The one thing she probably hates more than him not wanting her, is the fact that he acts like it’s because he doesn’t want to ‘ruin the friendship,’ which is such a lie. That’s not a reason. She’s read enough books to know that that’s wrong. Namely ‘He’s Just Not That into You’ where it says in black and white that it’s a non-reason and a bad excuse. If he wanted her, he would have her. If he wanted her, he wouldn’t hide behind some pretend veneer of not wanting to ruin what they have.
“Look at us, Declan,” she says, in the door out to the yard and finally looks at him, tear-streaked cheeks and all. “We already are.”
Then she runs.
The next time she lets him see her is at the dress rehearsal. He tries to lead in with something but she cuts him off.
“I changed the music,” she tells him matter-of-factly and he makes a face like he doesn’t understand. Karin covers the mic on her shirt with her fist because Declan was late as usual and Gorman wasn’t. “I don’t want to dance to that song,” she says and gives him a pointed enough look for him to understand exactly why. “So I changed the music. I already tried it, it works.”
“Alright,” Declan nods, looking at her like she’s a bomb he has no idea how to defuse. “What are we dancing to?”
“My favorite,” she declares, and they do.
When they tell Sinea and run it through for her once before the taping, she loves it, even if they ended up dancing to their own song after all, suggests a slight twist on the final pose and by the end of the performance, it’s not the woman who dies but her lover. Declan winds up collapsing forward onto Karin on the last hurrah of the music, leaning on her side and clutching her hips for dear life. She doesn’t help him up when the applause is over.
They win the challenge by a landslide.
Kaidan and Kaelan are excited for them, Courtney is pretending to be excited for them and Aileen and Rickard look like they have their own things going on. Karin doesn’t care about any of it.
“For Foster and me,” Sinea says, giving her final guest-judging verdict, “we felt the strongest connection as well as the best artistic expression in Karin and Declan. Their dance was daring and brave, to go with a classical piece and to change it up at such short notice, and there were definitely sparks. A completely genuine connection.” Sinea’s words sound like mockery, even if that is not their intent at all. “Very well done, and I must say I agree with the couples regarding Aileen and Rickard. On the dance floor, they just did not harmonize. So, with a heavy heart, we have to give them our vote no.”
Karin can see it etched on Aileen’s flawless, stony face. She already knows that her and Rickard’s statement won’t change anybody’s mind. Heart Roulette is over for them. Karin can’t bring herself to care about that either. When they have drinks later in the kitchen, Karin stays for as long as she must to look polite and hugs Aileen and Rickard for a long time. She tells them she is going to miss them both so much and that she is very sad that they’re leaving.
That night, when Declan closes the curtains in their room and takes his blanket over to the pull-out couch with a muttered “I think it’s better if I sleep here for now,” Karin wishes she could trade places with them.
****
“Gee, buddy, you’re a god send,” Raeden bellows, patting Gorman on the back hard as he brings by rolls, pastries, and take-out coffee from the little bakery just up the shore. The guys so rarely get out of the production rental, a midday caffeine delivery is always met with disproportionate gratefulness that Gorman admittedly indulges in. He loves doing nice things for other people, that’s just how he’s wired. Raeden and Micky are always very appreciative. The two of them are the on-site editors, housed in a two story townhouse in Georgetown where the internet connection is the most stable, so they can confer more easily with the execs. It’s just that besides the internet connection, nothing else really works, least of all the air conditioning, which is why they have started to not-so-affectionately refer to their makeshift office as Hell.
“I don’t know how you can get hot drinks in you around here, actually,” Gorman muses, watching Micky dig into the chocolate croissant he bought specifically to cater to the other man’s sweet tooth.
“Addiction makes you do strange things,” Raeden says gravely. “So, what do you got for us today? I swear if I have to cut down another ten minutes of Courtney cooing at Bobby I’m going to jump out of the window.”
“None of that today,” Gorman replies and hands over the SD cards and copy lists Claudette, his unit’s production assistant, made. “But you’re not going to like what’s on there much, either.”
“Aw, don’t say it,” Raeden sighs. “K and D?” It’s their production shorthand for Karin and Declan.
