The image of him and Cece holding hands on the Convent verandah drifted across my mind again.
‘What?’ Lily said.
‘Hmmm?’
‘You stopped chewing. And you got those two lines, right here.’ She tapped the space between her eyebrows. ‘You’re not telling me something. What is it?’
‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a problem I might have worked out how to solve, that’s all.’
I ran it past Romeo-Dylan, so I could keep him on side. ‘I want to use Cece on the Episode Seven group date. But given how the last group date she was on went, I wanted to make sure you were okay with it first.’
‘The more screentime she gets,’ he said slowly, ‘the better for her, right?’
‘Absolutely. Cece’s really standing out to the network. She’s a serious contender to be the lead on the nextWherefore Art Thou Romeo?’
This was actually true. The notes Fucking Greg had been sending back on my rough cuts were very pro-Cece.
‘We need to reveal your friendship with Cece to the Juliets at some point,’ I told Romeo-Dylan. ‘The women still in the game don’t know she was the one observing the Episode Five group date. They have no idea you’ve built this platonic relationship with her. There’s a danger you might come across dishonest if we don’t come clean – and that’ll make selling the happy ending that much harder.’
‘I don’t want them to direct their anger at her, though. She’s been through enough.’
‘I’ll level with you,’ I said. ‘Can I promise you that none of the Juliets will be angry with her? No. But will it only get worse for both of you the longer you leave it? Yes.’
He exhaled. ‘All right. Let’s do it.’
The group date I’d planned was a trivia game. All the questions were about Romeo-Dylan, things that the women should know if they’d been paying attention. Each correct answer would win them a point, and whoever had the most points at the end would win the Episode Seven single date.
All seven of the Juliets left in the game were competing – but so was Cece, which should, if everything went like I intended, set off a cascading series of events.
No matter who won the group date, Romeo-Dylan would be forced to confront his feelings about Cece and take action, either inviting her back to the Villa or ending their friend spots.
He and Cece were falling for each other. That was obvious to me, even if neither of them had realised it yet.
I could, in theory, let them continue with the friend spots. Whether or not they articulated their feelings to themselves, I didn’t think they would articulate them to each other. They both had too much to lose.
But letting them continue would be bad for both of them – and, more importantly to me, bad for the show. I knew perfectly well how miserable pining for someone could make you. And if said pining showed up on screen (which it inevitably would) I’d have Brett and CJ vs Brett and Mary-Ellen all over again: the Romeo with the woman he did pick, instead of the one he clearly had something with.
So we had to make a move. We either had to end it now, and nip it firmly in the bud; or we had to bring Cece back into the game, let them explore it, andthennip it in the bud.
It went the way I intended. Much to the chagrin of the other Juliets, Cece won the trivia game, and thus the single date.
I got Suzette to run point on their date shoot. ‘They both think of me as the man who pulls the strings,’ I said. ‘They’ll feel freer to make big moves if I’m not front and centre.’
‘Look at you,’ Suzette said. ‘Relinquishing control to someone else. Does it hurt?’
I didn’t dignify that with a response. ‘I’ll be in your earpiece.’
Just like I planned, Romeo-Dylan and Cece’s date built to a perfect crisis point. ‘Are you sick of me?’ he asked her softly, his affection for her evident in every line of his body.
‘Of course I’m not sick of you, Dylan,’ Cece replied, equally softly, the fact that she was head over heels for him written all over her face in the twinkling fairy lights.
Then she swallowed, and in a move I recognised very clearly, shoved all her emotions down.
‘But I don’t think we should spend time together anymore,’ she said, the words running into each other as she tried to get them out.
So it was Cece, in the end, who took decisive action, who made the narrative move we needed, the woman who once couldn’t string a single sentence together on camera giving us a reality TV moment for the ages. ‘I don’t want you think our friendship isn’t important, because it is,’ she said to Romeo-Dylan, voice wavering. ‘It’s so important to me. I couldn’t even start to tell you how important it is to me.’
‘To me too,’ he said. ‘It’s – you’re – you’re my lifeline.’
