***
Viewers are probably going to watch this episode of My Billionaire Bachelor and wonder why the hell the hostess spends the entire jet ride constantly cropping up between Sir Berringer and this contestant, ‘Annette.’ She bombards us with questions about our lives, and I regurgitate information from Annette’s dossier. The instant Blake’s arm begins to settle around my shoulders, Candace launches into us again, now with facts about the waterfalls. They’re seventy meters tall. The Lambda Falls is a double waterfall. There’s a water curtain which obscures a rock shelf from view.
Our jet levels into a hangar, and we branch off toward the park. I stride toward the My Billionaire Bachelor van that I always ride in, but Blake reaches out and touches my arm lightly. I turn back toward him, and he nods toward the limousine with a soft grin. “Remember?”
That’s right. I’m a contestant tonight.
I do get a little flutter in my stomach at the thought.
Candace is waiting for us in the limousine. How romantic. She suggests that I take off the brass key necklace because “it clashes with my dress,” and I don’t even dignify her suggestion with a response.
There’s an elaborate set staged for us. We have to wait while stagehands assemble a luxurious, silky modern yurt. The stagehands are trying to figure out how to fit five cameras and two boom mics into the thing without tearing open a wall.
“Tear open a goddamn wall,” I hear Candace bark behind me.
The waterfalls of Edessa are beautiful, dazzling in the powerful lamps situated around the beach by the crew. I turn my back on the cameras and stare out across the park, absorbing the roar of the water, the smell of the trees, the magnitude of it all. I pretend there are no cameras. I pretend this is a real date, and I’m not Annette.
Then I sigh.
Maybe, in some other reality, there’s a girl named Roxanne and a guy named Blake, standing at a waterfall, no cameras. But not in this one.
Tonight, I’m just Annette.
The yurt is made ready, candlelit and plump with pillows and wicker baskets for some reason, and then the table and chairs are set up and we have a quick, moonlit tasting with a sommelier. These dates are ridiculous.
After the table is packed up and the wine-tasting portion of the date is over, we settle in the partially-disassembled yurt to talk fakely about life. As much as I hate it, we do the ‘billionaire date episode’ thing. I keep myself together. We barely touch. We chat about Blake’s work in Africa in 2013 and being knighted. I talk about the courses I’m taking at community college, and everything else I memorized off the back of Annette’s application packet.
It’s good that the cameras and Candace are always hunkering nearby. We never forget that this is not real. Even when Blake draws me out of the yurt and toward the lake’s edge, and the whole world seems to open up for us, even then, I still don’t forget.
Until I say the dumbest thing, like the mic fastened beneath my dress doesn’t pick all this stuff up.
I might have been ogling him a little bit. He’s so magnetic tonight. He wears a smart black and white suit and looks like a young Brad Pitt tonight.
“You know, I think you’re overdressed,” I whisper up to him.
“So are you,” he whispers back, and I glance down with a blush. I’m wearing a fairly revealing mini-dress in gold lamé. If I take off anything, I’ll be naked.
At the same time as Blake pointedly shirks his dinner coat, I slip out of my heels, a giddy energy overtaking us both. Fuck this stupid fake date, crowded with cameras in half of a yurt! We spring away and abandon our stage. The beach is cool and damp beneath my bare feet, and Blake looks even better, rolling up the sleeves on his crisp white dress shirt, exposing muscled, bronze forearms beneath.
You know it’s bad when even his forearms get to you.
Blake skips forward, and then I do, and we both pounce from rock to rock, escaping the beach until we reach the water curtain.
“Are you coming?” he wonders, and then springs onto the rock shelf.
I take a deep breath and pounce after him.
We’re behind a cascade of impenetrable white. It’s so loud, I wonder if the microphones can pick up our voices back here at all. It’s so loud, I wonder what Candace is screaming right now.
My heart soars with the realization that this footage is ruined. The audio quality isn’t salvageable. We’re suddenly really alone. I’m Roxanne again.
I see Blake in a new light, the same way I did on the day he scooped me off my feet and galloped into a glade. He’s calculating ways to create privacy with me.
But can I trust him?
Blake ducks his head slightly and yells his words to me, because if he doesn’t, I won’t be able to hear them.
“Now I know why you never really wanted to talk to me,” he says.
I scowl up at him uncertainly. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“It wasn’t your job or some misguided notion of friendship between us,” he goes on. “It was Jared.”
I smile because I’m uncomfortable, and I shake my head, looking down, breaking eye contact. “Don’t give yourself so much credit, Berringer,” I tell him. “I can reject you based on your merits. I can reject you right now.”
