by Archer, Amy
I swallowed. The fact that I’d fallen for him.
But maybe things hadn’t worked out with either Abby or Isabella. I hadn’t seen a lot of reality TV, but I’d seen enough — and enough tabloid headlines in the grocery store — to know that reality TV romances rarely lasted much past the airing of the show. Maybe there’d been a strategic reason he’d cut me. Maybe, I thought, the cinnamon roll turning to cardboard in my throat, maybe he really did love me back after all, and he would be able to tell me so once this was all over.
I shook my head. No. There was no point thinking like that. I stared out across the park at some kids kicking around a ball. One of them was about twelve, a couple of years younger than Ben had been when I’d met him. He looked a lot like Ben had back then.
Without meaning to, my mind flashed on a distant memory that I hadn’t thought about for ages: Ben taking me to hear his dad’s band play at an all-ages club back when we were fourteen, back when we liked each other but hadn’t yet admitted it. It had been an odd night. His dad had nodded at us as we’d sat down at a table near the front, then didn’t look our way again throughout the set. I’d never met him before, and when Ben pushed through the crowd with me afterward, he hardly said hi. There had been a group of people standing around talking to him, and he’d only met me quickly before turning back to his friends.
We’d left soon after that. Ben had seemed upset at first, but then he’d pulled me around the side of a building and kissed me. It was my first kiss.
In my memory, the night had been amazing — sitting nervously beside Ben throughout the show, acutely aware of when our legs touched beneath the table, and then that kiss, which had turned into twenty minutes of making out until my knees felt shaky and we were nearing our curfew. He’d seemed timid prior to that. I’d thought he liked me, but then he didn’t make a move. He would say something that made me think he just wanted to be friends.
But that night, after leaving his dad’s show, he had not been timid. He had grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the alley, and my heart had soared as his lips had descended on mine. The warmth of his body had encased me in the chilly, foggy night, and I wanted more, more, more of him.
He had tasted pepperminty, I remembered, and having never kissed a guy before I had wondered whether all mouths tasted like peppermint. He had pressed into me and then his tongue had pushed between my lips. My own tongue inexpertly felt his, and then he had tugged lightly on my lip with his teeth, and I’d melted.
Now, thinking back on that first kiss, I wondered what his memory of the night was. Had he woken up the next morning jittery with excitement as I had? Or had he woken up thinking about something else entirely, something about his dad? As a teenager it had been easy to shove aside the feeling of unease at seeing his dad ignore him like that, but now, a woman in my late twenties sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park watching kids kick around a soccer ball, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been as easy for him to forget that experience as it had been for me.
I ate the last bite of my cinnamon roll and shook the crumbs out from the waxy paper. Standing up, the heady smell of late-blooming rhododendrons drifted to me on the breeze. This was a beautiful city and I was glad to be home.
I headed toward the bus stop to head toward the restaurant where I’d be meeting the others, and wondered again, Should I live with him? It felt odd after all this time, to go from seeing him after so many years to living together, but then again, it was only temporary, after all. If I got a job at La Joie, I’d need to move to Los Angeles. Even if that didn’t happen, I might move there anyway, where I’d have a better job of getting a developer job at some other perfumery. I didn’t particularly like the fakeness of L.A., but such was life. I just had to soak up all the San Francisco I could while I was still here.
I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early, but Ben was already waiting beside the host stand. He smiled at me as I walked in, and I couldn’t help but smile back.
“You look beautiful,” he told me, and I blushed at the unexpected compliment.
“Thank you,” I said. “You look nice too.” And he did. Ben was wearing a chocolate-brown button-up shirt and dark blue jeans with brown leather shoes. Just like the first time I’d seen him, I was shocked at how he’d turned into a self-assured, self-sufficient man since I’d seen him over a decade ago.
“How are you feeling about the new episode?” he asked.
“Not bad,” I said, and it was true. “This week I’m more excited than nervous.”
“Good. And have you thought any more about moving into my place? I’ll need to put up an ad soon if you don’t want it.”
I hesitated, but at that moment Megan walked in with a hulk of a man I assumed was Mario. She squealed when she saw us, then ran up and gave me a hug. She looked like she had come from work, but Mario was a bit underdressed. He smoothed a hand over his dark, buzz-cut hair as she introduced us. I shook his hand, and Megan moved on to Ben.
“Benny, wow! Good to see you again!” She gave him a big hug too.
At the table, I sat across from Ben and beside Megan, who gave us all the rundown on what was good on the menu.
“Something to drink?” the server asked.
Ben and Mario ordered beers, and Megan ordered a cocktail. “I’ll just have water, please,” I said, glancing at Ben and feeling my face color again.
After we’d ordered our meals, Megan turned to me.
“So you’re a big star now!”
I laughed. “I don’t know if I would say that.”
She talked about how she’d always wanted to be on reality TV and how much she loved various characters from reality shows she’d seen in years past. Having not seen much reality TV, I was lost, but Ben chimed in with comments on a few of them.
“I didn’t think she was as bad as people made her out to be,” he said of one woman who had been made out to be a villain. “It seemed like the show was just edited to make it seem that way.”
