I swallow. My blood is running hot as I turn away from Marcus, try not to let him see me unwind it all.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. He hears the lie.
“You and I would be a good couple,” he says, pushing himself up from the bed behind me, standing at my shoulder. “We look good together. It’d be worth it for the social media followers alone. If we were engaged for two years, you get to keep the ring, too. You’d sell it and we’d split the cash.”
“You have a talent for casual cruelty that makes me think you won’t be an ideal partner,” I say, still hiding my face as I pull a T-shirt on. “Because nothing makes what you did to Shailene seem okay.”
“Shailene didn’t understand me. She had a lot of shitty notions about relationships and now she’s suffering the consequences of her choices. We’d understand each other, Jac.”
I don’t say anything for a moment, just letting the quiet of the room weigh on me. “I want to sleep,” I finally answer, crawling into bed, still avoiding looking at him, but letting him crawl in beside me, feeling his weight there. The camera crew will be back in three hours to film our morning after; maybe if I close my eyes, I can wake up and this nightmare will be over.
I can’t help but wonder if he’s right. If maybe this ends, and I make the wrong choice. If I thought I saw it all clearly, but Henry was always right there, amorphous.
And then I end up as hollow as Marcus.
SHAE IS VERY composed when she gets eliminated.
The elimination ceremony is outside of Paris because Henry said they’d been given very few days to film in the city. It’s not cold, but cold enough that I’m freezing in my pleated long-sleeve pink gown with its plunging neckline, goose bumps on my exposed skin.
Marcus walks Shae to the car, and then, after another godforsaken staged toast to the final two, assistants take Kendall and me to our own cars. I don’t think we’re going to speak at all until she says, “What do they like about you anyway?”
I sigh, bored. “Who?”
She stares over at me, lips pursed. “Marcus,” she says. “Rikki. Henry.”
I whip my head toward her so fast, I almost pull a muscle in my neck. But her expression is flat; she’s not prying for details about Henry. She doesn’t know anything about it. So, I answer, “Probably that I say what I mean instead of playing fucking games.”
“You take everything so personally,” Kendall says, flicking her nails. “You’re so abrasive and angry all the time, and you do all that while hating anyone who doesn’t fit into the Jac Matthis box of exactly what a person should be.”
“And what is that?” It’s just the two of us waiting for the cars, and I’m wrung out. We both watch each other, waiting for the other to change or apologize or do anything, and we stay the same people in the same ridiculous situation. “Who do you think he’s going to choose?” I ask.
She smiles slightly, closed lipped, and looks over at me again. “What do you care?” she asks. “You’re just here to sell books.”
Goodreads reviews for End of the Line by Jacqueline Matthis
Jane Austen lover4
Not reading this on principal. Jac Matthis is a huge bitch on the 1
Skelly
jac hawking her shitty canceled books on t1
[gif of cartoon fox dressed as a beggar, shaking an empty tin cup]
stealth cow
I was so sick of reading the main character of this book make bad decision after bad decision. She didn’t even have a hard life. The male main character was okay, I guess, and there were a couple of steamy scenes but I don’t waste my hard-earned money to read about petty bitches with ennui issues!!!!! That ending was NOT worth the journey.
24
Almost
Marcus is proposing to you,” Henry says to me as I’m sitting in my cottage in the shadows of the Cévennes. It’s an absurd thing to say in an absurd place, blue skies and snow-topped mountains on a wall of windows in front of us. He’s just walked in, and his voice is dark with a hint of anger behind it. He stands behind me and I glance up, tilting my neck at an awkward angle to look at his concerned expression.
I don’t say anything. Yesterday, production had taken me to a hotel in Chantilly, where they had staged a room for me to meet Marcus’s parents—his dad, in remission from cancer, and his mom. They were seemingly wonderful people, and the whole thing made me vaguely sick. We’d had our last date, a hot air balloon ride with breathtaking views and a picnic in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, and I’d hated every second of it.
I’d been preparing myself for Marcus’s inevitable decision to propose since our conversation in Paris. “I guess he’s calling our bluff,” I finally say, picking up a magazine to flick through. It’s in French, so I am, in fact, just being a bitch.
Henry’s made his way around my chair to stand in front of me. “I don’t think you fully understand what I’m saying to you. This is how the show is going to end. He’s going to propose. If you say no, he’s gonna go rogue. He’d absolutely air out all the dirty laundry. If you say yes, then you’re going to be a celebrity couple. It’ll be a fucking madhouse.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I say, flipping a page. “Probably the best thing for my career, right?”
“Where is this coming from?” Henry asks. I can feel his eyes boring into my skin even as I continue not to look up. He puts his hand on the magazine to stop me. “Do you want Marcus to propose to you?”
I close the magazine and toss it on the coffee table, looking up at him. “Since when do you care what I want?”
He stares at me, confused.
“You’re a producer,” I say. “Produce Marcus into choosing Kendall.”
“You cannot be serious. Marcus is only choosing you because of us.”
