Beautifully deceived

CHAPTERTEN

CHAPTER TEN : After the Cameras Cut

The moment the livestream cut to a commercial break, Elena stepped back so fast she nearly tripped over the hem of her own dress.

"Don't," she said, before Julian could say anything else, her voice low and shaking with something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite panic but lived somewhere in the overlap of both. "Don't apologize to me on a stage. Don't apologize to me at all, actually. Just don't."

"I wasn't going to make excuses." Julian's voice was quiet, controlled, the same flat calm she'd watched him wear like a second skin since the moment they'd met. "I know exactly whose idea that was, and it wasn't mine."

"It doesn't matter whose idea it was. It happened." She pressed the back of her hand briefly to her mouth, as if she could physically erase the last ninety seconds, and looked past him at the rest of the cast being herded toward a green room by a production assistant with a clipboard and an expression of professional indifference to the chaos she'd just orchestrated. "This is insane. This whole thing is insane."

"Agreed."

"You don't get to agree with me right now. You're the reason I'm standing on this stage in the first place."

Something flickered across Julian's face not quite hurt, but close enough to it that Elena almost regretted the words the second they left her mouth.

"I didn't ask for any of this either," he said, and for the first time since she'd met him, his voice cracked just slightly at the edges, enough that she caught it even through her own fury. "You think I wanted my father to pair me with the sister of the kid my sponsorship put in a coma? You think I wanted to stand up there and kiss a stranger for ratings while the whole internet decides what kind of person I am based on it?"

"I don't particularly care what you wanted, Julian. I care that my brother is still relearning how to walk in a hospital three miles from here, and I'm standing in a dress a stylist picked out for me, pretending to fall in love with the son of the company whose negligence put him there. So forgive me if I don't have room left over to worry about your feelings."

The green room, when the production assistant finally herded them into it, was full of the rest of the cast eight strangers who'd have to become familiar faces to Elena over the coming weeks, each of them watching the exchange with the particular, hungry curiosity of people who understood, instinctively, that they were standing in the presence of the season's real storyline.

There was Marisol Reyes, a junior on the debate team with a smile built for cameras and an ambition Elena recognized immediately because she'd seen versions of it in her own mirror someone using the show for exactly what it was worth and nothing more. There was Dev Patel, quiet, sharp-eyed, clearly here for the money and making no attempt to hide it. There was a boy named Cole Whitfield who introduced himself with a handshake and a grin that suggested he'd already decided he was the protagonist of this story, and a girl named Bree Anders who eyed Julian with an interest that had nothing to do with the show's premise and everything to do with his last name.

"Well," Marisol said into the charged silence, arching an eyebrow at Elena and Julian both, "that was quite the entrance."

"It wasn't an entrance," Elena said. "It was a mistake."

"Careful," Marisol said, not unkindly, tilting her head toward the small red light blinking on a camera mounted discreetly in the corner of the room. "They're always rolling. Every word, every silence it's all footage. Welcome to the show, Elena. Nothing you say in here is off the record anymore."

Elena looked at the camera. Then at Julian, standing a careful three feet away, jaw tight, eyes fixed on some middle distance the way he did when he was holding something in.

For the first time since the accident, since the hospital, since the interview that had made her the second most-searched name in the country behind his, Elena Davis understood with total clarity exactly what she'd signed up for.

There was no version of the next six weeks that would let her simply survive it.

She was going to have to perform it.