Lily raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t fill the silence. Of course she was going to make me spit it out.
‘Do you want to stay?’ I asked. ‘Here? With me?’
She paused. Every millisecond of that pause felt like an hour.
‘I’m not coming back to work.’
‘All right. I understand. I just—’
‘But I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘With you.’
I glanced over at the yoga women again. They were all facing the other way.
So I took the risk, cupped her face in my hand, and kissed her. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
Then Lily swiped her thumb across my lips. ‘Make sure you wash your face before anyone on set sees you. You arecoveredin my lipstick.’
I kissed her again. ‘Copy that.’
‘Still on schedule?’ I asked into my headset a little while later, parking the golf cart outside the Villa.
‘Affirmative,’ Suzette replied. ‘Ready to shoot in forty-five.’
‘Copy that. Carrie, do we have the government all-clear to send the Convent women home today?’
‘Yes, all clear. The first limo will arrive in two hours.’
‘Copy that. I’m going in now to shoot the final ITM with Dylan JM.’
The Romeo-Dylan that sat down across from me in front of the green screen was listless. ‘Just tell me what you want me to say,’ he said tiredly. ‘I’ll say it.’
He pulled it together enough to do a creditable job for the final breakup. ‘Kumiko, I so value and treasure the time we’ve had together,’ he said earnestly, holding her hands and looking into her eyes. ‘You’re a wonderful person. But I’m so sorry. Your heart is not the other half of mine.’
Kumiko cried. Romeo-Dylan held her. ‘There’s someone out there for you,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘I have no doubt about that whatsoever.’
We were waiting until full night to shoot the Dylans’ declaration of love, which gave me a couple of hours’ grace. I sat in the war room by myself, just me and my coffee, mindlessly scrubbing through some B-roll, occasionally making some notes, and let myself fantasise.
She’d said yes. She was going to stay with me.
We still had a lot of things to work through. I had no illusions about that. Just because I’d been ruthlessly shoving things down didn’t mean they’d gone away. The future I wanted and the one Lily had set a course for were completely different. We had rough seas ahead.
But tomorrow?
Tomorrow, this long, painful season would be over. Tomorrow, this terrible plan of mine would finally be fully executed. Tomorrow, maybe I – and Lily, because she wouldn’t be able to help herself – could start making some better plans for Cece’s season ofWherefore, ones that didn’t involve rigging it.
In the afternoon, anyway. Because tomorrow, we could fuckingsleep in.
‘Sun’s almost down,’ Suzette said in my earpiece. ‘We’re good to start shooting in thirty.’
‘Copy that.’
It was a clear night, so we were staging the final declaration of love outside, in the rose garden. Every single fairy light we had was strung up. Candles were flickering between the rose bushes. The ground was strewn with petals, mirroring the sky, which was strewn with stars.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Romeo-Dylan. ‘You ready to declare your love?’
His fingers were tapping, thumb into middle finger, over and over again. ‘Can you give me an earpiece?’
