Love in Reality: A Contemporary Romance (The Blackjack Quartet) (19 page)

“Yeah?”

“Nice try, by the way.”

She felt that chill again but tried to hide it. “What was a nice try?”

“I may be gay, but I’m not blind when it comes to women. No way are you attracted to me. I think I know who it might be, but don’t worry, your secret’s safe.”

She just looked at him sadly. “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, Greg. I’ll recover someday from the crushing blow of learning you play for the other team.”

He laughed and threw a shark pillow at her as she slipped out the door.

* * *

Good save, all things considered. At least, Libby hoped so. Really, she should be keeping a mental tally of how many lies she’d told on this adventure. Previous total: Tons. Current total: Megatons.

Libby wandered back down to the living room. Even with no clock on the wall, there was a funny rhythm to the ’Bowl. Most of the other Fish would be up for a few more hours, but the group tended to quiet down except for the smokers outside. After hanging out with Kai and Jim, Libby went and brushed her teeth and got ready for bed. The little bedtime rituals felt odd, as though they might get interrupted at any moment.

How embarrassing that Greg picked up on her being so happy nearly every evening. She stared at her reflection, one hand about to slather on some stupid skin cream that Lissa had given her. She did this most nights after talking to Rand—come in here and engage in this silly beauty routine. She had no doubt there would be a montage in the final episode of how she spent all her time in the bathroom, but she didn’t care. It was camouflage to keep people from seeing her well-kissed lips and pink cheeks. Just more deceit on her part. Turned out it wasn’t enough camouflage. She had no idea she’d even been humming. Oh, please don’t let it be some dorky “put a ring on my finger” song.

It was a relief to go into an empty bedroom, change into her tank top and shorts, and get into bed without having to make small talk with Greg. Now she had to figure out a way to fall asleep knowing that something good was going to happen soon. How had she and Lissa managed Christmas Eve all those years? Not by going to bed quietly, that was for sure.

* * *

“Dude, that situation you asked about is copacetic.”

Rand had to smile. Trust Dick to call from the Control Room and use unnecessary code language to tell him that Lissa had gone to bed.

“Thanks,” Rand said idly as he tapped out some questions for his next round of Journal Room interviews.

Dick wasn’t done. “But you’d better come see what Editing has for you. It’s a doozy.”

“Okay.” Rand wasn’t worried. Debbie and he hadn’t done more than talk about their plan, so there couldn’t be anything on the live feeds that might give the game away. He walked over to see what they had.

Jamie was working at the nearest editing station. Her normally friendly face was rigid. She looked worried as she glanced from Rand to Dick and back. Rand waited while they took him into the small viewing room Marcy favored. Jamie went straight to the mini-board at the back. There were two leather chairs. One was Marcy’s, but no one ever sat in the other one. Rand leaned against a wall.

“Okay, what’s up?” he asked.

“Watch this,” Dick said and nodded at Jamie. “You’re the first to see this, other than the two of us,” he added as Jamie cued it up.

Jamie said, “This is a conversation between Greg and Lissa in the Shark Tank from about an hour ago.” She started the tape.

Rand recognized it as the feed from the camera pointing at the bed from across the room. Marcy called it “the sex cam,” hoping each season that the Shark Tank would be transformed into someone’s love nest. Lissa’s back was toward the camera, but he could hear her fine, as they’d synced both her mike and Greg’s mike to the camera feed.

At first, the conversation seemed fairly standard to Rand’s mind. Lissa managed to get Chris and Susie to leave without realizing they’d been manipulated. Rand smiled at her artful air of fake innocence. That was his Ditz.

Once Greg and Lissa were alone in the frame, Rand had a moment of anxiety. He felt his stomach drop when Greg told Lissa he’d figured out she was clearly in love with someone. He felt a little better when Lissa brazened her way out of that situation, and actually laughed when she claimed she was attracted to Greg.

Then his jaw dropped. “He’s gay?” he burst out. Jamie paused the tape.

“That’s part of what you need to see. We,” she pointed to Dick, “need to talk to you about this. Marcy will want to see this tape—she’ll be thrilled that Greg is gay, you know how she is—but it gets worse from your point of view.”

Rand was feeling sick, but he just nodded. “Go ahead.”

