Chapter Six: The Podcast & Live Show

He never told me what he’d stopped himself from saying, and I didn’t get the chance to ask again before Thursday arrived and Gerald’s assistant was in my kitchen at seven in the morning with a garment bag and a schedule printed on actual paper, like this was still an era where anyone read things on paper.

“Mic check’s at eleven,” she said. “Hair and makeup at nine. Cole’s already downstairs.”

“Already? It’s not even eight.”

“He’s punctual. You should try it sometime,” she said, already halfway out the door.

By the time I got down to the car, he was leaning against it reading, that same coverless book held loose in one hand, and something about the sight of him standing there in the early light, unaware I was watching, made my chest do something I didn’t have a name for. He looked up before I could decide what to do with that.

“You’re staring,” he said.

“You’re standing in front of my building at eight in the morning. Somebody should be staring.”

“Fair.” He held the car door open for me, an easy motion, nothing performed about it since there were no cameras yet, and that was somehow worse than if he’d made a show of it.

“You could’ve waited inside,” I said, once we were both in the back seat.

“I could’ve. I don’t like waiting rooms.” He said it simply, no explanation offered, and I decided not to push for one this early in the morning.

The studio was loud before we even reached the greenroom, techs shouting cues, a producer walking us through where to sit, how the cameras would cut between us, when to laugh, when to look at each other instead of the host. Cole took all of it in without complaint. I took all of it in wanting to be anywhere else.

“You’ll do fine,” he said, low, while a makeup artist dabbed powder along my jaw. “Just do what we did at the restaurant.”

“What, lie convincingly?”

“Exactly that.”

The show itself blurred faster than I expected. The host was warm, funny, asked exactly the questions Gerald’s people had fed him in advance.

“So,” the host said, leaning toward us both, “who fell first?”

“Depends who you ask,” Cole said, before I could open my mouth.

“I’m asking her.”

“Him,” I said. “Obviously him.”

“That’s not what happened,” Cole said, and the crowd laughed before he’d even finished the sentence, delighted with the bickering, exactly the reaction Gerald had wanted when he wrote this whole thing into the contract like a stage direction.

“Fine,” I said. “Me. I fell first. Are you happy now?”

“I’m always happy when you admit I’m right.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Close enough.”

The host asked how we met, and Cole told the story we’d agreed on, easy, charming, nothing like the guarded man from the coffee shop. Somewhere in the middle of it he reached over and laced his fingers through mine on the armrest between our chairs, and the laugh that came out of me at his next line wasn’t performed at all. I heard it happen and couldn’t take it back.

The audience loved it. I could hear them, that particular roar that happens when a room full of strangers decides they’re rooting for you, chanting something that took me a second to make out.

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

It started small, a few voices near the front, and then the whole room picked it up until the host had to hold both hands up laughing, telling them to settle down, and I sat there with my heart going faster than it should have for something that was, according to every clause I’d signed, entirely fake.

Cole laughed it off, said something about saving that for round two, and the room ate it up, and I sat there smiling for the cameras while some small, treacherous part of me wondered what would have happened if he actually had.

Backstage after, the moment the door shut behind us, I pulled my hand out of his.

“That was too much,” I said.

“Too much what.”

“The hand-holding. The laughing. It felt —” I stopped, because I didn’t have a safe word for what it felt like. “It felt real.”

“It’s supposed to feel real. That’s the whole point of the contract.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t hide behind the contract like it explains everything.”

He was quiet for a second too long before he answered, and when he did, his voice had lost some of its ease. “It’s just business, Rhea.”

“Say that again like you mean it.”

“It’s just business.” But he didn’t look at me when he said it the second time, and his hand, the one that had been laced through mine ten minutes ago, curled into a loose fist at his side like it was still holding the shape of it.

“You didn’t answer the question I actually asked.”

“What question.”

“Whether it felt real to you too.”

A young woman from the show’s staff walked past us just then, clipboard in hand, and slowed down long enough to touch Cole’s arm and tell him he’d done great out there, laughing a beat too long at something he said back that I didn’t catch. I felt something small and unreasonable flare up in my chest watching it, an ugly little spark of it’s not supposed to bother you, and hated myself a little for how fast it had shown up.

He didn’t answer that one either. A producer stuck her head through the door before the silence could stretch any further, telling us the car was waiting, and Cole walked out ahead of me without another word, leaving me standing there with a question I already half knew the answer to and no one willing to say it out loud.

I didn’t hear from him again until close to midnight, my phone lighting up on the nightstand with a text from a number I’d finally saved under his name that afternoon.

You were convincing tonight.

I read it three times before I let myself type anything back, my thumb hovering over the screen longer than the message deserved.

So were you.

The reply came almost instantly, like he’d been waiting with the phone already in his hand.

That’s what worries me.

I set the phone down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for a long time after that, replaying the sound of my own laugh in that studio, the one that hadn’t been performed at all, and wondering which one of us was actually losing this game we’d both agreed to play.