Thirty-three
Nate
As I step out onto the stage for the live finale, all I can see is Becca waiting for me. I sat by myself watching every word she said, and I couldn’t be prouder to call this incredible woman mine. Becca doesn’t give herself nearly enough credit. Sure, she’s not perfect. She’s made some mistakes, and so have I. But watching her stand up to Preston and then tell her story with so much poise and grace (though not nearly enough grace for herself), makes me want to pull her into my arms and kiss the hell out of her.
So when I reach her, that’s exactly what I do. I take her hands and lift her up off the couch and put my arms around her and kiss her the way she damn well deserves.
I get cheers from the audience for it, too, which is an added bonus.
We sit down together on the couch, Becca so close she’s practically in my lap, and Swiss smiles at us. “Nate, we’re happy you’re here,” he tells me, and I bet he is, given that we’re apparently saving their happily ever after. Preston has somehow managed to make himself lookeven worsethan he did the day of the proposal. It’s no wonder the show decided to throw him to the wolves and cast their lots in with us.
I didn’t see that coming, but I’m incredibly grateful for it. It’s going to make our lives a whole lot easier if we’re not public enemy number one.
“So, Nate,” Swiss says. “I have some questions for you, but first, let’s take a look at how your relationship progressed throughout the show.”
Becca and I look at each other, eyes wide.Take alook?
Sure enough, on the giant screen to the side of the stage runs footage of Becca and me together.They generally don’t get the producers on camera, so they must have combed like hell to find everything they had.There’s a shot of me teasingThea to get her to smile, and me watching Becca cook with a grin on my face.There’s a moment of Becca and I standing in a hallway talking. I remember that day—it was before the incident with the zipper, and god, we look so happy just to be near each other.They play some more footage of the balcony, of when I told her how wonderful she is. Here on the couch, Becca grips my arm, and when I look down at her, there are tears in her eyes.They, of course, play the footage where Becca talks about the “date that says ‘I love you,’” and the audience eats it up, now that they know what it really means.
They end it with the footage of Becca announcing she’s in love with somebody else, and us holding each other like we’re afraid to let go. Now there are tears inmyeyes.
My god, I love this woman more than anything in the world, more than I thought it was possible to love someone.These last couple months have been incredible, despite the stress and the hiding out and the sneaking around. Becca andThea and Rosie feel like my family, and I put my hand on my pocket, feeling the box there.
I’d meant to give it to her after the show, but with things going as they are—
“So Nate,” Swiss says. “Tell us how you fell in love with Becca.”
That feels too enormous for words, but I’m on camera, so I’m going to try. I tell him my side of meeting her, and the carriage talk, and the stuck zipper. “You’ve got to understand,” I say, “that I wasn’t entirely innocent of the way all this went wrong. Becca takes all the blame on herself, but as a producer, it was literally my job to manipulate her. And I did some manipulative things on this show, things I’m not proud of. I didn’t know we were being filmed that night on the balcony, but I knew it was a possibility, and if I hadn’t selfishly wanted to hear what was going on with her, I would have had the good sense not to talk about it there. She was right to be mad at me.”
I expect Swiss to turn on me as I’m admitting how the show manipulates women, but somehow he doesn’t.
Truth is, Levi did a pretty good job manipulating me, too—after his stunt with keeping Madison as a back-up plan, I’m certain the reason he never mentioned that balcony footage to me wasn’t because he thought I already knew, but because he knew I didn’t. Even if he hadn’t quite clued in yet about how deeply I was falling for Becca, he must have known my loyalty had shifted to her rather than the show. And Levi wasn’t about to risk losing out on any more secrets she might confess to me, not until he was willing to let Becca go.
Still, this doesn’t absolve me.
“But I wasn’t right to go back to dating Preston,” Becca says. “I never should have done that to you.”
I grip her hand. We’ve talked a lot about that, and about the moment she asked me again if I thought she’d be good with Preston, and about my hurt that she didn’t just reject me, she rejected me forhim. I’ve felt bad about how much that still hurts, when I feel like I should just be able to put it aside—especially because now I know she never wanted to be with him. But the wound was real, and as Becca told me late one night, if it was a broken bone, it wouldn’t have healed completely in that time, so it makes sense that it still hurts.
That helped a lot, and over these last few weeks, the hurt is healing over and leaving nothing but the memory in its place. “We both made some bad decisions,” I say. “Either of us could have left the show at any time, and looking back, we should have. But at the time, we were both so scared that it was a one-sided thing, and neither of us wanted to throw our lives away if the other person wasn’t totally in it.”
“It was hard enough to believe he could really be in love with me,” Becca says. “But after the whole thing with thinking he knew the cameras were there that night, and then what Preston told me in the DallianceTower—”
“What did he tell you?” Swiss interjects, and Becca winces. She clearly hadn’t meant to bring that up.
She fidgets, and I squeeze her hand tighter, even as I’m fighting my own wince. “In the Dalliance suite,” she says slowly, “Preston told me that the producers were the ones bringing me along, that he hadn’t even chosen to keep me until after our one-on-one.”
I cut my eyes back to Swiss. No way do the producers want the fact that they do that to be public knowledge. I expect him to immediately divert the conversation, but instead—
“So, let me get this straight, Becca.The man who accuses you of cheating on him hadn’t even chosen to keep you around untilafteryou and Nate were together.”
“That’s absolutely right, Swiss,” she says, and the audience makes a sinister murmur that I’m thinking is directed at Preston and not at us.
I want to kiss them, every one.
“So tell us where you’re at now,” Swiss says, and Becca doesn’t hesitate.
“We’re living together,” she says. We have been pretty much since we got back from Europe. I was surprised Becca was willing to trust me so much so early, but she meant it when she said she was going to work on her trust issues, and when Becca sets her mind to something, nothing can stop her. “And yes, I definitely regret some of the choices that I made, but ultimately, I can’t regret the whole experience, because it led me to Nate.”
