by Jen Greyson
I tried to pull mine away, but he held me fast and tugged me close.
The other girls didn’t seem surprised and Rinnae smiled knowingly at Mandy, like they’d planned the rainstorm. I was so confused. Weren’t they supposed to be mad at me? The entire walk I’d been desperate for a way to work out an explanation if Mateo was going to go through with his suicidal mission to tell everyone that he was a big fat liar. I knew the girls would be heartbroken and—more importantly—that I’d lose the tiny glimmering friendships that I’d eeked out while we’d been together. I liked them, and while I’d been turning over the consequences of what we’d done in my head, I’d forgotten to tally that one.
Kat surged forward, reaching for my free arm with a clawed hand, but Mateo blocked her. “Calm down.” He spun her around and directed her back to the table, one hand firmly around her elbow while he tugged me along on the other side. I wanted to sink into the deck boards. “Let’s talk about this like adults.”
Mandy, Kemmerie, and the others eagerly pushed their remaining plates aside and leaned on the table, chins in their hands. They must just think he was helping me since I didn’t have my crutches. Hopefully that was the excuse he was going to give them.
Kat managed to take a seat, but she was brimming with fury and indignation to the point where I wasn’t excited about ever being alone with her again. Mateo’s thumb swished across the entire length of mine, then back while he guided everyone into an easy chat about the rainstorm and how we’d decided to wait it out. Kemmerie asked questions about the storm and where we’d found shelter until Rinnae elbowed her. “Right. Um, well we were just finishing dinner.” Kemmerie stood. “We’ll go and let you guys eat.” Mandy stood quickly and pulled Cassidy up with her. “But what about dessert?”
Mandy pushed Cassidy in the back. “It’s on the upper deck, where the dance is later.”
I wasn’t sure how they were going to get Kat to play along, but before they could attempt to sway her, she leapt from her chair and stormed out of the room in the other direction. I wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t taking it well.
I was so relieved that the other girls weren’t pissed at me for butting in where I was never supposed to be... And certainly where I’d never intended. Our strange budding friendships were something so foreign, but I enjoyed whatever form they’d taken, though they probably wouldn’t continue past the show. I sure didn’t want them mad at me during the events and while we were on camera twenty-four, seven. These boats just weren’t big enough for us to not get along.
With everyone’s abrupt departure we were alone again, but now it was awkward and forced. The waiters brought us dinner but I wasn’t really hungry. Mateo leaned back in his chair and my water goblet lurched to the side. I grabbed it and took a drink. “Guess we’ve set sail.”
He dragged a finger across my bare knee and up my thigh. “You still need to get out of those wet clothes,” his voice was low and sultry. Cameras watched us from every single angle. I nibbled my lip as my plans for what would happen when we got back to the ship unraveled quickly. I’d anticipated a huge blowup and harassment from the girls that would make Mateo see that he’d made a big mistake in thinking he could charmingly explain it away. But now that the other girls didn’t seem to care at who he ended up with, if it was me, I didn’t know what to say.
I cleared my throat and curled my fingers around the stem of my glass. I was past understanding why everyone but Kat didn’t want Mateo.
I did... Badly.
But we needed to work out the details of the contract and what Stuart was going to do about the remaining production schedule. Mateo’s fingers changed course, gliding along the inside of my thigh. I closed my legs, trapping any further progress. He grinned, completely without remorse.
“I guess if we’re going to the dance later, I’d better change into something a little less, um, purple.”
He stood and helped me up, then handed me my crutches. “I’d like to have dessert first.” He kissed me tenderly, then pushed my hair back.
I shook my head, reading between his well-articulated lines. “I don’t think so.”
He tipped my face up. “You’ve already been worth the wait. Go get fancy and I’ll see you upstairs when the party starts.”
“We still have parts to play.” This was so surreal, but no matter what I wanted, we couldn’t do what we wanted, especially with cameras rolling. Stuart could edit out what he didn’t want later. I covered his fingers with mine and held them to my cheek.
