And I heard her say, “Anything.”
And I said, “Tell me you love me.”
And she said—she said nothing.
So I had my answer.
There were tears in my eyes when I turned away from her. And when I ran back inside, Bobby asked me what was wrong, and I said I was afraid. And he said so was he.
I never loved him the way I did her, but I loved him for that.
Saturday
It was strange to Audrey, in a way, how quickly she’d settled into a new pattern. Rather than eating with the contestants, she’d got up and gone straight to Jennifer’s trailer where they’d shared a breakfast of coffee and bacon rolls, brought to them by an unquestioning Colin Thrimp. And then instead of being herded into the ballroom to watch Grace Forsythe’s introduction from an uncomfortable stool upholstered with stress, she watched it over a closed-circuit feed.
“Welcome back, welcome back,” Grace Forsythe was saying to the remaining six competitors. “This is the fifth week of the eighth season ofBake Expectationsand in keeping with our back-to-basics theme, our ever-wise production team has chosen to dedicate it to a style of baking that is famously complex and technically demanding. But don’t worry, I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”
Jennifer pushed a button. “Knock it off, Grace.”
And in the ballroom, Colin Thrimp echoed thatknock it offto the talent, who promptly ignored him.
The blind bake for the fifth week of the eighth season ofBakeExpectationswas custard slices. Which to be fair to the production crewwasabout as close to back to basics as you could get while still keeping a patisserie theme.
It still felt distancing to be watching from, well, from a distance, but now that the initial shock of elimination was a fortnight behind her, Audrey was beginning to find she preferred it. As a way of forcing herself to get back into baking post-Natalie, the show had been great. But now it was behind her she could admit she didn’t miss the stress or the waiting around or the judging or the competitiveness or constantly feeling like she was letting herself down because she had this great opportunity she wasn’t super focused on.
By contrast watching the footage as it came in was almost soothing. If there was one thing that had attracted Audrey to journalism more than anything else, it was that it let her elevate her love of people watching to the status of a career. But in some ways having a producer’s-eye-view of a reality TV show was even better. Something she’d always admired aboutExpectations, about the whole genre really, was the way it created a narrative from whatever footage its still-mostly-unscripted subjects managed to produce.
And, from here, even more than in the ballroom, she could see the stories coming together. There was Alanis tackling every challenge like it was her GCSEs, and Reggie, tackling every challenge like it was a prototype rocket engine, and Joshua, tackling every challenge like it wasn’t a challenge at all. There was Linda, already beginning to panic. And Meera who never panicked about anything. And Doris, of course, who the nation would love but never know.
Every so often Audrey would glance away from the monitors and look over at Jennifer, only to see her watching, totallyfocused, breaking her silence periodically to issue an instruction or—because even in her element she was still Jennifer Hallet—an insult.
From some quiet, almost domestic impulse, Audrey rolled her chair sideways and leaned her head against Jennifer’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Jennifer asked with, in the circumstances, much less hostility than she could have.
Audrey took a deep, relaxing breath. “Just enjoying the company.”
“You’re the fucking worst, Lane.”
But despite how much the worst Audrey was, Jennifer let her stay where she was. And they remained that way until filming broke that evening.
“Right,” said Jennifer with grim professional finality. “That’s that.” She pressed another button and spoke into another microphone. “Colin, Audrey’ll be needing food as well—sort something.”
Audrey wasn’t quite sure how she felt about getting her evening meal delivered by an underling or, more pertinently, how she felt about her evening meal being delivered by an underling without her really being consulted about it. “Actually…” she began.
“Hold on, Colin.” Jennifer swivelled around to face Audrey. “Are you rushing off?”
“No, not exactly. I just—how about if…as well as failing to not fuck we also sort of failed to not have dinner together?”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better not be trying to date me, Lane. That’s not the arrangement.”
“No, no.” Audrey shook her head perhaps a touch too exaggeratedly. “Just thought maybe eating somewhere that wasn’t a dingy trailer might make a nice change?”
“Excuse me, this isn’t dingy. It’s practical.”
“It’s practical for being the supreme overlord of a reality TV show,” Audrey pointed out. “It’s not very practical for, y’know, eating in. You don’t even have a table that isn’t covered in…in telly stuff.”
“I’m busy. I eat at my desk.”
