Chapter 14: The Diary Room Confession
The diary room door was heavier than it looked. It sealed behind him with a soft suck of pressure, and then the corridor sounds were simply gone, the whole house going mute around him like a hand closing over a mouth.
The room was smaller than the hallway suggested. Bare walls, black carpet gone grey in patches at the corners, one chair bolted to the floor. A single light hung low over it, and the rest of the room fell away from that cone of heat into a dim he could feel more than see.
David sat. The chair was cold for about four seconds.
"Hey there."
Zola's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, warm, mild, sliding out of a speaker he couldn't find. He turned his head anyway.
"Hi." He greeted.
"You can look straight ahead. There's a marker on the wall, the little cross. Talk to that." A pause, and he heard her take a drink of something. Ice knocked against glass. "Long day."
"Long night." He said.
"Mmm. Sweaty shirt, David. And bare feet?" She laughed, low, easy. "Okay. Just breathe a second. Let your eyes get used to the light."
He breathed. Under the hum of the light he could hear the mic above him, a faint electrical tick like a bug in a jar.
"Give me your name and where you're from. For the log."
"David Dupree. Houston.”
"Houston." She said it like she was tasting it. "You're thirty-one."
"Yes."
"And you came into this house a virgin."
There it was. She didn't say it gently. She set it on the floor between them like a dropped fork. David's jaw went tight and he made himself relax it, because the camera would see that. The camera would see everything.
"Yes. I am.”
"Say the rest."
"I've never had sex." The words came out flatter than he expected. "I've never done anything. That's why I'm here. That's the whole reason."
"A million dollars isn't."
"It's second."
"Okay." Ice knocked again against her glass. "How did that happen? Thirty-one."
He looked at the cross on the wall. It was a piece of black tape, he realized, stuck up crooked over a scuff mark. Somebody had put it there with their thumb.
"I was busy."
"You're not going to get anywhere with me being cute, David."
"I'm not being cute." He put his hands on his knees. "I was raised to be good at things. School, then work. I got very good at screens. I was scared of everything that wasn't a screen. That's the honest version. It stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a place I lived."
The light was hot on the top of his head. He could feel sweat gathering behind his ears.
"Thank you," Zola said, and she meant it, which threw him. "Now. The Heartbreakers."
"Did you look that one up?"
"I have a card. I have cards on everybody." A paper shuffle. "Four women took you in on day two. Why you?"
"They felt bad for me at first."
"And now?"
David turned that over. The room ate the silence and gave nothing back, and that was oddly freeing. There was no one to perform for. There was just the tape cross.
"Now they don't," he said. "Renee yells at me. Mia tells me things she wouldn't tell the others. Tasha checks my water. Simone feeds me like it's a job she got assigned." He shrugged at the cross. "That's not pity. Pity is polite."
"And what do you give them?"
"Numbers." He almost smiled. "I'm good at the bracket. I can see the whole board. They can't."
"You're the calculator."
"I'm the calculator."
"Okay." Another drink. "You won immunity twice. You kissed a man (the biggest threat in this show’s history) on national television in front of everybody. You beat Kyle Barlow on a rope competition when you had no business beating him. Which of those was the one that changed you?"
That one he had to think about. He could hear his own breathing amplified somewhere remote, mixed down into the room's speakers along with Zola's voice, a half-second ghost of himself.
"The rope," he said finally. "Losing to beat him didn't matter. Holding did."
"Why?"
"Because it was mine. Nobody gave me that. Not Remy, not the girls. I just stood there and didn't fall down."
"Good answer," Zola said. "Take your glasses off."
He took them off.
"What was on your mind tonight, at midnight."
The temperature in the room did not change, but something in the air went taut, the way it does before a door opens behind you. He set the glasses on his knee and looked at the blur of the tape cross.
"Footwork," he said.
"David."
"Footwork's what we were doing."
"I have the footage." Her voice stayed level and pleasant. "I'm watching it right now, actually, on a nice big monitor. You want to know what I see?"
He said nothing.
"I see a woman sitting on your hips for eleven minutes. I see you get turned over four times, and every single time your body answers before your brain does. I see Remy Richards walk in and stand in a doorway like a man holding a bag he doesn't want to be seen carrying." A pause. "And I see you flush, on camera, at minute nine, and I see you turn your face to the mat so she can't look at you."
