team true love true stars mod
Ok shutting this down, it’s getting too nasty in here
12
I Miss You
Filming starts at 7 a.m. the next morning.
The fewer girls there are, the more brutal the schedule gets, the demands for us to be on camera at all times—if not on dates or with Marcus or in ITMs, in girl chats, talking about Marcus and who’s trying to take Marcus away from us and how much we’d like for Marcus to meet our families and all of our insecurities as they relate to Marcus.
Even Marcus must be exhausted of himself at this point.
Henry meets me outside of the hotel first thing in the morning, and he’s right there like nothing happened and now we’re here and everything is fine, he hardly shoved his tongue down my throat at all. I only had to spend ten minutes in the shower masturbating and that’s just great.
“How’d you sleep?” he asks me.
“Better than Kendall,” I say, because she looks ghastly. I see now why she’s attempting to sleep so much.
“You might want to stop feeding the beast,” he says, and I glance at him out of the corner of my eyes. I’m miked, of course. I’m always miked.
“Isn’t this great for you? Heard you’re cleaning up this season.”
“C’mon, Jac,” Henry says as we get in a car with Rikki, who is listening to the two of us intently. “We’re friends today, right?” He gives me a smile that we both know isn’t a real smile as he slams the car door.
I hate it, the way I wonder what it means. I’m used to a certain ease when it comes to men, not necessarily understanding them, but knowing what they’ll do and when they’ll do it and how. That’s how Henry had been that first night, but this is still happening and he is still here and he kissed me, but now there is nothing.
So, I try. “I told Charlotte I’d start playing the game.”
That finally gets his attention. He looks fully away from his phone and over at me. I have on one of my favorite outfits, high-waisted, wide-legged white pants with a purple crushed velvet cami top, my hair in a ponytail like that first night, and I can’t help but wonder if he notices. “Why?” he asks.
“Because I want to be a good girl,” I say, and he blinks at me, slowly at that. I don’t know what I’m trying to do; get a rise out of him? Piss him off? Please him?
“I can work with that,” he says, turning back to his phone.
We drive through the city streets of Chicago to the Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s an area of nice bars and million-dollar Greystones that I’d heard called Viagra Circle due to the common occurrence of rich older men with high net worths looking to pick up much younger women. We finally get out in front of one of the classic Chicago pizza spots, Lou Malnati’s. I’ve practically burned a hole in Henry’s hands, staring at them as he typed away on his phone throughout the car ride, his nails immaculately clean. He’d touched me with those hands two days ago. But I had to let that go.
I had to let it go.
“Are you okay?” Rikki asks me as we sit in the car together, waiting to be told what to do next.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe? It’s probably just the travel.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “The jet lag is killing me.”
“Mm-hmm,” I answer, distracted.
After an absurdly long hour of waiting (always waiting), we are ushered inside the deep-dish pizza joint and informed the eight of us on our group date (Eunice and Aaliyah had one-on-ones that week) will be making a pizza, and—guess what—Marcus will be there to help us out.
I spot Marcus watching me and wave at him. He waves back, and I hate how much I want that little moment of affection. I don’t look at Henry, but I do think about how he’s the kind of person who would never give me that, who would always have me begging for the scraps of his attention because that’s the kind of man he is, I can see it so clearly.
Marcus and the random guy from the pizza place tell us that each of us will be making our own pizza with the help of the Lou Malnati’s experts and with some assistance from him.
“I need to see which of you can be the most authentic Chicagoan,” he says with a shit-eating grin. I almost feel in on the joke with him, at how ridiculously we must contort ourselves to explain these dates.
Each of us is given our own workstations and instructions. I am trying to play along with it, but I can’t concentrate. I go over to Rikki’s station and am absolutely amazed by the catastrophe she is creating. It gives me an idea.
I go back to working on my own pizza and, making a big show of it, spill marinara sauce all over my prized top. It’s minorly hilarious and they make me film an ITM with Elodie, making fun of myself.
“Would you say,” Elodie asks me, “that making a pizza together shows a lot about how you would make a life together?”
I blink, stunned for a moment. Production loves to feed us lines that fit their narrative, but that was an all-time bad one. “Really, Elodie? You want me to say that?”
She laughs at my clear disdain. (When the episode airs, Andi says it word-for-word. Then they show my marinara spill in slow motion three times in a row, highlighting exactly how fake it looked.)
“We got you a T-shirt to put on,” Henry tells me when I finish my interview, offering it out to me. “One of the production assistants can take you to the back to change.”
I hate the new production assistants, not because they’ve done anything, but because I’d just gotten used to the ones in LA and now they’re gone. Now there’s even more people I don’t know, even more instability.
“Let’s not wait,” I say. “I’m tired of waiting. Just go with me.”
He knows what I’m saying, and he acquiesces, even though I can tell he desperately doesn’t want to.
We make our way into the back of the building, into the kitchen with the giant industrial sink and dishwasher. I pull up the back of my shirt so Henry can take my mic off, his fingers caressing my bare skin as he hands it to me.
“Is it off?” I ask.
He steps away from me, giving me a long look. “Yes.”
