Made sense. She’d never liked whiskey.
How long had she been sitting in the dark, waiting for me? God, that was classic Lily Ong, setting up a cinematic moment like that.
I took another swig from the whiskey bottle.
Classic Lily. Drama queen Lily. My Lily. She was still in there. She was stillher, underneath the Lily Fireball façade.
What the fuck was I supposed to do?
‘It’s Episode Eight,’ Romeo-Dylan said in our ITM the next morning. ‘I can cut Lily Fireball now, right?’
I sipped my coffee to give myself time to clamp down on any traitor emotional responses. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘Yes. It is.’
At least one of us wasn’t confused.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep that in mind as we figure out the dates for this episode.’
Romeo-Dylan gestured at my coffee. ‘Is there any more of that? I didn’t sleep well.’
We sent him on a single date with Parisa, the last Juliet who hadn’t been on one. It was an easy, uncontroversial choice, but compared with the high drama we’d been getting, it was fairly uninteresting. ‘We need to keep up the tempo,’ Carrie said in our production meeting. ‘If we’re cutting Lily, we need to send her out with a bang.’
‘Absolutely,’ Suzette said. ‘It’s got to be a Thunderdome date. Lily versus Dylan G.’
The Thunderdome date was a format we used when two contestants had formed a clear rivalry. We sent them together on a date with the lead. One would receive a necklace. One would be eliminated on the spot.
Wifeys like Juliet-Dylan didn’t feature often on Thunderdome dates, but villains did. If Lily had been a garden-variety villain, in a garden-variety not-here-for-the-right-reasons edit, this would be where we revealed her true colours.
But that wouldn’t work here. There were many phrases you could use to describe Lily Fireball, but ‘garden variety’ was not one of them.
I spent a lot of time standing in front of my whiteboard trying to figure out how to shape the date before I abandoned it. I couldn’t control what Lily was going to do.
I threw myself into preparing Juliet-Dylan for the date instead. ‘We have to walk a careful line here,’ I told her. ‘You need to come out of this looking like a hero, not someone who’s spent more time and energy disliking Lily than she has falling in love.’
‘I get it. You don’t want me to look like a petty bitch.’
‘Not the words I would use, but yes. Do your best notto let Lily get a rise out of you. Nothing else matters now. Only the Romeo.’
‘Nothing else matters,’ Juliet-Dylan repeated firmly. ‘Only the Romeo.’
I recognised the body language of compartmentalisation immediately, but I didn’t say anything. If her bust-up with Amanda was going to be a problem, I’d deal with it later.
I just needed to get through tonight.
A lot of our date formats had bells and whistles attached: activities to do, rules to learn, games to play. The Thunderdome date wasn’t like that. We didn’t need an activity to illuminate interpersonal tension, because the tension was already there. It was the purest form of subtext-is-for-cowards: in the Thunderdome date, all the subtextual tension became text.
We’d set up a romantic dinner in the middle of the hedge maze. Every fairy light we had was strung up. Our most ostentatious outdoor chandelier was hanging from the tree. Around the table, three hundred candles were flickering.
Pure maximalism. Pure excess. Pure romance.
Wardrobe had got the memo. Romeo-Dylan was in a classic tux. Juliet-Dylan was in a dark green sheath dress, accessorised with statement gold jewellery.
Lily was wearing the most spectacular dress I had ever seen.
It was dark red, the colour of wine. The skirt was long and full, almost conservative, matching her severe updo; but the neckline was daringly low, a V cut almost to her navel, leaving her collarbone bare. It was covered in sequins, reflecting the twinkle of the fairy lights, the shimmer of the chandelier, the flickering flames of the candles.
I wanted to cry, looking at her in that dress. I wanted to drop to my knees, put my head in my hands, and weep.
