Chapter 10
Proximity
“When there’s only one bed — and he becomes your protector”
SLOANE
Tessa had the decency to announce the Proximity Test with coffee in my hand, which was either a kindness or a strategic choice designed to prevent me from throwing things.
“Twenty-four hours,” she read from her clipboard, her voice carrying across the lounge with the brisk authority of a flight attendant explaining crash procedure.
“One continuous observation cycle. Each remaining contestant will share a confined space with the Queen for a designated window. Cameras in all common areas.” She paused, savoring the room’s collective panic like a sommelier nosing a particularly vindictive Burgundy. “The schedule is as follows.”
The daytime slots were rattled off — Derek’s three-hour afternoon session, Julian’s evening, Mason’s morning — and I registered them how I registered background music in waiting rooms: present, acknowledged, filed under irrelevant.
And then Tessa looked directly at me with an expression that managed to be simultaneously apologetic and deeply, profoundly entertained.
“And the overnight.” She glanced at her clipboard like she was verifying information she already knew by heart. “Rhys Callahan. Ten PM to eight AM. One room. Shared quarters.”
I took a sip of my coffee because it was either that or acknowledge the heat climbing my neck.
Across the lounge, Rhys was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his face set to its default expression of vaguely offended calm — the one that made him look as if he’d been asked to attend a party he hadn’t agreed to in a building that didn’t meet his standards.
He met my eyes for exactly one second before looking away, and in that single second he did the thing — the flex in his throat, the micro-adjustment, the tell I’d spent six weeks learning to read.
And I knew, with the certainty of six weeks spent studying this man’s micro-expressions like a behavioral study, that his composure was as convincing as mine. Which is to say, not at all.
“The overnight,” I repeated to Tessa under my breath as the room dissolved into murmurs. “You gave me ten hours in a bedroom with the one contestant who makes me lose the ability to form sentences, and you’re calling it a schedule?”
Tessa’s smile was beatific. “The algorithm assigned the time slots.”
“You don’t have an algorithm.”
“I have a spreadsheet, which is basically the same thing.” She leaned closer, dropping her producer voice for her best-friend voice, the one that meant she was about to deliver news I was going to need therapy to process.
“The room is on the second floor. East wing. One bed. Before you panic — it’s a queen. ”
“A queen bed for the Queen. Very on brand.” My voice came out steadier than my pulse deserved. “And the cameras?”
“Everywhere except the bathroom.”
“Lovely. So I can have my nervous breakdown in private as long as I’m within six feet of a toilet.”
Tessa squeezed my arm. “You’ll be fine. It’s one night. People survive longer in escape rooms.”
“People in escape rooms aren’t sharing a mattress with someone who smells like poor decisions.”
She was already walking away, clipboard tucked under her arm, a satisfied stride, knowing exactly what she’d engineered and was planning to watch from the control room with a bowl of popcorn and zero remorse.
I saw Derek on the way to the room.
He was standing alone near the stairwell, and for a fraction of a second he wasn’t Derek Hoffman, Professional Charmer, Contestant Number Seven.
His shoulders were curved inward, caved around a weight no one else could see, and his face had done a thing I’d only seen once before — on a contestant during Season Two of a dating show I’d worked on, thirty seconds after he’d gotten a phone call about his mother.
The mouth slack, the eyes unfocused, directed at a point a thousand yards past the wall.
Not sadness, exactly. Absence. Like someone had reached in and removed whatever held the performance together, and what was left was just a man standing in the wreckage of a life no one else could see.
I must have made a sound — a shift of weight, a breath louder than I’d intended — because his head snapped toward me and the transformation was instant.
Mask on, smile deployed, the charm slotting back into place with a speed that made my producer’s brain do the thing it always did when it spotted truth: catalog it, timestamp it, file it under come back to this.
“Sloane.” His voice landed like a hand on the small of your back at a party.
Easy, intimate, pitched to make you feel like the only interesting person in any room.
“Big day. You excited for the Proximity Test?”
“Thrilled,” I said, and my voice was normal, and my smile was normal, and none of it mattered because I had seen the frame underneath the filter.
