Karin grins at him, supportive and a little proud, even if all he did was introduce himself but it’s still enough to make her forget briefly that she has to do the same and only remembers when he pulls a face at her.
“I’m Karin Hanson,” she blurts once she knows what he’s trying to tell her and snaps back around to the other people in the room. “I’m twenty-three, turning twenty-four in May, born and raised in Tennessee. I went to the National Ballet school here in Scanlon but then had to quit dancing after I graduated because of an injury and now I’m getting my BA in Social Sciences in Tennessee and work at a cafe to pay the bills.”
“And her favorite music is everything that eighty-year olds like,” Declan supplies, as if he was bound to, since he has this really odd love-hate relationship with her musical tastes.
“I like oldies,” she shrugs, nonplussed and unabashed, because she has decided ages ago that she wouldn’t let his frequently uttered distaste of her passion for oldies mess with her mood. “I like fashion and art. Sports too.”
“And chocolate,” Declan adds.
“Yes, that as well,” Karin confirms. She would be shamefully remiss to leave chocolate out of that list, it’s true.
“And your story together?” Brody asks from his seat right of Marietta, leaning leisurely against the wall and scribbles something on a notepad before looking at Declan. “Your friendship?”
“We met as kids and her sister and my cousin thought it would be funny if we were dating,” Declan rattles off and that’s the first time Karin realizes how many times she has heard him tell that story now. Because they went to so many things together that whenever they met new people, he liked to tell them about how long they knew each other. Always with that sweet little proud tint to his voice. She kind of likes it more than she realizes.
“So we did that for a while when I was ten and then I broke up with her,” he continues, “and after that we actually started talking to each other and became friends. We then stayed friends. But before she moved back home after school, we only saw one another on the weekends. Now, it’s all the time, though. We live in the same building, and she’s my best friend,” he closes and pats her thigh, grinning over at her appreciatively. “I tell her absolutely everything.”
“I always have to make sure he doesn’t blow it with his girlfriends,” Karin adds although she is not exactly sure why she felt compelled to.
“You make it sound like I have a harem,” Declan nags instantly and sounds almost embarrassed when he turns back to the TV people. “There’s been three at most, and at separate times, mind you.”
“Four,” Karin corrects.
“Alright,” he huffs. “There’s nobody now.”
“So, you care deeply about each other?” Marietta asks into their air of slight bickering and thankfully pulls them back on track.
“Absolutely,” Declan affirms.
“But you never wanted to try and date?” Marietta follows-up.
“No,” he sounds certain as death itself and Karin sets her jaw into a bright, deliberate smile. “Not after eight and ten.”
“May I ask why?” Brody pipes from the side.
“It would be too strange,” Karin says and hopes she doesn’t sound too much like she’s talking through gritted teeth. Do they have to talk about this right now? Is that really necessary?
“Yes, probably,” Declan agrees beside her. “We know each other so well, we’re just too close for that. I’m not a very good boyfriend and she deserves so much better than me, so I guess we just wouldn’t want to risk losing what we have for something else that might not work out, right?” He looks over at her, his eyes burning into the side of her skull enough to make her look at him and nod. He says that like it’s true, when really, he just finds her ordinary and doesn’t want her plain and simple. But this is the official version, so she sticks with it.
“No,” she says to him and then to Marietta and Brody: “And I’m not his type either.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she thinks she hears Declan mutter but the only thing she can really kissing is: “Never mind.”
“Yes?” He’s got her full attention again now.
“No, go on, never mind, Rinny,” he says, shaking his head. “Forget about it.”
“No,” she says, reluctantly doing him the favor of not trying to find out if he said what she thinks she heard. Ever the steadfast friend that she is, after all. “We never wanted to we’re not going to. It’s not like that with us, we’re really just friends.”
“Best friends forever,” Declan says and sounds like a little girl which she is not completely sure is deliberate. Then he buffs her in the shoulder with his fist and she tries to control her features so that she doesn’t give him her signature ‘what are you doing?’ look - that one is very particular, and frequent, to her reactions to him.
“Alright, but if you want to be a part of our show,” Estelle interjects, “you’re going to have to seem like a real couple if you want to win, do you think you can do that?”
“Definitely,” Declan jumps in.
“Yes,” is all Karin can say to that at the moment.
“Would you mind showing us a little bit?” Brody asks evenly and puts another note on his pad. Karin wonders what he’s writing down there.
“Pardon?” Declan says it but Karin thinks it loud enough to be audible too, she thinks.
“How you would act?” Brody clarifies. “If you were trying to sell that you were a real couple?”
Declan clears his throat and shifts in his seat and the energy in the room changes immediately because it changes in him.
She can feel it and see it when he turns to her, beckoning her to do the same. It’s instantly awkward because she can see him try to act a certain way, look at her a certain way and it’s not a new look, either. She has seen this a million times over: At the end of long parties in his small town, walking down abandoned streets with him, carrying her heels, on her way to crash in one of his brother’s old bedrooms. At that one semi-formal he brought her to because they didn’t have those at the National Ballet School, when he slow-danced with her and spun her out and turned her in like she was suddenly new. At his brother Joseph’s wedding where she read a poem to the congregation, and sometimes just on a random Tuesday when for some reason, he looks at her like that, like maybe there’s more.