CHAPTER
THE SHOUTING SURPRISED me. I paused a few feet from my door at the short hall to Stuart’s production room. It was loud enough that I backed up a few steps and listened.
He was going after his assistant, Emily, but it sounded like she was giving it straight back. I couldn’t tell what they were discussing, so I eased closer. Maybe she was just tired of Stuart and taking his crap. Frankly, I didn’t know how she’d put up with him this long.
“It’s fucking up our ratings, that’s why!” Stuart yanked the door open and I froze, caught eavesdropping without a single excuse as to why I was there.
I cleared my throat. “Hey.”
His face contorted in anger. If ratings were dipping—and I had a pretty good idea why and it had a whole lot to do with my still-tingling body parts—there was truly no way he was going to let Mateo out of his contract. Now he was going to double his efforts to push me out of the way and get the other five in Mateo’s face as much as possible. He may have thought it was funny to keep me on as a favor to a billionaire’s whim, but when that whim interfered with ratings, Stuart wouldn’t care who was asking or who he pissed off. Ratings were everything. He looked super pissed. “Where have you been?”
I pointed down the hallway. “The storm—“
“Everyone else made it back just fine. Don’t you have work to do?
I bristled. I did have a ton of work, both for the firm and what I owed him, but that was none of his freaking business. I was entitled to a break every now and then. “What’s your problem?”
He glowered and let his gaze travel down my rumpled, wet clothes, clearly voicing without words what his problem was, but I wanted to hear him say it. This had been his freaking idea to include me in the taping. He could have just as easily said no, or kept me off camera. But he’d gone along with Mateo’s request without reservation. It wasn’t my fault that he hadn’t seen the ratings dip coming—or Mateo’s real reason for putting me on the boat. This was their fault. Not mine. And I wasn’t about to let him blame me.
Emily eased toward the door, an iPad in her hand. “Um, apparently people really like you.”
Stuart turned his venomous attitude on her and grabbed for the tablet but she sidestepped him and thrust it at me. “She has a right to know.”
“Know what?” I frowned and studied the screen—A twitter page filed through, streaming messages. I hadn’t thought to check social media, though I knew Stuart had generated some serious buzz about the show and made viewers tweet and interact online before, during, and after the show. None of that had appealed to me before the show, and less now that I was part of it. I still didn’t know what I was looking at.
“Read them,” Emily urged, shoving past Stuart.
I looked from one to the other, trying to decipher what was going on, then scrolled through the tweets.
RT: Where did @LawGirl_Sangria come from? #Loveher #keepher #undertow
Mateo is hawt tonight! But I want more of @LawGirl_Sangria! #Notanotherscavengerhunt #undertow
Holy heatballs, batman! Mateo and @LawGirl_Sangria are meant for each other, no? #Putthemtogether #undertow
They went on and on and on. I scrolled through at least a page, glancing over to the trending topics and laughed out loud. I looked up with a grin. “Really? #ThrowKatOverboard is trending?”
Emily smiled, but Stuart pulled us both into the room and slammed the door. “It’s not funny!”
“It’s freaking hilariou
s. And I told you that she was trouble a month ago, but you never want to listen to anything I say.” I handed the iPad back and sat down on one of the chairs. “Including kicking me off in week one. Sorry, Stuart, but this is your own bed of crap you’re lying in.”
“Oh don’t think you’re not covered in it, too. You told me you weren’t interested in him.” He threw a stack of DVDs at me. “I have hours of tape that prove otherwise.”
My face heated. Hours seemed like an overstatement... at least for what I knew he had tape of. And on camera we’d only been friendly and okay, maybe we’d flirted a little, but nothing that should put me ahead of any of the other girls. Now, if we were including the last, um, hour, he’d have enough heat to melt those DVDs. I looked away and tried to figure out how I was going to get us off this discussion and onto a solution that wouldn’t get me fired or require Mateo to write the biggest check of his life.
“Our ratings have tanked because of this! Viewers are confused. They don’t know what’s going on and that makes them check out.”
