Chapter 13
“Good morning, lovers!” TJ boomed as soon as he stepped in the front door some short twenty minutes later.
Before they answered the doorbell, Olivia had found Chuck sipping coffee in the kitchen, still wearing his glasses and barefoot in his pajamas. She’d brushed her teeth and pulled her hair into a ponytail but otherwise hadn’t bothered to get dressed either. Based on the film crew and the makeup and styling team filing in the door behind TJ, it appeared they were in for a morning makeover anyway.
“Why do you keep calling us that?” Olivia sourly asked as she noted the familiar red envelope tucked under his elbow.
“Because, clearly , that is what you are.” He winked at her and held out the envelope.
She took it with a scowl, at the same time fearing they were about to be docked half their prize money for the pantry encounter. “No, that is what you’re trying to make us.” She slid her finger under the seal as Chuck came to stand beside her.
Parker had shown up with a to-go coffee cup in one hand and his phone in the other. Tyler bobbled around shuttling cases of water and a carton of coffee.
“You can’t fight chemistry,” TJ said. “We’re only creating situations encouraged to increase engagement. How you respond is entirely up to you.”
“Spoken like a master manipulator,” Chuck said. “That was a real jerk move having my parents show up unannounced last night, by the way.”
TJ held up a hand. “Uh! Let’s save that conversation for the cameras, shall we? Lots to discuss today. But first, Olivia, if you will.” He flicked his hands at the red envelope.
She pulled out the sheet of paper with a sigh and read it out loud.
“?‘Olivia and Chuck, the production team has found you in violation of the No Physical Contact rule for your indiscretion in the backyard last night, a close-contact cuddling session lasting approximately fifteen minutes. As punishment for this violation, the total prize money for each of you will be reduced by a sum of fifteen thousand dollars.’ Oh,” she said, relieved. “That’s not so bad.”
“Should have been more,” TJ said with a frown.
“It’s an appropriate amount,” Parker butted in. “That moment between the two of you was really beautiful.” He gave them a warm, sincere smile that caught Olivia off guard.
TJ scoffed and stomped off, clearly indicating that they were at odds on the fact and had argued about it.
“Thanks, Parker,” Chuck said, sounding as pleasantly surprised as Olivia.
“You bet,” he said, and then took a breath to reset himself. “Well, we’ll be doing another sit-down interview in the backyard today, so hair and makeup is ready when you are.”
“Sure,” Olivia said.
“Got it,” Chuck echoed.
Parker gave them a nod and then shuffled off with the crew.
Olivia and Chuck were suddenly alone in the entryway without any cameras in their faces.
“You were right about the fifteen grand,” Chuck said, and nodded at the letter she was still holding. “I’ll pay you back for it, like I said.”
“You don’t have to do that, Chuck,” she said with a shake of her head. “I—” Her words lodged in her throat at the memory of the feel of his arms around her, his heart beating so close. “I, um…needed that last night, so it’s fine.”
He looked at her with a soft warmth that nearly melted her into a puddle. “Okay.”
Suddenly drawn to him like a magnet, she leaned in and lowered her voice. “And thank you for the letter. I’m really glad we’re not being punished for the other thing that happened yesterday.”
The corners of his mouth twitched up. He leaned in close enough that his lips brushed her ear and his breath spilled over her like a warm bath. “I told you, there’s a blind spot leading into the pantry. I didn’t only mean there were no cameras inside it. They have no idea what we did.”
His neck was an inch from her lips. She could nearly feel his pulse leaping under his skin. She wanted to kiss it. To bite it. To run her tongue against the vein keeping time with her own heartbeat.
“Are you guys trying to lose more money?” Parker called from the back doors with a clap of his hands. “Come on! Hair and makeup, now!”
They snapped apart like rubber bands, fiercely blushing and flustered.
But Parker was smiling. He walked back inside and squeezed Chuck’s shoulder. “I can only do so much here, kids. Stop self-sabotaging.” He pulled Chuck away toward the guest bathroom and winked at Olivia over his shoulder.
“Are you rooting for us now?” she heard Chuck ask as their voices faded.
“What can I say. I’m a hopeless romantic…”
Olivia softly smiled and turned in the other direction for her own makeover.
Apparently on a tight schedule, the styling crew all but pounced on her. As they dressed her in a canary yellow jumpsuit, painted her lips flaming red, and twirled her hair into a classy low bun, she couldn’t spare a minute to answer Mansi calling her not once but twice. She only managed to glance at a text that said Call me back as the crew guided her into the backyard. What all the rush was, Olivia didn’t know, but she found the usual mini studio set up and Chuck looking less like he’d just rolled out of bed and more like he was ready for a date with a button-down and artfully tousled hair.
