His hands go under my dress to my bare thighs, and he pushes against me, swinging me around with ease so my back is against the wall, his fingers wrapping around the material of my underwear, pulling them down, and his fingers immediately going into me, so I gasp out, my head leaned up against the wall, tilted up to the blank white ceiling of the hotel room. I let myself go for the first time in weeks. I’m me in the worst ways and the best.
“Come on,” I say into Henry’s eyes, between gasping. “You can do better than that, right?”
He groans, his hands catching up in my underwear abandoned around my thighs and he pulls them off onto the ground until he can hitch me up against the wall, his arms looping around my legs as our skin slides against each other, him so close and then fully inside of me.
The tension doesn’t release but it’s almost like a sigh, like relief, like two bodies that have been so desperate to feel this again since the first time, and we’d been denying it, the way he braces his arms on either side of me and the wall bruises my ass in a way that feels more like reward than regret. We’re drug addicts who’ve given up the sober life, and I can’t believe I ever considered not getting high again.
Henry bites into my shoulder as he comes, lightly, but I still feel the pain, as real as being alive. He drops me, and I slide my feet down onto the floor, exhausted, but his fingers are back, and he works at me until I come, too, finally releasing a shuddering sigh, eyes closed.
When I open my eyes, the ceiling is still blank and white.
I’m panting, and I point in the direction of the bathroom. “I have to—” I start, and when Henry nods, still silent, I pick my underwear up off the floor and go to the restroom and pee.
I stare at myself for a moment in the big, bright, clean restroom as I wash my hands. I touch the dark spot on my shoulder, which will surely bruise. Something to think about when I select my clothes for the next few days.
And I’m already back at it, thinking about the show. Considering winning. Considering winning Marcus.
I shouldn’t be this skinny, I think as I stare at my body. I’m hungry. I’m hungry and I look gaunt, and I’m still a cunt.
Maybe it’s better we all know it.
Back in the hotel room, Henry is sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through his phone. I sit down next to him, our sides touching.
“Hey,” he says, setting his phone aside.
“So,” I say, “this is pretty fucked up.”
“Sure,” he agrees. We both sit there, staring straight ahead, until Henry finally says, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Right.”
“I could . . .” I say, gesturing with my hands awkwardly for a moment. I finally give up and drop them. “Again.”
“So, the thing is,” Henry begins, scratching the back of his neck, “I’m kind of sharing this room with another crew member and if he comes back to the room, and—”
“Yeah,” I say, spotting the issue. So much for torching the place. “Okay,” I say, slapping my hands against my bare thighs and standing up. “I guess I should go then.”
“And by go, you mean—”
“You have to take me back to my room because you basically control every aspect of my life? Yes,” I confirm. He grins to himself and grabs a key card from the mess of papers on his bedside table. We are both walking to the door when I stop. “Henry,” I say. He’s behind me, but I don’t turn around. “I don’t want all of America to hate my guts. I already hate myself too much, okay?”
“It’s just a stupid thing we do,” he says. “We slot people into the roles we think they’ll play. It’s a moving target, storylines change.”
“Mine hasn’t,” I answer him.
Like a chill, I feel him behind me, his lips pressed into my shoulder, into the forming bruise, his hands light on my hips. I close my eyes for a moment, breathe in it.
“You don’t have to keep playing,” he says. His grip on my hips tightens. “It’s not real. Marcus—” But he cuts himself off.
I twist around to look at him, his fingertips still resting lightly on my hips. “What about Marcus?”
Henry drops his hands and looks down at the hardwood floor we’re both standing on, the five-hundred-dollar sneakers he wore while he fucked me, steels himself, then looks back up at me. “He was never going to propose to Shailene.”
“What?”
“He sabotaged their relationship, played it to make himself the victim so he’d get this role. He was never going to propose.”
“That’s because he’s smart. He knew Shailene wasn’t going to pick him, and that kept him from making a fool of himself.”
“Why do you think that?” Henry asks me. “She begged him to stay. She was basically in pieces.”
“Did she sleep with him?” I ask then. “Why would she lie about that if she was going to pick Marcus?”
“Because she was embarrassed. It was none of our business if she slept with him. And for the record, I still have no idea if she did or not. Only the two of them ever really knew.”
“That’s really rich, coming from you,” I say. “When you had Marcus talk about it. And the show sure as shit wanted us to think she slept with him.”
“The fuck I told Marcus to do that. Shailene only agreed to do the show if we promised not to mention anything that happened in the overnight dates. It was private for her. Marcus went rogue. I never trusted him, I made him who he was that whole season, made Shailene fall in love with him, and he used it to do that to her.”
“Listen to you,” I say. “Marcus is who he always was.” But as I say it, I do wonder if he ever has been. I scroll through my Rolodex of conversations with Marcus, my fixation on his physicality.
Maybe Marcus had only existed in my head. I had always thought of him as straightforward, but that was only true about certain things. There was a certain aloofness to him that made me want him to see me, but maybe he had been playing a character just as much as I had.
“I don’t think you believe that,” Henry says, watching me coming to the conclusion he has just laid out.
“Marcus went through a lot.” I can’t help but defend him, can’t help but want to. Until half an hour ago, he had taken up a good portion of my daily thoughts. “His dad had cancer. It was really fucking him up.”
