We did get a visitor the next morning, though. As we were all jostling for space in the kitchen and trying to make breakfast, Murray came stomping in. ‘Cece!’ he yelled.
He looked like shit. What once might have been a five o’clock shadow was now at least a four-day scruff, and he had dark purple bags under his eyes. He clearly hadn’t been to bed last night. Or possibly for several nights. Obviously he wasn’t joking when he talked about how overworked he was.
Oh God. Was this why Dylan hadn’t come down? Had Murray been able to tell what a massive crush I had on him when he was watching us on Convent Cam? Had he nixed the friend spots?
‘Whatever I’ve done,’ I said, ‘I’m sure that I can fix it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to get dressed. You’re coming on the group date today.’
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Jess K exclaimed.
Two things were clear. The first was that Murray was very much not fucking kidding, and the second was that obviously, despite a brief and beautiful ten seconds where I thought Dylan might be inviting me back into the competition, I wasn’t actually ‘on’ the group date.
‘I had this idea when I remembered what you study!’ Murray shouted over the wind as we rocketed up towards the Villa on a golf cart. I had no idea golf carts could go this fast, so I was hanging on for dear life, but Murray barely seemed to notice that the PA driving had a lead foot. ‘Crime! Mysteries!’
‘You know criminology isn’t about solving mysteries, right?’ I shouted back.
Either I wasn’t loud enough, or he’d slept so little he’d forgotten that there were supposed to be two halves to a conversation. ‘I thought, love is a mystery, right?’ he yelled. ‘Let’s get Cece to help Dylan solve it!’
I found out what he meant when we got up to the Villa and he shepherded me into a tiny room that had probably originally been intended to be a bedroom but was now wall-to-wall monitors. ‘This is where you’ll be watching the action from today,’ Murray said to me. ‘We’ve split the women into groups of three. Each group has to build a love machine.’
‘A what?’
He sighed. ‘It’s a catapult that fires heart-shaped stuffed toys. Rube Goldberg-style thing. Not important.’
If Dylan ever came down to the Convent again, I was going to spend at least half an hour ribbing the shit out of him for the concept of ‘love machine’. This was worse than Love Jockey Hockey.
‘The way we’re going to set it up is so that the Juliets will think whichever group builds it the fastest and fires the most hearts into the pool will win,’ Murray went on. ‘But really, you’ll be up here watching them and gathering evidence of what they’re like when Dylan isn’t around. The team that you think does the best will be the one that actually wins. Then he’ll pick one of them to take on some one-on-one time.’
‘How do I judge which team does the best?’
‘You’ve talked to Dylan a bunch. You know what he likes,’ Murray said, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of a monitor, where I could see—oh God, I could see Dylan hiking up his shirt so someone could mic him up, revealing abs you could scrub laundry on. ‘Pick the team with the women you think’ll be best for him. You know. Friend shit.’
‘Friend shit,’ I repeated slowly, watching Dylan tuck his shirt back in.
‘We do these dates all the time. Usually, we fly in a sibling or a parent or a friend from the outside, but you’re all we’ve got this time around.’
I nodded. Someone had just handed Dylan a different belt, and he was unbuckling the one he already had on and laughing at something someone had said.
‘Cece. Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, forcing my attention away from the monitor. ‘Yes, I’m listening. Sorry.’
‘There’s one little wrinkle that I’m going to need you to be okay with,’ Murray said. ‘We don’t have fixed cameras in this room like we do in the Convent, so there’s going to be a camera guy in here with you.’
My mouth went dry.
‘Just one guy,’ Murray said. ‘Saurav, would you get in here?’
A big South Asian guy stuck his head round the door frame. ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘We ready to go?’
‘In a minute,’ Murray said. ‘Cece, this is Saurav. Saurav, this is Cece.’
‘Hi, Cece,’ Saurav said. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Hi,’ I managed to say, my throat suddenly parched.
‘Saurav’s going to be in here with the camera,’ Murray said. ‘Just him. No one else. You’ll barely even know he’s there. All you need to remember is not to look down the lens. Right, Saurav?’
