I stop with her outside the door, crossing my arms defensively over my chest. “Am I in trouble?” I ask her.
Charlotte shrugs. “Should you be?”
The thing that drives me the craziest about Charlotte is that I never actually know how much she knows. I always know it’s more than she lets on, but I don’t know how much more.
She’s an enigma, a mystery, and sure of herself in a way I desperately long to be. Charlotte is there with her life together and her family together and her job together, and she sees right through me.
The oddest thing about this whole experience is how deeply paranoid I have become, how much I have begun to question things I formerly trusted about myself.
“Jac, I don’t have much longer,” Charlotte tells me.
I frown down at her. “Condolences.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “I can’t travel abroad. Chicago is the end of the line for me and this baby,” she says. “That means you’re stuck with Priya and Elodie.”
She doesn’t say Henry, and it bugs me. I don’t want to ask, but now I’m suspicious; he kisses me and now he’s disappeared.
“Aren’t you supposed to destabilize me by just disappearing without warning when I least expect it?”
“Don’t take this personally, babe, but you’re the last person I want to destabilize. Especially not when things are going so well between you and Marcus.”
I want to ask, Are they? but I know they are, feel the proof every time he looks at me. Why am I trying to fuck this up? Everything I planned is working, if not exactly how I imagined it playing out.
“You guys are really pushing this crazy thing, huh?” I say, feeling it always there in my periphery. Like I might snap at any moment, collapse into a puddle on the floor, give up, and they’d need to get the cameras over quick to capture that.
“No one thinks you’re crazy, Jac,” Charlotte says. Then: “Well.” She tilts her head to the side. “Maybe Priya.”
“Priya can’t take a joke,” I mutter, and she laughs.
“Look, we get a lot of contestants who don’t do well in this environment. It’s a lot. The cameras and the other women and just the general idea of spilling your guts when you don’t want to. I get it; I would never do it.”
Yet, she had talked me into it. Was the devil on my shoulder every minute of my waking life.
“I see it from contestants all the time, but rarely do I relate to these girls the way I do to you.”
“Bullshit,” I say immediately, spotting this for exactly what it is.
“I knew you’d say that,” she says. “It’s what I would say.”
“Cut the shit, Charlotte. Make your point.”
She smiles sardonically at me. “You can’t keep half-assing the game,” she says. “You’ve been skating by on chemistry with Marcus and your ass, to put it kindly, but if you don’t start trying, you will go home.”
“Maybe I should,” I say, and her eyes spark with curiosity.
“Do you want to be here or not, Jac?”
“I want Marcus,” I say, a lie that almost sounds true at this point. “I don’t want the rest of it.”
“That’s what Marcus used to say last season,” she tells me. “You two are perfect for each other, and you don’t even know it.”
“I do,” I say. I bite my lip. I want to tell her how I’ve been feeling; maybe it will help me understand it. “When I watched last season, my best friend saw it, and she saw it because she saw me see it. Marcus didn’t trust what any of this meant, and neither do I. Marcus protected himself, and I saw myself in him.
“I wasn’t sure what all this was when I started, but I think I am now. I’m here for Marcus,” I say, the first time I’ve verbalized it and meant it.
“Okay,” she says. “Then I think we’re getting somewhere.” Then she reaches out and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear. Charlotte is tiny, a waif of a woman, but some part of me wants to collapse into her, the way I would Sarah.
I want someone here to see the real me.
“Who am I, Charlotte?” I ask her.
“What do you mean?”
“On this show. To you. Who am I? What’s my part in this story?”
“Jac.” She shakes her head. “Most of that sort of stuff doesn’t happen until we edit. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know who you are.”
I still want her to tell me though. “Sure you don’t,” I say.
“Get some sleep,” Charlotte says, her hand warm pressure on my arm. “Okay?”
“Will Henry be there, too?” I ask, cursing myself the moment the words leave my lips. “After you leave? You said Priya and Elodie. Will Henry not be going overseas?”
She reaches out, gives my arm a reassuring squeeze. “Of course, how could I forget Henry?” She gives me a different smile than the others, one I see something else behind. Recognition, or something like it.
(Not then, I don’t see it then. I see it later. I look back and I see it clearly.)
“Henry won’t leave your side the rest of the way through this journey.”
