‘Dylan cares about Cece too,’ I said. ‘A lot. Alot. If we give them alone time without cameras, there’s a strong chance it turns romantic.’
‘So? Just say they smooched. Hell, say they fell into bed. He’s got a lot of skin in the game, telling the story you’ve rigged for him. Do you really think he’d blow everything up?’
I thought about it. Romeo-Dylan clearly cared deeply about Cece – but did it really outweigh how much he cared about telling the fairytale we’d set up for him? Would it cancel out all the anxiety he felt about how he came across?
‘No,’ I said at last. ‘But it’s still a risk.’
‘The cost/benefit is pretty clear, though,’ Lily said. ‘And honestly, it might give him closure too. Help him get it out of his system.’
We had to do this once. We had to get it out of our systems. But if we tried to do this for real, we’d wreck each other. We’d burn out.
‘Besides,’ she added, ‘if he did blow everything up, it would probably be a better story.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Lily,’ I groaned.
‘Think about it, though! Forbidden love! Literal Romeo and Juliet shit! It’d be an unbelievable story.’
‘Do you know why I rigged the show?’ I said abruptly.
‘You told me. Fucking Greg’s up your arse and you didn’t trust you could deliver a perfect fairytale without writing it in advance.’
‘I wanted to make something perfect,’ I said, ‘for you.’
She stilled.
‘But I knew I couldn’t make it perfect,’ I went on, ‘without you.’
I pressed harder at my twitching eye with one hand and hooked my earpiece in with the other. ‘You’re the other half of my brain, Lily. You’ve always been there before to bounce things off, to ‘yes, and’ things, to make them better. It’s always been both of us, working together. And the only thing I could think of that would help – that would make up for not having you there – was to impose some structure. To give myself some certainty. A way toknowthat it would all turn out all right in the end.’
I held up a finger before she could say anything. ‘I know it looks like mashing a Barbie and Ken together whenever theDylans are on screen,’ I said. ‘Iknowthat, in a perfect world, there are other stories we’d chase. But I’m on my own now, and we are too far down this path to change it. Too many people have signed off on too many things. And you put the last nail in the coffin yourself. There’s no way Fucking Greg will let me change the plan after he sees the footage from the Thunderdome date.’
‘You’re not on your own,’ Lily said softly.
I looked at her.
‘I know it’s not like it used to be,’ she said, ‘but you have me, Murray.’
She pushed gently at my shoulders until I sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Head forward.’
I obeyed. She dug her thumbs into my occipital muscles, then tugged gently at my hair until I tilted my head back, leaning into her.
‘I hear you,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to help.’
Part of me – the part that had pined for her for years – wanted to pull her into my lap and wrap my arms around her and not let go, even if the show started blowing up in my earpiece.
Another part of me – the part that was always thinking – couldn’t help remembering that she’d said that to me before.
Later that night, I watched Lily’s conversation with Cece eight times.
I told myself I was doing due diligence. That even though Lily had done what she’d told me, and staged a second – extremely Lily Fireball – entrance into the Convent, theremight be a few grabs I could use from her first conversation with Cece. ‘Don’t you dare air this footage,’ she snarled, right at the end, once she’d realised there were mounted cameras, staring directly into one of the lenses. ‘Don’t you fucking dare. If you do, I will rip off all your extremities and feed them to you, starting with your balls and ending with your dick. I mean it.’
Part of me wanted to be petty. To call her bluff.
I knew, though, after I watched their conversation the first time, that there was nothing here I could use.
I watched it again anyway. And again. And again.
‘After this show,’ the Lily on the screen said, sitting on the floor, in front of the Convent coffee table, ‘the world is going to be my oyster.’