It startles her to learn that apparently, he can do this at the tip of a hat. That he can just generate an overwhelming heat with her, for lack of a better term, just because somebody told him to. It makes her wonder if it was ever real before at all. But that thought makes her feel too mortified and stupid to linger on.
Then Declan is already busy rocking his chair towards her in one clunky motion and puts his arm around her shoulder, dipping his forehead slightly against her head, close enough to feel his breath graze the shell of her ear and hear it rattle through his windpipe, right to the point where she would maybe be unable to help shivering but then he deems the performance done and disentangles himself to her, shifts on his seat and turns back around to the camera. For a second Karin thinks he might ask Marietta for a cookie.
“I’m sorry for being blunt but could you kiss each other?” is what Marietta gives him for his trouble and it’s not a cookie by any stretch of the imagination. “It’s just so we have it on camera for evaluation purposes later. So we can see your chemistry because we had people in here that looked like they were kissing their siblings and that doesn’t make for great television.”
“Oh,” Karin starts, poised to politely decline, feeling her body flush up and instantly drenched in cold sweat and humiliation.
“Yes, sure,” Declan says and hits his knee against hers with little subtlety. “Of course.”
“I don’t know,” she mutters forlornly.
“Come on, Rinny,” he hisses under his breath, not missing a beat.
“Have you ever kissed each other before?” Marietta asks, ignoring whatever it is that Karin and Declan are doing r
ight now. God knows Karin has no idea what it is.
“Yes, we have. She was my first kiss,” Declan offers up easily while Karin hopes to die or maybe just dissolve into air. “It was when I was ten. I gave her flowers and everything.”
“I would have gotten the flowers anyway,” she corrects through the lump in her throat. “You just stole them from the bucket to give them to me.”
“I didn’t have an allowance, what was I supposed to do?” Declan yelps mock-defensively. “The kiss was all mine.”
“Lucky that kisses are free,” she half-scoffs and then adds: “We also kissed afterwards, once.”
“We did?” Declan asks and looks at her.
“At Oakley’s house at spin the bottle?” She stares at him. He hasn’t forgotten about it, has he? “I was fourteen?”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Right, I remember.”
She’s not sure he does and incredibly hurt all at once that he might not, because that would mean it meant less than nothing to him, too distracted by Tina, who’d been at that party too and who he was trying to get with. Meanwhile tiny Rinny was probably just the sad little boarding school charity case who had no friends in Scanlon and so she had to come with him to his High School parties. That would be heavy if he hadn't cared about it at all, because it had meant everything to her at the time. She had replayed that one forced, stupid, wet and teeth-cluttering kiss a million times in her head over the next eight months that had followed it, hopelessly pining away from him like the last loser while he started sleeping with Tina and Karin wanted to die every day of it.
“But not since,” she says to no one in particular and tries very hard to not look hurt.
“Well, would you then?” Marietta asks again, now with an added edge of slight impatience and Declan taps her leg, making her lock eyes with him to see the urgency there.
We have to, they say. That might very well be true. She still doesn’t want to, especially not now and not on camera and anyway. This is going terrible, far worse than she thought it would.
“We got this,” he mutters to her under his breath and snakes his hand up her arm until it lands on her neck lightly, leaving goosebumps in its wake that she doesn’t appreciate much at the moment. “Just close your eyes and pretend it’s someone else.”
What if I don’t want it to be someone else? Her traitor brain blurts the moment he leans in.
“Close your eyes, Rinny,” he whispers again and the last thing she sees before she does, entranced by the breathy rumble of his voice is that slight smile on his face. The one that makes her toes curl no matter how over him she thinks she is.
She still feels that smug little arch of his lips when they slot over hers softly, pecking once, pressing down next and then she gasps beside herself when she feels his tongue sweep over her upper lip. On the exhale, her mouth falls open for him and he goes in, working his hand into her hair to navigate her by the back of her head, pulling her against him as he deepens the kiss and she is left helpless in the motion, in the flow of it. It sets her skin alight, making her feel this strange ache, a sort of craving for him she had only imagined to ever be met like this but instead of dulling it or sating it, it's only getting worse. She doesn’t really feel anything but shock and a kind of static current race through her, can’t really decipher what he does or if she likes it, doesn’t know if it’s any different than it was at fourteen or the same or anything at all, only that it’s happening.
Until it’s not and he leans out and her eyes fly open to see him hovering close, licking his lips and staring at hers for a split second before he looks at her eyes again, the hazel darkened to a soft brown and unreadable. He leans further out, clears his throat and won’t look away until she does.
“Great,” Marietta says, seconds or eons later and Karin could swear she sounds a smidge breathless too. The only thing Karin knows for sure though, is that she has aged a couple of decades in the last couple moments and that she would like to leave now.
