Above us, the giant screen transitions to another couple, then another, but the damage is done. People have already seen. Already marked us. Across the room I can hear someone saying, “That’s them, from before,” like we’ve become an exhibit.
I lower my voice. “You all right?”
The look she gives me could preserve meat.
“Are you unwell,” she says, “or is this your natural form?”
Sonya coughs into her hand to hide a laugh.
I should let the joke land. I should step back, give her space, stop feeding the machine.
Instead I say, softly, “Tilda.”
Her jaw tightens.
For one moment the noise thins. Just a thread of silence between us while the hall keeps roaring around the edges.
I can smell the citrus from her water, the faint clean note of her soap beneath the reception hall’s perfume fog, the electric charge of stage lighting warming glass and metal. Her pupils are blown a little wide. Whether from anger or adrenaline or both, I can’t tell. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“Believe it or not,” I say, “I’m as blindsided by this as you are.”
She lets out a small, humorless laugh. “That is not remotely comforting.”
“Fair.”
A producer appears near the stage, gesturing contestants into rough paired clusters for a photo op, because the universe is not done humiliating us yet.
“Contestant pairs to your marked positions!” a staff voice calls.
A groan rolls through the room.
Tilda closes her eyes for half a second, then opens them and goes colder still. It’s almost impressive, how quickly she can turn pain into polished hostility. She should teach seminars.
“Listen carefully,” she says, taking one tiny step closer so the cameras can’t easily read her mouth. “Whatever this is, whatever stunt they’re trying to pull, it changes nothing.”
The words land like stones.
I nod once. “Understood.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Do not smile at me like this is fate.”
That startles me, because she’s right. Somewhere under all the shock, some stupid, reckless part of me had reached for exactly that—fate, irony, one more impossible chance delivered by a rigged universe.
I let the thought die on my face.
“This is a mess,” I say instead.
“Yes,” she says. “You are.”
And there she is again. Knife to the gap in the ribs.
I almost laugh, but not because it’s funny. Because it hurts, and laughter has always been my cheapest armor.
The staff call goes out again, firmer this time. Contestants begin moving in reluctant pairs toward lit floor markers beneath the screens. All around us, bodies are stiff with resentment and disbelief. One man is actively arguing with a producer about whether a fling on a gambling moon counts as romance. The producer, maddeningly, seems to think yes.
