Taming Cupid

by Emily Bishop

  “The last time I saw her, she was planking.”

  “Wonderful.”

  ***

  The set is grim. Most of the girls are fine—only half of them needed to stay in England for more than the first episode, and the staying half were safely at their hotel today, with the exception of Annette, who crushes a plastic bag into my hands and then bolts back into the portable toilet between trailers.

  I make the mistake of glancing into the plastic bag and immediately recoil with a cry of alarm and disgust.

  There’s diarrhea all over this dress.

  Shit.

  I hunt down Candace at the front of the Berringer mansion, being led across the threshold by Miles. Miles apologizes for Candace’s sickness while she sifts through painkillers and anti-nausea and anxiety medications, ignoring him. She pops them all in a row like a boss, and I gallop the front steps and catch up to the couple.

  “Annette has food poisoning, too. Now will we cancel?”

  Both Candace and Miles lower glares down to me. Why do neither of them like me right now?

  “We can’t, Roxy,” Candace answers plainly, nodding to Miles to continue walking. She speaks angrily with her hands as they go. “We’re already several days behind, which puts us over-budget. We can’t afford to move everyone on a new schedule. This episode must be done tonight. We’re leaving for America literally tomorrow. There’s a formula: four exotic, indulgent dates, and then four downhome middle-class fun. That’s the whole point of the show. Regular people being rich, rich people being regular. If we don’t do this episode, we’re going to be short one billionaire date. And these bitches may not care much about the individual women–you know, no one is voting or anything–but they damn sure want to see all their juicy billionaire dates. They want to see the opera and the five-star restaurant and the private jet. We’re talking about a tour of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world. Do you think it’s easy for me to walk in heels right now? Do you think all I need to look healthy is a little bit of makeup? No. But I don’t have a choice. I have a boss, too, Roxy. I’m filming this date even if she needs to carry a bucket everywhere they go.”

  “We can’t do that to Annette,” I say, following. “She’s going to be on national television with food poisoning? We can’t do that. The show would be a laughingstock. Can you imagine the world of memes? Is that the kind of ratings bonanza you want to see?”

  “We’ll send Jenny,” Candace suddenly pipes, like she’s a genius. “We’ll send Jenny, and no one will remember or care that she’s not Annette. They’re both blondes, right?”

  “Annette has dark brown hair.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I thought you fired Jenny.”

  “I did, but she’s still here. I could rehire her for the evening.”

  We reach a closed door, and I grasp Candace’s arm. She goes still. Miles pauses like a perfect Englishman, politely staring at the wall and pretending he doesn’t hear any of this.

  “You fired Jenny?” I whisper to her.

  “No, no. Not officially. Why?”

  “Because half the season is still left, and I’m supposed to be the senior makeup artist on this set,” I remind her. “I’m not an errand girl. How much longer are you going to do this? Am I ever going to really work on one of your sets again?”

  Candace nods, her eyes glassy, and she says, “You will, Roxy. You’ll be my makeup artist again when we get to America, where I can keep a closer eye on the entire set.”

  She pushes open the next door and we enter a large, barren room with hardwood floors. Blake is shirtless in a loose pair of royal blue pants, slicing his hands delicately through the air, practicing what appears to be some martial art. He bends impossibly low on one powerful thigh, then springs into a roundhouse kick.

  His landing is graceful and low, almost as low as the beginning stance of the kick. When he sees me, he freezes completely, still so low on one foot, his other leg fully extended. I stare back at him. His chest rises and falls from the exertion of his exercise and my eyes slide over his entire powerful body.

  When they lift back to his, his eyes are still locked on mine.

  A grin spreads across his mouth, and I can’t help but offer a tiny smile in return.

  “Are you ready for the waterfalls of Edessa tonight, Blake?” Candace wonders in a hard, loud voice.

  Blake glances at her and rises back to two feet and a full stand. He stretches his flawless torso, slick with sweat.

  I lick my lower lip and swallow. This is the first time I’ve stood within ten feet of him since he went down on me in the gardens last week…and we ended on the note of frantically scouring for a condom and ten minutes we didn’t have.

  “Are you ready?” he pants back to her. “You look like shit, Candace.”

  “Bad shrimp,” she explains, limp and dogged. “But it’s not a problem. I’m the only person on the traveling crew that ate it.”

  “You and Annette,” I correct her. “Your date for tonight,” I inform Blake.

  His mouth moves, but no sound comes out. His eyes dart to Candace. “You can’t be serious,” he says. “You can’t make a sick girl go on a TV date with me. That’s just cruel.”

  “Well, do you want to take me to the waterfalls of Edessa, then?” Candace snaps at him. “Because those are our options. Fuck it. Roxy…grab a box of dark brown hair dye and go get Jenny from the trailer. She’s going on a date with a billionaire bachelor.”

  “Mm, no,” Blake disagrees easily. “These women were all carefully screened. I don’t know Jenny at all. Who’s Jenny?”

  “She’s my assistant. You’ll love her.”

  “It looks like Roxanne is your assistant, actually. Maybe I could love her instead.”

  Candace’s eyes swing to me, horrified. I don’t think she considered that Blake might demand a say in his substitute date.

  But I’m still caught on the last thing he said.

  “Because Roxanne…because I need Roxanne,” Candace lies starchily.

  “I’m not even supposed to go to Greece,” I remind her. “You didn’t need me for anything.”

  “She’s the right age,” Blake goes on. “She’s single. She’s beautiful. Witty. Strong. Sexy.” His eyes light over me as he lists my attributes, then tear away, fastening to Candace. “Most importantly, she’s dark-haired, of course,” he adds. “What more could you want in a dating show contestant?”

  “Well…it’s not really that kind of show,” Candace says.

  “I want to go,” I blurt. “I want to see the waterfalls.”

  “What about Jared?” Candace spits, and my blood runs cold at his name. How dare she invoke him here, right in front of Blake?

  “What do you mean?” I breathe, feeling instantly smaller.

  “He might see you, Roxy. Would you feel safe?”

  “Who is Jared?” Blake wonders.

  I look at him, peering back at me, so strong and concerned.

  “No one,” I answer firmly. I look back at Candace and nod, my gaze unwavering. “I want to go to Greece.”

  ***

  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 fi
rst 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.