“Are you kidding?” Megan shot back. “She was a manipulative bitch.”
I glanced at Ben in amusement. “For someone who hates reality TV, you sure do know a lot about it.”
“I sure do,” he agreed. “I told you my ex was really into it. I’ve seen more of it than I wanted to in the past couple years.”
Meanwhile, Mario had pulled out his phone and had it resting in his lap beneath the table, where he was not-so-discreetly staring at it.
“Mario,” Megan said sharply. “What do you think?”
“Huh?” He glanced up at her.
“That’s what I thought. We’re at dinner, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s a big game!” he protested, not moving his phone from his lap. Instead of staring at it, now he looked around to all of us, pretending to listen, and glanced down only ever few seconds. It was obvious he would’ve rather been elsewhere.
Megan started talking about a new makeup brand she was trying out, and my mind started to drift too. It had clearly been a long time since high school, and we had gone very different directions since then. Still, I was glad to know someone in this city aside from Ben and my family.
“Oh, and you make perfumes and stuff, right?” she asked me.
I nodded. “Sort of. That’s the goal.”
She sniffed at me. “Did you make the one you’re wearing now? I like it.”
“I did,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You should sell it,” she advised. “People would buy that.”
“I’d love to, but that’s not quite the way it works,” I said. “You have to work your way up the ranks at a perfume house and develop something that fits their specifications, as well as a bunch of other guidelines.”
“What sort of guidelines?” Ben asked.
“Well…” I said. “A lot of essential oils are in high demand, and so you can only use small amounts of them. In Europe, for instance, there are limits on the amount of various oils you can use in perfumes now. And more gen
erally, those ingredients are often very expensive, so to keep the costs down a lot of perfume houses use synthetic ingredients instead of real ones.”
Ben made a face. “Ugh. There’s nothing worse than synthetic perfumes.”
Our food arrived then, and Megan started talking about clubs where she’d gone dancing recently.
She shoved a thumb toward Mario. “This one doesn’t like to go dancing, but I have a few girlfriends who are always up for it.” Then, glancing at me, she asked, “Do you like to dance?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Remember when we learned to two-step?” Ben asked, gazing at me across the table. “Back in high school?”
“I do! I was so bad at it!” The memory rushed back to me. “And then after the lesson all these men as old as my dad kept asking me to dance.”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, that’s not the type of dancing I’m talking about,” Megan interjected, and Ben caught my eye for a moment. He was being such a good sport about this, even though I knew he must be miserable among this self-centered chatterbox and her bored, silent-type boyfriend. Had Megan been like this back in high school?
But Ben amiably chatted with her for several minutes about club music and dancing, something I was fairly sure he had no interest in. I was grateful to him for being social and keeping the conversation going despite the hurdles.
When we’d finished eating, Ben leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows in a good-natured taunt. “All right, it’s almost that time again. January, are you ready for episode 2?”
I leaned toward him too, matching his posture. “I’m ready,” I told him. “I feel good.”
Out of the corner of my eye, a bright light flashed through my vision, and when I glanced over a couple of women were taking a selfie beside us.
Megan leaned toward me and asked in a quiet but excited voice, “Do you think they’re paparazzi?”
I laughed out loud. “Megan, I promise you, I’m not important enough for that.”
Back at Megan’s house, we turned the TV on just in time for the start of the episode. I smiled giddily when my own face appeared on the screen in the recap, and Megan, beside me on the couch, patted my leg.
“So come on, tell us who won,” Megan said. “Are you hiding a ring somewhere?”
I shook my head and held up my hands. “I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “It’s against my contract.”
“Oh, contract, whatever,” she scoffed, and the episode began.
In episode 2, the eleven of us all went out on a group date. We’d had a seven-course dinner in a fancy restaurant. Andrew had said it was his favorite restaurant, but I’d never had such an impressive meal. If Andrew and I got together, would this be my life? I’d wondered. It had been the first time I’d considered that I might be interested in him for more than professional connections, but it was a passing thought at the time.
I had a feeling I knew how this episode would go. There were certain aspects of the dinner that had stuck out at me at the time, and they had seemed like obvious choices for the producers to include in the episode.
After we all walked in, the scene cut to Andrew in his confessional. “I’m one lucky guy,” he said to the camera. “But then, I’ve always been lucky.” He winked. Was he talking about his luck at getting chosen to be CEO of the perfume company his father had started? Or did he mean lucky with the ladies, as in ‘getting lucky’?
Either way, I found it an odd thing to say, a bit off-putting. But surely he was nervous. This was still early on in the filming. None of us were used to being followed around by cameras at that point.
Back in the restaurant, we were each served a salad. When the waiter set Abby’s salad down in front of her from the right-hand side, she was shown saying to me in a critical tone, “Always serve from the left.”
“What a bitch!” Megan said. “Who cares? Just enjoy your fancy meal.”
“That’s not what really happened!” I protested. Ben, who was on my other side in an armchair, glanced over, so I told him while Megan kept watching. “She was saying that people have very strong opinions about which side to serve from in formal dining. At the restaurant where she works, her manager insisted on serving from the left, but in European dining, they do the opposite, like they did here.”
