Page 16 of Unscripted

“You weren’t supposed to leave your spot!” he cried.

Next to Harry stood a pale, blond guy with round-framed glasses. He was trying to hold back his laughter at Harry’s distress, the edges of his mouth quirking up in a barely restrained smile.

The blond guy turned to the man in front of me.

“Callum,” he said.

“Ben,” Callum said back.

Callum. A nice name for an annoying guy. And the blond man was Ben, the other producer Harry had gone to meet with.

“You two are not supposed to have met yet!” Harry exclaimed, shooting me a reproachful look.

I was about to tell him the moment could hardly qualify as having actually met, but Ben turned to him first.

“Haz, it’s fine,” he said, giving Harry a squeeze on the arm.

That they were already on a nickname basis was something I would definitely be bringing up to Harry later.

Ben turned back to Callum and me.

“Let’s just go our separate ways now, and when you both walk into the villa in a few days, promise us you’ll pretend you’ve never met before.”

“Easy,” Callum said, his tone laced with cutting rudeness.

The smiling guy from yesterday was clearly a one-off. This person standing in front of me was a total dick.

I couldn’t believe I had ever thought twice about his eyes.

“Fine by me,” I said, trying to match his icy tone with my own.

Not wanting to be near Callum a moment longer, I pushed past him and made my way to Harry.

“I’m going back to my side of the boat,” I said.

I walked away without looking back.

I shouldn’t have felt anything other than slight annoyance over the interaction. I didn’t know the guy. Why would I care how he acted?

But as I settled myself back into my little nook for the rest of the boat ride, I couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit of disappointment that Callum had turned out to be a prick.

***

I spent the rest of the ferry ride alternating between being annoyed at Callum for being so rude and annoyed at myself for not having said anything about it to his face. I replayed our entire interaction over and over, coming up with better and better one-liners I could have said to him.

My fantasy world of revenge occupied me enough that I didn’t even notice when we had docked on Ischia.

Harry poked his head into my tiny alcove and said, “Well, come on. We’re here.”

I jumped up, happy to get off the boat and away from the weirdness of the afternoon.

Everything had happened so fast since I said “yes” to doing the show, and I had tried my best to be ready for what was to come. What I had not prepared myself for in the days leading up to my departure from England was the contestants being intolerable.

If Callum was a dick, would the others be the same? Would I even meet anyone I liked? Would I make any friends?

These thoughts plagued my mind as we deboarded, and I was ushered into another waiting car. Out the window I could see a second sprinter van that Callum and Ben were climbing in. They were laughing with each other, which only made me more annoyed.

It was just me, apparently, that he was frosty toward. He wasn’t being rude to Ben.