“Excuse me?” She asks, peeking up at him. His skin has a bit of a yellow tint in the unflattering neon light. But he’s still handsome which is really annoying.
“Come on, don’t give me that look,” he says, eyebrows rising towards his hairline making his forehead wrinkle deeply. “You know you have the worst taste in guys.”
“What are you talking about?” She asks testily.
“Rinny, are you trying to tell me that you’re not aware that all the guys you ever go on dates with are assholes?” He almost laughs. “I think that’s going to be the biggest doubt about us being a couple ... the fact that you’re exclusively into douches and I’m a very stand-up guy.”
“Terrible is what you are,” she mutters under her breath.
“Maybe I should be,” he muses, completely ignoring her. “Maybe I should be a sexist braggart.” Then he steps behind her and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her in close against his front and locking his head over her shoulder. “Hey girl, bring that little ass over here, come sit on my lap and make me a sandwich.”
“How can I make you a sandwich if I’m sitting on your lap?” She asks, trying to wriggle free off his death grip. He’s not letting her.
“Mmm, baby, I think you’ll find a way, huh?” This, he positively drawls into her ear, making her squirm. “You’re a resourceful little doll.” Then his nose brushes the side of her jaw and she keeps her eyes from rolling into the back of her head by a hair. That damn idiot.
“Get off me,” she growls, her throat all dried up and finally frees herself from him as he snickers. “That’s disgusting.”
“So, you want less of this and more of me?” He asks and she glares at him over her shoulder.
“Well, do you want me to be psychotic like all your exes?” She challenges and wants to piss him off a little bit in retaliation but instead he just laughs louder and gives her that sheepish look.
“No. I want that,” he says and playfully prods his fingers into the angry crease between her eyebrows. “That’s fun.”
“You’re insufferable,” she tells him, not impressed. Then remembers to add: “Babe.”
That makes him stay quiet for a moment. They’re facing each other now and he opens his mouth like a fish, only to close it again and swallows, licks his lips and nods.
“See,” he breathes after a long few seconds. “You’re making it work.”
She shakes her head at him and puffs out some air, ignoring how stuffy it suddenly gets in the little changing cubicle. “Try the checkered shirt with the blazer,” she instructs and then turns on her heels.
“Rinny?” She hears after a while, when she’s already waiting outside in the light blue dress with big florals, she’s picked out for herself that she likes quite a lot.
“I’m here,” she says and then the curtain of his cabin is pulled aside and he stands before her looking like a proper adult, sharply dressed in a dark navy suit, a light blue checkered shirt and blazer on top. He steps up to her to regard them in their matching outfits in the mirror.
“Alright,” he says after a moment. “This looks…”
“Very good,” she finishes for him.
“Like we’re going to city hall to get legally married,” he nods, giving their reflections a thorough, kind of bewildered once-over. “I don’t think I’ve ever dressed this much like a contributing member of society.”
“It looks good,” she tells him, not really in the mood for his fishing for compliments right now.
“That’s what I’m saying. We can rock this. See?” He puts his arm around her waist, pulling her close to his side as if they were posing for a picture and she arranges herself around him, bringing her hand up to rest leisurely on his shoulder. “We look really together.”
It’s strange how Karin can see her own face fall, reading her own features spell out grave danger that she isn’t able to pull back. There’s fear in her eyes. It feels like everything crashing down on her, all the years behind them casting their shadows over the months ahead. For the first time it properly dawns on her what they are going to do; act like a couple, touch and kiss like lovers for the benefit of a taxing audience. That they will have to be publically fake in love with each other while she could very likely be very much that in reality, probably within two days of the scheme her sense and sensibility and her own instinct for self-preservation are gone. Then her eyes dart to his and she can see it. He knows.
Damn it all. He knows. He’s always known.
“Hm,” she hums, looking at the floor, preparing herself for the inevitable, for him pulling away and getting cagey and strange. But to her surprise, he pulls her closer and presses his head against hers to whisper.
“We’re going to be fine, Rinny,” he murmurs under his breath and then turns her easily, because she presently can’t offer up any resistance. He works her into his arms, so her head slots into his neck, pressed ear to cheek and feels him breathe in deeply against her frame. “I don’t want either of us to get hurt,” he whispers and she doesn’t feel tethered to her body anymore. There’s just his grip on her that holds her to the earth.
How did this get here so fast? She just can’t seem it fathom it. Is this some sort of acknowledgement of his own feelings in the matter? Does he have feelings in the matter? What does this mean?
“Me neither,” she says and it’s barely audible.
“So, we’re going to be smart, alright?” He rumbles, his bass making both their bodies vibrate where they’re lined up. “No stupid decisions.”
“Yes,” she agrees automatically while her brain kicks into overdrive. What is he saying? That they would make bad decisions if they didn’t declare they shouldn’t just now? And what would those decisions entail? Is he worried that she’ll break one of these days and ruin it all, unable to understand that he is pretending to want her too for the sake of their success? Or that maybe he would potentially be tempted to be make a bad decision himself?
