assessing the terrace railing — wrought iron, decorative, poorly anchored to its limestone base, a structure that would go unrepaired until someone actually leaned on it — when I heard footsteps behind me.
I didn’t turn. I already knew who it was from the rhythm alone, the slight hesitation before each step like she was second-guessing her decision to be here.
“Stalking is frowned upon,” I said, still facing the deficient railing. “Even on reality television.”
“I’m not stalking.” Her voice was closer than expected, low and carrying the particular edge of a woman too tired to maintain defenses. “I’m collecting my prize.”
I turned.
She was standing six feet away, wrapped in an oversized knit — sweater or repurposed blanket, hard to tell in the dark.
Hair loose around her shoulders for the first time since I’d arrived, unpinned from the architecture of camera-readiness, and without the professional styling she looked younger.
More real. Like the woman behind the title had been granted a few minutes of unsupervised existence.
The jasmine caught the breeze behind her, and for one disorienting second the night smelled like her perfume and flowers and a note I couldn’t name that made my lungs contract inadvisably.
“Your prize,” I said flatly.
“The Attention Test. I never gave you a reward for winning.” She stepped closer, and I tracked it like you’d track a crack forming in a foundation wall — with growing alarm.
The moonlight caught the green in her eyes, and her mouth had arranged into an expression I hadn’t classified yet, neither Camera 2 nor Defense.
“Everyone else got elimination immunity or date cards. You got nothing.”
“I got to leave a room full of men comparing notes about your grandmother’s cat. That was reward enough.”
She laughed. The real one. Quiet and startled, like it had escaped without permission. “Mr. Whiskers. He was a terrible cat. Bit everyone except me and my grandmother. Even the vet was scared of him.”
“A discerning animal.”
“He once hissed at a FedEx driver so aggressively the man left the package on the sidewalk and never came back. We had to start using UPS.” She said it with the particular fondness people reserve for loved ones who are monstrous. “I miss him every day.”
“You would miss a cat that terrorized delivery workers.”
“He had standards, Rhys. Not everyone does.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She moved to the wrought-iron bench and sat, pulling her knees to her chest in a way that made her look less queenly, more like a person who’d snuck out of bed to look at stars.
The oversized sweater swallowed her whole.
She looked — and I was going to hate myself for thinking this — soft.
Approachable. Like a person you might tell the truth to, if you were a person who did that.
I was not a person who did that.
“Why do you keep coming here?”
“How do you know I keep coming here?”
“Because you’re always gone after midnight and you always come back smelling like jasmine.” A pause. “And because this is the only place in the mansion where the lenses can’t reach, and you seem like someone who would find that appealing.”
I should have been calculating the implications of her paying attention to my habits how I’d been paying attention to hers. Instead, I sat down on the opposite end of the bench, two feet of cold limestone between us, and told her the truth. “I come here because I can’t breathe in there.”
She nodded like that made perfect sense. “The performance.”
“The performance. The filming. The constant awareness that everything you say is being recorded and edited into whatever story makes the best television.” I leaned back against the stone, let my eyes drift up to the stars the city had stolen from me years ago.
“I’m not built for performing. I don’t know how to be someone I’m not. ”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Is that an insult?”
“It’s an observation.” She turned to look at me, and in the dark her face was all clean lines and shadow, stripped of everything decorative. “Everyone else in that mansion is playing a character. The Perfect Boyfriend. The Funny Guy. The Intense One.” A pause. “The Villain.”
“And you think I’m not playing a character?”
“I think you’re playing yourself, and you hate that it doesn’t feel like enough.”
The words landed behind my ribs, in that space I’d spent thirty years sealing with concrete and the absolute certainty that letting anyone see what was underneath would be a collapse I couldn’t engineer my way out of.
She was right. Exactly right, and I hated her a little for the exactness of it — for cutting through everything with a single observation delivered in the dark.
“You asked why I don’t play the game,” I said, after a silence long enough to become its own conversation.
“The truth is I don’t know how. I can’t be charming on command or say things I don’t mean or pretend this entire operation isn’t a content farm with better catering.
When the other guys are figuring out their camera angles, I’m calculating the ceiling load capacity.
