Who is Marcus? I think, an annoyingly invasive thought. Who am I?
And who the fuck is Henry Foster?
I hate the way I’m overthinking, especially when I’m dry humping Marcus and I like dry humping Marcus. Henry isn’t even here. He’s somewhere else, somewhere in this building, and I am here.
I pull back, and Marcus’s eyes go to mine. “You good?” he asks, and that’s another thing to like about him, to want about him. That he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. I lean back, sitting next to him on the hot tub’s bench seat, and he puts a comfortable arm around me, in the casual way you would someone you care about.
“How’s it going with the other girls?” Marcus asks me. We’d had to shed our mic packs for this little jaunt in the hot tub, and now a man is standing in front of us, holding a boom mic. If I hadn’t gotten so used to it by now, it would be weird, but my life has ceased being my own and I’ve been a willing participant.
“Well,” I say, taking a long minute to measure my words, “I’m glad to be out of the house.”
Marcus nods and swallows. “Andi says you’ve been having some trouble with some of the other girls.”
I turn to face him, resting my cheek in my palm. “Trouble?” I echo.
“Sure.” He shrugs. “She made it sound like you were mocking Hannah when she got sent home. Like, implying you made it happen.”
“I—what?” I ask, genuinely confused.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “It sounded like she maybe heard it from . . .” His eyes flick to Elodie, his face saying everything he can’t manage to get out of his mouth. “Maybe she heard it secondhand.”
“So, Andi wants me gone?” I shrug. “What the fuck,” I say, exhausted of it all at last. “I’ve never done anything to her. Jesus Christ, what does this show do to people?”
“Hey,” Marcus says, holding up his hands. “Remember I’m the villain of last season. People can really push you into shit on this show.”
I glance at the cameras, and then decide, Fuck it. “Henry?”
“You too?” he asks with a conspiratorial grin. “Yeah, avoid that prick like you avoid the plague.”
Janelle interjects: “Can we please get back to the date?”
“No,” I say stubbornly, “I’d like to have a conversation with the man I’m dating,” I say, making eye contact with Janelle.
Janelle gives me a sour look, but I turn back to Marcus, who seems even more pleased with me. “Please elaborate.”
Marcus just shakes his head. “You know how he does. I thought we were friends. Thought he had my back. Idiot. Then he started sabotaging me with Shailene. Getting in my head, telling me I needed to tell her things I had no business telling her. Convincing me I had to talk to her on camera about us having sex. Making me think I had to do things I didn’t want to do. He’s good at that.”
I lean in closer. “He plays so easy. You want him to like you.”
“Yeah.” Marcus tilts his head down, smiling at me, nodding. “And then he does whatever it takes to make you blow it up. I told them not to let him near me this season.”
“You know what?” I ask, so close to Marcus now I could tear into him. “All I’ve heard is how much he fucked up last season. What is that about?”
“Enough,” Janelle cuts over us. “We need to wrap this up.”
“We’re in trouble now,” Marcus says, leaning down until our foreheads are touching, our eyes aligned, and something about acknowledging Henry so openly has given him less power here.
Marcus hates Henry, and now it doesn’t seem quite so hard.
I lean back into Marcus’s mouth, my hand sliding up his cheek, and he hitches me back up to straddle him. “Okayyy,” Janelle says. “We get it.”
But we ignore her, Marcus’s hand sliding up my thigh, teasing at the line where my bikini hits my skin, his thumb sliding under it. It is almost physically painful to feel his erection right there below me and not be able to do anything about it. I devour him, press against him as much as they will let me.
“So, like,” I say, freeing my mouth for a moment and glancing over at Janelle, “can we get five minutes alone?”
She stares back at me, her gaze hard. “No,” she says.
Marcus’s mouth presses into my neck, and then he lays his head on my shoulder so he, too, can stare over at Janelle.
“Please?” he asks. She gives him a fond look.
“Two minutes,” she finally says.
Then, miraculously, they clear out. They fucking leave.
It goes off like a rocket. I grab on to Marcus’s hand and push my bikini bottom to the side, letting his warm palm dig into the skin there. “Fast,” I whisper to him, and his eyes dilate with the realization of what’s happening, him touching me and me biting into my lip to stay quiet.
I grab his hips, hurriedly guiding him to sit up from his bench seat, pushing his swimsuit bottom down to expose his body to me, hard and sculpted and so gloriously beautiful, and we awkwardly maneuver over so my knees are pressed into the bench, and he pushes himself into me then for one-two-three glorious seconds, and then we both startle apart with a knock on the door.
Just the fucking tip indeed.
Briefly, I think of the recklessness of the decision. But we were all STD tested before we were allowed on the show (Charlotte told me about once having to tell a contestant they had been removed from the cast list because they did in fact have syphilis), and I’d had an IUD put in a few years before. I’d done worse.
Burying my face into Marcus’s chest, right where his heart is pounding, I laugh lightly against his skin as he pulls his swim trunks back up and I straighten my bikini. That was almost worse than nothing, and by the way he swears under his breath, I suspect Marcus feels the same way. My lust only grows.
“It’s you, Jac,” he suddenly whispers then, his voice in my ear again, making me shiver. “It’s you.”
