And it’s exactly what I’ve always suspected about myself.
But, somehow, it’s the last comment that really stuns me, hits me where I don’t expect it. It says: Jac Matthis thinks she’s special, so make her feel special.
And I know that handwriting. The way the o is a perfect circle and the k never actually touches. Just like the note he wrote me by the pool.
Henry wrote it.
Hatefully, I feel tears welling in my eyes as I snap the binder shut and throw it across the room, tearing my face mask off. I feel fury possessing me. I am so angry and so stupidly hurt. I’m still the same old me I’ve always been, a bitch who is bad at people, and now a million people across a million households are going to hate me, and the worst thing is, I didn’t even see it coming.
Some chance to start over.
I was supposed to be the down-to-earth girl—the one guys wanted to fuck and girls wanted to hang out with—but I never actually was, no matter how hard I tried. I was always the one trying too hard and pissing everyone else off.
I leave the room, let the door close behind me and take off. The room numbers are burned behind my eyes just like every word about me. I’m at his door, and I’m banging on it, and if he doesn’t answer, I don’t know what I’ll do, I don’t know who I’ll become.
Henry answers the door. I burst into tears.
“Jac?” he asks, then he grabs on to me and pulls me through the door, closing and locking it behind him. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and I wonder if he is barely resisting the urge to go get a camera crew right now.
What do you think of me? I might ask him if I could get the words out. Am I someone worth loving?
Of course not. I never had been.
I shove away from Henry, a late-arriving instinct, and he holds both hands up in surrender. “Dare I ask how you found my room?”
“The cunt,” I say, hiccupping around my stupid tears. “The cunt! From the very first day, that’s who I was to all of you.”
Henry’s eyes go wide. “How do you—”
“You’re not even going to deny it!” I scream. “What the fuck did I sign up for? Who did I sign up to be?”
“Jac,” he says. “Listen.”
“I’m done fucking listening to anything you say. I know what you think of me. God.” I bury my face in my hands. This is what they want. This me. I’m a bad person and an unstable person and an unlovable person. “What is the point of all this? Why?” I beg him.
“Jac,” he says again, and he moves forward, his hands wrapping around my forearms. I try to pull away from him, but he holds on to me until I’m looking up at him, his dark brown eyes on me. “Look at me. Talk to me. Fuck this show.”
I blink, a tear creeping down my cheek. “Why should I believe you? ‘Jac Matthis thinks she’s special, so make her feel special.’ You think I don’t know who wrote that? How did you see that? How?”
“I wrote it because I wanted it to be true. I wanted to treat you like any other contestant,” he admits sheepishly.
“I’ve been trying to hide for so long and you expose me in one fucking sentence, Henry.”
His fingers are still wrapped around my wrists. “It’s just a piece of paper. It’s not you.”
“It’s what you think of me,” I say. I’m crying again or I never stopped crying. “What they all think of me. That’s my story. The cunt. That’s all it’s ever been.”
“Hey,” he whispers, his hand going to cup my cheek, where I’d opened up everything, spilled it out for him. The thought keeps racing through my mind like a high-speed train: It worked. Everything he did worked. “Remember when we met?”
I did. Two seats down from me at an overpriced bar in Santa Monica. I’d thought almost nothing about him, even though everything about him was appealing, a man perfectly designed to hit all of my weak spots.
“You wanted to fuck me,” I say. “Just like Marcus.” I avert my gaze, and his hands don’t leave my face. “Shit,” I mumble.
“I thought, I’ve never wanted a person so much. I’ve never wanted to stare at a woman so long.”
“You were engaged to a model, Henry.”
“I thought this woman sees straight through me, and I was so sick of me.”
“I didn’t see through you,” I say. “I just said whatever I thought would get us in bed fastest.” My skin is still warm where we’re touching.
“I’d torch this whole building to be back there, to forget all of this bullshit,” he says. “You’re so smart and so scared of yourself and everyone else when you don’t have to be. You still haven’t figured that out yet.”
I look back up at him, through my eyelashes, stuck together with tears. “You’ve been wanting to burn everything down since the first time I set eyes on you.”
“Finally caught up,” he says, flicking a tear away with his nail, “have you?”
“Are you producing me?” I whisper to him then.
We’re so close. We could crawl into each other, and we should, I would. He says, “Depends on if it’s working.”
I push myself onto my tiptoes and kiss him, frenzied and fast. Love me, I beg with my mouth and my body. Love me. Please love me.
“Okay,” he says, and I know I’ve said it out loud, desperate and disturbed, and he’s agreed to it, so I’m not sure which one of us is worse.
We both stop, and we stare at each other, like the absolute fuckups we are. This time, we know we’re completely crossing the line in a way neither of us can take back, professionally or emotionally. We decide at the same time we’re okay with that.
I push Henry back against the wall of his room, next to the entertainment console (where he does in fact have a television), my fingers going to the buttons of his jeans, pulling them down, my hands finding him hard, and he sucks in a breath at the cool touch of my skin.