His ears were burning. There was nowhere to put his hands.
"That's not what happened," he said.
"Tell me what happened."
"That's not what..." He stopped. The sentence died on him. Under the heat of that light his throat had gone dry enough that the words scraped coming out, and he knew, with the part of him that was still watching, that this was the exact moment the answer stopped being a game. He could feel it happen. Like a step off a curb in the dark.
"It was the first time anything felt like that," he said.
"Like what."
"Like my body was doing something I actually wanted instead of something I was scared of." He heard himself and kept going, because stopping now would be worse. "She put her weight on me and I wasn't afraid of it. That's it. That's the whole thing. I've been terrified of my own hands for thirty-one years and somebody sat on me in a gym and I wasn't."
The red light on the far wall didn't blink. It just stayed on, patient and round, waiting for him to finish.
"Okay," Zola said quietly. "That's the one."
"The one what?"
"The take." Glasses clinked. "Now. The last question, and I want the straight version. When Remy came through that door, what did you feel?"
David put his glasses back on. The room sharpened. The tape cross went from a smudge to a crooked little mark over a scuff.
"I wanted him to stay," he said.
"Why did you want him to stay?”
He opened his mouth. What came out was not what he planned.
"Because he's the only person in this house who looks at me like I'm a problem he's working on," David said. "Everybody else looks at me like a pet project. He looks at me like a cost. And I don't know what it means that I'd rather have that."
Silence stretched. He could hear the tick of the mic over his head.
"Do you want to refuse the pairing?" Zola asked.
"No."
"Say why."
"I don't have a why. I just don't want to."
"Alright." Papers moved. "One more thing, and it isn't a question. The booking tomorrow came from his side. He asked for you. I told you the network wanted it because he asked me to tell you that."
The heat of the light pressed down on the top of his skull. He sat very still, and the room waited, and behind the black wall a camera motor whirred as it racked focus on his face.
"Next week's challenge," Zola said, "you won't have to guess at the name. I'll say it out loud in front of the house, and I'll say your name and his right after it. So think about what you're going to do with your face."
She switched off the speaker.
He sat alone under the light with his palms flat on his knees, and after a while he stood up, and the chair stayed bolted where it was.
The corridor took him back like cold water. The pressure changed first, that quiet suck of the seal letting go, and then the house came in again, pool pumps thrumming behind the walls, a fan turning over somewhere up in the atrium ceiling.
His feet were bare on the polished concrete. He had left his shoes by the mat and had not thought about them once, not until now. The floor held a little of the day's warmth in patches. He walked toward the water table out of habit more than thirst.
The atrium was down to its last light, a low amber wash along the base of the glass. Somebody had left a towel crumpled over the back of the bench where Mia had sat. He filled a cup, drank it standing up, filled it again.
Two things sat in him and would not sit still. The first was the sound of his own voice saying I wanted him to stay under that light, amplified into the room's speakers, played back to him a half second late so it felt like hearing a stranger.
The second was smaller and worse. He asked for you. Zola had said it mild as a weather report, and it had gone in like a splinter under a nail.
He carried the cup down the corridor past the bunkroom door, where the house breathed in slow uneven chorus, and turned the corner toward the kitchen because there was ice in there and he wanted something cold on his palm.
Remy was at the bar.
Not the couch, not the terrace. The bar, one stool, one glass, the bottle beside it still mostly full. He had not changed out of the navy silk. His sleeves were rolled and his forearms rested on the oak, and the signet ring sat on his pinky catching the one small light over the shelves.
"Kitchen's closed," he said, without turning around.
"I'm not eating."
"Then what are you doing."
"It’s my Hand." David held up the right one. The rope burn had gone from red to a hard pink line, and there was a raised pad of fluid at the base of the middle finger. "I need Ice for it.”
Remy looked at the hand for a moment, then nudged the freezer drawer under the bar with his foot. He didn't offer anything else.
David dug out a handful of cubes, wrapped them in a paper towel, and pressed it flat to his palm. The cold went up his wrist bone and made him exhale.
"Beatriz's work," Remy said.
"Some of it."
"That's what I want to talk about." He turned the glass a quarter turn on the bar, exactly the way Mia had turned her cup. "What did she offer you?"
David kept the paper towel pressed to his palm and looked at the wall behind the bottles, where the shelf threw a hard black line of shadow.
