‘You’re resourceful.’
‘Yes, but I’m not magic. The amount of work it would take to re-shape the narrative is sickening.’
Especially without you,I wanted to say, but didn’t. If the only version of partnership she could offer me was one whereshe dated other men on television and snuck around with me, then I would take it.
It was a truth the last week had made me face. Lily had ruined me for anyone else. I didn’tlikeit – hated it, in fact – but there was no escaping it. I would break myself in half if it meant my jagged edges would fit like puzzle pieces with hers.
‘I don’t know,’ she said lightly. ‘That thing you did with your tongue before was pretty magic.’
I hooked a finger under her chin so I could kiss her. ‘Stop trying to distract me by stroking my ego.’
‘Would you rather I stroke something else?’
‘Once you give me a minute to recover, absolutely. But I want what’s in here first.’ I tapped her temple. ‘Tell me how to fix my problem.’
‘Hmmmm.’
God, I loved that little half-smile of hers she had when she was plotting something. That wicked glint in her eye.
I would do just about anything for this woman – compromise on just about anything – if it meant I could keep her.
‘You need to trigger a breakdown in Amanda,’ Lily said, after a few moments. ‘Then you can either have boy-Dylan cut her out of kindness, or have her eliminate herself.’
I thought about it, playing with her fingers. ‘Self-elimination would be better. It’s the penultimate episode. It’d be a strong promo hook.’
‘Obviously it wouldn’t be as iconic asmyself-elimination—’ Lily pressed her lips to my knuckles, ‘but it’d give you a good plotline going into the finale. A bunch of contestants have taken themselves out, which gives you a wholedark-night-of-the-soul story for boy-Dylan. You can ask a ‘If all these women keep leaving me, is the right person for me really here?’ question.’
‘And then answer it. Yes. She is. Dylan G.’
‘Of course,’ Lily said, craning her head around to look at me, ‘it’d be an evenbetterstory if at the last minute both the Dylans announced they were in love with other people. No one would see that coming.’
I groaned, letting my forehead fall onto her shoulder. ‘How many times do we have to have this conversation?’
‘If you want my genius brain, you have to take my genius criticism.’
‘I rigged the season because I didn’thaveyour genius brain,’ I said. ‘The wheels are in motion. This is what we’re doing. If your genius brain gives a shit about my genius brain not liquefying from stress, you’ll help me figure out how I get Amanda worked up enough to eliminate herself without doing any permanent emotional damage.’
The plan was, to say the least, morally grey.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t done some extremely morally grey things in the name of story before. I lived in the grey shades. Season Eight – the season of malicious compliance – had seen some of those grey shades turn perilously close to black.
This wasn’t quite as dark as that. However, it was easily the closest I’d skated to the line since.
‘Think of it this way,’ Lily said. ‘We went along with all of Tony’s nasty shit in Season Eight for the greater good, right? This is the same.’
She wasn’t wrong. The principle was the same. Sometimes you had to sacrifice pawns to win the game – and Amanda was only one pawn, as opposed to the twenty Juliets we’d sacrificed then.
Still.
‘I hoped, when we took over,’ I said, ‘that we could do better than this. Be better than this.’
I expected her to flash me a Lily Fireball grin and shoot off some snarky quip about how none of this would have happened if I hadn’t rigged the season, but instead, she just caressed my cheek with the back of her fingers. ‘I know, Murray,’ she said. ‘I know.’
The plan we’d come up with was to centre the Episode Eleven dates on the women’s exes. We’d keep our three remaining contestants separate, so they wouldn’t have a chance to warn each other what they were about to be faced with. In Dylan G and Kumiko’s case, that wasn’t going to be more than mildly unpleasant memories. Amanda’s most recent ex, though, a) sounded like a piece of shit, and b) was a woman – a fact I’d promised her weeks ago I wouldn’t reveal.
And I wasn’t going to. We’d be Zooming with an earlier ex-boyfriend instead of her ex-girlfriend.
‘But if Amandathinksyou’re going to blow up her spot,’ Lily said, as we flow-charted it out, ‘she’ll be fundamentally destabilised, and you can trigger fight or flight.’
