“And that he looked wrecked when he came back from the garden last night? That has no bearing on your approach today?”
I put down the contour brush. Picked it up. Put it down again. “He told you about that?”
“Honey, Mason told me about that. Rhys hasn’t told anyone anything, because Rhys communicates exclusively through scowls and structural metaphors.” She bumped my shoulder with hers. “Mason noticed. He always notices more than people give him credit for. And I noticed how you looked when you came back inside. And between the two of you, I’ve seen less emotional carnage at actual funerals.”
I should have argued. Should have deployed the arsenal of deflections I’d been stockpiling since night one — he’s difficult, he’s cold, he doesn’t even want to be here. But underneath all those convenient narratives was the thing I hadn’t told anyone, the thing I kept turning over like a stone I was afraid to look beneath.
His hands had trembled. And instead of feeling powerful — which was literally my job, which was the entire premise of this show — I’d felt seen. Not by the trembling itself. By what came before it. The quiet do you want me to like my answer was the only thing that mattered. His hands finding the spot in my archthat hurt without being told. Those hands — calloused from drafting tables, steady from years of designing things that had to stand up under pressure — holding my foot like it was a load-bearing element he was personally responsible for.
I’d Googled “is it normal to be attracted to someone because of their hands” at 2 AM. The results were not reassuring.
“I’m going to be completely normal about this,” I said.
Tessa looked at me for a long time. “Okay,” she said, in the tone that meant I’ll have the wine open when you get back.
Julian went first, and he was perfect.
Of course he was perfect. Julian approached the Patience Test with mechanical efficiency, every response pre-calculated to any possible scenario. He stood on the platform — which the production team had dressed with dramatic lighting Tessa personally designed to make everyone look simultaneously gorgeous and slightly terrified — and arranged his face into composed confidence. Leading man screensaver. Power save mode.
I circled him. This was the choreography: slow approach, gradual proximity, testing the perimeter of a man’s self-control for weak points. I trailed my fingertips near his shoulder without touching. Stepped so he could feel my warmth. Leaned in near his jaw and let my breath graze his neck.
Nothing. Zero movement. That polished surface held. His breathing was steady. His pupils were exactly the same diameter they’d been when I walked in. He might as well have been contemplating quinoa options at Whole Foods.
“Good boy,” I murmured near his ear.
He smiled. The polished smile — pleasant, appropriate, and so completely empty that I felt a wave of sadness more than satisfaction. Julian had won the test and also proved,definitively, that nothing I did could reach him. There was nowhere to reach to. You can’t rattle a man who’s all surface.
“Thank you,” he said, like I’d validated his parking.
Mason failed in eleven seconds.
I hadn’t even completed my first circuit around him when he let out a noise — half-laugh, half-wheeze — and covered his face with both hands like a kid caught stealing cookies. The crew was already laughing. Mason’s inability to maintain composure was becoming a show tradition, a recurring bit that the audience loved because it was so transparently, helplessly genuine.
“I can’t,” he said through his fingers, shoulders shaking. “I’m sorry, I cannot — you’re doing the walk, the slow walk, and all I can think about is how my mom does the same thing when she’s checking if I cleaned my room, and now I’m thinking about my mom and this is so not the vibe—”
“Mason.” I was laughing too, which wasn’t in the script but was going to make the final edit. “The test hasn’t even started.”
“I know! That’s what makes it worse! I failed the pre-test. I’m failing the tutorial level. This is the easiest boss fight in the game and I walked into a wall.” He dropped his hands, face red and beaming and completely incapable of the composure this challenge required. “Can I at least get partial credit for showing up? A participation trophy? I was told there would be participation trophies.”
“Good boy,” I said, mostly because he looked like he needed the kindness.
Mason clutched his chest in mock horror. “See, now that’s a Geneva Convention violation. You can’t deploy that on someone who’s already emotionally compromised. I’m filing a formal complaint with the UN.”
He stepped off the platform still laughing, and when he passed the remaining contestants, he pointed at his own faceand mouthed save yourselves with theatrical desperation, like he’d survived a firing squad and found the whole experience unreasonably funny.
Derek was the opposite problem.
He stood on the platform with relaxed confidence, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this challenge — a test of control, of dominance, of who could hold still longest. His attention tracked me as I circled, not with Julian’s blankness but with sharp, watchful focus that made the back of my neck prickle. The same prickle I’d felt during our date when his hand had pressed flat against my lower back, two inches below where I’d have placed it myself.
I stepped close. He didn’t flinch — but he didn’t stay neutral, either. His chin tilted down. He looked at me with an intensity that was meant to read as confidence but registered, underneath, as ownership. He was playing at making me feel watched.
I’d met men like Derek before. The kind who treated stillness as dominance. Who confused control with superiority. Who could sit through any test you designed because they’d already decided the test was beneath them, and the only thing they were really proving was how completely they could manage a situation — and you.
“Good boy,” I said.
“Always,” he murmured, low enough for the boom mics to miss, intimate enough that I was meant to read it as private.
It wasn’t. I stepped back and made a note on the scoring tablet. His expression held, but a nerve behind that polished surface went briefly, coldly flat — a man who’d expected a different reaction and was already recalculating. I’d seen that look before. Not on this show. In my mother’s kitchen, on theface of her third husband, the one who’d smile while explaining exactly how much you needed him.