They sat next to each other, across from TJ, and let the mic tech wire them up.
“Is there a fire somewhere this morning?” Chuck asked with an awkward laugh as the tech shoved his hand up his shirt.
Olivia glanced at him and surmised he’d been sped through the same frenzied rush of preparation as she had.
“Just a lot to get to today,” TJ said, and straightened his blazer. “Ready?”
Whether they were ready or not, they started rolling.
“Chuck. Olivia. We meet again,” TJ said once Olivia was wired and the cameras were up. “So you’ve made it through your first weekend in the house. Congrats. There have only been a few… hiccups , let’s call them, so far, and it seems like things are going better than anyone expected.” He left a loaded energy lingering in the wake of his statement. Olivia wondered if they were going to pull a gotcha on them and announce they’d known about the pantry all along, but he didn’t go there. Instead, he dove right into the topic Olivia was still recovering from. “Chuck, a surprise visit from your parents last night. Tell us how that went.”
“You know how it went, TJ. You’ve seen the footage,” Chuck said with a frown.
“Well, sure, but I’d like your take on it. Olivia, yours too, especially the reason you ran out on dinner.”
“She didn’t run out ,” Chuck said, defending her before Olivia could say anything. “That was an emotionally charged situation that you sprang on us out of nowhere.”
TJ leaned his elbow on his knee and held his chin like they were heading in the exact direction he wanted. “Seems to be her MO, though, no? Running from such situations .”
Olivia uncomfortably shifted in her seat at the reminder, again, that they’d watched all their interactions in the house, minus the pantry, including every one in which she and Chuck had discussed her reflex to flee emotional turmoil. A feeling of vulnerable exposure burned her face.
“Tell me more about last night,” TJ said with a scheming note in his voice. “Why was it so emotional?”
Chuck folded his arms over his chest. “Because you forced us to tell my parents the truth.”
“About your breakup.”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t they already know?”
Chuck sighed, seemingly annoyed that they were going to analyze everything that had happened. Olivia couldn’t blame him. “Because I didn’t want to disappoint them. They love Olivia and clearly have a lot invested in our relationship.”
“So you lied to them.”
“Yes.”
“The same way you lied to them about losing your job?”
“Yes—and for the same reason, before you ask.”
“Hmm,” TJ hummed thoughtfully. “You’re very protective of the people you care about, Chuck.” He let a silence stretch. In it, Chuck straightened his posture and tugged on his collar. His sudden fidgeting put Olivia on edge.
“Yes,” he said plainly. “I am.”
TJ looked at him with a thoughtful if not sinister purse of his lips. “On that note, how much does Olivia know about the reason you got fired?”
Olivia’s heart shot up into her throat. She hadn’t been present when he’d told his parents last night, so she didn’t know what he might have said on camera.
Chuck fidgeted more. He’d begun to sweat, Olivia saw when she glanced at him. “She knows enough,” he said through tight lips.
TJ considered him again. “Hmm. I don’t think that’s exactly true, is it.”
Olivia froze in fear, wondering if they were going to drop another challenge on them and force him to confess right there on camera or pay.
TJ reached for his iPad sitting on the table, and Olivia bristled. Nothing good ever came from the iPad. “Now, I know you’re cut off from the world in here what with no internet or television, so I think it’s safe to assume you haven’t seen today’s news, right?”
Olivia and Chuck swapped a nervous look.
“What news?” Chuck asked.
TJ grinned a sinister sneer and swiped the tablet. When he flipped it around to a screenshot of a tabloid headline and photo, Olivia’s vision momentarily blurred out of focus from dread. Secrets from the Set , the headline read, and where she might have expected to see another unflattering photo of her and Chuck, she saw Chuck and…someone else.
“What is that?” Chuck asked, and all but lunged across the table to reach for it.
TJ yanked it out of his reach and instead handed it to Olivia. “Something I think Olivia needs to see.”
He shoved it into her hands, and she could not rearrange the shock on her face as she read.
New photos from the set of Safe Gamble emerge in the wake of Chuck Walsh’s recent firing. The disgraced actor who is currently filming an episode of Name Your Price after a video of his breakup with now ex-girlfriend Olivia Martin—notably not the woman in these photos—went viral is seen here with a production assistant identified as Madison Bilton. The timeline of events tells us these photos were taken before the viral breakup video. What exactly was happening on that movie set?
Olivia swiped to the next screen and found three photos that ripped her heart right in half.
