He looked at me quizzically.
‘You said I couldn’t make you insult me,’ I said. ‘I win.’
‘Okay, yeah, fine, but I didn’t know about the gummy bears when I made that promise,’ he said. ‘Can I really be expected to keep it in light of this shocking new information?’
‘I will have you know,’ I said, ‘that I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for gummy bears.’
‘Oh really?’ he said, waving at the PA who’d just pulled up on the lawn in a golf cart to pick him up.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘I drunk-applied for this show. If I’d been eating something with more nutritional value than gummy bears, that application never would have been sent. You would have a whole different TV BFF. You would be standing out here talking to Samantha or Rani or someone right now.’
He cocked his head to the side for a moment, thinking.
Then, ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I would have.’
‘Oh?’
‘I don’t just like talking,’ he said. ‘I like talking to you.’
I thought about that long after he left, long after I’d endured another round of, ‘Oh, we’re permitted to come downstairs in our own house now? How generous of you,’ from the other women, long after they’d got bored and I’d found a quiet corner of the Convent to myself.
Dylan was freer and more generous with compliments than anyone I’d ever met. He’d said more nice things about me in the little time we’d known each other than everyone else in my life put together.
He was a fantasy man. Of course he said nice things to me. I knew it didn’t mean anything.
But I hugged those words to my heart just the same. The emphasis he’d put on the last one.I like talking to you.
7
Dylan was back again a couple of days later, before the next Last Chance Party. He was wearing another beautiful suit, dark purple this time, paired with a bright yellow tie and pocket square. ‘What do you think of this one?’ he said, turning around in a slow circle as I settled myself in my friend-zone armchair and hid my mic pack under the cushion. ‘I’m not sure about it. It might be too showy.’
‘I like it,’ I replied. ‘You look like an iris.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling, then taking off his jacket, loosening his tie, and unbuttoning his top button. ‘I’ll take it.’
I was glad he didn’t ask me again how I thought he looked. Was it normal to be transfixed by the hollow at the base of someone’s throat?
Unsurprisingly, our assigned topic was who he was going to eliminate at that night’s Necklace Ceremony. ‘I’ve narrowed it down to Heather and Jess K,’ Dylan said. ‘But I can’t make up my mind.’
‘Why those two?’ I asked, hoping that none of the other women had sneaked down to listen. Every time a PA came down to tell me that Dylan was on his way to film a friend spot, they relayed strict orders from Murray that the other women were to stay in one of the bedrooms with the door closed so no sound filtered down, but it wasn’t like there were people there enforcing it. If any of them overhead this conversation, even if all I did was reflect Dylan’s thoughts back to him, it would one hundred per cent get turned into ‘Cece tells him who to eliminate’ and things would get even worse.
‘With Jess K, it’s just not there,’ Dylan said. ‘I like to talk—’
‘No shit.’
He gave me one of his mildly withering looks, which conveyed ‘ugh’ without any menace. ‘I like to talk, but we can’t get through a conversation without there being five hundred awkward pauses. That back-and-forth just isn’t there.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So why Heather?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something’s not right. Like maybe she’s just telling me what I want to hear.’
He took a piece of honeydew melon off the fruit platter I’d put together for us. ‘That’s why having you is so great,’ he said, pointing at me with it. ‘So much of the time, when I’m up at the Villa, I ask a question and it feels like I get a job interview answer back. At least when I’m here, I know I’m talking to a person, not three talking points in a trench coat.’
‘How do you know?’
He looked over at me, melon slice half in and half out of his mouth. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve only known me for, like, ten minutes,’ I said. ‘How do you know I’m not three talking points in a trench coat?’
