But then the French doors rattled open behind us. ‘What are you still doing out here, Dylan?’ Murray sighed.
His eyes dropped to our hands. I saw him clock it.
I braced myself for shouting.
‘It’s late,’ was all Murray said. ‘Go home.’
Dylan let go of my hand.
‘Good night, Cece,’ he said, and left.
10
The lecture I expected from Murray never came. There was no tirade about how much of Dylan’s time I was taking up, or how much trouble I was causing. There was no,Don’t think I didn’t see you holding his hand, Cece. Don’t you remember what I said would happen if I saw a flicker of chemistry between you?All he said to me before he left was, ‘Look, I put the fear of God into Heather so she should leave you alone, but if she doesn’t, let me know.’
Maybe he hadn’t seen any chemistry. It was dark. Murray was coming off his millionth consecutive million-hour workday. Plus, our fingers hadn’t even been interlaced. In terms of sheer mechanical, physical contact, it was practically a handshake.
It hadn’t felt like a handshake. Not to me.
Which was why I had to stop seeing Dylan.
It wasn’t the only reason why. There were tons of reasons. It was bad for my living situation, for one. It was bad for Murrayand the crew and their workload, for two. It was bad for all the women up in the Villa who were still in the running to be Dylan’s girlfriend, who were fighting tooth and nail for scraps of time with him, for three. Which was also bad for Dylan himself, because if he was going to date someone, to have this perfect fairy-tale love story that he needed to have to be the Romeo he wanted to be, he needed to spend more than five minutes talking to them instead of talking to me.
But the main reason was selfish. It was bad for me.
I couldn’t pretend any more. There was no more writing this off on the fact that he was hot, and I had pandemic sex-starvation and it was just proximity-based horniness. I couldn’t keep telling myself that it was just him accidentally pressing all my buttons by being so kind, so sweet, so nice, by crying, by needing me. I couldn’t even chalk it up to the weird environment of reality TV, where sheer lack of anything else to think about cranked the dial all the way up on your emotions.
It wasn’t the situation that was making me feel like this. It was just him.
I believed everything I’d said to him last night. It was all right to need people. It was even all right – as I’d grudgingly come to admit to my therapist after many years of work – for me to need people.
But it wasn’t all right for me to need him. Not when I couldn’t have him.
So I had to cut it off. If I didn’t, my heart was going to be smashed into a thousand little pieces when he finally picked Kumiko, or Amanda, or Hero Nurse Dylan, or Parisa or whoever to be his Juliet, and it would take years for me to beeven a little bit all right again. I’d be filmingWherefore Art Thou Romeo?, and they’d get Dylan to spy on a group date of mine like I spied on his because we were such! good! friends! He’d give me his take on all the potential Romeos, and he’d smile at me, and I’d burst into tears, because my whole body would be screaming, ‘Pick him, pick him, it’s him.’
I knew all of this, and still I sat down with him to film the friend spots. I stayed where I was supposed to in my friend-zone armchair and laughed at his re-enactment of his disastrous single date with Lily Fireball. I let him draw me a diagram of all the various feuds in the Villa and how they’d played out on the next group date. I helped him talk through whether it was all right for him to eliminate Belinda or whether he owed her a few more episodes after the whole tooth incident.
He didn’t say anything to me like he had when we’d sat together on the verandah steps, his thumb stroking over my hand, and he’d looked into my eyes and said,I need you so much. Too much, I think.Murray might not have lectured me, but maybe he’d come for Dylan, because he kept all our spots deliberately light, our goodbyes on the verandah friendly but perfunctory, everything as perfectly platonic as we’d promised.
It didn’t matter. We could be talking about nothing at all, and my whole body would still be screaming, ‘Pick me, pick me, it’s me!’
‘Production’s got a fun idea for the next group date,’ he told me through a mouthful of toast as we filmed a breakfast friend spot together, the morning after we’d decided that yes, he’d done right by Belinda and could safely eliminate her (a viewpoint she had not shared, judging by the floods of tearsshe’d been in when she’d arrived at the Convent, although there was no way in hell I was telling him that).
‘Are we talking Love Jockey Hockey fun, or actual fun?’ I said, instead of,Don’t tell me, I can’t take it, please stop coming here before I fall so hard for you that this pandemic will be completely cured and forgotten before I get over you.
‘I’m not telling,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘It’s a surprise.’
It wasn’t a surprise, then, when Murray pulled me out of the Convent the next morning. The smears under his eyes were nearly black as we rocketed up the hill on a golf cart towards the Juliet Villa.
I expected to be led back to the panopticon room again, but instead, Murray bundled me off with a team from hair and make-up. ‘She’s got to look phenomenal,’ he told the stylist. ‘And don’t let the other Juliets see her.’
‘What am I—?’ I started asking, but he was already gone.
It wasn’t like I couldn’t work it out for myself, though. Given everything Murray had already said to me and all the giant sexless cardigans I’d been wearing, it wasn’t hard to guess. They wouldn’t be shoving me into hair and make-up and making me look phenomenal if they weren’t going to use me to make the Juliets jealous.
A sick feeling began to twist in the pit of my stomach, knotting itself over again and again as the make-up artist slathered my face with foundation.
No, I told myself. This was a good thing. I was going to see Dylan with all the Juliets. I was going to see how awesome they all were, these human rights lawyers and scientists and hero nurses. I was going to see how much chemistry he hadwith them, and how different he was with them than with me. I was going to get it through my head that this man with seven girlfriends who had told me a thousand times in a thousand ways that he just wanted to be friends with me, really just wanted to be friends with me.
