Her hand was still on my chest. She smiled — a real one, unproduced, the kind that did something dangerous to the corners of her mouth. “I would have liked Captain.”
We stood there. Her palm, my heartbeat, and a corridor with bad camera angles. The crew was still breaking down the Truth Test stage, and in the temporary pocket of semi-privacy we existed in a version of reality that felt almost normal — almost like two people standing close together by choice, without production value or competitive dynamics or the weight of an audience. Her fingers curled once against my shirt, a half-inch gathering of fabric she might not have even been aware of, and my entire body catalogued it desperately, like someone starving who had just been handed something to keep.
Tessa’s voice cut through the corridor with the efficiency of a fire alarm: “Attention, everyone. Tomorrow’s challenge has been posted.”
She appeared around the corner, clipboard in hand, wearing the professional smile that meant she was about to create excellent television and terrible personal boundaries. Behind her, a PA wheeled a monitor into the hallway, and on it, in clean white text against a dark background:
THE PROXIMITY TEST 24 hours. Complete isolation. One partner assigned.
And underneath, in smaller text that might as well have been printed in neon:
Rhys Callahan & Sloane Mitchell. One room. Shared quarters. Cameras in all areas except bathroom.
The contestants reacted — murmurs, exchanged glances, someone muttering “ratings gold” — but I was doing mental math with all the accuracy and none of the calm I brought to professional calculations. Twenty-four hours. One room. Shared quarters. With a woman who’d held my face last night while Iasked her to call me a good boy. With cameras recording every breath, every glance, every moment that my body decided to broadcast what my mouth was trained to deny.
Sloane’s hand had dropped when Tessa appeared, but I could still feel it — a thermal imprint — five phantom points of pressure that my skin was refusing to let go of. She stood beside me reading the monitor with the composed expression of a veteran reality television producer who was not going to let a room assignment undo her professionally, but I was near enough to notice the pulse in her throat. It was faster than her face suggested. By a lot.
I’d spent the last hour telling strangers about the worst day of my childhood. I’d cracked open a lifetime of silence and let it pour through a microphone into the permanent record.
That had been the easy part.
Because tomorrow I was sharing a room with Sloane, and the distance between our bodies would be measured in inches instead of camera angles, and the truth I’d told today about my father and my dog and my boarded-up windows was nothing. Nothing — compared to the truth my body was going to tell all night long while she slept near enough to count her breaths.
I’d survived the confession. I was about to discover that proximity was the real test.
CHAPTER 10
Proximity
“When there’s only one bed — and he becomes your protector”
SLOANE
Tessa had the decency to announce the Proximity Test with coffee in my hand, which was either a kindness or a strategic choice designed to prevent me from throwing things.
“Twenty-four hours,” she read from her clipboard, her voice carrying across the lounge with the brisk authority of a flight attendant explaining crash procedure. “One continuous observation cycle. Each remaining contestant will share a confined space with the Queen for a designated window. Cameras in all common areas.” She paused, savoring the room’s collective panic like a sommelier nosing a particularly vindictive Burgundy. “The schedule is as follows.”
The daytime slots were rattled off — Derek’s three-hour afternoon session, Julian’s evening, Mason’s morning — and I registered them how I registered background music in waiting rooms: present, acknowledged, filed under irrelevant. And then Tessa looked directly at me with an expression that managed to be simultaneously apologetic and deeply, profoundly entertained.
“And the overnight.” She glanced at her clipboard like she was verifying information she already knew by heart. “Rhys Callahan. Ten PM to eight AM. One room. Shared quarters.”
I took a sip of my coffee because it was either that or acknowledge the heat climbing my neck. Across the lounge, Rhys was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his face set to its default expression of vaguely offended calm — the one that made him look as if he’d been asked to attend a party he hadn’t agreed to in a building that didn’t meet his standards. He met my eyes for exactly one second before looking away, and in that single second he did the thing — the flex in his throat, the micro-adjustment, the tell I’d spent six weeks learning to read. And I knew, with the certainty of six weeks spent studying this man’s micro-expressions like a behavioral study, that his composure was as convincing as mine. Which is to say, not at all.
“The overnight,” I repeated to Tessa under my breath as the room dissolved into murmurs. “You gave me ten hours in a bedroom with the one contestant who makes me lose the ability to form sentences, and you’re calling it a schedule?”
Tessa’s smile was beatific. “The algorithm assigned the time slots.”
“You don’t have an algorithm.”
“I have a spreadsheet, which is basically the same thing.” She leaned closer, dropping her producer voice for her best-friend voice, the one that meant she was about to deliver news I was going to need therapy to process. “The room is on the second floor. East wing. One bed. Before you panic — it’s a queen.”
“A queen bed for the Queen. Very on brand.” My voice came out steadier than my pulse deserved. “And the cameras?”
“Everywhere except the bathroom.”
“Lovely. So I can have my nervous breakdown in private as long as I’m within six feet of a toilet.”
Tessa squeezed my arm. “You’ll be fine.It’s one night. People survive longer in escape rooms.”