A man who could bury that much grief beneath that much polish was a man who had practiced the burial until it was art, and I climbed the stairs to the second floor with a chill I couldn’t shake and a mental note I couldn’t file.
The daytime slots passed in a blur of producer duties and performed normalcy — a morning where Mason made me laugh so hard I forgot I was being filmed, three hours of Derek’s calculated afternoon charm, an evening session with Julian’s flawless-and-forgettable courtesy.
All fine. All professional. All completely insufficient preparation for ten PM, when I pushed open the door to Room 6 and understood that Tessa had not been kidding about the size.
The room was an act of psychological warfare disguised as a floor plan.
I’d expected a reasonably sized room — the mansion’s bedrooms were generally built for people whose relationship with square footage bordered on codependent.
This room was a converted sitting room approximately the size of my first New York apartment, which is to say it contained a bed, a nightstand, a chair that had clearly been added as an afterthought, and cameras mounted in opposite corners.
The bed was technically a queen, as Tessa had promised, but it had been pushed against the far wall to accommodate camera angles, which meant one side offered a generous six inches of clearance before you hit plaster.
For a man who was six-two and apparently assembled by someone who believed shoulders should be a commitment, this bed was a suggestion rather than a solution.
Rhys walked in twelve minutes after I did, carrying nothing.
Of course he carried nothing. The man traveled light because the man was light, or at least tried to be — stripped to essentials, unburdened by excess.
He stopped in the doorway and evaluated the room with the same measured attention I’d watched him apply to the mansion’s ceiling joists and, on one memorable occasion, a salad that had personally offended him.
“This is small,” he said.
“Congratulations on your spatial awareness.” I was sitting on the bed because there was literally nowhere else to sit, the chair commandeered by the overnight bag Tessa had packed for me.
Pajamas (the silk set, not the cotton one, because Tessa was an agent of chaos with an eye for psychological warfare), a book I would absolutely pretend to read while actually watching Rhys exist in my peripheral vision, and tucked at the bottom like a passive-aggressive fortune cookie, a note in Tessa’s handwriting: Try to breathe.
He stepped inside and the room contracted — the displacement of air when a man that size crossed a threshold. His skin did the thing it always did, that clean-soap-and-skin scent I’d been mapping since the garden — a sommelier losing her professional objectivity one vintage at a time.
“One bed,” he observed, looking at it with the clinical attention of a man assessing a problem he hadn’t been contracted to solve.
“I believe the technical term is ’forced proximity.’” I crossed my legs and aimed for casual, but casual had taken one look at Rhys standing in my bedroom doorway and filed for early retirement. “You’re either sleeping on the floor or we’re negotiating a mattress treaty.”
“A mattress treaty.”
“I’ll draft the terms. Pillow allocation, blanket distribution, a clearly defined no-man’s-land running down the center.
” I was talking too fast, the verbal equivalent of running downhill and hoping my legs could keep up with my momentum.
“Standard Geneva Convention stuff. No encroachment. No unauthorized body heat transfer.”
Then the ghost appeared of an expression that on anyone else would be a full smile but on Rhys was the equivalent of a standing ovation. “Geneva Convention doesn’t cover mattress disputes.”
“Then we’ll be setting legal precedent.”
He moved to the far side of the bed and sat down, testing the mattress with one hand pressed flat against the surface.
The bed dipped under his weight and I felt the tilt in my hip, a tiny gravitational announcement that the mattress had opinions about proximity and intended to express them all night.
The distance between us was three feet of duvet and all of my remaining self-control.
“Rules,” he said, still looking at the mattress.
“Rules are good. Rules are great. I love rules.”
His eyes came up to mine, and whatever lived in that blue-grey — I was learning to read it through context and repetition and the desperate hope that what I was translating was real. “Clothes stay on,” he said.
“Obviously.”
“No talking about this to production.”
“Agreed.”
“And—” He hesitated, and the hesitation was so unlike him that it landed with its own weight, a disruption in the steady signal he broadcast. “If you need me to take the floor. At any point. I will.”