“Yeah, well, we’re all fucked now anyway.” He leans his head forward against my shoulder, and I exhale. I knew he couldn’t say it. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Faintly, he presses his lips into the skin there, waiting to see my reaction.
“Yeah?” I reach up, push my fingers into his hair, the barrier officially crossed.
“Yeah.”
“I would’ve left with you,” I say. “After Chicago. It wasn’t real, but it was.”
“I think I knew that,” he admits. “And I couldn’t let it go.”
I sit with that. “But you could’ve let me go?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve been trying, haven’t I?”
“Why Marcus?” I ask him, the question that’s been eating at me since Mexico. “Why is he the one that broke this open for you? After everything you’ve done on this show?”
“Marcus?” He sighs, running his hands through his hair before he begins, taking his sunglasses off as he does so, letting me see his eyes. “When we started filming the season last year, everyone who talked to Marcus loved him, but he wasn’t translating onscreen at all. It took me about a week, but I finally realized it was because he mimicked whoever he spoke to. He could mirror another person perfectly, and that’s why people liked him. He knew what they wanted to hear because he could essentially become them; he was a hell of a salesman. So, I did what made the most sense—I told him to be me. And eventually, toward the end of the season, it got to the point that I couldn’t just tell him to tell Shailene how he felt, I had to instruct him on how he felt, but he was so good at it. At saying my words and making them feel true. Hell, most of what he said sounded truer than anything I ever did. And that really fucked me up. That I could give him my thoughts and he’d be better at being a person with them than I was.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“Sure it is. He was easier for you, too, at first, wasn’t he? And I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand you with him. Then I couldn’t stand me obsessing over it. He took what I gave him and hurt Shailene, and then he was using it on you. It made me sick.”
We look at each other, and I can tell both of us are wondering what the other is thinking, always wondering. Finally, I say, “Why couldn’t you have told me that before?”
“My mom died,” he answers. Something about the way he says it is strangled and it takes longer than it should have before he continues. “You want to know how I ended up with this life? My mom died and I took all my grief and started working on the 1.”
“That’s your big tragic backstory?” I know I sound callous as I say it, but how many contestants has he produced on the 1 with the exact same story?
“You think I don’t know it’s weak? You think there’s a reason I don’t talk about me? The first thing I learned working on the 1,” he says, “is you give anyone a piece of you, they’ll use it against you, so no, I don’t talk about my dead mother.” He takes a deep breath, collecting himself. “Cancer, since you’re wondering. Pancreatic.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, uselessly, too late.
“Me too.” There’s a tic in his jaw as he stares straight ahead. “This woman—this strong, smart, vibrant woman who raised me—wasted away to nothing. I had to lie to her constantly, tell her she looked like she was getting better, and it made me think that maybe lying hurt the person doing it more than the person who was being lied to.
“I couldn’t talk about that, could I? All I could do was be on the set of the 1 and consume other people’s feelings and alcohol until I felt like I was on the edge of real humanity. When I was off set, that was where I had to act, right? But on the show, it was nothing but emotions and projection and—” He shakes his head. “Somewhere along the way, there was nothing else.”
I almost laugh. “Fucking irony,” I say. “You get off on the pain because it’s the only place you let yourself feel it.”
“It’s asinine. To pinpoint my mother’s death as the turning point in my life. The worst part is it wasn’t even the dying, in the end, that really broke me. It was the waiting. I was a kid in school on the other side of the country and drunk and stoned and honestly, sleeping with more girls than I’d ever thought I could sleep with, and then she was sick and I was suddenly back in this godforsaken sun-bathed place. She was always dying. She used to cry every night, saying she wanted to go home, back to Malaysia, and she’d stopped speaking English, so I couldn’t understand her, which is a fun mix of pain and shame. Her hair fell out and I had to give her baths and I became numb to seeing her naked or shitting herself or to my dad drinking himself to death instead of helping. I even taught myself to cook pan mee, like she loved before, and she’d get a couple of bites down, smiling at me, telling me what a good son I was, and then throw them back up. She knew she was dying and I knew she was dying and she was ready to go but she couldn’t. She stopped eating—that was two fucking weeks before the end. Stopped drinking. Stopped speaking. She was still alive, but there was nothing left, and that was somehow worse. Because what if that was all that was left of her when she went to the next life? That isn’t fair.”
He rubs his free hand against his face, almost clawing at it, leaving dark red marks behind on his skin. I see him doing that in my mind’s eye, twelve years ago, on another sunny beach, all alone. I grab his hand before he draws blood, and it flexes around mine. “It’s easy,” he says, “to give them what you’re feeling. It’s easy to tell them, ‘Hey, remember when your grandpa killed himself? Did you ever stare at your skin so long, you considered carving it open to see if there was still anyone inside?’ And then pretend that thought has nothing to do with me, was always theirs.”
The silence lives and breathes between us in a way it feels it must. I feel my pulse, quick against his where our hands are touching, where he’s holding on like he’s afraid I’ll let go.
I take a deep breath. “It was you,” I say, the realization sinking in. “Marcus’s speech about his dying dad. You fed it to him.”
He shrugs one shoulder, embarrassed. “I saw him, and he talked to me about his dad’s cancer until I almost couldn’t breathe because I was right back there again, reliving my mom’s death. I was so sure I could make things better for him than they had been for me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask him. I grasp his hand, digging into it as he digs back into mine. He meets my eyes. “You knew what that made me feel about Marcus, and you just let me believe it was all him? After everything?”
“Would you have believed me?” he asks. “There’s no big answer I’m going to give you that’s going to make you okay with who I am.”
“That wasn’t the right thing to say,” I say.
“No,” he returns. “I didn’t think it was.”
“Okay,” I answer.
“You’re right, you know,” he says. “About me. I turn it on and off. Love? I guess. I don’t know.” He doesn’t look at me; he wants me to say it for him, and I can’t.
I move on the sand, in front of him, straddling his legs, on my knees. His fingers slide into my hair, pushing it back from my face.
“Why?” he asks me.
“Because—” I swallow. “Because my heart aches whenever I see you.”
His mouth captures mine without further hesitation, his hand sliding up under the back strap of my bikini. I push myself against him, hovering over him. There’s something different in it, something open, a nexus crossed. His fingernails skim across my back, not enough to break the skin, but reminding me of when he sank his teeth into me in Chicago.
He climbs up to meet me, his pulse racing under my fingertips, his other hand sliding into my bikini bottoms. His fingers instantly finding the most sensitive spot, expertly, easily bringing me to him, distracting me from his mouth, working in and out until I’m gasping.
“Don’t come yet,” he whispers in my ear.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I manage to return, but still, I let him change the playing field, my back against the sand as he presses me down, his tongue trailing from my belly button to just above my bottoms before he slides them off, licking the water off my skin. His shoulders press into my thighs as his tongue flicks into me, more heat, more humidity. I press my hands into his bare bronzed shoulders, curling them, digging fingernails in until I draw blood and come, my body shuddering against him.
He lays his face against my stomach as I pant, recovering. I get in a couple of breaths and can’t imagine stopping, can’t imagine ever stopping, tugging at his hair, commanding him to climb me, and then, flipping over, taking him back into my control, sliding his swim trunks down past his hips all the way off, exposing his erection to me. I touch him first with my hands, all of him, and then take him into my mouth, licking the full length of him before I wrap my mouth around him, his body tensing all around me. “Don’t come yet,” I say, grinning up at him when he starts squirming.
He closes his eyes, head against the sand. “Come on,” he breathes out.
He comes up to me, chest-to-chest, greedily tugging my bathing suit off. “This is a public place, Jacqueline,” he whispers to me.
