by Julie Murphy
Stacy, Addison, Chloe, Beck, the rest of the crew, and I all gather on the deck of the main house for an epic buffet. It’s the best food we’ve had since the start of the show—tamales, flautas, gorditas, street tacos, every veggie you can imagine from fresh pico to grilled cactus, and rows of fresh fruit carved in the shape of flowers.
“Trust me,” Beck whispers, “we’re eating way better than those two.”
Despite Addison’s permanent scowl, the evening is delightful. The crew takes turns telling stories about former contestants, and there’s everything from the woman who pooped her pants skydiving to the man who was scared of worms. Some mention Erica and how she used to live on set in the early days. They tease her in the way you can only tease someone who you simultaneously fear and admire. Even though I can’t let on how true all their stories and memories ring, I still feel a twinge of pride at simply knowing her.
After dinner, Stacy and I each take a mango on a stick and kick our sandals off before settling onto a beach bed.
Behind us, the drunken crew sets up a karaoke machine, and their songs and laughter bounce off the water like skipping stones. I have to think that the villas are a sort of celebration for them after slogging through the rest of the season.
“Can you keep a secret?” Stacy asks the moment we’re settled.
“My five favorite words,” I tell her.
She downs the rest of her margarita and plants the cup in the sand before leaning back onto the beach bed. “My ex has been watching the show.”
“How do you know he’s been watching?” Though what I’m really thinking is that I’m pretty sure everyone’s exes are watching.
“She.”
“Oh, sorry, I just assumed,” I say, feeling incredibly foolish.
She leans her head toward me and takes a bite out of her mango. “I like who I like, and just FYI, if you weren’t totally in love with Henry, you’d totally be my type.”
“Wait, wait, wait, I have so many questions, but first off, I think if I were in love with Henry, I’d know.”
She gives me a look that says she’s not willing to contest her point.
“Fine,” I say, “we can hash that out later, but first, can we go back to how exactly you know that your ex is watching the show? Do you have secret ties to the outside world that you’re keeping from me?”
She laughs wildly. “I wish my life was that scandalous.”
I cringe a little. If she only knew.
“No, she got wind from some gossip blog that we were headed to New York for filming, and she took the overnight train from Chicago to New York and showed up at our hotel the morning of the fashion show challenge.”
“Ho-ly sh—”
“I know. I was a little bit freaked out but also weirdly endeared by the whole thing. Who doesn’t love a grand gesture?”
“How did she even find you in the city?”
“Her brother is a concierge at the St. Regis. There is not a New York City question he can’t answer or find the answer to. Admittedly, as a librarian I find concierge back channels deeply sexy.”
“That is so very specific.”
“Mmmm.” She moans dramatically. “That sexy, sexy information.”
I nearly choke on a chunk of mango as I snort out a laugh. “Okay, so what exactly did your ex say?”
“She said she’ll be waiting.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, when we left this morning, she was still in my bed.” She bites down on her bottom lip.
I gasp and shoot up right to my feet so I’m hovering above her, standing on the beach bed. “Stacy! You naughty, naughty librarian!”
She hides her face in her hands, and her squeal of excitement turns into a groan.
I sink back down to my knees. “Are you freaking out?”
She nods wordlessly.
“Does it feel like your insides are screaming?” I ask like a doctor listing off possible symptoms.
“God, yes. And the thing is, I haven’t gone on a solo date yet. Chloe hasn’t either. We’re definitely the next to go. Top three is without a doubt you, Sara Claire, and Addison. But I just didn’t want to be the girl who left because of her ex. The internet would slut shame me the same way they are doing with Anna.”
“Oh no,” I say. “Did your ex say if it was bad?”
She nods. “Taylor said the Twitter buzz was harsh.”
Selfishly, I nearly ask her what she’s heard about me. The bits of information I’ve received from Beck have only made me hungry for more, but Stacy is a woman in crisis.
“Anyway,” she says, “back to you and Henry. It’s pretty obvious that you two are all moony for each other.”
I make a scoffing noise. Nothing here is obvious. Trying to decipher who has genuine feelings and who doesn’t is harder than scoping out a fake pair of Louboutins from two blocks away. Even Addison, who is absolutely batshit, might be acting the way she is because she’s lovesick. There’s no way to know for sure.
“Did you hear Sara Claire on the way here?” she asks. “She sat there the whole time making a pros-and-cons list, trying to talk herself into falling for Henry. He’s not even her type!”
“How do you know her type?” I ask. “Her type could be Stanley Tucci for all we know.”
“Actually,” Stacy says, “Stanley Tucci is everyone’s type.”
I nod in solidarity. “Amen.”
“But really, Sara Claire’s type is a guy who grills. And wants to take care of a pool and wears cowboy boots with tuxedos.”
“Henry probably owns a grill,” I say.
She arches a single brow. “But does he introduce himself as the grill master to guests? Important distinction.”
I shake my head. “No, definitely not.”
“You two make sense.”
Thrill pulses through me at that. Henry and I could make sense. Someone else sees it.
