“I better get back to filming before I get in trouble,” I say.
“Godspeed, Jac,” she says, taking another bite from her sandwich.
“CAN I TALK to you, Jac?”
I glance up. I’m in a corner of the back patio, drinking my whiskey and lounging alone.
“Come on,” Charlotte said to me earlier when she found me in this same place. “You look like a real bitch right now. Loosen up. Have some fun.”
“I am fun,” I returned to her. “This is me having fun.”
“Jump in the pool. Skinny-dip. Anything,” Charlotte begged me.
“Charlotte,” I said, meeting her eyes. “Come on. At least let me be me. That’s all I’ve got in this godforsaken place.”
She sighed and left me alone.
But I guess she’d sent Marcus after me now.
“Of course you can talk to me,” I tell him easily. Before I’ve even finished, he reaches his hand down to me and pulls me up, interlacing our fingers as we walk over to the designated filming area under the cabana. When I go to sit next to him on a wicker loveseat, he instead pulls me gently into his lap.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” I whisper, leaning forward and pressing my lips to his. As I pull away, he grabs my head and pulls me back more aggressively, his grip on me somehow soft but commanding. I take the hint, our mouths devouring each other in a way, to be sure, that radiates nothing but sexual chemistry.
As soon as it’s happening and I’m thinking about it, I know Henry is there. I find myself wondering again and again what he’s thinking.
He doesn’t think about me. Not unless it means good TV. He never thinks about me.
“I needed that,” Marcus says, smoothing my hair back as he pulls away.
“So, you missed me,” I say, leaning my forehead into his. I want this. I can want this.
I want this.
“I missed everything about you,” he whispers back to me, and in the way I sometimes can’t help, I start to wonder about that. What it means. Me—the real me. My body. My face. Who I pretend to be when I’m with him?
Who could miss everything about me?
“How’s the pool party?” I ask him, scooting back into my own seat. His arm stays tightly wrapped around me.
“Well, I just kept asking the producers where you were, which I think annoyed the other girls.”
I laugh, even though the producers know as well as I do that this will only rile the other girls up.
“You do stuff like this back in Chicago?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Sure, sometimes. Summertime in Chicago is the best three months of your life.”
“What do you think we’d do together?” I ask.
“We’d take a boat on the water,” he says. “Then go out to Au Cheval, this cheeseburger spot that doesn’t take reservations.”
“So we’d get drunk at the bar next door while we waited for our table?”
“Exactly,” he says with a laugh. “You’d fit in perfectly.” He kisses me again. Easy. “What would we do down in Charleston?”
I don’t answer for a minute, see myself there. Alone. Stuck. Wondering where to go to get out. Wondering where to go to fit in.
“Pretty much the same,” I say. “Just for eight months of the year instead of three.”
He laughs. “Ouch and also touché.”
“Your family’s in Chicago?” I ask, turning him away from me and my life as quickly as possible. He tells me all about it—about his nieces and nephews and his mom’s Thanksgiving dinner, and Marcus is so sublimely simple and loving and all the things I should be.
All the things I want to be.
Rikki comes to steal him, giving me a wink when she does, which the producers then make her film again.
I head back over to my corner I’d been sitting in before and stop when I see the scene before me. My chair is gone. I give the nearest production assistant the nastiest look I can manage, and reluctantly make my way back to where a group of the other girls are sitting in another cabana.
“Mind if I join y’all?” I ask sweetly.
I don’t miss two of the girls, Kady and Hannah, exchange glances with each other when Aaliyah says, “Yeah, of course.”
“Where have you been?” Kady asks me, twisting around to look at me.
(Once we get further into the season, some of the girls start realizing that just being in my orbit, picking fights, will guarantee them screen time as the producers push them toward me.)