“Okay, continuing to yell that at me isn’t helping. Do you want my help, or are you just blaming me?”
He stomped back and forth while Emily tapped out tweets and things on the iPad. She looked like she was trying to blend into the background while still listening intently to our conversation. I wasn’t sure yet if she was an ally or not in this... And I still didn’t know how I wanted this show to end either. Now was a great time for me to run and keep Mateo in the clear and headed off into the sunset with the right girl instead of me.
“Most of the girls on the show have no idea how reality shows work, maybe you don’t either, but this isn’t a throw-a-bunch-of-people-in-a-blender-and-see-what-happens. We’re very meticulous about what personalities we put together and we can almost always predict what’s going to happen, right down to the individual episodes and the final decision. For us, there are no surprises.” He rubbed his forehead. “Well, okay there was that one twist in season two of The Underground that caught us by surprise, but one out of twelve seasons is remarkable. There’s a reason we make the girls go through that rigorous psychological testing. We know who the ringleaders are, we know the martyrs, the supporting characters, the team players, and the ones who will win at all costs.” He stared intently at me. “We also have an idea from viewer feedback before we start taping what their expectations are, and we play to those. It’s how we’ve had hit after hit. Those weren’t accidents, but carefully scripted and edited works of art.”
I almost laughed, but I caught myself when I realized he was being serious. For him, this really was art. And if I could look at it from an unbiased point of view without my hatred for reality TV, I guess I could kind of see that there were definitely buyers for the art he was selling. Viewers at these shows paid up and it never seemed to matter how stupid they got, or how fake or predictable the characters were, they loved every fricking minute of it.
And who was I to judge? Because I’d been buying too. I’d so totally bought into Mateo and everything that we’d turned him into on this boat and in front of the cameras. Granted, I’d gotten the behind-the-scenes Mateo, but wasn’t it still a game?
This wasn’t real life. This was a law intern on a multi-million dollar boat with a billionaire. I couldn’t trust any of my feelings, and I certainly couldn’t trust his. We were suspended like a raindrop. But Stuart had just shaken the crap out of my tree and I couldn’t pretend that what we’d constructed wasn’t plummeting rapidly to the earth.
“So what went wrong?”
“You.”
Okay, that stung. I knew I was the piece that Stuart hadn’t counted on when he scripted everything, but that didn’t mean he had to be so damn blunt about it. Jeez.
“But I thought they liked me?” I’d been dunked in the icy frozen stream of losing the fans I’d barely gained. Not that I’d ever wanted anything other than anonymity, but for a moment thinking that a bunch of people were rooting for me had been kind of cool.
“He can’t pick you!” Stuart screamed and angrily paced the room. “I can’t edit you into the scenes because you’re not supposed to be there. All of these...” He yanked the iPad out of Emily’s hands and shook it at me. “They’re not helping anything. But it’s impossible not to see the way he looks at you, and my lame-ass idea of having the live webcams caught way way too many things to ignore. Now they’re dying for a glimpse of the two of...”
He looked up and there was a sparkle in his eye that creeped me out. “The two of you.” He clenched the iPad tight and pointed it at me. “And I’m going to give them what they want.”
The thought of being manipulated by Stuart and his team made me furious. I’d never wanted to be on camera with Mateo and I’d avoided it as much as I’d been allowed. The thought of doing what had just happened in front of anyone, let alone on camera was not only embarrassing, but disgusting. If Mateo and I took this relationship any further—and we clearly would never be allowed to do that—it would be in the real world, not inside one of Stuart’s creation. And there was the whole pre-meditated engagement that was supposed to cap off the season.
I wasn’t sure that I was ready to admit how much I liked Mateo, let alone fast-forward to a commitment. I stood and backed toward the door. “No, Stuart. I’m not on this stupid show. I’m not part of this.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“The hell I don’t.” I twisted the doorknob behind me. “I quit.”
CHAPTER
A FLURRY OF ruffles and curls and giggling women burst into my room, startling me.
