“People in escape rooms aren’t sharing a mattress with someone who smells like poor decisions.”
She was already walking away, clipboard tucked under her arm, a satisfied stride, knowing exactly what she’d engineered and was planning to watch from the control room with a bowl of popcorn and zero remorse.
I saw Derek on the way to the room.
He was standing alone near the stairwell, and for a fraction of a second he wasn’t Derek Hoffman, Professional Charmer, Contestant Number Seven. His shoulders were curved inward, caved around a weight no one else could see, and his face had done a thing I’d only seen once before — on a contestant during Season Two of a dating show I’d worked on, thirty seconds after he’d gotten a phone call about his mother. The mouth slack, the eyes unfocused, directed at a point a thousand yards past the wall. Not sadness, exactly. Absence. Like someone had reached in and removed whatever held the performance together, and what was left was just a man standing in the wreckage of a life no one else could see.
I must have made a sound — a shift of weight, a breath louder than I’d intended — because his head snapped toward me and the transformation was instant. Mask on, smile deployed, the charm slotting back into place with a speed that made my producer’s brain do the thing it always did when it spotted truth: catalog it, timestamp it, file it under come back to this. “Sloane.” His voice landed like a hand on the small of your back at a party. Easy, intimate, pitched to make you feel like the only interesting person in any room. “Big day. You excited for the Proximity Test?”
“Thrilled,” I said, and my voice was normal, and my smile was normal, and none of it mattered because I had seen the frame underneath the filter. A man who could bury that much grief beneath that much polish was a man who had practiced the burial until it was art, and I climbed the stairs to the second floor with a chill I couldn’t shake and a mental note I couldn’t file.
The daytime slots passed in a blur of producer duties and performed normalcy — a morning where Mason made me laugh so hard I forgot I was being filmed, three hours of Derek’s calculated afternoon charm, an evening session with Julian’s flawless-and-forgettable courtesy. All fine. All professional. All completely insufficient preparation for ten PM, when I pushed open the door to Room 6 and understood that Tessa had not been kidding about the size.
The room was an act of psychological warfare disguised as a floor plan.
I’d expected a reasonably sized room — the mansion’s bedrooms were generally built for people whose relationship with square footage bordered on codependent. This room was a converted sitting room approximately the size of my first New York apartment, which is to say it contained a bed, a nightstand, a chair that had clearly been added as an afterthought, and cameras mounted in opposite corners. The bed was technically a queen, as Tessa had promised, but it had been pushed against the far wall to accommodate camera angles, which meant one side offered a generous six inches of clearance before you hit plaster. For a man who was six-two and apparently assembled by someone who believed shoulders should be a commitment, this bed was a suggestion rather than a solution.
Rhys walked in twelve minutes after I did, carrying nothing. Of course he carried nothing. The man traveled light because the man was light, or at least tried to be — stripped to essentials,unburdened by excess. He stopped in the doorway and evaluated the room with the same measured attention I’d watched him apply to the mansion’s ceiling joists and, on one memorable occasion, a salad that had personally offended him.
“This is small,” he said.
“Congratulations on your spatial awareness.” I was sitting on the bed because there was literally nowhere else to sit, the chair commandeered by the overnight bag Tessa had packed for me. Pajamas (the silk set, not the cotton one, because Tessa was an agent of chaos with an eye for psychological warfare), a book I would absolutely pretend to read while actually watching Rhys exist in my peripheral vision, and tucked at the bottom like a passive-aggressive fortune cookie, a note in Tessa’s handwriting: Try to breathe.
He stepped inside and the room contracted — the displacement of air when a man that size crossed a threshold. His skin did the thing it always did, that clean-soap-and-skin scent I’d been mapping since the garden — a sommelier losing her professional objectivity one vintage at a time.
“One bed,” he observed, looking at it with the clinical attention of a man assessing a problem he hadn’t been contracted to solve.
“I believe the technical term is ’forced proximity.’” I crossed my legs and aimed for casual, but casual had taken one look at Rhys standing in my bedroom doorway and filed for early retirement. “You’re either sleeping on the floor or we’re negotiating a mattress treaty.”
“A mattress treaty.”
“I’ll draft the terms. Pillow allocation, blanket distribution, a clearly defined no-man’s-land running down the center.” I was talking too fast, the verbal equivalent of running downhill and hoping my legs could keep up with my momentum. “StandardGeneva Convention stuff. No encroachment. No unauthorized body heat transfer.”
Then the ghost appeared of an expression that on anyone else would be a full smile but on Rhys was the equivalent of a standing ovation. “Geneva Convention doesn’t cover mattress disputes.”
“Then we’ll be setting legal precedent.”
He moved to the far side of the bed and sat down, testing the mattress with one hand pressed flat against the surface. The bed dipped under his weight and I felt the tilt in my hip, a tiny gravitational announcement that the mattress had opinions about proximity and intended to express them all night. The distance between us was three feet of duvet and all of my remaining self-control.
“Rules,” he said, still looking at the mattress.
“Rules are good. Rules are great. I love rules.”
His eyes came up to mine, and whatever lived in that blue-grey — I was learning to read it through context and repetition and the desperate hope that what I was translating was real. “Clothes stay on,” he said.
“Obviously.”
“No talking about this to production.”
“Agreed.”
“And—” He hesitated, and the hesitation was so unlike him that it landed with its own weight, a disruption in the steady signal he broadcast. “If you need me to take the floor. At any point. I will.”
The offer sat between us, simple and enormous. A man who never surrendered space offering to give up all of his — because Rhys would rather spend a night on hardwood than risk making me uncomfortable by existing too close. “Stay on the bed,Callahan.” I managed to make it sound like an order. “The floor hasn’t been cleaned since the Clinton administration.”
The cameras watched us get ready for bed with the unblinking patience of a creature that fed on discomfort. We took turns in the bathroom — the only twelve square feet in this entire mansion where I could press my back against the door and silently scream into my hands without it appearing on a highlight reel. I changed into Tessa’s silk pajamas, cream-colored and tasteful, and walking back into that room in a fabric that narrated every line and curve of my body with editorial fidelity was an experience I intended to discuss with a licensed professional at my earliest convenience.
Rhys was already in bed when I emerged. Grey t-shirt, dark sleep pants, lying on his back with his hands behind his head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling like it owed him an explanation. The cameras hummed from their corners. The nightstand lamp cast the room in amber, the color of late-night bars and bad decisions and spaces designed for two people to share and neither of them to sleep.
