A week-ish in which you’ve spent most of your time on camera, Ayo would say.You think he’s not putting his best foot forward?
He probably has all kind of flaws, Flick would add.All men are terrible, when it comes down to it.
Ayo would roll her eyes and say,Just because Adam is terrible doesn’t mean all men are terrible. I promise you there are better men out there.
Flick would say,Really? Name one.
Ayo would say,Babe, you deserve better than him, stop it with this shit,before she turned to me.You deserve better too, Cece.You deserve something real. Not a fantasy.
Dylan was a fantasy. That was what being the Romeo was, at the end of the day. He was the nation’s fantasy boyfriend, practically perfect in every way.
He didn’t feel like a fantasy when he sat down on the couch and made me laugh and launched into a monologue whenever I got too inside my own head, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t one. It just meant he was good at his job.
It was okay to be attracted to him, I decided. I could be that kind to myself. It was too much to ask not to be attracted to him. He was lovely, and I had eyes.
But I had to file it away in the same place in my mind that I put celebrity crushes. Hot, but fundamentally unattainable. An idea of a person more than an actual one.
‘Don’t want what you can’t have,’ I muttered to myself.
He turned up early the next morning to record a quick friend spot before his single date. This one was with Dylan G, he told me, and they were baking. ‘I hope she doesn’t mind that I’m terrible at it,’ he said. ‘I can cook pretty well, but I can’t bake for shit.’
‘Do you know what you’re making?’
‘Murray told me, but I’ve forgotten,’ he said. ‘Some kind of cake, I think.’
He stretched, muscles rippling under his shirt. ‘I hope it’s not too sweet,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.’
‘You don’t?!’
He raised his eyebrows at me, mid-stretch, arms still above his head. ‘Why’s that so surprising?’
‘Because the first place you head every time you arrive here is the kitchen,’ I said, gesturing at the plate resting in frontof him on the coffee table, on which there were three pieces of toast. ‘I didn’t think you’d met a food you didn’t like.’
He chuckled. ‘You’re not wrong,’ he said. ‘I’ll eat just about anything. But you know when you go to a restaurant and they’ve got a two-course menu, and you can pick either entrée and main, or main and dessert?’
I’d been to a restaurant like that exactly twice, both times with my ex-boyfriend Jordan, and both times he’d paid. ‘Sure.’
‘I’ll always pick entrée and main,’ he said. ‘Unless there’s cheese on the dessert menu. Then we have a very tricky situation. You know how I feel about cheese.’
I did know. He’d lamented to me on several occasions that they always set out cheeseboards on his dates, but he was never allowed to eat them.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Sweet tooth? No sweet tooth?’
‘Sweet tooth,’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to get between me and a bag of gummy bears.’
He shuddered. ‘Gummy bears?!’
‘What’s wrong with gummy bears?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you just tell me you’d eat anything?’
‘I saidjust aboutanything, not anything,’ he said. ‘The texture, Cece. How can you handle it?’
‘I like it.’
He looked so horrified it nearly made me cry with laughter.
‘You have terrible opinions,’ he said, when I walked him out a little while later. ‘First Crocs. Now gummy bears. What other dark secrets are you hiding?’
‘Ha,’ I said. ‘Got you.’
