Lily looked her up and down.
‘What?’ Juliet-Dylan snapped.
‘You just can’t stop yourself, can you? You can’t bear to let people stand up for themselves.’
‘Lily!’ I barked. ‘Out here! Now!’
She glanced over at me. ‘Or what?’
‘Don’t,’ I snarled, ‘make me ask you again.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Fine, fine.’
Lily followed me into the production tent. ‘You know I hate it when you use the daddy voice on me.’
‘That is not something you get to have an opinion about anymore,’ I said shortly. ‘My partner gets to have opinions like that. My contestants do not.’
There was a glint in her eyes. ‘Is that how we’re playing it now?’
‘You’re the only one who’s playing. I’m just trying to do my job. And so is Tess. Don’t speak to her like that.’
‘I’ll apologise later. It’s just for the cameras.’
‘And like I’ve told you a thousand times already, back off Dylan G.’
She took a beat.
‘I’ll back off,’ she said coolly, ‘when you convince me it’s the right thing to do.’
People did not walk away from me on this set. I was the boss. The buck stopped with me.
Lily turned on her heel and swept away.
I should have followed her. I should have made her come back. I should have made her stand there and just fuckingtalk to me.
I didn’t.
Instead, I sank down in a squat where I was, every last remaining ounce of energy leaving me.
My whole body ached. My calf, which had already cramped up twice that morning, was twinging ominously. My stomach was a roiling mess, and there was a hot, scratchy feeling behind my eyes, like someone was scrubbing at them with steel wool from inside my head.
It had been hard, when Julia and I split. It had been the right thing to do, but that hadn’t made it easy. I’d missed her horribly. I’d been deeply, profoundly lonely.
But I’d had Lily. At every step, at every hurdle, at every setback, my best friend had had my back. I might have been lonely, but I’d never been alone.
‘Murray!’ Romeo-Dylan said from behind me. ‘Are you all right, mate?’
Do your job, do your job, do your job,I chanted to myself.
‘Yeah, yeah, no worries,’ I said. ‘I just haven’t had much sleep.’
The Episode Four group date was a clusterfuck.
It was intended to be a clusterfuck – we’d pitted five active Juliets against the five eliminated ones in a nonsense sport called Love Jockey Hockey, with the express intention of starting a Villa vs Convent shitfight – but it swiftly turnedinto a different kind of clusterfuck when one of the Juliets, a blonde named Belinda, got hit in the face and lost most of a front tooth.
Because of the strict bubble our set was in, we couldn’t take her to a dentist. I had a long, painful argument about it with Juliet-Dylan, who’d once again dived in to provide emergency first aid. Then, once I’d calmed her down, we’d had to spend another fifteen minutes trying to find Romeo-Dylan, who’d apparently found all the blood very confronting.
By the time the date wrapped, my brain was moving at about a third of its normal speed, my eye was twitching so badly I could barely keep it open, and everything hurt. I didn’t even have the energy to care about the missed story opportunity. I’d intended to rig it so the Convent team won, with the promise that Romeo-Dylan could resurrect one of the eliminated women to full Juliet status. However, in all the chaos, the Villa team had run away with it… due in no small part to Lily playing incredibly viciously. Yet another way she was making my life harder.