“Thank you,” Marietta says, heeding her unspoken plea. “Now we’re just going to take some pictures of you both. There are some forms to fill out and then you’re on your way.”
All of it is such a blur for Karin, the pictures getting taken, her body tucked against Declan’s side as he touches her like she might break in his arms and is suddenly far less chipper than before. She gets her Mother’s phone number wrong three times on the sheet where she’s supposed to enter her emergency contract and is beet red about it by the time she finally writes it down correctly under Declan’s inquisitive side glances.
Don’t look at me, she thinks, feeling the tips of her ears pulse red hot.
“When will you be able to tell us if we’re in?” Declan asks, minutes later when Karin has sort of noticed in the periphery of her mortification that they are being complimented out of the door and back into the lobby. They kissed. They kissed and she’s quite certain it was fantastic.
“Things should be moving fairly quickly now,” Marietta tells them as they end up by the large entrance portal, the glass panes opening up the view to the bustling Scanlon streets. “We’re going to be finalizing the cast within the next two weeks and then the shoot starts in July, with four weeks on the Caymans and then two weeks off while the episodes air and then we finish in August with the live show. But Declan said you can both be available for that?”
“Yes, no problem,” Karin answers on autopilot, careful to remain eye-contact with the other woman and keep her voice level so the producer thinks that her opposite is not just spiraling to all hells. “I’ll just tell my boss at the cafe and by July the semester is over, so it’s all good.”
“Yes, my family is my boss, so I’ll be fine,” Declan jokes and at least he sounds like himself again.
“Great everyone,” Brody says and politely shakes their hands again. “Thanks a lot for coming! You’ll hear from us with news soon.”
With that they are back out on the street, walking back to his car in a strange state of strangeness and suspension, like they’re some different people wearing their bodies. They don’t talk until they’re inside and once they do, it’s just a brief acknowledgement of the fact that it likely didn’t go horribly. That’s about it before Karin tells him that she has to listen to a lecture on her iPod and does that for two hours straight, staring at the road home flying by. This is so strange, it’s so, so, so, so strange, and the weirdest thing of all is how her lips still feel like they’re all numb, as if she’s bitten into an electric fence.
When Karin and Declan arrive in Tennessee, the precise moment that they awkwardly say goodbye at the driver’s door with a very badly executed fist bump they have to try again to make work twice, a couple of hours further north, the video of them in the their audition is sent to the entire Heart Roulette team.
The subject line reads “I think we found our fake couple” and the body: “Everyone, that’s Karin and Declan, we saw them today. We think they’re perfect for our fake couple. Young, attractive, free schedules for the shoot and just please check out that chemistry. It’s off the charts! What do you think?”
Karin and Declan don’t know about this. They just know that two weeks later, Declan gets a call, then calls Karin and tells her on a nearly a Tarzan-yell that they’ve got it. That they’ve been chosen and that they are, as of April 28th, in the running for one million dollars on Heart Roulette.
“I can’t believe we’re really going to do it!” Declan wheezes into the phone and he sounds like he might start to cry soon. “It’s going to be so great. We’re going to win this! Aren’t you excited, Rinny? It’s going to be so wonderful, right?”
“Yes, it is!” She nearly screams, working her pitch up as high as she can without it sounding completely ridiculous. “I’m excited!”
It’s a really fortunate thing that Karin Hanson is a good liar. But probably the fortunate thing is that Declan can’t see her shake her head over the phone.
Oh god, what has she gotten herself into?
CHAPTER TWO
Karin is over Declan. In truth, she has been over him since before her birthday almost ten months ago. She’s over everything about him. He’s her best friend, yes, but that doesn’t mean she wants to be with him. He’s far too headstrong, too impulsive, too stubbornly unaware of her feelings. She doesn’t need this. She can do perfectly well without the butterflies and the pining and the thinking through every little thing he says or does, trying to give meaning to stuff that has less than none.
She’s been over him at nine, thirteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one and now at twenty-three. A desperate, meaningless, forced kiss is not going to change that. It’s because he’s made his mind up about her at ten and twelve and fifteen and so on. The trend is ever so clear, and she refuses to play the broken-hearted girl for the rest of her life. Not a chance. No, thank you. She will finally pass the Bechdel test in that continuous conversation in her own head. The time is now, the time for Karin to get with herself. Playing his girlfriend for a month for the chance of getting some cash is not going to throw her back to feeling like she’ll forever be only half a person without having him love her.
She lies awake in her bed after he called her to tell her they made it onto the show and resolves with fervor to not fall back into the trite old patterns. Yes, she’s thinking about it, that’s completely fine, but it only just happened so she allows her the grace period of that night to stress about it. It’s to wonder if maybe now that he’s kissed her while they’re both semi-adults he might’ve finally figured out that everything he ever wanted had been right in front of his nose all this time, to question if the way his fingers curled against her scalp and he pulled her hair just a little as he worked his tongue around hers was for show or not, to ponder if she just signed her own death warrant by agreeing to do this competition with him and more of the same. But in the morning that will be over.
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