She laughed. The real one. Quiet and startled, like it had escaped without permission. “Mr. Whiskers. He was a terrible cat. Bit everyone except me and my grandmother. Even the vet was scared of him.”
“A discerning animal.”
“He once hissed at a FedEx driver so aggressively the man left the package on the sidewalk and never came back. We had to start using UPS.” She said it with the particular fondness people reserve for loved ones who are monstrous. “I miss him every day.”
“You would miss a cat that terrorized delivery workers.”
“He had standards, Rhys. Not everyone does.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She moved to the wrought-iron bench and sat, pulling her knees to her chest in a way that made her look less queenly, more like a person who’d snuck out of bed to look at stars. The oversized sweater swallowed her whole. She looked — and I was going to hate myself for thinking this — soft. Approachable. Like a person you might tell the truth to, if you were a person who did that.
I was not a person who did that.
“Why do you keep coming here?”
“How do you know I keep coming here?”
“Because you’re always gone after midnight and you always come back smelling like jasmine.” A pause. “And because this is the only place in the mansion where the lenses can’t reach, and you seem like someone who would find that appealing.”
I should have been calculating the implications of her paying attention to my habits how I’d been paying attention to hers. Instead, I sat down on the opposite end of the bench, two feet of cold limestone between us, and told her the truth. “I come here because I can’t breathe in there.”
She nodded like that made perfect sense. “The performance.”
“The performance. The filming. The constant awareness that everything you say is being recorded and edited into whatever story makes the best television.” I leaned back against the stone, let my eyes drift up to the stars the city had stolen from me years ago. “I’m not built for performing. I don’t know how to be someone I’m not.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Is that an insult?”
“It’s an observation.” She turned to look at me, and in the dark her face was all clean lines and shadow, stripped of everything decorative. “Everyone else in that mansion is playing a character. The Perfect Boyfriend. The Funny Guy. The Intense One.” A pause. “The Villain.”
“And you think I’m not playing a character?”
“I think you’re playing yourself, and you hate that it doesn’t feel like enough.”
The words landed behind my ribs, in that space I’d spent thirty years sealing with concrete and the absolute certainty that letting anyone see what was underneath would be a collapse I couldn’t engineer my way out of. She was right. Exactly right, and I hated her a little for the exactness of it — for cuttingthrough everything with a single observation delivered in the dark.
“You asked why I don’t play the game,” I said, after a silence long enough to become its own conversation. “The truth is I don’t know how. I can’t be charming on command or say things I don’t mean or pretend this entire operation isn’t a content farm with better catering. When the other guys are figuring out their camera angles, I’m calculating the ceiling load capacity. When they’re rehearsing their confessional monologues, I’m noting that the east wing has a moisture problem that’s going to become a mold issue in approximately eighteen months.” I paused. “I realize this is not what most women find attractive.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“And yet I’m still here.”
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t push. Instead, she shifted on the bench, closing the distance between us without making it obvious, and said: “Do you want to know a secret?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me regardless of my answer.”
“I don’t know what’s real anymore either.” Her voice was softer now, stripped of the armor. “I created this show because I was tired of men who treated women like afterthoughts. And now I’m surrounded by ten men who are professionally paying attention, and I can’t tell which of them actually see me and which of them just see a platform.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” She laughed, but this time smaller, sadder. “And the worst part is I can’t talk to anyone about it because I’m supposed to be the Queen. In control. The woman who has her shit together.” She pulled her sleeves over her hands — a gesture I’d seen her make exactly once before, in the hallway after Derek’sspeed date, when she thought no one was looking. It meant she was cold, or scared, or both.
“You don’t know what you want?”
“I know what makes good television. I know what the audience expects.” She paused. “But what I actually want? When the production lights go dark?”
“What?”