“Still on the rocks,” Gorman shrugs quite unhappily.
“Did Marietta get back to you on how she wants it edited?” Micky asks, taking his place at the workspace in the corner, waking up his two screens to start working again after his break.
“She said not to treat them differently from the others,” Gorman tells him. “We’re not going to be deliberately fooling audiences. If they look like they’re not together, then that’s what it is.”
“They did so great the first few weeks,” Raeden sighs. “Now for four days it’s been just strange.”
“It is strange, right?” Micky agrees, sounding far more invested than strictly necessary. “Is it strange in person?” the other man looks at Gorman expectantly, rolling a bit more into the room on his office chair. The other men don’t come in direct contact with the contenders or the rest of the on-site crew really, so Gorman is basically their window into the world…the emissary traveling between the two forbidden lands, so to speak. At least he can provide some entertainment and scoop that way if he can’t do anything about the heat.
He pulls up a chair, thinking he might as well tell them, get the gossip out of the way before he shares the good news he’s most excited to deliver, even more than the chocolate buns and puff pastries he brought.
“To be honest, I don’t know what happened between them,” Gorman says, surprising himself by how sincerely distraught he sounds about it. He knows Karin and Declan are the fake couple, they all know, but they still feel like they’re his special kids, because he is their assigned cameraman and there is something going on with them, isn’t there? You’d have to be deaf and blind not to realize that. Even then, you’d probably feel the electricity.
They might be the fake couple, but there is real love there. There has to be. Nobody can fake it that well. Not Declan, with how his whole body radiates want whenever Karin is near, so much so that Gorman has half a mind to ring up his wife at home whenever he’s had to film K and D kissing passionately. Not Karin, with the way she looks at Declan, especially when he can’t see, like all she’s ever wanted in life is to be close to him.
Yes, so Gorman might be a sentimental sap, that’s entirely possible, he just thinks it would be romantic if they would fall in love, alright? Realistically, he knows that they won’t. There is no money for them, contractually, if they enter a real-life relationship. Even more so, if they win as the fake-couple and are then revealed as a real couple after all, they are liable for fraud and Gorman isn’t entirely sure the production company wouldn’t go to court over that. So, it’s better for them not to get into anything. Still, the thing is he, Gorman, has had a front row seat to everything they’ve decided to put out there and he’s seen some things - things he didn’t get on camera that made him contemplate.
They started as early as the first day, when Declan slapped Karin’s ass hard and she looked ready to pop in a very interesting way, followed by what he witnessed outside the clothing store just a week ago. He’d seen how they’d stood in the middle of the boutique floor and Declan had pulled Rinny in, putting his hand on her cheek. Gorman had legitimately held his breath, thinking they might kiss. They didn’t, of course, but still. He had texted Raeden and Micky all the same. Not to gus
h but for competition reasons, because no one could blame them for starting a betting pool. Two betting pools, actually. One that was about who would win (K and D versus C and B, as it stood, with Raeden and Gorman rooting for K and D) and the other was about if or when K and D would get caught having sex on the beach somewhere and throw the competition. Needless to say, Gorman’s apparently high chances of winning that second pot with his prediction of ‘some time before the fourth week’ have turned to dust recently, with the way Karin and Declan are acting now that the fourth week has arrived.
The three men skip through the material from C and B as well as K and K (Kaelan and Kaidan) and then devote more time than needed to scrutinize what new stuff Gorman has brought from Karin and Declan. It’s not pretty. They watch them go from the announcement of the last island challenge - “The Teamwork and Survival Challenge: You will be stranded on a lonely island together and have to survive the jungle for a whole day!”- through two days of survival training. They’re the most tense they’ve ever been. Not that they’re not physically close. They try to keep up appearances. But Karin is short with Declan and even jumpy at times, and Declan periodically looks like he’s not going to survive, usually when he hugs Karin for one reason or the other, burying his face in her hair like he hopes to choke in it. Something went down between them and it wasn’t pretty. Their interaction is strained beneath the veneer of togetherness, strange enough for the camera to pick up. If they were feeling malicious, they could cut this in a way that would have them eliminated by the time the grand finale live show happens.