"Wrestling."
"Don't." Remy's voice stayed low and even. "I was in three seasons of Miami before you could look me in the eye. I've heard every shape of that exact same sentence. What did she offer you?"
"She offered to train me straight through the rest of the season. Every night in the gym. She wants a second."
"And?"
"And she wanted me to say no to something."
"What?"
"She didn't say. She said pick one. She said tell you I refused it."
Remy stopped turning the glass.
The room held still a second. Out past the glass wall the pool filter clicked over and started its cycle. David heard his own mouth close and his own heart working at his ribs, and behind all of it, faint and stupid, the pleasure of having said the true thing on purpose instead of by accident.
"Say that again."
"I said no to a private bonus she gets to keep if I make the final three with her."
Remy looked at him for a long time. It was that same flat check-and-tally from the dais, from the far circle, from the doorway of the gym. He was doing the arithmetic and not hiding it.
"You're lying," he said.
"Mm hmm. I know."
"Why'd you bother?"
Somewhere down the corridor the bunkroom door creaked and a set of feet shuffled out and back in again. The filter clicked off. David shifted the ice to the heel of his palm and felt the water run down under his wristband.
"Because she told me to lie.” He said.
Remy laughed. It was one note, mostly air, and it came out of him before he could arrange it. He caught it and put the glass down without drinking, and when he looked back up the polished face was halfway on and halfway off, which was worse to look at than either.
"Beatriz Cardoso," he said, "trained a stuntwoman for two regional titles and dumped a business partner in open court. She doesn't do favors. Whatever she's charging you, you can't pay it."
"She asked for information."
"About me."
David didn't answer. Remy nodded slowly, as if he'd gotten the answer anyway, and pushed off the stool. He took the bottle and set it back on the shelf, aligned the label out like it mattered.
"You should know something," he said. "I asked Zola for the pairing. Not the network. Me."
"I know. She told me in the booth."
"Then you know the other half." He turned and walked the length of the bar toward the corridor mouth. "She put a camera in that room and she'll have clipped the whole thing by breakfast. Whatever you gave her in there, that's tomorrow's cold open."
He stopped at the corner. The blue of the pool threw a moving line across the tile at his feet.
"What did you give her?" he said.
David set the paper towel on the bar. Water pooled around it and stayed.
"Footwork," he said.
Remy held his eyes for three full seconds, and something moved behind his face and got put away again. Then he shook his head once, almost fond of it, and stepped into the corridor.
"Sleep with your shoes on, David." he said. "They won't let you back in the gym after tonight."
The corridor took him. David stood alone at the bar with a melted paper towel and a steady hand, and it took him a while to understand the thing he felt standing there was not fear and was not hope, but had a little of both in it, turning over.
He rinsed the paper towel in the kitchen sink and wrung it out, and the water that came off it was pink.
The house had gone down to nothing. The pool pump ran its slow circuit, and somewhere a dryer turned with a sock thumping inside it. David walked the corridor barefoot with the wet towel in his fist and looked into the rooms as he passed them. Bunkroom: dark, breathing. Lounge: dark, couch cushions stacked. He was halfway to the gym door before he remembered it wasn't his tonight.
So he kept walking.
The laundry room sat at the end of the service hall, past the pantry and the door marked STAFF. The light was on under the door, a cheap yellow line, and the dryer was the thing thumping. He pushed in.
Beatriz sat on the counter with her feet in the sink and a protein bar in her teeth. She had changed into loose sweats and a hoodie cut off at the elbows, and she was watching the dryer turn like it was television.
"Did he let you have it?" she said around the bar.
"Most of it."
She took the bar out of her mouth. "What did he do with his hands?"
David set the towel on the machine. "That's the part you wanted."
"That's the part I'm paying for." She chewed and swallowed. "Where were they?"
"Left one stayed on the bar. Right one went to the ring. Then he stopped doing it because he noticed I noticed."
"Good." She slid down off the counter and landed flat without sound. "What'd you tell him?"
"That I refused a private bonus of yours."
"Which one?"
"You didn't say which one."
"Right. Doesn't matter." She pulled the hoodie over her head and dropped it on the counter in one motion, leaving the cropped top underneath. "Gym's shut for the night?"
"That's what he said."
