Chapter Thirty-Six
The studio lights are bright.I’m back in the room where Bridgette first interviewed me a week ago, but this time, there is an emerald-green couch opposite a love seat where she sits with her husband. I’m in between Grant and Ivan, perched awkwardly on the end of the couch.
Derrick isn’t here.
He didn’t show up.
But they told us he wouldn’t. So it’s fine.
I’m fine.
I’m not going to read into it. Even though Grant said he would’ve found a way to be here. Even though the couch feels like it’s large enough for four, I can’t stop looking at the place he’s supposed to be sitting right now.
Bradley’s teeth are somehow brighter than before. He’s gotta lay off the bleach. “Well, everyone wants to know. Was that what you expected?”
Grant leans back and crosses his arms over his chest. “Is that really a question? Were you not watching? This episode is the poster child for the whole show.”
“We definitely earned our name this season, that is true! It was a shock from our side of things, so I cannot imagine what it was like to live it.” Bridgette flips her ponytail, but it doesn’t look dismissive like it would on most people. She leaves her head tilted to the side with an encouraging look on her face as she stares me down.
I guess she wants me to answer the question her husband asked, but Grant sidestepped.
“It was painful. I felt so much hurt, so much fear, that I barely even gave myself a chance to know them. I’m lucky I did.”
Bradley crosses one leg over the other. “And what made you make that decision?”
My hands are shaking as I push one into my back pocket and pull out Calvin’s note, neatly folded.
“Calvin. I’m glad I brought this letter with me, because it helped me realize that I wasn’t honoring my brother’s memory by living the way I was. My heart knew it was time to take a chance and open myself up to them.” Ivan takes the letter from me and stuffs it in his front chest pocket, and Grant weaves his fingers with mine for support. “It may not make sense to some of the viewers how things played out, but it does to me, and that’s what matters. I fell in love with them once, when I only had pieces of them. It wasn’t hard to do it again.”
I spent years not telling Sax I loved him, thinking I was protecting my heart, and here I am, letting it slip out as if I say the words all the time.
There’s a smile on Grant’s face when he turns to me and cuts Bradley and Bridgette out of the conversation. “You loved me?”
“Love.”
Maybe I should have waited until we weren’t oncamera. Until we’d been together for the obligatory three to six months that make it acceptable to drop those words.
But I don’t need to wait to acknowledge what my soul has known for ages.
“About time you said it. Didn’t you tell her on day one, Grant?” Ivan kisses the side of my neck as our Beta chuckles. “I love you too, sweetie. I hope you didn’t need me to say it out loud to know.”
I didn’t. Ivan wears his heart on his sleeve, and I adore him for that.
Bridgette interrupts our moment.“Wow. How incredible it is that we got to witness this! What a one-eighty from that first day in the house!”
Her husband chimes in as well. “It’s touching to see, honestly. I was terribly worried about how this was going to affect Ariana.”
“I have a question,” I interrupt. When they give me their full attention, I ask what I’ve wanted to know since I got the selection email. “Why did you pick me for this season?”
Bridget’s voice goes dreamy. “Your story was fascinating. The producers loved the idea of bringing together two people who had let fear keep them apart. After researching Pack Sax and interviewing them, we knew we had to bring you on the show. But it wasn’t just the truth about who Sax was. Something you wrote in the application moved all of us.”
Her husband grabs her hand and picks up where she left off. “‘I’m terrified of so many things, but I’m starting to think that everything would be less scary with someone I love beside me.’”
Damn, Marlie killed it with that one.
“We insisted, and the producers agreed, that eventhough it was going to be a massive surprise to you and put you face-to-face with Alphas, that if you were ready to stop going through life alone, we should help you get there.” Bridgette leans over and grabs my hand. “It’s not often we have a storybook outcome. A lot of the time, it’s such a massive lie that there is no hope for reconciliation, or everyone is exactly who they said they’d be, and there’s little excitement in that. But we hoped that even though you had someone who may not have been who he said he was, you’d end up happier because of it.”
I’ll never know if that was a sincere sentiment or something they were told to say to help the ratings. But I like to think it was real.
