Mom folds one of my hands up into both of her own, her eyes shining. “As long as this is right for you, Jackie.” She kisses my hand. “I love you so much, sweetheart.”
I bow my head, blink away a tear.
After a couple of requested reshoots, Priya sends Mom back inside with one of the assistants. Priya gives me this look, like perhaps we are friends or perhaps she is a mother figure to me.
“Jac, that was a really beautiful conversation with your mother,” Priya says.
“Yes, I know,” I answer, dead-eyed.
Priya shifts uncomfortably, sensing her overreach. “You know what I’m going to say then,” she says anyway. When I don’t answer, she goes on, “You should tell Marcus you love him. He’s still worried that your walls aren’t all the way down. It’s a really beautiful moment, seeing you finally able to open up with your mother in a way you can’t with everyone else. It will make the audience understand you better. It’s humanizing.”
“Too bad I’m not a human, right?” I ask. I pick up my drink and walk back into the brightly lit house.
It goes like that, next with my dad and then Austin and Eileen. I stew in what I’ve done, in the mess I’ve made as I sleepwalk through the conversations, and then it’s Marcus’s turn to be individually grilled by my family.
Henry creeps to my side when Austin and Eileen go out onto the deck with Marcus. “What?” I say, feeling him there like a ghost.
He’s barely moving his mouth, whispering to me. “Did you tell your mother you were in love with Marcus?”
I look at him over my shoulder. “Can we talk about this later?”
“Priya is going to lose her shit on me if you don’t say it to Marcus by the end of the night,” Henry says. There’s a layer missing—a layer of manipulation or charm or something. Just the unvarnished truth: Henry and his job.
“Sounds like a personal problem,” I say. “You didn’t bring my dog and you promised you would.” (Shae’s dog was in her hometown. I guess they figured they’d save the moment for the more likable contestant.)
“I tried to talk John into it,” he answers. “But after the incident with Elodie—”
“Fine.” I don’t meet his eye, staring off in the distance.
He lets out a breath, the smell of booze, and leaves the room, leaving me alone. I lean into the cool marble counter, close my eyes, and breathe. I feel someone watching me and open my eyes to see my brother in front of the open back door. Austin is staring down at me, his brow furrowed. He closes the door behind him quietly and comes to stand at the island opposite me. “You don’t seem like yourself, Jac,” he says after a minute. I look away from him, my cheeks coloring. “Are you happy with all this?” he asks.
I swallow down every real thing I want to say. Because I’m miked up, because they’re all here, because I’m always miked up. “I think I could be happy,” I say. “This is my way back from New York.”
“I’m not sure a television show can change you that easily,” he says. “You never give yourself a break. So, you don’t write for a while. That’s fine. You didn’t do anything wrong moving back home.”
“What did you tell Marcus? About me?”
Austin sinks down farther against the counter, a small smile playing at his face. “I told him about when Eileen was studying abroad and Mom and Dad were on vacation and my appendix burst. How you slept next to my bed all night in the hospital. I told him that’s the kind of person you are.”
I feel myself wanting to cry and hold back. This isn’t staged; we aren’t faking it for the cameras but we’re not alone. “What did Marcus say?”
Austin squints, a poor imitation of the way Marcus looks when he is pretending to be genuine. “He loves that about you.”
I laugh. “Shut up,” I say to his unspoken but clear mocking. “I’ve actually done a lot of self-examination on the show.” That part is true at least. “It’s like having all my flaws magnified and spelled out for me by thirty other people or so.”
“That sounds awful,” Austin says.
I glance over at him. “It was.”
“Is this really it?” he asks. “Marcus.”
I close my eyes, take another deep breath. “Maybe.”
Just another thing for me to get absolutely brutalized for when the show airs.
An hour later, we are finally, blessedly wrapping up this charade. My family is gathered back in the den, and I feel the time slipping away, myself disappearing.
Eileen is looser than she was when the filming first started, learning a lesson about alcohol and the 1 that I have learned many times over. Lightly, she says, “So, Marcus, you gotta tell us, what do you like best about Jac?”
The words clearly take him aback. He looks at me as the seconds tick by, and we all see the gears turning in his head. “She’s just”—he grasps, that blank smile still on his face—“she’s laid-back, kind of a guy’s girl. And she’s so beautiful.”
Henry scoffs, and we all look over at him in surprise, my eyes going wide. “That’s it?” he asks. “Not that she’s incredibly intelligent? Her acerbic sense of humor? The fact that she’s by far the most interesting person here?”
Marcus laughs, looking thrilled. “You trying to get on camera now, too?” he asks Henry pleasantly. “You want to ask her on a date?” Eileen’s eyebrows are practically in her hairline as she watches the two of them. Mom and Dad are both looking from Henry to Marcus to me. Fuck.
Henry holds on to Marcus’s bemused gaze for a moment before he says, “That’s fine. I think we have enough here. Sorry, I need to use the restroom.”
As the crew members start resetting us, as casually as I can, I get up myself and follow him. It seems impossible to be subtle after that showing. Henry’s in a dark hallway, his forehead pressed into the wall.
“‘Don’t drink with my dad’ is the number one rule of fight club,” I say. “You still drunk?”
He twists his head to look at me, his cheek then pressed into the wall. “Sobering up. Painfully,” he answers, his pretty face smushed up against the wallpaper. “Need to learn when to shut the fuck up.”
“Don’t we all.”
“I hate this, Jac,” he says.
“What?” I ask, and he glances at my mic, then back at my eyes. He pushes himself off the wall.