Jamie pressed a button and the conversation resumed. Dick compressed his lips and crossed his arms.

Lissa managed to shift her shock about Greg’s announcement okay, but then he mentioned casually that Susie thought Lissa was a plant because her Journal Room interviews were longer.

“Oh shit,” Rand breathed. The tape stopped again. He turned to Dick. “Why wasn’t I told about Susie’s comments?”

“We don’t know,” Dick answered. “We routinely trash anything the contestants say about the production staff, so all I can imagine is that the logger figured it was just more chat about behind-the-scenes crap.”

Jamie piped up, “Trust me, it’s no fun having to show Marcy tape that has the contestants talking about how the show is made. So we pretend no one ever discusses it.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you, Rand. No one in Editing said anything to me about it,” Dick added.

Rand’s phone buzzed. It was Debbie. “Hey, we have a problem here,” he told her.

Debbie’s voice sounded troubled. “About tonight?”

“No, that part is cool. But can you get here now?”

“Yeah, I guess. Twenty minutes?”

“Thanks.”

He turned to Dick. “Does it get worse?” he asked, indicating the monitor.

Dick signaled for Jamie to continue. Rand watched the rest in silence, his stomach cramped with anxiety. Lissa spun some nonsense to explain why her interviews were longer. That might satisfy Greg, but it would make Marcy’s eyeballs explode. If she saw this, she’d demand explanations until everything came out. He might as well quit now.

He looked at Dick when the tape finally ended. “How bad is this?” Dick was a veteran and had worked with Marcy for longer even than
The Fishbowl
had been on. If Dick said there was a risk, there was a risk.

The older man just shook his head. “Catastrophic. Jamie and I were talking about it earlier. Marcy’ll want to see the whole tape—we can’t isolate Greg’s revelation that he’s gay—and she isn’t going to buy Lissa’s ‘he needs to be patient with me’ routine because Marcy’s seen the times on your interview tapes. They actually run way shorter than the other Fish. She’ll want to know what Lissa’s talking about.”

“Do we have any plausible explanation?” Rand asked.

Dick exchanged a look with Jamie. “Not that we can think of.”

They were still going over the implications when Debbie arrived. Rand explained about Greg and Lissa in the Shark Tank and they ran the tape straight through.

“Oh.” Debbie looked the way Rand felt, as though the bottom of her stomach had dropped out.

“Any ideas?” he asked her.

She dropped into Marcy’s chair. “Only one. We lose this bit of tape.”

Rand goggled at Debbie. “Really? I can’t get you all fired.”

Debbie looked over at Jamie. “Has anyone else seen this?”

Jamie shook her head, but the look on her face said it all. What Debbie was suggesting was heresy. They really could lose their jobs if Marcy knew they’d tampered with something this big.

Debbie turned back to Rand. “You don’t get it, do you? I have a dog in this fight. When I recruited Greg he was as straight as an arrow. If he’s gay, he did not want us to know.”

“But he said it aloud in a room with more cameras than anywhere else in the house. He has no reason to hope we would ignore it.”

“Think about it, Rand. He’s only told one other Fish. Being the gay guy isn’t who he is in this game. He’s the Band Geek. That’s who Marcy wanted and that’s who she got.”

“But she’d cream to know he’s actually gay,” Dick said.

“Would she?” Debbie asked. “Because that’s not the script she has for this guy. She’ll have us poring over all the Greg footage from the past five and a half weeks for something—anything—that has a gay subtext. Jamie, is that really overtime you guys want to have?”

“No.”

“Plus, do any of us think the loggers would find anything?”

Jamie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Not to mention,” Debbie went on, “I’ll be on Marcy’s shit list for recruiting a gay guy I didn’t know was gay, thus depriving her of that whole in-the-closet story line. No. I say we lose the tape.”

Dick and Jamie instinctively looked at Rand. They wanted him to approve this mutiny, he realized. Who cast him as Fletcher Christian?

“We have to,” Debbie implored. “Your little romance with Lissa will come out and you will lose your job. I may lose my job. You could afford it, but I’ve got a kid to feed.”

Rand finally nodded. “What she doesn’t know won’t kill her.”

“What if Greg tells someone else, ‘Oh, when Lissa and I were talking earlier’ dot dot dot?” Jamie asked.

