On paper, he was perfect — attentive, charming, with dark good looks and a way of speaking that turned each sentence into a compliment designed for you. He maintained eye contact that was just this side of intense without crossing into uncomfortable. He was the human equivalent of a five-star Yelp review that you knew was fake but couldn’t quite prove — a guy your group chat would unanimously vote “hot but off.”
And yet.
“You’re different from what I expected.” Derek leaned in about three minutes into our session, close and intimate. “The woman on TV seems so confident. Untouchable. But sitting here with you now…” He paused, scanning my face with what might have been admiration or might have been calculation. “I can see the vulnerability underneath. The real you.”
It was exactly the observation a woman might melt over — the implication that he could see past the armor to the softness beneath. Maybe if he’d said it differently, less smoothly, I would have believed him. Instead, I felt like a mouse being watched by a cat who hadn’t decided yet whether to pounce.
“The real me,” I said carefully, “is exactly what you see on TV. I’m not hiding anything.”
“Everyone hides.” His smile widened, and for a beat I caught a flicker behind the charm — sharp, hungry, nothing to do with romance. “That’s what makes people worth studying.”
I made a mental note to tell Tessa that Derek needed watching — surveillance usually reserved for exes who still followed you on every platform and liked your photos at 2 a.m. Then I turned on my television face and counted down the remaining seconds.
The other six contestants blurred together — a parade of men trying too hard or not hard enough or in all the wrong ways. One talked about his car for the entire five minutes, giving flashbacks to every man who’d ever opened a Hinge conversation with a photo of himself next to a vehicle he did not own. One asked if I’d ever considered going blonde, which — sir, this is a dating show, not a suggestion box. One called me “sweetheart” three times and seemed confused when I didn’t swoon. One had clearly done opposition research on me, which would have been flattering if he hadn’t also called my viral tweet“a fun little rant” — the dating equivalent of patting my head while explaining my own career to me.
By the time my session with Rhys approached, I was exhausted, overstimulated, and forty-two percent convinced that heterosexual romance was an elaborate hoax. The remaining fifty-eight percent was thinking about forearms — one pair, specifically in a charcoal sweater, specifically in a way that would have made my therapist reach for a second notepad. I was also, not that I would admit this to anyone, nervous.
I never heard him approach. One second I was alone with my aggressive sunshine, and the next — cedar, woodsmoke, a scent that made me think of cabins and terrible decisions made in low lighting. The air between us seeming to charge.
I turned.
Rhys was standing three feet away, hands in his pockets, jaw tight in a way his bored expression couldn’t quite sell. Charcoal sweater today, sleeves pushed up to reveal forearms that I was not going to think about because I was a professional and professionals did not catalog contestants’ musculature. This was a televised dating show, not a Renaissance art appreciation class.
(I memorized them anyway. Michelangelo would have wept.)
“You’re early.” I crossed my arms, aiming for regal composure.
“You’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“You’ve touched your earring three times in the last thirty seconds.” Flat. Observational. Like he was noting a structural flaw. “You did the same thing last night right before you told me I had to play. It’s a tell.”
My hand froze halfway to my ear. I had not — in twenty-eight years of human existence, through debate competitions, job interviews, and one harrowing first date with a man who collected teeth — ever been informed that I had a tell. “I don’t have tells.”
“Everyone has tells.” His gaze hadn’t moved from my face — that same intensity, the kind that stripped you down to your wiring. “You just don’t like that I noticed yours.”
“Or maybe I just have itchy earlobes,” I said — the worst comeback I’d delivered since middle school. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. Worse. The promise of one.
For a moment — just a moment — I forgot how to speak. Which was inconvenient, since speaking was my job.
The production assistant saved me. “We’re ready whenever you are, Miss Mitchell.”
I smoothed my expression into queenly composure and gestured toward the chairs. “Shall we?”
Rhys stayed still. “Ladies first.”
I was halfway to my chair when my heel snagged — a cable, a rug, possibly just karma — and the floor rushed up to meet me. I didn’t hit the ground. A hand closed around my arm, firm and warm, and pulled me back to vertical with exactly measured force — enough to stabilize, not enough to bruise. And then he was right there, close enough that I caught cedar and woodsmoke and the faint clean scent of his soap, my brain starting to make suggestions my dignity would prefer to ignore.
“Steady.” Completely neutral. He let go, and the absence registered as loss — a thought that would make a future therapist lean forward in her chair and say Tell me more about that.
“Did you just compliment my center of gravity?” I said, because apparently that was what my mouth decided to do with the adrenaline.
“I stated an observation.” Not a flicker of awareness that this might be the strangest thing anyone had ever said to a woman on national television. “The heel was angled wrong when you stepped. Manufacturing defect, probably. You should return them.”
“I’ll be sure to file a complaint.” Dear shoe manufacturer, your product caused me to fall into the arms of a man who smells like cedar and talks like an engineering manual. Please advise. “Your schedule is precise and I don’t want to throw off your timeline.”
He offered it as courtesy, not a compliment, but your schedule is precise coming from Rhys sounded like the highest possible praise — one architect admiring another’s blueprints.
