‘They’ll know I was bad at this, sure. But they won’t be able to show more than a quick montage. You’re the only person who’ll know how genuinely awful I was.’
Romeo-Dylan chuckled. ‘I promise you that if anyone ever calls me up one day and asks for a reference because you’ve applied to be a Pash Mash Smash professional, I’ll lie through my teeth.’
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled at her. Lily smiled back.
It wasn’t a Lily Fireball smile. It was Lily Ong, sitting opposite me at our desk as we worked late.Oh hey, babe,she’d say, something in her softening as she looked past me at Jeff.You brought us dinner? You’re so sweet.
‘Shall we go sit by our fire and have a glass of wine?’ Romeo-Dylan asked.
‘I hope by glass you mean bottle. Bottles, ideally. Plural.’
‘Look, as a professional athlete, I can tell you that we really should be hydrating first.’ He got to his feet and offered her his hand. ‘But as someone that just played eight hundred hours of Pash Mash Smash – bottles plural sounds great.’
Lily took his hand. Romeo-Dylan pulled her up.
There was no part of me that believed that she was attracted to him, or that he was attracted to her. It would be difficult to find two people as wildly mismatched as Lily Ong and Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor.
But I’d done my job too well. Just for a moment, as his fingers wrapped around her wrist, I could see it, and it took everything in me to stamp on that toxic cocktail of feelings and bury it deep.
There was a healthy distance between them as they sat next to the firepit, but it was comfortable, friendly, not coloured with the fear and tension of their previous interactions. Romeo-Dylan held his glass up. ‘Cheers.’
Lily clinked hers against his. ‘Cheers.’
They both drank. ‘Sorry for putting you through that,’ Romeo-Dylan said. ‘But I hope you had fun.’
She examined him shrewdly. ‘Is it exhausting?’
‘Is what exhausting? Pash Mash Smash?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Caring about what other people think as much as you do.’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ he replied. ‘Is it exhausting constantly having to come up with ways to put people off-balance?’
‘Oh, no,’ Lily said brightly. ‘That’s not hard at all. You just have to know where to apply pressure. Where the start of the domino line is, so when you shove one person in the shoulder, another one ends up in the pool.’
Romeo-Dylan opened his mouth. Closed it again.
Lily took a sip of her wine. ‘For instance,’ she said, gesturing with her glass, ‘sometimes you whisper the right wordsin the right ears, and the house racist gets humiliated on national television.’
If Romeo-Dylan had been drinking, he would have done a spit-take.
If I’d been drinking, so would I. My mind started racing, connecting the dots.
‘It was easy, really.’ Lily leaned back on one hand and swirled her glass. ‘All I had to do was mention to my producer that Heather and Naya didn’t like each other. I didn’t even have to tell him why. He ate it right up. Heather and Naya got put together on the group date, Heather couldn’t resist beingHeather, and – bam.’ She mimed a flicking motion with her fingers. ‘Over go my dominoes.’
Romeo-Dylan paused.
Paused a moment longer.
Gulped down half his wine glass in one go.
‘It wasyou?’ he said. ‘You’re the one who – who…?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I felt bad about putting Naya in the firing line,’ Lily said. ‘But she was already in the firing line with Heather in the Villa anyway, so…’
She shrugged, in that entirely studied, deliberate way of hers.
Romeo-Dylan gulped down the other half of his wine.
