“Why do you want me to keep this quiet?” I ask, tilting my head to the side as I look up at him. “You hate this job.”
He blinks slowly. “Yeah,” he says after a minute. “No. I don’t know. I don’t hate it. I hate what it makes me. What it makes me feel.”
“Which is?”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, thinks about it, swallows. “Good.”
(The thing I would grow to love and hate the most about Henry was the way he was so easily, effortlessly handsome, and the way he wore that like punishment. Of course he could produce women with ease, the way he only handed out real smiles when you’d done more than enough to earn them, the way he’d tip back a shot of tequila and not even have to ask you to do the same. Everything about him screamed for you to give him what he wanted, just to earn that kindness in his eyes that he withheld from everyone, most of all himself. Henry Foster. Dark eyes and high cheekbones, broken promises and kept threats.)
“Listen,” he goes, “producers have slept with contestants on this show before. Especially in those first few seasons, it was like the wild, wild West. It hasn’t gotten out, but it has happened. We can keep this quiet. We didn’t even know.”
“You didn’t know,” I correct him. “I couldn’t have known.”
He’s staring at me in a way that makes me feel like he’s remembering what I look like without clothes. He’d dropped that intensity, just for a bit, that night, and now here we were and he was in charge of everything that happened to me and I was trying to date another man.
“Will you help me out?” I ask him. “With Marcus.”
He smiles a little. “Of course I will.”
I don’t know why—a memory, an impulse—but my fingers go to my bare collarbone, caressing the skin there softly. His eyes dart to it and then back to mine.
“This needs to be worth it for me, you know?” I say.
“I do,” he answers. He turns back to the door, and I watch him go. “Try to get some sleep, Jac,” he says as he touches the door handle. “I’ll see you later.”
Writers’ Room Private Slack Channel
Anika K. Wright
Bestselling author of In Your Arms series
Am I on mushrooms or is Jacqueline Matthis on the new season of the 1?
Brynn Riley
I write books and shit
girl lmao her publicist told me last month that she was on the new season
C. Duncan
Catch My Love out next month
I KNEW that bitch would do anything for sales!!!
Y’all think it will work?
Annie Kate
Texas Stars at Night, Rhode Island Lights, Last Stop in Carolina
Sorry, who is Jacqueline Matthis?
C. Duncan
This author who got paid a million dollars for her series, which later tanked. One of the sales highlights from her publisher was all about how she was a beautiful twenty-six-year-old ingenue. I used to run into her at parties around nyc but I heard she bolted a few months ago. I am fucking dead that she’s on the 1
Brynn Riley
end of the line, right? I remember when that came out
C. Duncan
It was about this all-female country music group or something? And in the first one, this lead falls for some guy and they have lots of hot sex and then at the end SHE CHOOSES HER CAREER OVER HIM AND THEY BREAK UP
