“Other than that whole situation, how are you doing?”
“I’m sore. I hurt everywhere. Dante made us play soccer yesterday, and I think I tore my everything. Is that thing on?” I gestured at the camera.
“Not yet. I wanted us to have a chance to chat before we got to what you should say on camera.”
What I should say? Taylor had her tablet in her lap, and she typed something and then pointed it at me. She had typed in big letters “MATTHEW IS WATCHING. DON’T LOOK.” She pointed up at a camera in the corner of the room behind her, which I could just see out of the corner of my eye.
I nodded slightly, and she put the tablet back in her lap. I would have to play along and say what they wanted to hear when the camera went on.
“How are you?”
“Finer than a frog’s hair split four ways.”
Her eyes lit up. “I wish we’d filmed that. That would have been a fantastic sound bite. Remember that one. I’ll probably ask you to say it again later. Now, before we start filming, tell me what you really think about Dante. And this is me, Taylor, talking. Not Taylor, field producer.”
I sighed. These days I couldn’t tell the difference between Friend Taylor and Producer Taylor. “Don’t get me wrong—in a lot of ways he is an amazing man. He has a lot of good qualities. And then there are some bad ones that I think are insurmountable.”
She slid her finger across the tablet screen. “So you don’t see a future with him?”
“To be honest, I don’t. You’ve seen him back there on your monitors. You know what he’s like. A total player. I bet he’s made out with every woman here.”
She looked up at me, pausing for a beat. “You’d be surprised.”
How would I be surprised? I knew how he was with girls.
She stopped for a minute, putting her hand over one ear. When she removed her hand, I realized she was wearing an earpiece. I wondered who was feeding her questions. “I wanted to let you know that the first show has premiered.”
Now that was unusual. I knew from my initial talks with the producers that they would spend weeks filming, edit it, and then release the show. “Why so soon?”
“Something about the show feeling more alive instead of being edited to death,” Taylor said under her breath. I could barely make it out. “How would you feel if I told you that you were the audience’s favorite? By a landslide?”
“Landslide?” I echoed, not sure where she was going with this.
“Almost every e-mail, tweet, and Facebook post we get is about you and how much they want Dante to pick you. The ratings are the highest they’ve ever been. I told you. Mad chemistry. What’s between you is real. All of America can see it.”
“But we’re just friends. I’m engaged.”
She tilted her head to one side in a sympathetic gesture. For some reason, it made me feel like I was getting played. “I know. But if Dante were different, if you knew he could commit and be faithful to you, would that change how you would feel?”
I started inhaling and exhaling a bit too quickly for my liking. “Off the record?”
“Of course.”
I gulped down the emotion in my throat. I couldn’t lie. Not about this. “Yes. It would change how I feel.”
I saw a brief triumphant smile, and then she was back to her sympathetic face. “Can I tell you what I think?”
“You’re in the driver’s seat. Have at it.”
“I think you’re in love with him.”
“I am not . . . not . . . there’s no way that I . . . You don’t know . . .” Had this room always been this hot? Why was I glistening so much?
“Sentence fragments? You can say you disagree, but your speech pattern proves otherwise.”
“It means that I’m so shocked by how wrong you are that I can’t even think of a dignified response,” I retorted.
She shrugged. “It was just an observation.”
Fan-freaking-tastic. Hooray for Taylor being so observant. Maybe I should just slap a dome on her head, give her a telescope, and call it good.
When had I become so moody? My feelings were more unpredictable than a twister in a trailer park. One second I was mooning over Alternate Reality Dante, the next I was ready to knock out my own sorority sister.