Chapter 5 #2
I found Mason sitting alone on the terrace overlooking the mansion’s absurdly manicured gardens, strange because Mason was never alone.
Mason was perpetual motion, constant chatter, infectious energy that drew people into his orbit whether they wanted to be there or not.
Seeing him still and quiet, staring at the sunset with an expression that looked melancholy, was like seeing a golden retriever who’d forgotten how to wag its tail.
The internet would have called it a “sad boy autumn” moment, but the internet would have been wrong — there was nothing aesthetic about how his shoulders curled inward like he was trying to occupy less space.
“Hey,” I said, settling into the chair next to him. “You okay?”
“Yeah! Totally. Great.” Too fast, too bright, and his smile had all the heat of a fluorescent bulb. “Just, you know, taking a moment. Enjoying the view. Living my best life.”
“Mason.”
He deflated, the performance collapsing. “I’m fine. Really. Just…” A vague gesture at the gardens, the mansion, everything. “Thinking too much. Bad habit.”
“What were you thinking about?”
For a long moment, nothing. He was searching for words that wouldn’t come, and the golden retriever mask slipped just enough to show what was underneath — a loneliness I recognized from my own mirror.
He was peeling the label off his water bottle, shredding it into tiny strips, unconscious destruction people do when their hands need somewhere to put everything their mouth won’t say.
“Everyone likes me,” he said finally, his voice stripped of its usual voltage.
“I’m fun. Easy to be around. The guy who makes everyone laugh, who never takes anything too seriously, who you invite to parties because he’ll bring the energy.
” He laughed, but it came out wrong, hollow.
“Nobody ever looks at me like I could be… enough. Like there might be a person worth paying attention to underneath the jokes.” He was staring at his hands now, at the shredded label, and I realized he’d torn it into a perfect little pile of confetti.
A celebration nobody had thrown. A party for one.
The admission hung between us, raw and completely at odds with the Mason I’d seen on camera — the one who tripped over furniture and seemed incapable of a serious thought.
“Mason—”
“Ignore me.” He was already pulling the mask back on. “Being weird. Probably hungry. Did someone mention food?”
But I didn’t ignore it. I couldn’t. I’d spent too many years being the person everyone laughed at and underestimated to miss the pain underneath someone else’s act. I filed it alongside the other things I was learning about these men — the ones who showed you who they were, and the ones who hid.
“Gentlemen, welcome to the Care Test.”
Tessa stood in the mansion’s industrial kitchen — stainless steel, commercial appliances that looked vaguely terrifying — with the confident smile of a woman about to ruin ten men’s afternoons.
“The rules are simple. You have two hours to prepare Sloane’s comfort food. The catch?” She paused. “You can’t ask her what it is. You have to already know.”
Julian’s composure cracked for a quarter-second — genuine panic, quickly smoothed.
Mason made a noise like a dying whale. Derek’s smile sharpened, predatory.
And Rhys didn’t react at all, just stood with his arms crossed, face unreadable, like he’d already solved a puzzle the rest of them hadn’t noticed.
I tried not to read into the fact that my gaze had found him first. Failed.
“You have access to anything in this kitchen,” Tessa continued. “Cookbooks, recipes, ingredients. The only thing you can’t access is Sloane herself. Good luck.”
The chaos was everything the producers hoped for.
Julian immediately began assembling a lobster thermidor with precise, methodical movements completely disconnected from anything I’d ever said about food — the culinary equivalent of buying someone a Peloton for their birthday: impressive, vaguely insulting, and proof he hadn’t been paying attention.
Mason set fire to a pan of butter within ten minutes, spent fifteen more fighting the extinguisher while the smoke alarm auditioned for a horror movie, and eventually resorted to ordering pizza on his phone when he thought no one was looking.
(I was looking. I appreciated the honesty.) Derek prepared a picture-perfect beef bourguignon that screamed “I googled ’impressive date night dinners’ and selected the first result with good SEO. ”
And then there was Rhys.
