Chapter Text
Lights. The sun is always on, even at night, the faces all around. Even so we need more lights pointed at our faces and glistening muscles.
Places, places.
We the beautiful sit on this tacky lesbian-flag couch, groomed and proper–me, of the guys, best of all. Camera. The camera’s on most of the time too. Right now it’s not yet; the production crew’s milling about. The rest of them were built for this, and in that sense I’m just another one of the white sheep in the sheep-crowd. Being on TV is not what I imagined when I was a kid, when I dreamed of being an actor–the next Bond, maybe, or the first hot Greek Doctor of all time.
Here, I am myself, Zach-–one version of him or another.
This version sits back on the couch, propped just so. I’m the pillow prince, that’s what Brayden used to call me. I accidentally let that slip here, once. I hope it’s not hilarious enough to keep in the final cut, but it might be. The people here are mostly brainrotted –besides, of course, him. Bryce.
Bryce, who I’m not looking at right now. Bryce, who I can feel there on the other side of the couch with a model-beautiful woman on his arm.
Kayda, the model-beautiful woman on my arm, shifts in her black dress next to me. She’s not stupid, either. One night lying in that weird communal bed after the cameras turned off we made this three-part agreement, her and I, to look good and be loved and go all the way. I’m ninety-six percent sure the agreement means the same thing to both of us.
I whisper to her, Dolce & Gabana, Light Blue? She rolls her eyes, as if to say, I would never wear such a basic scent.
She whispers back, "You’re fucking gay."
Well.
Action.
Recoupling’s rolling. Eric, our snaky head producer, draws a line across his neck at us so we won’t make any unwanted background noise while our host talks.
“Islanders,” Dame Ariana Maddix addresses us, “I know this week’s been an exciting time, with the arrival of two new bombshells. Tonight, we’re going to let the bombshells choose first.” We pretend to be surprised, but production’s already told us.
Ariana gets through her little spiel all right but I can’t hear her over the sound of her positively horrendous outfit. The getup looks like if an Avatar from the 2013 Avatar film mated with one of those American boho-chav types from 2014 in the hamsa print yoga pants.
Some of the girls here can’t dress for shit. I’d told Kenzie she wasn’t my type for being blonde but really it was those tacky spaced-out implants and the cowboy hats, eugh. The guys are, you know, American dudes, nuff said.
Bryce’s girl Trinity is the house stylist, so he’s been dressing cuter and pushing his long hair back. He looks all right tonight. Nothing interesting will happen tonight. He’ll stay with his girl, me with mine.
For some reason, that’s all I care about.
Yesterday we had the most tension we’ve had since arriving. Bryce told me he wanted to chat with Kayda.
As Bryce told me he was pulling Kayda to chat, he looked suspiciously perfect. He had his skinny chest out and his hair tousled just so. He wouldn’t look at me, he just did that side mewing face. It was all right–the angle worked for me too.
My first reaction was, “Production put you up to this?”
“Zach, try again,” some kid chided me from behind a tripod. The cameraguys came out during the manufactured scenes. We weren’t meant to mention them, of course.
Bryce began his explanation over again: “I’m thinking of pulling Kayda.”
“You’re into her? How do you think that’s gonna go?”
“I think there might be something there, something we haven’t explored. I mean, if it came down to it, she’d be my second choice.”
Though I was now certain it was a put-up, my chest tightened. “I don’t think she’s into you like that.”
Now Bryce turned to me with something like panic in his eyes. “I know,” he said quietly, “it’s just that I have to do this.”
“Try that again,” said the camera guy, who I believe is called Kevin. “From the part before Zach said she’s not into you.”
“Well, what would you like me to say? She’s not into him like that. It’s obvious.” I never knew what they were playing at in this mind-fuck palace.
Kevin sneered at me. “Protect your girl, ma-yan.”
When the scene was mercifully over, I asked him again if it was a production set-up.
“Come on, man, don’t,” he said. We were walking back in towards the house to get a few pumps in.
“Come off it, who cares? They just did our scene, they’re not near enough to hear the words. This is at most B-roll right now.”
“One thing I don’t like, dude? You act like every single second of this is a game. Part of it’s real, to me. And I know it’s a mindfuck but we gotta have some integrity at least. Just because it’s tacky, doesn’t mean the experiment has no value. Don’t assume everything I say is an act.”