Instead of enlightening her on the matter, she feels him turn his head into hers and then his lips on her forehead. He’s kissing her.
Like a shot, she punches her fists into his sides and pushes him away, taking a step back and won’t meet his eyes.
“I’m not in love with you,” she feels compelled to say, her voice wavering and aimed at the pile of his bunched-up backpack on the floor by their feet. He pulls in a breath but she still can’t bear to look at him.
“I know,” he says, low and toneless.
“I’m not going to fall in love with you either,” she goes on and feels her cheek burn. This is terrible. How did this happen, again? How did they get here? And more importantly, how do they get out?
“I know, Rinny,” he says and she can hear the smile on his face when his hand lands on hers to cup her flaring red cheek. “I’m not worried.”
She nods, lingers for a bit with his palm on her skin and then steps away. “I’m going to get changed. We should get going soon. Your Mother is going to kill you if you don’t fix the mailbox today.”
Once they are back in their normal clothes, their little heart-to-heart already feels like it has happened to other people and when he drops her off at their apartment building, she even manages to look him in the eye as they part ways. They still don’t meet again until Friday when they have to drive out to Scanlon to get the promotion pictures and teaser shots taken for the show’s production. But that’s fine. She has calmed down considerably by then.
On Thursday, she had taken measures to cleanse herself of her twitchiness and general fretting. She’d paid extra hard attention in class, took extensive notes, worked a double shift at The Big Bean and topped that off with an extravagantly long hot shower where she did misuse the shower head like she might usually do. Just so her thoughts wouldn’t drift to places they weren’t supposed to.
Instead, she used some sea salt peeling, rubbed herself down and studied her naked body for a while, smoothing her hands down her flat stomach and the belly ring s
he got after leaving Chanelle and thus, quitting to be a perfect and pure little dancer. She thought that before they’d film her in a bikini on that island, she should be hitting the gym a bit more. She didn’t need to lose weight that much because she’d always been naturally slim, that had never been a problem, but she should be a little tighter, a little firmer, a little back to her old professional shape.
So, she ended her night with a YouTube pilates tutorial and some warm water with lemon in it, feeling accomplished like she had done good things for number one that day. In her bed, she planned out the following day, keeping her thoughts clear of a certain someone and to occupy her brain, plotted her outfit and the car ride playlist. Upbeat and light songs only, nothing with any mention of love or kisses or anything else of that sort. She cuddled herself into her pristine white sheets and revised the class notes from earlier in the day in her head. In the end, she fell asleep to that and dreamed of tests and diplomas, which in the morning, she counts as a definite win.
On Friday, at three p.m., she and Declan are picked up by Brody at the train station and he drives them to the photo studio, explaining that the pictures taken today will be used for promo all over the country. That they will be on adds out in the big cities, at bus stops, on actual buses and all over the internet. Karin thinks she might be sick, Declan looks like he’s about to. Right upon arrival, they’re being ushered inside and fussed over, pampered and treated like talent, which Karin supposes they are. She is still glad to have Declan there to make everybody light and easy with his jokes, helping her incredibly to be charming and interesting too for the sports team lineup worth of new people she meets. She has some problems socializing excessively with people she has just met, but somehow, everything goes swimmingly.
A residue, left-over after-effect from her crippling shyness growing up that she battles by throwing herself into the act of getting to know people. By asking them questions and listening intently, cataloguing the bits and pieces she gets, putting them along with names and faces so she can pour her anxiety into knowing exactly who she is dealing with. It also helps when she meets those people again. She then knows what to expect, can control herself and the situation a little and her fellows are impressed that she has remembered their conversation so well.
So, it doesn’t take long until she knows that their photographer has three children and drove in from Dalton in the morning and that Abigail, who does their hair and make-up, went to Declan’s high-school but their paths never intersected before today. The first rounds of pictures are taken in jeans and shirts, portraits of their faces and short little blips of them interacting. Once, Declan’s twirling her around a bit in a dance hold because apparently they’re going to be working with the angle of the “childhood dance partners” thing, even if they never really were dance partners in any actual sense of the word but since most of what they will say about their life together will be lies anyway, Karin can’t be bothered to correct them.
In that first outfit, they also do some pre-interview about their love story, which Declan makes up as they go along because they had not had the foresight to come up with something beforehand. After that, they’re being ushered back into wardrobe and asked to change into a black dress and grey suit for the glamorous part of their pictures and teasers. For that, Karin needs to get her hair redone and has been sitting with curlers in her hair for a while when her phone rings and her friend Mia’s name lights up her screen.
“Hey,” she says, picking up and working her phone awkwardly between the plastic rollers in her hair and her ear.
“Hey, Rinny, I got Luna here, too, you’re on speaker,” Mia says, because as of twenty minutes ago, Karin is missing their weekly get-together at their favorite bar. “We wanted to know how the shoot’s going.”
