I don’t know exactly what time it is when I hear the knock on the door (all clocks have been removed from the room for the sake of driving us utterly insane), but it’s still dark outside. I nearly fall out of the bed and onto the floor, I’m so surprised by the sound, but Rikki barely stirs, probably too tired and too cried out to bother.
“If there’s a camera at that door,” I say out loud to myself, “I may be forced to jump out of the window.”
But I open the door, and it’s Henry. Just Henry, looking sort of small and lost without the usual cadre of cameramen and assistants and producers behind him.
“Five more minutes,” Rikki mumbles as she rolls over.
“What?” I ask, leaning against the door.
Henry swallows, his eyes traveling to Rikki and then back to me. “I need to talk to you,” he says.
“Now?”
“Yes, right now.” I lean my head out of the door and glance around the hall. Empty.
“Am I going on a date or something?” I ask him.
“No. Just throw on something. No one else is going to see you,” he says. He’s wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a coat. “Could you make it quick?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay, just a second. No camera is going to pop out, is it?”
Henry shakes his head. “Take the elevator up to Cindy’s.”
“What about getting back in my room?” I ask. I had been informed when we arrived here, much to my absolute horror, that Rikki and I would not be getting cards to our hotel rooms while we were traveling. We were simply not allowed to leave unless it was for filming, unless we had a producer’s permission.
“I’ll take care of it,” he says.
I turn away from him and close the door, already annoyed at his demands.
“Do we have to get up?” Rikki asks me as I pull a sweater out of my bag. Clothes packed for all weather, all occasions in only two bags, as was demanded.
“Not yet,” I say. “I guess they need me for something.” I hear myself lying to her and wince.
“I’m not even jealous,” she says, yawning, her breathing almost immediately slowing back down.
Feeling oddly naked with nothing to take with me from the room but my clothes and myself, and with no mic on me or cameras trailing, I head to the elevator and press the up button.
When I get to the top, I have to walk out through the interior bar onto the edge of the rooftop to see Henry standing there, framed against the Chicago skyline at night, twinkling lights and water stretching out forever, his back to me. I make my way closer to stand next to him, leaning against the glass wall, and he doesn’t turn to look at me.
“It was kind of hard to enjoy with all the cameras around,” I say. The lights are still bright in the skyline, the lake sitting peacefully in the quiet of the night. An ambulance siren blares in the distance and a train rumbles by, and I remember the sound of a city like a lullaby putting you to sleep every night.
Henry chuckles, the vibrations reaching out to me from where his arm is touching mine. “Isn’t everything?”
I don’t answer, and he doesn’t say anything more. We stand like that, side by side.
“What are we doing here?” I finally ask.
Henry keeps his gaze trained on the lake. “Did you have sex with Marcus in the two minutes you were left alone in the hot tub today?”
I wait a beat before I say, “Only a little bit.”
His gaze shifts to me, and we make eye contact. I start to laugh, and then he does, too. Then we are both laughing here on the edge of the world in the middle of the night in Chicago, nothing but two fuckups seeing each other clearly.
“You are going to get destroyed, Jac,” he says to me, still slightly gleeful as we quiet down.
“Ah, yes. Didn’t wait to have sex until the producer-sanctioned overnights. It barely even counted.”
“You’re smart enough to know they kept filming when they left you alone in there, right?” (Strictly speaking, they were only filming a crack through the door—you couldn’t see Marcus or me and you could only hear some splashing noise and whispers—helpfully subtitled—but the implication was enough.)
“Shit,” I say, putting my head down. “I mean, I guess deep down, I knew, but my hormones . . .”
“Yeah,” Henry says, openly smirking now. “I know.”
I bite into my lip, aware of the ease the two of us have so quickly fallen back into. I find something almost distasteful about it, the easy way he slides into my side. The way I want him there.
“I don’t want you to do this to me,” I say, looking over at him as I push a piece of hair out of my face. “Keep manipulating me. Even using these small moments you carve out for us to manipulate me.”
“It’s called producing,” he quickly corrects me. “And you knew what it was when you signed up for it.”
“You kissed me,” I tell him. “Was that part of producing me?”
He looks away from me, out over the city. “I thought we agreed to pretend that never happened?”
“We didn’t agree to anything because you barely spoke to me.” I throw my hands out in front of me. “Everything you do is all part of some scheme of yours, and I keep falling for it. Do you know how much I hate that?”
“I’ve read your file,” Henry answers. “So yes, I know exactly how much you hate it.”
“Fuck you,” I return. “Marcus hates you. You forgot to mention that. That you’re not producing him because he hates you. Because you did the exact same shit to him that you’re doing to me.”
