Just the Girl
Well,” Henry says, walking into my hotel room and closing the door behind him, “that explains why you looked so familiar at the bar. Casting photos.”
He stops behind my door, his black T-shirt, black and blue Jordans, and dark jeans against the white walls of the hotel room, and we size each other up quietly. He’s broad-shouldered, dark-haired, a few inches taller than me. Bronze-skinned, brown-eyed, and radiating a heat that most people don’t, and I’m there, sans makeup, in a bathrobe, and more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life.
Jesus.
“I met,” I say, “with every producer on the 1. They put me through the wringer, and you”—I pointed my finger at him—“were not there.”
“Family emergency,” he says. “On one day of casting. Didn’t they mention it?”
Yes, of course, I thought, of course they had. “Isn’t that just so fucking convenient for you?”
He gave me a look, a look like who-the-fuck-implies-a-family-emergency-was-convenient? “Who has a one-night stand the night before they are joining a reality TV show to get married?” he asks me, like he has a right to be mad.
“Oh, fuck off,” I say. “Everyone does. ‘Get married.’ Spare me.”
“Okay,” Henry concedes. With a quiet kind of desperation, he runs his hands through his black hair. “Okay. This is going to be fine. This doesn’t have to be a thing.”
“You could have just said something,” I tell him. “Mentioned you were a producer on the biggest reality show in the country.”
His eyes meet mine. “There wasn’t exactly a lot of talking going on, as I recall.”
My face goes red. Here I am, thirty-two and single and still doing the same stupid shit I’ve been doing since college. I feel shame rising up in my body. “I asked you, though. I did ask you what you did and you hated it so much, you wouldn’t tell me.” When he doesn’t answer that, I take a deep breath and say, “Maybe I should just go home.”
“What are you talking about? The producers are obsessed with you.”
“They are?”
“Yeah,” Henry says, sighing. “Charlotte thinks you’re hilarious. Keeps saying that you’re going to make amazing television.”
“What exactly does that mean?” I ask suspiciously.
He gives me an assessing look before he answers. “We like to have a stand-in for the viewers. Someone who says what we’re all thinking—that’s you.”
I roll my eyes, secretly pleased. It’s not far off from who I wanted to be when I game-planned with Sarah.
“See,” he says, flashing me a winning grin, “the skeptic giving into love. Just what they like.”
“And if someone finds out what happened between us?”
“Oh, you’ll definitely get kicked off the show. And probably some on-air misogynistic slut shaming, but that’s the 1 in general, isn’t it?” He shrugs. “I might get fired. Depends on how much they value me.”
“What?” I ask, momentarily distracted from my own plight. “You don’t know how much they value you?”
He leans back against the wall, hedging for a moment before he says, “I know how much they valued me a couple of seasons ago.” He shrugs again. “I’ve been told I can get pretty old after a while.”
I give him a cold look. “I can’t imagine why.”
When he doesn’t answer, I groan, turning away from him and going to sit on the bed. “Fuck. This could only happen to me.” I bury my face in my hands, and we both sit like that, in total silence. After a moment, he makes his way slowly across the room toward me.
“Do you . . . want to leave?” he asks, in a way that almost sounds like a test. I look up at him from where I’m sitting.
“I don’t know,” I say after a minute. “I only barely managed to drag myself out here in the first place.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I looked and you were on the ‘might not show up’ list. But you’re here to sell books, right?”
I swallow. “I’m here to fall in love.”
“Right, right,” he says, holding up his hands. “We’re all just here because we love love.” He drops his hands. “Look, I know you need this show.”
I blink a couple of times. “This is all starting to sound very threatening.”
“I don’t mean it that way,” he says. “It’s just in both of our best interests to pretend it never happened, right? That night.”
I’m so exhausted, I feel like something is sitting on top of me, pressing me down against the bed, against the choices I make over and over again. “That’s what we would’ve done,” I say. “We’d have pretended it never happened.” That’s what I always do.
We both sit there, with that hanging between us. It is true, and maybe it isn’t.
“I should’ve known,” Henry says at last. “It’s on me. It’s literally my job to know who the contestants are.”
I raise an eyebrow at the statement. “Maybe you did.”
He looks up at me, startled. “That’s a bold accusation.”
“Yeah, well, seems to me you hold all the power here. Like you said, I confess, I get labeled a slut and sent packing. Maybe they’ll even have Brendan and Becca throw me under the bus in a nice closing scene.”
I see something flash in his eyes then, a darkness I’ve seen before. “Harder to buy books from a slut.” He sees the story this would become, and so do I.