Where are those damn cameras? I know they’re right at our backs, and if they aren’t, Candace will send an emissary to force us out from behind the water curtain. I kind of wish they were here. Anything to get me out of this conversation about Jared.
The mention of his damn name brings my pulse to an immediate boil, and I feel suddenly claustrophobic.
Blake reaches out and lightly takes both my arms. “I saw you after you left him, Roxanne. You were terrified.”
I wrench my arms from him and take two steps back, holding his eyes as if commanding him to stay. “No,” I tell him firmly, just like that. As if Jared never happened. I never let myself think about it. Therefore, it didn’t happen.
If I catch myself thinking about it, I throw that thought away like it’s a scrap of ruined paper. Get a fresh sheet. Start again. Don’t look back.
“It was just a few years ago!” Blake yells, frustrated as he watches my body language close him out. “People get PTSD from stuff like this! And then…” He steps forward, crossing the space between us in one stride. He gestures toward me but doesn’t touch my skin. “I know you must have seen those pictures. You must know that I did damage a member of the paparazzi. Desmond Delago.”
“I did hear about that,” I allow, realizing he’s going to dig in and have this conversation whether I want to or not. I feel sick to my stomach. I look at the water curtain. I want to jump through it and swim for shore. “He was nineteen, wasn’t he?”
“I didn’t know how old he was, Roxanne, but that’s no excuse. I hardly even looked at him when I attacked. I was barely myself.”
My eyes turn back to him shrewdly. “That’s not an excuse, either.”
“I know.” His hand covers mine completely, and I step back again, but he doesn’t let go. “He just…took me by surprise. No one was supposed to be there.” He hesitates and confesses, “I didn’t want anyone to see me like that, and there he was, taking pictures.”
I swallow the tightness in my throat, but I can’t swallow the pounding of my heart. “See you like what, Blake? Cracked out?”
His eyes become gentle with sorrow. “No.”
I clench my jaw and pull my hand out of his. I can’t stand to hear a liar lie. “If you weren’t there for rehab,” I snarl, “then why have you been silent about that day for months?”
Now it’s Blake’s turn to sigh.
He doesn’t try to take my hand again. He just stands there, gazing down at me with those eyes, framed by the roaring water curtain.
“Because it’s no one’s business,” he answers softly.
“What about me, then?” I ask, lifting my chin. “Am I no one?”
Several seconds lapse.
“It started out as a volunteer thing,” he goes on, and I have to struggle to hear him now. “I was part of a program called The Eleventh Hour, which places people at the bedsides of those who are dying and have no one with them.”
My heart is still pounding hard, and a part of me—the survival instinct that saved me from Jared and hates to hear that name—warns me that he’s not telling the truth. No man ever is.
“It can be pretty…intense,” Blake goes on. “You become familiar with all the people in hospice when you participate in that program, and I became close with a patient named Arthur. Really close.” His eyes go unfocused, and he swallows thickly. “He had leukemia. He was…um…six. He was an orphan.”
I don’t say anything, and I don’t need to. I know what happens next. It’s scrawled across my face. I slowly crack and begin to let his words seep in, begin to really hear him. I want to believe him.
“I was with Arthur when he died. It wasn’t the first death I’d ever seen, but it was the death of a child. He was hemorrhaging and full of painkillers, but he—he said—” Blake’s eyes crust with tears, and he presses his knuckle to his lower lip for a brief moment, taking a deep breath through his nose and closing his eyes. The last of my disbelief falls away. He continues in an uneven voice, “He begged me to help him escape the hospital. He wanted to go to the carnival. He said he could see it in the distance. All the lights were coming closer. He said he wanted to ride the rollercoaster. And then…”
I watch helplessly as Blake closes his eyes again and takes another deep breath. I see the stress flow from his body as he does.
He opens his eyes again and looks at me. Back here, his eyes seem dark and shiny at the same time. They’ve aged. I forget that the camera crew even exists.
“I came stumbling out of that hospital, just feeling drenched, you know,” Blake goes on. “So heavy. So lost. I don’t even remember anything after the heart monitor stopped until this punk,” Blake’s voice fluctuates, like he’s either going to laugh or cry, “sends a flashbulb off in my fucking face. And I just… snapped.” He shakes his head with heartbroken blue eyes. “One time,” he says again. “For a few seconds, I snapped. And I’m sorry.”
Blake leans in and reminds me in a whisper, and I hear him in spite of the roar of the water. “I would never hurt you,” he promises.
My eyelashes kiss closed, and I exhale, but my chin tilts down, not up.
He’s asking so much of me.
