It might have been a trick of the light, but it looked like a smile ghosted across Murray’s lips. ‘Good.’
He took a few steps towards the French doors, then he turned back. ‘Eat something.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Seriously?’ Dylan said.
‘Yes,’ Murray said. ‘Eating on camera is usually deeply unsexy. Huge mood killer. So eat something.’
Dylan punched the air. ‘Yes!’
Murray rolled his eyes again and left. Dylan made a beeline for our kitchen.
‘So you’re hungry then, I take it?’ I said, trailing behind him as I pinned the lapel mic to my horrible cardigan and then tried to figure out where to put the battery pack.
‘I’m always hungry,’ Dylan said. ‘But they taunt you with the food on these dates, I swear. We did this photo-shoot group date yesterday where there was all this gorgeous food, beautifully presented, like pages out of a magazine, and they wouldn’t let us eat it. It was torture.’
‘I’m sorry to have to break this to you,’ I said, ‘but they do not feed the rejected nun-women of the Convent anything food-magazine-worthy.’
‘We’ll make do,’ Dylan said, nose already in the fridge.
And so we were munching on peanut butter toast and tea when we filmed our first friend spot, him sitting on the couch Murray had covered with the doily blanket, me curled up in an armchair a good six feet away from him, mic pack hidden behind a particularly ugly cushion while I tried not to get crumbs everywhere. ‘So why did you pick Jess D for the first single date?’ I asked.
It wasn’t as simple as a switch flicking, but I could see Dylan slide into Romeo mode. ‘We had a really strong connection at the First Night Party,’ he said. ‘The conversation just flowed.’
Unlike with me.
I could feel the eyes of the two mounted cameras on me. I clutched at my plate and tried to focus on all that money I could make.You have to figure out how to be on camera without falling apart.
‘Hey,’ Dylan said softly. ‘Don’t think about them, okay?’
He gestured up at one of the cameras with a piece of toast.
‘I don’t think I know how,’ I said.
My shoulders were around my ears. I tried to relax them the way that Jenifer was always telling us to do in her YouTube yoga videos, but it didn’t work.
‘I’m sorry, Dylan,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’
‘We don’t have to,’ he said. ‘If you want to, we can stop.’
I almost said yes.
But even if the production company did agree to pay us all the daily one hundred dollar rate for the time we were here, how long would that last me? This was my first pandemic. I had no idea how long it would go. What if I said, ‘Yes, please, let’s stop,’ and we did, and I leftMarry Me, Julietafter makinga mild splash on the first episode and then immediately being eliminated?
There’d be noWherefore Art Thou Romeo?then. NoJuliet on the Beach. No Instagram.
Fifteen minutes of fame, I might be able to make a living off. Fifteen seconds, however…
‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep going. I’m okay.’
‘Is there anything I can do to make this easier?’ he asked. ‘I know this is going to be hard for you no matter what, but I don’t want it to be some traumatic, painful experience you have to white-knuckle your way through.’
‘Can you reprogram my brain?’ I said. ‘If you could just get in there and recalibrate my fight-flight-freeze reflex to something a bit less extreme, that would be a step in the right direction.’
‘Oh, sure. I’ll fix that right up for you. Do you think there’s a scalpel in the kitchen?’
I laughed. A tiny little bit of tension melted out of my body.
