‘Glad I could be of assistance,’ he said. ‘For the record: assuming it’s the same lipstick you’re wearing today, it looks great.’
A frisson went up my spine, but I didn’t let it show. He hadn’t earned that yet.
‘Noted,’ I said instead, keeping my tone breezy. ‘It’s calledBlood of My Enemies,in case there’s some lucky lady in your life you want to buy it for.’
He chuckled again, but didn’t take the bait.
Fair enough. It had been a clumsy attempt to figure out if he was single. I wouldn’t have taken the bait either.
Instead, he moved his satchel from the seat beside him. ‘Want to sit?’
‘Sure.’
I sat, putting my handbag on the floor. The boy from the bar offered me his hand. ‘I’m Murray. O’Connell. Production assistant. First time on a show, in case that isn’t obvious.’
I shook it. ‘Lily. Ong. Also a production assistant. Also my first time on a show.’
‘Really?’
That question surprised me. ‘Yes, really,’ I said. ‘I don’t lie unless I absolutely have to.’
That was a line I tried not to cross. Most people seemed to have been born with them: lines that demarcated good and bad, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate. I hadn’t been, not really, so I’d had to draw my own. Not lying was one of them.
Murray studied me. Even with his bloodshot eyes, he had a very intense gaze. I had the sudden feeling that, if I let him look at me long enough, he’d figure out exactly what I’d been thinking when I watched him across the bar.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Do I look like a liar?’
‘No. You just don’t seem like a newbie.’
It was my turn to study him. ‘What do I seem like?’
‘You seem,’ he said, ‘like someone who knows what they’re doing.’
3Murray
It should have been the most comfortable limo ride of my career. Usually, when we shot the drive out to the First Night Party, we’d have a cameraperson in the back with us. They’d take one of the seats, crammed in beside the contestants, and I’d be lying on the floor so I wasn’t in shot, staring straight up at the limo roof so I didn’t accidentally look up anyone’s skirt.
This season, though, our pandemic-reduced personnel numbers meant we didn’t have enough camera operators to have them both in the limos and on set to shoot the red-carpet entrances. The entrances were obviously more important, so we’d sent all the camera crew ahead to the Villa, and were shooting the limo rides using lipstick cameras instead.
So in some ways, yes, it was one of the more comfortable limo rides of my career. I was sitting upright.
But I was sitting next to Lily.
‘Long time no see, Murray.’ She squeezed herself between me and one of the other Juliets and draped her enormous yellow skirt across my lap.
I gave her a look.
She looked back, unabashed, that implacable mask firmly in place.
A jolt of anger stabbed through me. She knew exactly what she was doing to me – and she was just fucking sitting there anddoing it anyway.
Justifying her presence to the crew had been a nightmare. They’d had so many questions at the briefing that I’d had to either invent answers for or handwave away, and they were going to have more. One more thing I had to worry about, on top of the giant pile of responsibilities I was already trying to manage.
That was nothing, though, compared to the way looking at her made me feel.
How could she do this? How could she turn up here like this after a year of total silence and expect me not to completely lose my shit?
‘Get that off me.’ I shoved the mass of her skirt off my lap. I was not a big man, and she was not a big woman, but there wasn’t room for her and me and her dress and my mood in this limo, not even close.