“It’s going great so far. They’re just prepping us for the second leg of it,” Karin says as Abigail steps back in behind her and starts unwinding her curls. “Declan’s been hanging out for like half an hour and I’m still getting my hair done.”
“So how fun is it?” Mia asks.
“A lot, so far,” she tells her friend. “I think that’s a job I could do.”
“Yes, just become a model,” Luna pipes from somewhere further from the speaker, like Karin hasn’t just been kidding.
“Great idea,” she says sarcastically to drive the point home.
“But maybe you can, who knows?” Mia offers. “You might get really famous on this show.”
She loves her friends, they’ve always been so supportive. But Karin is well aware that after her ballet career tanked, none of them really knew what to do with her, how to deal with a perpetually gloomy and insecure girl who’d struggled to find meaning in anything. Mia had at one point suggested Karin travel with her to stay with her extended family in Hong Kong and then go on some Buddhist temple self-awareness vacation to find herself. Luna, meanwhile, had just shaken her blonde hair at her and said “You need to go into trading, that’s where the money’s at.” Like Karin had ever cared a smidge for numbers.
“I don’t know,” she says now at the new suggestion of becoming a famous person. “I don’t know if I want that.”
“Declan will love being famous,” Luna says. “All those parties, and the girls ... ”
“Probably,” Karin sighs. “But I don’t know, maybe the show gets cancelled after an episode and we’ll go right back into obscurity.”
“Oh, but you definitely have to keep us posted from the island,” Mia shoots. “No matter what happens.”
“I can’t,” Karin says regretfully, making a strained face as Abigail pulls on a stubborn strand of hair unwilling to let go of the curler.
“Why?” Luna asks as Abigail apologizes with big gestures, mouthing ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ over and over and Karin hurries to put her at ease.
“We’re not allowed phones,” she answers her friends on the phone. “There’s a complete media blackout. We can watch Netflix and the news but we’re not supposed to be on social media and we get our own phones with no internet on it.”
“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” Mia enthuses as if Karin had just told her that her whole family died in a fire.
“It’s supposed to be a bubble,” she informs them. “No outside influences and no Googling the competition. We also don’t get to meet the other couples until we’re in the Caymans.”
“That’s wild,” Mia says.
“I know,” Karin replies.
“So, we won’t know if things gets strange with you and Declan,” Luna adds.
“It’s not going to get strange,” Karin tells her sharply and Mia, or Luna, or both, make some unconvinced sounds. “No, we talked about it. We’re going to be just fine.”
“Whatever you say,” Mia pipes. “But hold on a minute, did you just say ‘the Caymans’?”
“Yes,” Karin confirms, “they got this luxury villa for us where we’ll shoot and live. They showed us the pictures today, it’s like from a Hollywood movie.”
“Oh, that’s worth getting your heart broken over,” Luna sighs wistfully.
“Stop, saying that,” Karin murmurs. “I’m not going to get my heart broken.”
“Get your heart broken over what?” Declan’s voice says from somewhere behind her as he pokes his head into the room and Karin rolls her eyes, trying to keep the pink off of her face and waves him off. “Come on, Rinny, everybody’s waiting.”
“Just five more minutes,” Abigail tells him and he dramatically rolls his eyes before ducking out again. Karin feels suddenly too large for her little black dress.
“I have to hang up,” she tells her friends, unwilling to entertain more of this conversation and so hurries their goodbye’s along.
She loves them and appreciates their concern but right now, that’s really not helping. She doesn’t need the reminder that things might blow up terribly as she gets back to the photo set and they ask Declan to lift her into a bridal carry for the shot.
“Tuck at his tie,
” Eugene, the photographer says and Karin does as he bids, smiling brightly at the camera, worrying that she might be too heavy for Declan to carry much longer, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t put her back on her feet for a long time. When he does, he’s grinning at her.
“I’m going to look like a complete idiot in those pictures,” he tells her through his teeth, not stopping the smile. “I’ve got so much make up on my face I look like a wax figure.”
He does, which is why Karin can’t help but laugh. In that moment, a bit of the tension breaks that has been between them since that day at the mall and she revels in it, in feeling dorky and normal with him again.
On their way back to Tennessee, the mood still holds and it’s not even strange when Declan says to go through his bullshit dating story, so they got it straight for when it comes up again. It’s a good thing because Karin learns that she only paid attention for half of it earlier.
“We got together right after Tina and I broke up,” he recaps half of their way home, “so we’re relatively new. But we’ve been in love with each other forever, yes?” She nods. “And we just decided to go for it.”
“Didn’t you say something about how we got together?” Karin asks, shifting in the passenger seat.
“Did you listen to a word I said in there?” He asks back, shaking his head to her apologetic shrug. “Well, since you obviously didn’t, let me tell you how I knocked up a storm at your door the same night I came home from breaking up with my ex, and how you expected I would come crying but instead I made a big, sappy declaration about how it was always you and then we kissed and it was in slow motion.”
“Terrible,” Karin laughs.
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