He moved through the kitchen like he belonged there.
Didn’t rush, didn’t panic, didn’t glance at the others.
Just worked. Competence porn — the internet had a word for everything.
The specific attractiveness of watching someone be exceptionally good at a task.
I’d thought it was a myth, a thing that only existed in Nora Ephron movies and TikTok thirst traps of men building shelves. I was wrong.
I watched from behind the one-way glass as he gathered flour, butter, sugar.
Baking — but that narrowed it down to ten thousand options.
His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and I’m going to state this once and never revisit it: forearms. The kind that belonged on a man who built things, all lean muscle and visible tendons, now dusted with flour that I had the sudden, unhinged urge to brush off.
I filed that thought under never examining more closely and focused on his technique — confident, measured movements that suggested either training or obsessive research he’d bring to any problem.
He measured the way an architect would — no approximation, no eyeballing.
When he cut the butter into the flour, he did it with the focused intensity of a man performing surgery on a building that mattered.
“You’re staring,” Tessa observed.
“I’m observing. There’s a difference.”
“Uh-huh. And you’ve been ’observing’ him for twenty minutes while ignoring everyone else because…?”
“Professional interest in the competition format.”
“Sloane, you just leaned forward when he rolled up his sleeves. Professional interest doesn’t involve cardiovascular events.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I watched his hands work the dough and tried not to think about his hands.
The dough went into a pie dish.
My heart did not stutter. My heart made a sound like a car alarm going off in a quiet neighborhood — sudden, inappropriate, impossible to ignore.
He was making pie. Apple pie, thinly sliced fruit in careful concentric circles, and my brain connected the dots with a force that was physical.
A few weeks ago, during a camera break, I’d mentioned my grandmother’s recipe in a throwaway tangent — not even part of my prepared remarks, just a slip about comfort and nostalgia and the taste of being loved without conditions.
I’d thought it was just noise. Verbal filler that got lost in the flood.
But Rhys hadn’t been transcribing. He’d been listening.
I watched him reach for the cinnamon — the secret, the thing that made my grandmother’s version different from every other apple pie — and a fissure opened somewhere behind my ribs.
The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile — three weeks of intensive field study had established that Rhys didn’t do those — but a half-second of satisfaction, quickly suppressed.
I caught it anyway. And my stupid, traitorous heart lurched forward like a dog spotting its owner, and I had to grip the edge of the observation window to keep my face neutral.
“Oh no,” Tessa said quietly.
Yeah. Oh no.
The tasting was supposed to be theatrical — each contestant presenting their creation while I offered diplomatic feedback on camera.
In practice, it was two hours of pretending lobster thermidor was a reasonable interpretation of “comfort food” and trying not to laugh when Mason presented his definitely-not-ordered-from-down-the-street margherita with the confidence of chaos as a lifestyle choice.
And then it was Rhys’s turn.
He set the pie down without ceremony. No elaborate presentation, no speech about his culinary philosophy.
Just a pie in a simple dish, golden-brown crust slightly darker at the edges than it should have been, steam carrying the unmistakable scent of cinnamon and brown sugar and — underneath — Sunday afternoons in a Connecticut kitchen.
Flour-dusted countertops. Her hands guiding mine to crimp the edges with a fork.
And beneath all of it, a trace that was just him — soap, clean cotton, a scent you’d have to be standing too close to detect, which meant I was standing too close.
I stared too long. My brain recognized what it was seeing but refused to process it, how you stare at a word you’ve read a thousand times and it briefly stops making sense.
Apple pie. Lattice crust. Deliberately burnt edges.
My grandmother’s cinnamon. Each detail resolved — a photograph developing, and each one made the next harder to breathe through.
“You made apple pie,” I said, and my voice came out strange.
“You mentioned it.” He stood with his arms crossed, expression giving nothing, but his eyes were locked on mine with an intensity that made me feel X-rayed. “Once. A few weeks ago.”
“And you remembered.”
“I was listening.”