The first showed Chuck and a pretty blond girl with silky mermaid hair sharing an embrace. His arm was hooked around her shoulders, and her face was partially hidden behind the swell of his biceps. Neither of them was smiling but rather looked like they were sharing a private, intimate, yet serious moment. The second could have been taken moments before or after the first. They stood in nearly the same position facing each other, except this time Chuck’s hand cupped the crown of her shoulder, and her head tilted back in a laugh. Chuck was smiling, and the sight of it, his easy, gorgeous smile pointed at this stranger, flared a wicked, ugly insecurity inside Olivia.
The third photo was of her from that day on the sidewalk. A still from the fight that managed to capture her looking as betrayed and angry as she suddenly felt.
Her mind shot back to that morning with the banana pancakes, to the name she’d seen on Chuck’s phone. Maddy. She’d thought nothing of it, and apparently, she should have. It had to be this same Madison. Chuck clearly knew her well enough to have her saved in his phone under a nickname.
Her breath had left her along with the ability to say more than three words.
“What is this?” she asked, and numbly handed the tablet to Chuck.
He grabbed it with a frown. She watched his eyes dart over the words and images. They grew wider by the second until a look of panicked guilt swallowed his whole face.
“This is not what it looks like,” he said.
The hackneyed phrase bounced off her ears thanks in part to shock but more so to the fact that the fate she’d been running from her whole life had just sunk its teeth into her like an angry dog.
A scandal. And she was caught in its jaws just like her parents.
TJ leaned forward and plucked the iPad out of Chuck’s hands like a card from a deck. “For the viewers keeping score at home, a piece ran online this morning that shows some pretty compromising photos of Chuck on the set of Safe Gamble looking rather friendly with a production assistant. Chuck, what can you tell us about this? Who is Madison Bilton, and does she have anything to do with the reason you got fired?”
Chuck flinched and dropped any sense of cordiality. “What is this? What are you doing?”
“I’m simply wondering if there’s more to the story here. Those photos suggest that there was something going on between you on set, and—”
“There was nothing going on between us,” he blurted, and turned to Olivia. “Liv, this is not what it looks like, I swear.”
“Then what is it, Chuck?” TJ said. “You lied to your significant other about why you got fired, and now these photos show up.”
“I didn’t lie!” he cried. He reached for Olivia’s hands resting in her lap, but she pulled them away. “Liv, please.”
“If you didn’t lie, then tell us the truth right now, Chuck,” TJ taunted.
Chuck was all but panicking. He squeezed his hands with a pained grimace. “I can’t—I literally can’t! Liv, I swear, they are turning this into—”
“What’s going on, Chuck?” Olivia asked, finally finding her voice but still reeling in shock.
He looked at her like he was being strangled. His brow knit; his lips twisted. Something sat on his tongue ready to explode, and keeping it in was nearly killing him.
“Looks like someone has been keeping secrets,” TJ cut in.
“Stop!” Chuck said, and burst out of his chair. “You can’t do this. Parker, this isn’t—!”
Parker stepped in with a serious look on his face and holding up his hands like a referee. “TJ, this isn’t the direction we agreed on.”
“No, but it’s an interesting one,” TJ said with a mischievous sneer.
“Interesting or not, you know we can’t go there,” Parker said, his hands still raised.
Chuck was pacing and swearing, yanking his styled hair into a mess.
Olivia was completely numb and vibrating with fear at the same time.
Couldn’t go where? Chuck literally couldn’t talk about it? Had Mansi been right that he’d been forced to keep quiet? Most important, who the hell was Madison Bilton?
Her instinct to run, to protect herself from harm, kicked in hard. She popped out of her chair and dashed off toward the house.
“I think we’re already there,” TJ said with an ominous cackle.
“Liv, wait!” she heard Chuck call behind her. And then directed at TJ, “You asshole! Why are you doing this?”
She left it all behind and ran inside for the guest bathroom, remembering that Chuck had scoped it out for cameras. And at least this one had a door with a lock, unlike the other.
When she got there, she shut and locked the door behind her and found Chuck’s stash of products lining the sink. A shower stall stood at one end on the other side of a toilet. Everything was shades of cream stone and green glass. She sat on the closed toilet to keep her legs from giving out and tried to take a deep breath.
Her hands shook as she pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed Mansi. She prayed she wasn’t in the middle of a meeting.
“ There you are!” Mansi greeted. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning. Liv, there’s—”
“I’ve seen it,” Olivia said, suddenly realizing why Mansi had been trying to reach her. It was to warn her. “They just showed me, on camera. I saw the whole thing. The photos, the article. Now I’m hiding in the bathroom and freaking the fuck out. Who is she, Mansi?” She heard the panic in her own voice.
