She left.
I’m frozen, the cameras long since turned off after Brooke hightailed it out of here, jumping into one of the production vans and hitching a ride with the unsuspecting driver to only God knows where. The production team ate up the drama, with cameras following Brooke’s path out of the field, and I’m the fool left in her wake.
I'm not even sure how much time has passed. How much has happened since waking up this morning to Brooke’s lips on my throat, her hands in my hair, our legs tangled together. What could’ve changed in the last ten hours to cause our life to so massively implode?
I’m physically incapacitated. Only slightly aware of the scrambling happening around me. Of someone saying my name. The sun beats down on me with such an oppressive heat, it feels hard to breathe. Hard to think past the aching pain in my chest.
“Owen,” a voice breaks through the fog. “Owen, we have to move you downstairs. The other contestants can’t know you accepted the offer.”
The offer. A prize I don’t care about in the least, though someone tells me anyway. It doesn’t matter. Not without Brooke.
I vaguely register that Sumer Morrison has made her way to our roof. Mine and Brooke’s.
Before she says anything, though, Todd steps in front of me, not even bothering to take the camera off the strap that holds it to his chest. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I realize he’s been the one calling me all along.
“What are you doing, Owen?” The first time I truly hear Todd's voice, he’s accusatory and angry. “Go after her!”
“I don't know if she wants me to.” My first response to Todd is filled with tears.
“I’ve filmed you two for eight weeks, and I’ve seen your B-roll from inside. I don’t know what you were before you came here, and it’s been abundantly clear to all of us that she didn’t either. But you have always known, haven't you?”
Sumer nods her head, lips pursed, agreeing with Toddy Boy. “We’ve seen fake couples here before, Owen—” I start to interrupt, worried they think we tried to deceive them, but she holds up her hand. “You and Brooke are not faking anything.”
We aren’t. We never were.
“She's just scared, man. And she needs you. She needs her husband. You have to go after her,” Todd repeats, and who would have thought that a quick pep talk from the silent cameraman and a musical mega star would be amping me up so much? I half expect a slap on the butt and anatta boy, but, instead, they both just start herding me towards the ladder that hangs off our trailer. They might very well just throw me off the thing, but Gloria begins causing a fuss, distracting their efforts.
“You better take that blindfold off of me right now, son. I’ve had about enough of this heat and your manhandlin’.”
“They’re just doing their job, honey.” Clyde’s hand shakes as he blindly puts it on his wife’s. He can’t see her, but he knows exactly where she’s at. Gloria leans into him, clearly more at ease in his arms than the crews’. He’s her safe place. He talks into the air, barely giving notice to how his wife has softened beside him. “It’s all part of the game. I think we’re winning, Sugar.”
Suddenly, I know where Brooke is.
“I’m gonna need y’all to get off my roof,” I tell Sumer, Todd, and the small crew of people who’ve joined without my notice. “Now.”
Everyone scatters. I climb down the side of the trailer and take my first steps out of our suite in five days.
“Where do you think she is?” Sumer yells into her megaphone. It’s only then that I see Todd and a crew jumping in a van.
I don’t want an audience for this, so I only yell back, “Where Brooke feels the safest.” Then, I hop into the RAM 3000, peel out of the fair grounds towing our Tinkerbell behind me, and go to get my wife.
After an agonizing twenty-minute drive, I barely put the truck in park before jumping out and racing through the door.
“Brooke!” I shout in the entryway, seeing no sign that she’s here. My confidence wavers as I flip on the lights and stalk through the living space. I thought—Ihoped—that as scared and unsure as she was, Brooke would have still come home. To her safe place. To the sheets she loves and the room she swears isn’t hers, but she’s decorated and made her own. “Brooke?” I say again.
That room is the first place I look, but it’s untouched. A few of her belongings are scattered across the space after the chaos of moving in here the week beforeSuite Hearts. It smells like her,so much so that I have the urge to curl up in those sheets and stay there until she shows up.
But, instead, I close the door softly, look down the hall where my room shares the wall with hers, and that door opens.
Brooke steps out, wrapped in the comforter from my bed, her face is splotchy and her eyes swollen from tears, but she’s here. She’s home.
“Babe…” I whisper, so relieved I can barely speak.
“I got scared,” she cries, shrugging her blanket-covered shoulders.
When I nod my understanding and simply answer with, “I know,” Brooke walks straight into my arms and rests her head on my chest.
“I… I’m… I’m sorry, Owen. I shouldn’t have left.”