“It’s, like, the most fashionable happily-ever-after. TV gold and IRL gold. But that’s not what’s important. Do you like him? It really seems like it.”
I lie back on my side and face her with my hands tucked under my cheek. “I…sometimes I feel like I don’t even know him, and other times I feel so in sync with him that I could predict the next word out of his mouth. But when we’re…” I hesitate for a moment before deciding not to tell her we’ve been alone together. I know I can trust Stacy, but being on this show has me feeling like I can never be sure of my footing. “When we’re simpatico, it’s like when you meet someone new and you should be freaked out by how much you like them, but you’re too in it to care.”
“What would you do if he proposed at the end of all this?”
It’s a possibility. And happens more often than not during the finale. I can’t imagine saying no, but I can’t see myself saying yes either. Everything around me seems to be shifting. I graduated. I moved. Erica moved. I was creatively blocked for so long, and I can feel something in my brain becoming slowly unstuck. Like all this frenetic movement has forced something loose. And now this new possible future with Henry and a real chance for us to get to know each other in the real world.
But despite all that, there’s some kind of hesitation in the pit of my stomach. A shadow of guilt for moving on to this next phase of my life without Mom and Dad. In many ways, college felt like an extension of high school, but that’s gone now, and I’m not a child anymore.
I shake my head finally. “I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want it to end.”
“Oof.” She laughs.
“Oof is right.”
After Stacy has a few more drinks and accidentally tries to go into Addison’s villa instead of her own, I decide to walk her to her door and say good night.
As I’m walking back, I see the camera crew clustering around two silhouettes on the beach in the distance.
Deep down, I know what Stacy said about Sara Claire having a type isn’t completely true. She could have said all that just to make me feel better. Still, I
feel more confident, like maybe this attraction is shared and not just one-sided. Even now, seeing Henry and Sara Claire on their romantic date from afar doesn’t give me the gut-churning feeling I expect it to.
Back at my villa, I find my duvet turned down with a piece of dark chocolate waiting for me on my bed. Definitely beats the barely two-bedroom apartment Sierra and I shared for two years.
I try getting ready for bed, but I’m too restless to sleep, so I start the water in my outdoor tub and order a drink from room service.
I find a lavender bath bomb and throw a T-shirt on to answer the door. I sit perched on the edge of my bed, waiting for my room service to arrive, but a few minutes turns into fifteen and then twenty. The bath is full, and since I’d hate for it to get cold, I leave a note wedged into the door that reads In the tub, please leave drink here. This moonlight bath is more luxury than I’ve experienced in a very long time, so I think I can handle skipping the fruity drink.
Outside, even though the outdoor shower and tub have a large vine-covered partition protecting me from unwanted onlookers, it’s still a shock to my senses when I strip out of my underwear and T-shirt. I know that no one can see me, but that doesn’t stop me from undressing and hopping into the tub and under the milky bath-bomb-infused water as quickly as I can.
I scoop my hair into a loose ponytail and lean back to take in the starry view. The quiet is so deeply comforting. I let the heaviness of it sink into my bones as I try to find some kind of peace in all this uncertainty.
My thoughts circle back over and over again to my conversation with Stacy. If Henry asked, would I say yes? I don’t know. I don’t know for lots of reasons, but maybe one of them is Dad. After he died, I kept brushing aside the future, only preparing for as far as my headlights out in front of me could see. The thought of meeting someone—someone who I could imagine myself being with for a long time—felt so distant and impossible. I couldn’t see that happening without my parents, but especially Dad, there to witness it all.
But that’s not reality. The realization snuck up on me at high school graduation and then again last summer when Erica asked me to sort through his belongings and then last month when I graduated from Parsons. Mom and Dad are gone. It makes me feel awful to even think it, but they are. And I wonder if all the language around grief and your loved one being there with you always makes it that much harder to deal with their deaths.
Sometimes I can’t fall asleep at night, because I’m scared that when I wake up some detail or memory will be fuzzier than it was the day before and eventually I’ll forget them. But it can’t all be woo-woo feelings or morbid reality. When I was in elementary school and Mom died, and then again in high school when Dad died, my everyday life was almost the same. I still went to school and took the bus home. But this adult version of my life? It’s my second act—my sophomore collection—and neither of my parents will ever be in the audience. I have to find a way to move through all these new experiences without forgetting them. And I have to find a way to create again. All the pieces are there inside me. They’ve just been lying dormant for the last year.
“Hello?” a voice calls, interrupting my thoughts.
“Yes!” I say. “You can leave it on the doorstep. Thank you!”
“You don’t want it to melt, do you?” There’s no mistaking that voice.
My heart skips and my limbs splash as I frantically sink down lower into the bath. “Henry? Don’t come in here! I’m naked!”
He chuckles. “Was that supposed to be a deterrent?”
“Yes,” I say with uncertainty. “Did it work?”
“Sadly, yes. Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m staying right where I am…. I just…I guess I just wanted to see you.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to settle for talking.” It’s been less than twenty-four hours since our steamy make-out session in the early hours of the morning, and somehow it feels like years ago.