“So what?” Dick said. “It’s unlikely he’ll specify the time and place. I’m with Debbie. It’s in the trash. Can you do that Jamie? Lose it completely.”

Jamie looked at each of them one last time, then she typed something on the keyboard. A moment later, she said, “Well, it’s not deleted completely, but I’ve marked that whole chunk of time in the Shark Room as having the lowest level of interest. Frankly, Greg sleeping is tagged as more riveting TV.”

They all stared at each other for a long moment, then Rand took a deep breath and turned toward Debbie. “We now return to our regularly scheduled insubordination,” he said.

Debbie smiled with relief. “Then let’s go get your girl.”

Libby fell asleep reciting the conditions that triggered the Statute of Frauds while trying to ignore her disappointment that Rand hadn’t called her back to the Journal Room. It seemed she had only just dozed off when she was shaken awake. Before Libby could say anything, the woman standing over her put a finger against Libby’s lips.

Her heart lurched with fear. Something horrible had happened.
Mom? Dad? Oh, please, not Lissa.
But she caught the woman’s expression which was reassuring, not solemn. Libby tried to relax.

The woman was dressed in chinos and a polo shirt, so she was likely on the crew for
The Fishbowl
. She had a tiny flashlight that she used as little as possible. There was some light shining in from the hallway, though, and once Libby sat up, she noticed the woman was smiling at her. She smiled back, relieved that whatever this was, no one had died.

The woman signaled for Libby to get up and follow her. Before they could leave the bedroom, the woman stopped Libby, poked her head out into the hallway, and waved her hand at somebody. Two men came, carrying something large. It looked bulky, like a rolled-up carpet, but as Libby’s eyes adjusted, she could see it was a body. She jerked in shock.
What the hell—?

One of the men was Rand. Libby took a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves. She watched as the woman pulled back the covers on Libby’s bed and they put the body in place. It was moldable in some way—the other man arranged the legs and arms in a specific position, then the woman flicked the hair in place.

Rand stood to one side, watching the process. When the woman nodded, he came over to Libby and breathed in her ear, saying he needed her mike and transmitter pack. Chills ran down her back at the touch of his lips to her earlobe. She stood still as his hands brushed against her chest, unclipping the mike and untangling the wires to the pack, which he also unclipped from her waistline. Who knew it was so erotic to have your mike removed? Her nipples hardened. She resisted the urge to fold her arms over her breasts.

Rand and the woman positioned the mike and pack onto the body, then nodded to the other guy, who had been waiting, grinning. He took something out of his pocket, twiddled some switch or knob and all of them watched as the body on the bed moved.

Libby clapped her hand to her mouth to keep from gasping out loud. It was a robot or something, its movements subtle but clearly human. The woman made a thumbs-up symbol at the rest of them and then bent down to pull the covers up around the robot’s shoulders. In the dim light, Libby could have been watching her sister sleeping.

She looked at Rand. What had he done? There was a dummy or mechanical doll or something in her bed, wearing her microphone, pretending to be sleeping. Then she looked over at Greg’s bed, which was rumpled just the way he’d left it the morning before he won the Shark Fight. Oh, wow. He’s in the Shark Tank. He wasn’t going to be sleeping in that bed, so if that machine looked enough like her to fool anyone watching the 24-hour feed, she didn’t have to be there.

Which meant she was actually free to leave the room—in fact, she had to leave the room before the cameras noticed there were two Lissas. Sure enough, Rand tugged her hand to get her to follow them. The woman checked the hallway, then whisked them all along to the Journal Room, which she unlocked with a key card. It was dark, but Libby knew about the secret door, which stood open.

They filed through the tiny space Libby now knew well, and continued out to a brightly lit hallway that could have been part of any generic office building. Industrial carpet on the floor and fluorescent lights in the dropped ceiling. Libby was acutely conscious of wearing only her tank top and boy shorts underwear, routine for sleeping on the show but inappropriate for mixed company in an office hallway.

She looked over at Rand as they walked along, not sure if they could talk yet. It might take a while to stop feeling for her transmitter pack.

He caught her look. “Yeah, it’s probably safe, but we have to get you out of the building for this to be completely successful.”