They did exactly what they were told. They smeared cookie batter all over each other, laughing good-naturedly.
It still wasn’t working.
I regrouped. Our single dates had two halves: the activity and then the intimacy time, with a break between them for ITMs. I’d initially planned for the Dylans to sit down, still flour-smeared, and chat while they ate the cookies, but letting them talk more just seemed like it would make the problem worse.
I got wardrobe to put them in swimwear instead and sent them out into the lake. ‘You’re not miked, so you can say whatever you like to each other,’ I told them. ‘But I need you to kiss.’
‘Is that okay with you, Dyl?’ Romeo-Dylan asked. ‘We don’t have to if you don’t want to.’
I bit back a sound of frustration. Me shoutingyou both signed a contract saying you would kisswould probably not produce great results.
‘It’s fine,’ Juliet-Dylan replied. ‘We’ve got to do it sometime, right? Might as well rip the band-aid off.’
What romance.
I made them go out deep. Most people thought that close-ups were how you conveyed intimacy, but sometimes the best thing you could do was shoot from far away. It was innately voyeuristic: it made it feel like you were watching a stolen moment, something private that you weren’t supposed to be seeing.
The Dylans kissed.
It was… fine.
‘What the fuck are we going to do about this?’ I murmured. ‘Any ideas?’
No one answered.
‘Interesting choice,’ Lily said, ‘cutting Marija.’
We hadn’t wrapped up the Episode Three Last Chance Party and Necklace Ceremony shoot until almost 4am, but it had apparently made no difference to her determination to feed me. She slid another perfectly peppered plate of avocado toast across the table to me.
I caught it with one hand before it slid off the edge, pausing the dailies I was going through with the other. ‘Go—’
‘—to bed, Lily,’ she finished, dropping her voice to mimic me. ‘I will. Soon. But I need two things first. One, tell me why you got boy-Dylan to cut Marija instead of Amanda. Two, promise me you’ll also go to bed.’
‘One, you’d have to ask him that. That was all him. Two, don’t have time.’
‘You have a crew, Murray.’
‘Not much of one. And this has to get done properly.’
‘One, the perfect is the enemy of the good; and two, you can share the load better than this.’ She gestured at the screens. ‘It is not humanly possible for you to actively produce the show, manage all the cast and crew,andgo through every frame of dailies.’
She was right – I was just keeping on top of the footage from our main shoots, but I was well behind on the Convent footage, and I hadn’t touched the mounted camera VillaB-roll at all – but I wasn’t about to admit it. ‘Thank you for the toast.’
She shook her head. ‘Sometimes you are unbelievably infuriating. Do you know that?’
‘I’m infuriating?I’minfuriating?’
My tone would have made anyone else quake, but she didn’t even blink.
‘You want to talk about workload?’ I demanded. ‘You want to talk about things that are robbing me of sleep? You want to talk aboutinfuriating?’
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath through my nose. ‘It would make my life a million times easier, Lily,’ I said, ‘if you’d just tell me why you’re here.’
‘I have told you. Several times.’
‘But it doesn’t make any sense!’ I exclaimed, the frustration getting the better of me again. ‘If you want to do something new and be someone else, then go and do something new! Be someone else! Don’t come back here!’