That live show will see the remaining three couples get an audience vote within the first ten minutes, and then two couples will move into the games round, going head to head for the big win. If Raeden and Micky edit what Gorman just brought them a certain way, they could probably decide that vote from where they sit. But that would give the game away as well, maybe. Sure, they had cut the other episodes to cast reasonable doubt on the couples that had been eliminated but they had always tried to balance that out with questionable moments for the other pairs too. So that’s the path they will take for K and D too, now. No special treatment. No less or more scrutiny than any of the other couples had to endure. The audience will make up its own mind on the matter anyway.
It’s not that Gorman doesn’t know that the general public had concretely made up its mind when episode two aired just the other day. Micky had complained that his girlfriend was badgering him on the phone on behalf of her book-club, whose members had caught the ‘Heart Roulette’ fever, much like big parts of the country had, too.
“She keeps asking me who the fake couple is,” he had lamented. “I say I can’t tell her and she says I don’t really love her.”
“Tell me about it,” Raeden had sighed. “Mine says it’s like being with a CIA agent. I just keep telling her that I’ll never work again if I blab, not to mention getting my ass sued to Mexico and back.”
“Who do they think are the fakes?” Gorman had wondered, just out of curiosity.
“Kaelan and Kaidan,” Raeden shrugged. “Anita thinks they’re too perfect to be real.”
“Yes, Mira’s book club is convinced Courtney and Bobby are fake because they’re trying so hard.”
“No one I know doubts Karin and Declan,” Gorman had offered.
“It’s the way you film them, man,” Micky had patted his shoulder appreciatively, but Gorman had shook his head.
“I’d take the credit if I could,” he’d replied. “But I’m afraid it’s all them.”
“My wife follows it,” Raeden told them then.
“She does what now?” Micky asked.
“Her and her book club, they are going on the internet and talking about Karin and Declan, about how perfect they are together, that their relationship is so great.”
“Isn’t that a little crazy?” Micky had mused.
“Hey, I’m not going to get into this with you right now,” Raeden had groaned, making Gorman laugh.
“Either way,” the cameraman had cut in, “I think it’s quite clear that the couple that’s actually bad is making all the others look like they’re the liars. It’s pretty fantastic for the format.”
“It also makes you think…” Raeden had given them all a pointed look. The same one he gives them now, after Gorman tells them he has no idea what happened between Karin and Declan to make them so awkward with each other all week.
“They had sex,” he states. “That’s why they’re strange.”
“I don’t think so,” Micky muses. “Wouldn’t they be happy if they had sex?”
“Not if they want to win,” Raeden says. “Or if one of them doesn’t really want the other and it was just a rash, stupid mistake.”
“It’s a pity,” Micky sighs, sounding almost wistful. “They can’t really be together even afterwards, can they?”
“I have no idea what’s going on there, to be quite honest,” Gorman shrugs. “I see them every day and I can’t make sense of it. There’s something big there, but sometimes it seems like they don’t know what to do with it themselves.”
“They did fine in survival training,” Micky says, nodding to the monitor that is playing back Declan learning to build a fire with flint stones.
“They pulled it together for the camera,” Gorman tells them, voice dropped low because theoretically, he is not supposed to divulge this information even to them. “When they’re off, they don’t talk to each other. As soon as we’re rolling, though, Declan’s got his hands all over her, it’s strange.”
“How do you think they’ll do on the lonely island?” Raeden asks.
“To be completely honest, I have no clue,” Gorman answers sincerely. “We’re taking the speed boat in the morning; it’ll just be them, Ralph, Claudette, and me in our little section of the jungle. We’ll see. But this brings me to the good news I got for you today - while we’re all on the island, Marietta agreed to let you spend your days off in the villa. Air conditioning, the pool, the beach, you get the whole thing to yourselves…you can finally get your taste of it!”
All speculation about the true nature of Karin and Declan’s relationship pales in comparison to the severity of the other men’s reaction to this news, and Gorman grins from ear to ear as they roar their thanks. God, he loves making people happy.
The End
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Stay With Me 2 Page 10
