Beautifully deceived

CHAPTERSEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN : Forced to Play

Julian found out he was cast in a reality dating show the same way he found out most things about his own life lately from someone else, in a room where his opinion had already been factored out of the decision.

"Absolutely not," he said, for the third time, standing in his father's office with his arms crossed, the tall windows behind Richard Ashford framing a skyline Julian had stopped finding impressive years ago.

"It's not a request." His father didn't look up from the document in front of him a contract, already drafted, Julian's name already typed neatly into the space where a signature was supposed to go. "The board approved the sponsorship for the athletics complex this morning. Conditionally. Contingent on 'demonstrated goodwill' their words from the Ashford family. You are the demonstrated goodwill, Julian. Congratulations."

"I'm not going on a dating show."

"You're going on whatever show keeps this family's name off the front page of every business section in the country for something other than a coma." His father finally looked up, and his eyes were flat, businesslike, the eyes of a man who had stopped seeing his son as anything other than an asset sometime around Julian's sixteenth birthday. "You will smile. You will be charming. You will let the cameras follow you around campus looking like a man capable of empathy, and in six weeks, this story dies, the grant clears, and you go back to being the person you were before all of this. That is the plan. That is the only plan on the table."

Julian thought about the boy in the coma he'd never met. He thought about the sister who'd gone on national television with shaking hands and said things about his family that were, as far as he could tell, entirely true. He thought about the particular, specific rage that had been building in him for two weeks not at the public, not even really at his father, but at himself, for a silence he'd let his lawyers write for him instead of finding his own words.

"And if I say no?"

"Then the grant doesn't clear, the athletics complex doesn't get built, four hundred student-athletes lose access to facilities this university has needed for a decade, and everyone from the board to the press finds a very convenient story about a spoiled hockey captain who cared more about his own comfort than the consequences of his team's actions." His father set the contract down and slid it across the desk. "You wanted to do something for that family, didn't you? Here. This is what doing something looks like in the real world, Julian. Not statements. Not sitting in silence feeling sorry for yourself. Action. Signed, sealed, and broadcast to forty million people."

Julian looked at the contract for a long moment. Somewhere in it, buried in legal language he hadn't read yet, was a name he didn't recognize.

“Cast Partner: Elena Davis.”

He read it twice before it landed. When it did, something cold moved through him — not quite guilt, not quite dread, but close enough to both that he had to sit down before he trusted himself to speak again.

"You're pairing me with his sister?"

"I'm pairing you with the most sympathetic, most photogenic, most narratively useful face currently attached to this story." His father said it without a flicker of shame, the way he said most things like decency was a rounding error he'd stopped calculating years ago. "The public already loves her. Attach yourself to that, and some of it rubs off on you. It's simple math, Julian."

"She hates me. Her brother is in a hospital bed because of my team."

"Then you'll have quite a redemption arc to play, won't you."

Julian signed the contract that night, alone, in the same dark apartment where he'd once sat with a trophy he hadn't wanted and a text from his father he hadn't answered. He signed it the way he did most things his father asked of him not because he agreed, but because he had learned, a long time ago, exactly how much it cost to refuse.