When they’re rehearsing their confessional monologues, I’m noting that the east wing has a moisture problem that’s going to become a mold issue in approximately eighteen months.
” I paused. “I realize this is not what most women find attractive.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“And yet I’m still here.”
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t push. Instead, she shifted on the bench, closing the distance between us without making it obvious, and said: “Do you want to know a secret?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me regardless of my answer.”
“I don’t know what’s real anymore either.
” Her voice was softer now, stripped of the armor.
“I created this show because I was tired of men who treated women like afterthoughts. And now I’m surrounded by ten men who are professionally paying attention, and I can’t tell which of them actually see me and which of them just see a platform. ”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” She laughed, but this time smaller, sadder.
“And the worst part is I can’t talk to anyone about it because I’m supposed to be the Queen.
In control. The woman who has her shit together.
” She pulled her sleeves over her hands — a gesture I’d seen her make exactly once before, in the hallway after Derek’s speed date, when she thought no one was looking.
It meant she was cold, or scared, or both.
“You don’t know what you want?”
“I know what makes good television. I know what the audience expects.” She paused. “But what I actually want? When the production lights go dark?”
“What?”
She turned to me, and in the dark her eyes found mine with an accuracy that had no business existing. “I want someone to see me. Really see me. Not the Queen, not the brand, not the feminist icon who started a dating show because she was mad about crypto bros. Just… me.”
I see you, I didn’t say. I’ve been seeing you since the first night, and it scares me more than anything my father ever taught me to be afraid of.
The distance between us had shrunk, though I couldn’t recall either of us moving.
Close enough for vanilla and a sharper attention underneath — citrus, ginger, whatever compound had been colonizing my subconscious since night one.
The slight tremble in her hands was visible, the vulnerability she was showing me like a trust fall she hadn’t fully committed to.
I could have reached out and touched her.
I wanted to. Wanted to so badly it felt — a fissure through load-bearing concrete, and my hand was already moving before my brain could intervene, reaching toward her face in the dark—
“OH MY GOD OH NO I’M SO SORRY—”
Mason burst through the garden gate like a Labrador who’d spotted a squirrel, phone flashlight blazing, face a portrait of mortified realization as he registered exactly what he’d interrupted.
“I was looking for— I thought I heard— I’m going to go now. I’m going to go very far away and never speak of this again—”
He was already backing through the gate, still apologizing, somehow managing to knock over a potted plant in his retreat.
He spent three frantic seconds trying to right it before abandoning the effort and disappearing into the mansion like he’d just committed a social crime he’d be processing in therapy for years.
The moment was broken. Sloane had pulled back the second the light hit, her defenses slamming into place with a quiet click.
She was standing, brushing invisible dirt from her borrowed sweater, not meeting my eyes.
The architecture of the Queen reassembling in real time — walls going up, windows closing, the whole facade reinstalled in under three seconds.
Impressive, if you didn’t know what was behind it.
I knew what was behind it.
“I should go. Early call time tomorrow.”
“Right.” My voice came out rougher than intended. “The filming.”
“The filming.” She was already walking toward the gate, already becoming the Queen again with every step. At the threshold, she paused without turning. “Thank you. For the water.”
She knew. Of course she knew.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Now she turned — just enough for me to see the smile. Small, knowing, and nothing like Camera 2. “Goodnight, Rhys.”
“Goodnight, Sloane.”
I stayed in the garden for another hour after she left. The jasmine smelled different now. Warmer. Complicit. Like the garden itself had picked a side and it wasn’t mine.
My phone buzzed. Mason: sorry again bro. truly. if it helps you two looked really cinematic? like a movie poster? I’ll delete the photo I accidentally took
I stared at the screen for ten seconds, then typed: What photo.
Three dots. Then: deleting now deleting now please don’t kill me
A second buzz: also FYI she left her hair tie on the bench
I looked down. A plain black elastic, curled on the stone where her hand had been, still holding the faint shape of her wrist.
I picked it up. Put it in my pocket.
A man who pockets a hair tie at midnight in a garden that smells like jasmine is not a man who is studying the enemy. He’s a man who is keeping evidence of her, which is a completely different thing, and the difference was going to be a problem I didn’t know how to solve with math.