The force of my defensiveness on Abby’s behalf surprised me. I liked her more than any of the other contestants, and I’d been glad that she was one of the last few with me. But I didn’t think that was why I was rushing to correct the score. I hated the idea that something innocuous she’d said could be edited to make it sound as though she’d said the exact opposite. Abby had loved the meal, and if the producers wanted to make someone look bad during this dinner, there were plenty of other options.
A strange feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. Dumbing us down was one thing, but trying to change the content of what we’d said was something else entirely. I was just glad that the producers were portraying me as the sweetheart.
The show skipped forward a couple of courses and showed Isabella dipping her shrimp into cocktail sauce and taking a bite. The microphone picked up the audible crunch when she bit in. She made a horrified face.
“What is this?” she’d asked, chewing slowly with the same disgusted look.
“Wait — you peeled it first, right?” one of the other girls had asked, and Isabella had given her a clueless yet somehow still holier-than-thou look.
This was one of the moments I was waiting for. I’d had a feeling this would make it in. I couldn’t help giggling. She deserved it.
On the screen, Isabella was spitting her shrimp out into her cloth napkin in a very undignified way. My shoulders were shaking with laughter.
“Has she never had shrimp before?” Megan asked in disbelief, and I shook my head.
“I guess not!”
Brandi, the gossip lover, had gotten seated on one side of Andrew, and a woman he’d end up eliminating at the end of this episode was on the other. Now, in an embarrassing display, Brandi was trying to feed Andrew some tuna tartare on a cracker, and laughing way louder than the situation called for, as though the whole thing was hilarious and they were having such an amazing time, just the two of them. I rolled my eyes.
The rest of dinner was fairly uneventful. The episode showed Andrew telling us all that we’d be going out dancing after dinner, and Ben turned to me and said in the teasing but kind tone I’d come to recognize from him when he talked about the show, “Dinner and dancing, how quaint.”
“Ugh, that’s so cliché!” Megan said. I frowned. It was a bit cliché, but she seemed to be forgetting that I was actually on the show. I could handle Ben’s gentle chiding — I enjoyed it, even. But didn’t Megan know that her words were an insult to me too?
Cut to commercial break. It was disappointing not to have gotten much airtime yet this episode, though we had a long way to go. I tried to remember what had happened that night. I knew I’d danced with Andrew, had commented on his cologne, but it had been a fairly uneventful evening as far as I was concerned.
“So, like, tell me about the girls,” Megan said while a tampon commercial blared.
“I honestly didn’t get to know them much,” I said.
She stared at me. “Weren’t you sharing a house with them for like two months?”
“Yes,” I said. “And for part of the time, I was even sharing a dorm room with some of them. But…I don’t know, I just wanted to stay away from the drama.”
She gave me a yeah-right look. “No one goes on reality TV to stay away from the drama,” she said.
When the show came back on, there I was. We were in the back room of a bar that the producers had rented out especially for us, with our own band and everything. Andrew asked me to dance first, and the shot cut to all the other women’s eyes following us to the dance floor.
“It was kind of awkward dancing with him in front of all these other women who thought they were in love with him,”
I said.
“You’re telling me you didn’t fall for him?” Megan asked skeptically. “That hair? Those arms? I bet he’s got a huge cock too.”
I blushed and swallowed. “I…might’ve gotten a little swept up in the competition after a while,” I admitted. “But not here in the beginning.” There was no way I’d admit that I’d actually fallen for Andrew.
As I watched us dancing together in front of the band, I thought back on that night, several months ago. Andrew was attractive, there was no denying that. But this was the night that I’d started getting to know him, just the slightest bit. I could see it in my eyes, watching myself on the screen: I was wondering, just the slightest tickle of wonder at the edges of my mind, whether he could possibly hold more interest to me than as the CEO of the company I wanted to work for.
While one of the other women made a snarky comment about us dancing, I couldn’t help it: I pulled out my phone and checked Twitter. “Love her!!!” someone had tweeted. “January looks like Cinderella in that dress,” someone else chimed in. I smiled.
But then the scene cut back to the confessional, an early interview. I’d been nervous back then because this was all so new, and I’d started chattering a little. Maybe this had even happened after I’d had some wine. I hoped I hadn’t said something dumb that would now be broadcast to the nation.
“I want to make perfumes,” I was saying on-screen. “Andrew’s company is one of the best in the world.” I did remember the producer asking me about my career aspirations, and whether I’d been familiar with Andrew’s company before applying for the show. I’d assumed they asked everyone the same thing, and hadn’t thought anything of it.
Then cut to me, later on the night of the dancing. We’d been there for hours, and I was exhausted. Andrew had danced with each of the women in turn, and standing around waiting and watching it all had gotten tedious, to say the least. Brandi had made a snarky comment about how much Andrew had looked like he’d enjoyed dancing with me as compared to the others, and I’d gotten irritated. She’d been petty and rude all night, and I just wanted to say whatever it took to get her to leave me alone.