‘Where else would you like me to put it?’
That tone in her voice. Thatfuckingtone in her voice.
‘Lily. Move it.’
‘I can’t just vanish it into thin air. Either it goes on your lap, or I take it off and I walk in there in heels and a G-string. I’m fine with either. Your choice.’
I glared at her.
She smiled back, spreading her skirt over my lap like it was a blanket we were sharing.
We used to do that all the time on night shoots onDesert Island Castaway, out in the wilderness. On breaks, we’d huddle together in our giant black puffer jackets under whatever blanket or coat or tarp we could find, keeping each other warm against the bitter cold.
It had been so easy then. Just her and me and vanishingly little responsibility, under the vast blackness of the sky and the spray of the stars.
Together.
‘What are you looking at?’ she snapped at one of the other women.
Lily Ong, producer, rarely spoke like that to female contestants. ‘Sometimes men respond well to it,’ she’d told me once. ‘But if I yell at a woman, it almost always reads as bitchiness.’
That was the Lily I’d huddled under a blanket with. I knew that Lily. I understood her. I trusted her. I loved her.
But Lily Fireball…
Lily Fireball had all my Lily’s knowledge, and she was going to use it to burn down her entire life, andshe was going to make me watch.
‘Can you tell us who the Romeo is yet?’ one of the other Juliets asked.
I dug my knuckles into the meat of my thigh and shoved the feelings down. There were four other contestants in this limo I was responsible for. No matter what Lily was doing, I still had to do my job.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ I replied.
The woman who’d asked was Amanda Mitchell, the petite blonde mechanic we’d cast basically the second her application had crossed our desk. She was Greg-bait – someone he’d look at and say, ‘Oh, yes,she’llplay to the heartland audience!’.
Heather Vincent, the blonde on Lily’s other side, was also Greg-bait, although she’d probably just develop into a low-level mean girl. Amanda had the potential to be significantly more interesting. She had a strong narrative arc we could develop: she’d just broken up with her ex, and was trying to put herself back together.
That ex, I knew from research, was a woman, although Amanda hadn’t disclosed that. I didn’t blame her. The show had done terribly by its queer contestants in the past. One of the things Lily and I had on our to-do list when we took over from our old shithead boss Tony was to find a queer inter-contestant love story we could portray in a genuinely positive and romantic way. It hadn’t happened yet, but I had high hopes for Amanda. There were at least two other bisexual women going into the Villa. If she happened to fall for one of them, I’d be delighted.
… as long as she didn’t fall for Dylan Gilchrist, the tall Samoan woman she was sitting beside (who I mentally referred to as Juliet-Dylan, to distinguish her from Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor, the Romeo). If Juliet-Dylan was attracted to women, she’d kept it quiet, but she’d become friendly with Amanda at auditions, and the way they were whispering and holding hands was giving me pause. I couldn’t have them falling for each other. I had other plans for Juliet-Dylan.
The last of my contestants was Cece James, a pale brunette who was biting her lip and jiggling her leg nervously. We’d cast her as a wifey – someone with the potential to go deep in the competition – because she had a strong backstory. She’d had a rough childhood in foster care, and even the worst producer in the world could spin ‘unloved child seeking true love’ into good content.
I was concerned about how Cece was going to cope, though. She’d been very nervous during her pre-show interview. If she couldn’t get her shit together, even a solid gold backstory wouldn’t translate on screen. I’d intended to find a few minutes to take her aside before the limo ride and give her a pep talk.
That hadn’t happened, though. For obvious reasons.
Lily elbowed me in the ribs and said something I didn’t catch. I was too focused on that saccharine smile plastered across her face.
If you had asked me yesterday,what would you give to see Lily smile again?I would have replied,anything.
‘I wouldn’t mind if it were Chris Gregory,’ Amanda said. ‘He has kind eyes.’
Beneath the cover of her enormous yellow skirt, Lily’s elbow brushed mine. It wasn’t an aggressive, jokey, performative nudge like before, but an inquisitive one.Is it? Is that who you picked to be the Romeo?
I was not prone to overt displays of emotion. I could count the number of times I had cried in the last decade on one hand (on three fingers, specifically: when I’d realised my marriage wasn’t going to work out, when my ex-wife Juliaand I had the formal conversation about separating, and at Jeff’s funeral).
In that moment, though, there was a genuine danger that tears might come pouring from my eyes.