I want to melt into him, but I can’t. I won’t. Invoking Jared reminds me of the cruelty in this world, and I’m scared. I lean away from him with remorse already kindled in my eyes. Didn’t he know this would happen? Haven’t I been dodging him at every turn?
“Blake, I—”
“Cut!” Candace yells, startling me.
Blake’s head whips to shoot icy blue daggers in the direction of the two cameramen literally up to their waists in water, holding handheld cameras just to get this shot. Candace is with them, barefoot and balancing on one of the rocks which juts through the surface of the water.
A muscle in Blake’s jaw ticks, and he strides from the water curtain without saying anything more. He doesn’t even look at me. He takes a graceful leap onto a rock and disappears onto the other side of the curtain.
“Blake,” I call after him, knowing he doesn’t understand, desperate to explain. I half-cross the rock shelf, but Candace skips onto it and intercepts me.
“Take a walk with me, Roxy,” she commands, scooping an arm around my shoulders. “Follow Blake,” she barks at the cameramen.
We stroll across the rock shelf now toward the other side of the water curtain. The downpour isn’t as harsh on this side, and we can see the beach from here. All the vans idle, waiting for us. The stagehands deconstruct the yurt. The cameramen trail Blake, who looks miserable. “You did the right thing,” Candace tells me.
“Which thing?”
“Not kissing the billionaire, of course. We would never have used the footage anyway. I wish we didn’t have to use you in the episode at all, but that wasn’t what Sir Berringer wanted, was it?” The cameras are all packed up. Stagehands trundle back and forth across the beach with pillows and wicker horns and candles. “Never let the bachelor kiss you,” Candace reminds. “Do you know why I say that?”
“You don’t say that,” I remind her. “This is the first season that has ever been a rule.”
“Oh, sweet Roxanne.” Candace squeezes my shoulder tightly and gives it a little jiggle, like we’re comrades. “Every season, I have to remind some staffer repeatedly to not climb into the billionaire’s bed. This is just the first season I’ve ever had to warn you!”
“So?” I ask, my tone tight and rigid. “Why don’t you just let people do what they want to do?”
“Because, Roxanne,” she snaps, “it’s going to ruin the integrity of the show when you show up pregnant in the tabloids, isn’t it? And anyway, I can’t have my best makeup artist going on crying jags while she paints up a date for her ex-boyfriend.”
“Dramatic,” I lightly critique her.
“Dramatic? Look at him, Roxy, and you tell me which is more dramatic, this advice or those cheekbones. You blind? Women crawl on that dick all day long. He can have anyone he wants. They’ll do anything. And you’re just the makeup artist on his reality television show.”
“No, I’m not,” I inform her staunchly, twisting from beneath her arm to glare squarely at her. “We met at a Second Chances Christmas party. Five years ago. We were the same back then.”
Candace mock-gasps. “You mean, he wanted to sleep with you back then, too? When you were all of twenty-five? I’m shocked!”
“Don’t,” I tell her. My fingers go to the necklace. “It wasn’t like that. We had a moment.”
Candace cocks her chin to one side. She scrutinizes my hand. “Why do you do that?” she wonders. “Why do you hold onto that necklace every time you have to defend yourself?”
My fingers unfold from the necklace, and my shoulders square. I exhale steadily. “I don’t.”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“What Jenny told me about that necklace. Is it one of the Berringer estate keys?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Blake give it to you?”
I don’t answer, and she simmers.
“I could fire you,” Candace reminds me, voice taut. “You know that, right?”
“I’ve had this necklace as long as you’ve known me, Candace,” I snap at her, calling her Candace aloud for only the second time ever. There was something about her which always felt motherly to me, but she is losing it now. Now she seems all too human. “I met Blake when I very first left Jared. That was the year of the Second Chances Christmas party.”
“So? You met after Jared and he just gave you a key to his house?”
“We didn’t just meet. I was about to kill myself. And he stopped me.” I normally wouldn’t let that just spill out, but I’m so hot to defend our background and our chemistry, the words are out there before I can stop.
“What?”
“I was hanging off the side of the ship, about to jump,” I confess, “and he stopped me. He talked to me. He helped me back over the railing and gave me this key.” My eyes lock onto Candace’s. “It means a lot to me. It’s not a sexual thing or a romantic thing. It’s a personal thing. So there.”
Still, Candace glowers. “All right,” she allows. “I guess that’s fine. But you know this guy is dangerous, right? You saw the pictures, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“Stay away from him,” Candace assures me. “He’s Bachelor #6, Roxy. That’s all. Another billionaire. Don’t fall for it.”