‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘We’re a package deal, Lily. I’m not going anywhere without you.’
His finger was still touching my hand, resting gently on one of my knuckles.
I should pull my hand away. I should definitely pull my hand away.
He tapped that finger gently. ‘But even if it takes forever, and even if we have to do it from afar, and even if we have to sacrifice thousands of contestants,’ he said, ‘we’re taking down Tony.’
Vault. Jeff.Jeff.
I pulled back, wrapping my fingers around my fork instead. ‘Let’s grind his bones to make our bread.’
‘Let’s use his blood,’ Murray said, ‘to make your lipstick.’
24Murray
‘You’re angry with me,’ Lily said.
She was standing in front of my golf cart, arms folded. I’d been heading back up the hill from shooting the Episode Nine single date (the Dylans again, building on the strengths of the Thunderdome date), and she’d stridden out of the trees, directly into my path. How long had she been waiting there to stage such a perfect entrance?
I turned the engine off. ‘Hello to you too.’
‘You’re angry with me. Or you would have found a way to sneak me out of the Convent again by now. It’s been forty-eight hours. Why? Which bit did it?’
It was the first time I genuinely understood what Lily had meant that day in the laundry when she said we were too similar. It was inconvenient, really, that she thought in flowcharts too.
She climbed into the golf cart beside me and took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine. ‘I don’t want it to belike this, Murray. I didn’t finally cross the fucking Rubicon just for you to try and throw me back over to the other side. Tell me what upset you so I can fix it.’
I looked at our joined hands for a long time.
I should let go.
A better man would let go. A better man would never have let it get this far. A better man would never have slept with his widowed best friend, no matter how actively she wanted it and how long he’d been pining for her. A better man would have found a way to keep her off the show in the first place, would have wrapped her in cotton wool and looked after her, rather than sinking his teeth into her vulnerabilities until she cracked.
But I wasn’t that man. I was a man with a fundamentally broken moral compass. I was a man who loved her infinitely beyond any kind of better judgement. I was a man who didn’t know how to be without her.
And I was a man who always listened to what she said.
She had told me to trust her. That I wasn’t on my own anymore. That I had her.
Did I, though?
I had turned it all over in my head over the last couple of days, staring at the ceiling in my trailer, trying to use my work brain to think through things, to set the emotion aside and find the story.
Lily becoming Lily Fireball was destructive. There was no way around that. She was actively throwing Lily Ong’s life away.
But where did I fit into the puzzle?
I wanted to believe that being with me was… helping, somehow. That the admission of what she’d thought on thenight of Jeff’s funeral was an opening of the floodgates. That us being together was actually constructive, allowing her to reconcile the two halves of herself that she’d drawn such a stark line between.
I was deathly afraid, though, that this was just wishful thinking. That sleeping with me was just another way for her to throw away Lily Ong, the Lily who had been married to Jeff. That once she was done, she would throw me away too, like she was throwing away everything else we’d built together.
‘Hey.’ She nudged me with her elbow. ‘Look at me.’
She didn’t wait for me to obey, reaching over with her free hand and cupping my jaw, turning my face towards hers. ‘Stop brooding. Start talking.’
A rush of anger pulsed through me. Didn’t she understand how momentous this was? How much this meant to me? What was she going to do, stick a band-aid on the fact that she was committed to being a different person and then go on her merry way?
‘We’re a team, Murray. Please talk to me.’