“You mind if I eat the cherry out of your drink?” he asks.
I pretend to gag. “Please. I hate those things.”
“Excuse me?” he says, his voice steeped in shock. “You hate cherries? How does anyone hate cherries?”
“In fact,” I tell him from the other side of the partition, “just take the whole drink. It’s been cherry tainted.”
“Wow. Okay, well, now that I know where you stand on cherries, I might as well take myself and my cherry-infested drink back to my room for a quiet night in.”
“Noooo.” I laugh softly. “Don’t go.”
Silence hangs in the air for a moment as I hold my breath.
“Okay,” he finally says.
I can hear the sound of his back sliding down the wall as he sits down in the grass. “Making yourself comfortable?” I ask.
“Well, I’m not open-air-tub-in-a-Mexican-villa comfortable, but this isn’t so bad either.”
“How was your big date?” I ask, even though I know I shouldn’t.
He groans.
“That bad or that off-limits?”
“You know it’s just part of being here, right? This isn’t real.”
“It’s not?” I ask, and I know it’s too big of a question for either of us to answer, so I quickly change course. “Olives too,” I tell him. “Can’t stand ’em.”
“Okay, well, you’ve left me with no choice. I choose Zeke.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure someone’s already called dibs on Zeke.” I clap my hand over my mouth, then remember that he saw them in the pool that night.
“Yeah, he and Anna make a pretty cute pairing. Neither of them is very good at sneaking around, though.”
If he only knew. I open my mouth to tell him about all the times Erica caught Anna sneaking out but quickly stop myself.
“Anyone who hooks up in a pool behind a house full of women isn’t keeping any secrets,” he says.
I don’t know how to talk to him about Anna without also telling him that she’s my sister, so I return to a proven tactic. “It’s not that I don’t like olives and cherries. But they have to be fresh. Like, with the pits in them. None of that canned or jarred stuff. Though, on my twenty-first birthday, I ate twenty-one moonshine cherries.”
He coughs, choking on his drink a little. “Did you say moonshine cherries? Are you from some kind of Appalachian dynasty? Is that what you’re not telling me?”
I fight back a chill as my bath begins to cool. “No Appalachian blood. Just happened to meet some guy from Queens who brewed moonshine in his bathtub.” My twenty-first birthday was epic, thanks to Sierra. She has this belief that seminal birthdays should be a quest, so we went on a multiborough hunt for the best baklava money could buy and ended up in some guy’s bathroom eating moonshine-soaked cherries.
“I…have so many questions, but first: How did he shower?”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of that…and I think I don’t really want to.”
His laugh fades into the quiet darkness, and for a moment it’s just the sounds of bugs and breathing.
“Henry?” I ask.
“Cindy.”
“Do you regret coming on this show?”
He’s quiet at first. “I think…I think going back to real life and constantly wondering if people actually take me seriously or if I’ll just always be that guy who went on a reality TV show and then let his mother’s company flop…And when I was on my way here, I thought I was already regretting this whole thing. But now, no matter what happens, I don’t think I’ll ever regret this. That flight. You being here. I wonder if maybe it’s all fate.”
“You don’t actually believe in fate, do you?”
“I don’t know. I think I just might. What else do you call being on the same flight and then the same television show?”
“Coincidence,” I offer.
“Oh, come on,” he says.
“It’s…hard for me to believe that something is orchestrating all of these specific moments so that our lives end up just as they were always meant to. I can’
t help but think that if the universe is playing by the rules of fate, my parents died for a reason. And ovarian cancer…a car accident. There’s no sense in things like that.” I pause, thinking about what he said. “But…I don’t know. Something about this whole experience does sort of feel…meant to be. Then again I don’t even know what we are, so maybe this was all just for nothing.” There. I said it. The impossible thing. The one thing I don’t know.
“Cindy—”
“I have to tell you something,” I say. “I need you to know.”
“Cindy, whatever it is, it’s okay. I want to be the person you need me to be, but I just—I can’t promise you anything. Not right now. I know that’s not fair, and I wish—”
“I’m here for the money,” I blurt. “Or I was here for the money. And the exposure for my career. I mean, I won’t lie. Winning the money would still be nice, but I—I didn’t come here looking for this. I didn’t come here expecting to find you.”
“I guess we both surprised each other, then, didn’t we?”
“And you hate surprises,” I remind him.
“This one wasn’t all bad. Cindy—”
“Shoot,” I whisper under my breath.
“What?” he asks, just a hint of worry in his voice.
“It’s nothing. I just left my towel on my bed.”
“I can get it,” he answers quickly.
I can already hear him standing. “Oh—okay.”
“No peeking,” he promises.
I nod, even though he can’t see me. “Okay.”
As I listen to him walk around to the front of my villa, I sink down even lower into the tub so that my chin is dipping below the water.
The glass door slides open. “Eyes closed, I swear. What I was trying to say is—” He steps forward and immediately trips on the lip of the door.
“Oh, be careful,” I tell him.