"It is. Crew resets the mats at one for the shoot tomorrow." She looked around the room. Concrete floor, three dryers along the wall, one folding table bolted down. "Sink's in the way but we've got eight feet of floor and a wall. That's enough."
"For what?"
"For the thing you actually need, which is learning to move when the floor is against you." She pointed at the far wall with two fingers. "Go stand against it. Back flat."
He did.
"Now. Everything I taught you in the gym assumed space. A mat, a center, a circle you could pivot in." She crossed the floor and stopped an arm's length out. "This house doesn't give you space. The final won't either. So tonight you learn what to do when you're pinned and there's nowhere to turn."
She closed the distance.
The first hold was fast. She got his wrist and hip at the same time and walked him into the wall, and his shoulder blade cracked against the concrete. The dryers hummed. He pushed off and she let him get six inches before she took the arm again and put him back.
"Slower," she said. "You're trying to win."
"I am."
"You're trying to be strong. That's different." She threaded her forearm under his and rotated, and suddenly his own arm was pressed up behind his shoulder. "Feel where that starts?"
"My shoulder."
"It starts in your elbow. You gave me the elbow and the shoulder came free." She let up. "Again. This time don't pull. Fold."
They did it nine more times. The dryer stopped and the room went quiet except for their breathing and the click of the drum cooling. He got better at the fold. On the tenth she took the hold and he sank through it, rolled his shoulder under her arm, and came up against her chest with her wrist caught in his hand.
She stopped.
"You did that."
"I did that."
Her face was close and she was studying him the way she studied everything, flat and total. Sweat had come up along her hairline. His hand was still closed around her wrist, and neither of them moved to break it.
"Let go," she said.
He let go.
"Good. You didn't get weird about it." She stepped back and rolled her neck both ways. "Now the floor. Down."
He sat, then lay back on the concrete. It was cold through his shirt.
She came down over him the way she had in the gym, one knee either side, but there was no mat now to soften it, and her weight landed full. One hand wrapped both his wrists. The other went flat on the floor by his head for balance, and her hair fell forward onto his chest.
"Now. There's no room to turn here. What do you do?"
"I don't know."
"Figure it out."
He tried the hip turn. The wall of dryers was a foot away and his shoulder hit metal. He tried the other way and got the same. She settled heavier and pinned him properly, and his whole body answered her before he told it to.
"There it is," she said.
"There's what."
"The thing you do that cameras can see from a hundred feet." She hadn't moved. Her voice was low, half-humming under the dryer. "Your breathing changes. Your hips come up. You get hard and you either hide it or you own it, and everybody in this house has already clocked which one you do."
His ears went hot. He looked at the ceiling. A fly was dead in the light fixture, a small black comma.
"I can't help that."
"I know. That's the point." She eased her weight off him and sat to one side, knees up, back against the washer. "Listen. I've coached people into national brackets. Nine out of ten of them lose because of something happening above the neck. Fear. Shame. A voice telling them to slow down." She looked at the dead fly in the light and then looked back at him. "You've got the opposite problem. You've got a body that shows up and a head that keeps apologizing for it. In these challenges, the guests watch you, the house votes you, and the ones who win are the ones who don't flinch at being seen."
David sat up. The concrete had gone warm under his back in a shape that matched his shoulders.
"So what's the training," he said.
"Same thing it's always been. I put weight on you and you don't flinch." She stood and offered him a hand. He took it, and she pulled him up harder than she needed to. "Tomorrow you're in a pairing with Remy Richards and a camera crew. I hear you already said yes."
"I did."
"Then here's the next lesson, and it's not on a floor." She picked her hoodie off the counter and shook it out. "Tomorrow, whatever he does with his hands, whatever room they put you in, whatever he says into your ear, you don't answer with your face. You give the audience a body that isn't lying to them and a mouth that is. You watch him try to read you and you let him fail."
"How."
"Practice. Every night I've got you, that's what we drill." She pulled the hoodie over her head and settled it. "And David."
"What."
"Report back. Word for word, like tonight." She pushed off the counter and walked to the door, and stopped with her hand on it. "And tell me one more time what you told him I asked for."
"A private bonus. And that I refused it."
"Which one you refused."
"I told him you didn't say which one."
Beatriz smiled at that, small, sideways. "He'll want to know which one by Friday." She pulled the door open and the service hall came in cool. "Good work. You folded faster than I thought you would. Get some sleep, you've got a date on camera."