Mansi didn’t miss a beat, surely having already exhausted her resources digging up dirt on Madison Bilton. “She’s an undergrad student at UCLA. Film major. She’s listed as a production assistant on Safe Gamble , but it looks like she left the production at the same time Chuck did.”
The earth fell out from beneath Olivia. As she tumbled, the rational part of her brain tried to tell her there was an explanation for everything, but the self-preserving part, the knee-jerking fight-or-flight part, told her to run from the ugly truth.
Her heart hammered in her chest right as someone knocked on the door.
“Liv? Are you in there?” Chuck called from the other side. He knocked and then tried the handle. “Olivia, please open the door.”
“Are you okay?” Mansi asked.
“No,” Olivia said on a shaky breath right as Chuck knocked on the door again.
“Liv, please . I need to talk to you.”
Her breath grew shallower as the world narrowed to a hideous point. She didn’t want to believe he would hurt her like this. Even more, she didn’t want her pain splashed across the internet, and thanks to Chuck, both things were happening.
“I have to go,” she told Mansi.
“Olivia!” Chuck called again, and pounded on the door.
“Liv, don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Mansi said, clearly having heard him.
“Thanks, Manse,” she said.
“Liv—!” Mansi tried, but she ended the call.
A familiar fire burned in her veins. One she knew talking to the man on the other side of the door would only fan into a full-fledged blaze, but she was going to do it anyway.
She wrenched open the door to find Chuck crowding the doorframe with the camera crew behind him.
“Liv—” he started to say, like he might have been about to step inside with her and lock the door, but she stood her ground.
“Who is she?”
He blinked at her sudden, furious appearance. “She’s…no one.”
She could feel her blood instantly start to boil. “Please don’t insult either of us right now. She is not no one , Chuck.”
He stared at her looking like he would have given up his million dollars if it meant he could not have this conversation with her. “Olivia, please. Just slow down here. They are manipulating us again by bringing this up. They want us to fight.”
“Oh, they’re manipulating us, Chuck?” She shoved her way around him into the hall, suddenly feeling suffocated in the narrow bathroom. The cameras followed on her heels. “You’ve been lying to me for weeks.”
He followed, arguing back, as if it were a choreographed dance. “Olivia, I never lied to you.”
They made their way back to the kitchen, her heels clicking angrily, where she whirled on him and clenched her fists at her sides. “Then you didn’t tell me the whole truth!”
“I couldn’t ,” he said, and flexed his arms and hands like he wanted to pick something up and snap it in half.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means—” He cut himself off with a tortured groan and clenched his jaw.
“Did you sleep with her?” she asked, seeking a truth she didn’t truly want.
“Jesus Christ, Olivia. No! ” he said, and flung out his arms.
The scene fit like an old glove, her glaring up at him and him glaring down while they were at each other’s throats. She could see the vein in his forehead that ticked like a time bomb when they fought. She felt its mirror in the side of her neck.
“Olivia, please see this for what it is,” he came back, trying to sound calmer. “They are preying on our problems by putting us in a position where I can’t tell you the truth about something, which is only making you think it’s way worse than it is. They sprang this on us on purpose. You have to trust me.”
“Trust you? Trust you. After you’ve spent the past week in here making me fall for you all over again only to find out you’ve been lying to me? What’s more, now it’s in the news for everyone to see!” A tearful crack splintered her voice.
Chuck flinched at the sound, knowing how tender that particular wound was given her family’s history. “Olivia, I’m so sorry about that. I will fix it, but you have to listen to me—”
“You can’t fix this, Chuck!”
He reached for her when she turned again. They’d made it to the entryway now. “No, Liv. Don’t run! Don’t run. We can’t let them win.”
But it was too late. The urge to flee was too strong. She slipped out of his grip, tears blurring her eyes and heart hammering. She had to get away. Away from the lies. From the truth. From the same fate that had ruined her parents.
The front door was wide open, left that way by the production crew, and before she knew it, she’d passed through it to the other side. It wasn’t until she heard Chuck shouting behind her that she realized what she’d done.
“Olivia, no !”
She turned and saw him on his knees inside the front door. Pure anguish mottled his face red. He squeezed his eyes shut and held both fists to his forehead like he might tear himself in half.
The production crew crowded the entryway behind him, catching the whole thing on camera. Tyler blinked in shock, Parker looked conflicted, and TJ full-on smiled.
It was the sight of the latter that made her fully realize what had just happened. What she’d done.
The wave that would drown her for the rest of time had only begun to swell when she too fell to her knees, breathless with regret.