Okay, so he really wanted to suss out chances with her. My chest tightened again. I’d seen this pattern before, but this time it was happening on international television.
The face I saw was Brayden’s, my old Milton Academy roommate, and his pattern of going for every girl I said I liked. I thought the behavior was so weird–I always felt like I was choosing arbitrarily, after all–until we…
“Okay, we don’t have to talk about it,” I said. Then I went and shit-talked him to high hell with KC where I knew the cameras would pick up every word. Of course in the end Kayda shot his skinny can’t dress ass down.
Served him right.
In the dream, I was walking through the villa, but a sort of dark-and-stormy-night version of it. Kayda was there, but she was wearing a hazmat suit and an N-95 mask. When I looked down at my body, I was butt-naked and for some reason I was taller and leaner–a body much like Bryce’s–but my hair wasn’t its usual tight curls–it lay down around my shoulders like Sincere. The walls were dripping with some kind of viscous whitish-yellow liquid and smelled like spring pollen.
When I’d wake up, I was in a Prosecco-haze, but worse, Kayda’s hair was all in my face. That we sleep like that proves she doesn’t really know me—I’m a certified little spoon. Then I’d fall back into my fitful nightmare where Kayda was in the hazmat suit walking side by side with me.
We were walking towards a door.
I knew where we were going–The Hideaway.
Producer Eric, this zώον, had pulled me to tell me tomorrow was Kayda and my intimacy session. He could tell I had panic in my eyes. When he accused me of erectile dysfunction and punched my arm, what he didn’t know was that he provided me a fantastic excuse.
When I can’t sleep I get freaked, feeling like lice are on me and I need to pick them off me with a fine-tooth comb. I went to the bathroom to do a ritual—brush hair, brush tongue, brush beard, five taps.
The door to the sink room didn’t close. I could see Bryce rustle out of his bed to follow me. Trinity turned once and made a little noise, but her eyes stayed closed.
He crept up behind me and put his hands on my waist. “Freaked about the Hideaway tomorrow?”
“Well, this ain’t Monk Island, mate,” he said, mocking my accent. He tightened his grip around my eyes.
I felt my cock stiffen against my will and quickly tucked it up in my boxer briefs, praying he didn’t notice. I love being blindfolded…
“Are you worried she’ll see how tiny you are?”
“I know you’re joking.” I pulled his scrawny arms off my eyes and pinned him easily.
“I meant your dick.”
My eyes darted to the camera on the ceiling, at two o’clock. “Could you shut the fuck up.”
“Chill, Father Georgiou. Besides, they don’t keep the cameras on this late. It’s against the law to film us in private quarters from the house of one to five a.m. My homeboy on production told me.”
I relaxed my grip. “Well, I have nothing to be ashamed of in that department. For the record.”
“Bet mine’s bigger.”
It probably was. Guy’s six four. But something compelled me to say,“Bet?”
Our eyes looked to the toilets at the same time. See, I wasn’t totally buying the cameras legally off story, but I knew for a fact they couldn’t film us in there.
I pulled him into the nearest stall to the door (statistically speaking, the least bacteria-ridden). “This won’t be fair though,” I whispered. “I’m a grower.”
“Of course,” Bryce murmured. “That’s not how it’s done.”
He took himself in his hands and stroked. I could see him stiffen in his loose boxers. Yeah, he had a horse cock. My face was burning. He pulled it out through the hole in the front and stood next to me as if to line them up.
I shook my head and put my hand on the door handle.
“This is so high school,” Bryce said, maybe not noticing. “Remember doing this with the boys?”
“Never done this before,” I muttered. In a moment of bravery, I lifted my tank top to flash him my cock, which was pointed straight up at my face. For maybe a second. Then I put it away.
He grinned at me and flipped his own erection up to match mine. “Okay, now I really gotta take a piss, man,” he said. “Gotta lean forward and shit.”
I turned the door and rushed back into bed. This time I curled the opposite way of Kayda so our backs were touching.
I heard the toilet flush, heard him get back into bed. Sleep was fitful, of course.
In the morning, hoping it was before five and that out , I told Kayda I was worried about being intimate (true) because what if a bombshell came in and shook up our connection (less true). She replied that there was no one she could see shaking our connection. I told her I agreed.
It was true, there was no bombshell who was possibly going to shake Kayda and my connection. The only person I could see doing that was already in the house, four beds down, and not quite what the producers—or my yiayia—had intended.