“Are you ready? Let’s go—“ Rinnae halted in the doorway, hand on the knob, Kemmerie and Cassidy bumped into the back of her, tumbling them inside my room.
My hands stilled over my suitcase, then I folded the shirt and set it on the stack of the other clothes I was taking with me. I’d probably burn them when I got home because I wouldn’t be able to stand the reminder, but for now, I was taking every last damn piece with me.
Rinnae slowly closed the door.
“What are you three up to?” I blurted before she had a chance to question why I was clearly packing my crap and not just what I’d need for the other boat in the morning. They’d obviously been drinking and based on their outfits of elegant evening wear, I assumed they’d been on their way to the evening’s dancing event. I wasn’t sorry to be missing out on that.
“We wanted to go to the dance together,” Kemmerie said, eyeing my suitcases. “So we stopped to grab you on the way.” She glanced at my nearly empty closet then at my suitcase again, confusing marring her perfect features.
“You’re not ready,” Cassidy said. “What’s going on?”
“Good question.” Rinnae advanced toward the bed. “What’s going on, Sangria?” Rinnae’s voice was soft, cautious even. She too took in the open dresser drawer and the empty hangers in the closet before swinging a stern look back my way. I didn’t like the way she made that one eyebrow lift in question and accusation rolled into one.
I ignored them and kept packing, I had hoped to avoid this, both because I was horrible at goodbyes, and because I didn’t want to have to tell them what’d happened between me and Mateo. He’d obviously hinted about kinds of stuff when he’d told them about how we’d waited out the storm and there had been no reason for him to be holding my hand once we’d gotten back to the boat... They had to know that something had happened between us, but I didn’t want to have to fess up.
Tears burned my eyes and I didn’t want to tell them the new events from Stuart’s office, for so many reasons. I didn’t want them to know that the viewers wanted me for Mateo. I didn’t want them knowing how much I truly detested what they’d come on this show for. I didn’t want to admit that I’d judged them without truly knowing them, that I’d made snap judgments after meeting with them, after reviewing their files, after seeing them up on that first stage with Mateo. But most of all, I didn’t want to have to tell them that though I knew thi
s wasn’t as simple as I’d originally thought it was, I still didn’t want to be a contestant with them... Though I’d probably always been one whether I admitted it or not.
“I, um, Stuart and I had a meeting.”
“About what?” Rinnae’s stern voice said she knew far more than she let on. She was too damn smart to ignore the glaring neon signs but that didn’t mean I was copping to any of it.
I waved my hand toward the general direction of Stuart’s production office. “There’s no need for me to stay at this point. The show’s on auto-pilot and I was always here only in a legal capacity.”
“Could have fooled me,” Rinnae said quietly.
“Well, I was.”
Kemmerie stepped closer. “Can we go talk to Stuart, ask him to keep you on ’til the end? I didn’t know you were only here as a lawyer, but I’d sure like you to stay. Come to think of it, I think Mateo sure thought you were one of us. He doesn’t want you leaving, does he?”
“No!” I rushed toward Kemmerie, then caught myself. “I mean, I doubt he cares and you shouldn’t go bother Stuart about it.”
Mandy came in, easing the door open and knocking quietly. “Sangria?” She paused and eyed the same things Rinnae and Kemmerie had, her attention finally landing on me. The compassion I saw in her eyes was almost too much, and far more dangerous than the frustration smoldering in Rinnae’s. “Hi.”
I lifted a hand in a small wave, then pulled down another shirt. There were a ton of clothes in here, most of them I’d never noticed, let alone bothered to put on. They were strangely my style though I never would have picked them. I wanted to shove through the remaining items and hide at the back until they left me alone.
Mandy took an armload of clothes from the closet and carried them to the bed while the girls walked around the other side. “So you’re running away, then?” She nodded slowly and pulled the hanger out of the first shirt, her mouth set in a line that I couldn’t quite read. “Interesting, never figured you for a runner.”
