‘I agree,’ I said, trying to keep my tone breezy. ‘You keeping Lily is very good for me. Once you get rid of her, she’ll move in here. That’d be a genuine hazard to my wellbeing.’
‘Who was it telling me the other day that she’s ninety-nine per cent tough exoskeleton?’
‘I stand by it. My exoskeleton is very tough. Doesn’t mean it’s not vulnerable to bulldozers.’
He chuckled. ‘Touché.’
‘Dylan!’ the PA yelled again. ‘Murray’s in my earpiece asking where you are!’
‘I’d better go before Murray follows through on one of those threats to murder me,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the chat, Cece. It really does help me figure things out.’
He pecked me on the cheek and then loped down the stairs to the golf cart. He waved as the PA drove them away.
I waved back, resisting the urge to touch the spot on my cheek where he’d kissed me.
Later that night, Kanda moved into the Convent. I wasn’t surprised, because that was the decision Dylan had ultimately come to, once we’d finally got off the subject of my intense hatred of Crocs.
‘What?’ she said sharply, when Rani and Samantha told her about the friend spots. ‘He talked to you about who he was going to eliminate? What did he say about me?’
‘Not very much,’ I said.
‘What do you mean “not very much”?’ Rani said. ‘You were filming for like ninety minutes.’
‘Ninety?!’ Kanda exclaimed. ‘I didn’t even get nine minutes with him!’
‘What the fuck were you talking about for ninety minutes?’ Samantha said.
‘He’s got a lot on his plate,’ I said. ‘A lot to think about. A lot of decisions to make.’
None of that was a lie.
But there was no way I was telling them that, in between our discussions about the show and who he was going to eliminate, we’d also talked about, among other things: celebrity crushes (mine: Chris Evans, his: Serena Williams), our mutual love of language-learning apps (I’d spent the last three years trying to teach myself Spanish, he was brushing up on his childhood French and keeping his level up in Sinhala), and how Brett absolutely should have picked Mary-Ellen instead of CJ. We had been in such furious and enthusiastic agreement on this last point that I managed to forget about the cameras for almost twenty minutes.
‘And while you were helping him make his decision, he never once mentioned why he was going to eliminate me?’ Kanda snapped.
I sighed. ‘He just wasn’t feeling it. It wasn’t anything more complicated than that.’
Kanda shook her head. ‘Ninety minutes,’ she said. ‘Ninety fucking minutes.’
She and Rani and Samantha started talking about how unfair it was that I got so much time with Dylan. After a little while, I managed to strategically slip out of the room. Me being there for them to yell at would only escalate the situation.
I pulled my air mattress as far away from theirs as I could, wedging it into a corner, and curled up in my sleeping bag. I couldn’t blame them. They were well within their rights to be angry.
It would have been nice, though, not to be public enemy number one.
I thought of Amanda, and how lovely she’d been to me on that first night. If she’d been eliminated, she might not have liked that I was getting all this extra camera time, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would have held it against me.We all would have done the same if the opportunity fell into our laps, she’d say.
It was a pity that Dylan liked her so much. She could have been… if not an ally, then at least someone who didn’t actively hate me.
But Amanda wouldn’t be moving into the Convent for a long time. Maybe not ever. She might win.
It was easy to picture her and Dylan together. Two literal rays of sunshine, holding hands, beaming at each other. Probably constantly getting taken advantage of because they were both just sonice.
I punched my pillow and curled myself deeper into my sleeping bag. No. I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t going to let myself be jealous.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise that I was attracted to Dylan. For one, the pandemic had already put a very serious cramp in my sex life. I hadn’t been allowed to spend time with anyone but Flick and Ayo for ages, and suddenly there was this man in front of me, smiling that lethal smile and rolling up hisshirtsleeves to reveal his incredible forearms and being more excited about getting to eat a piece of toast than anyone had ever been in the history of time.
For two, said man was, by any objective standards, extremely hot.
