Chapter 8: The First Taste
The house had rearranged itself around the challenge. Where minutes ago the atrium had been a loose constellation of cliques and strategy circles, now the contestants gathered in a tight ring near the central platform, a hexagonal dais that rose from the floor like a stage waiting for its actors. The cameras had multiplied, swinging down from the ceiling rigs on silent levers, their red lights blinking in steady rhythm.
Zola stood at the center of the dais, her emerald silk jumpsuit showing off all her glorious curves caught the neon and throwing it back in fractured green light. She held a small black bowl in her hands, the kind that might hold raffle tickets. When she spoke, her voice filled the dome without effort.
"First Taste," she said, letting the name settle. "That's the challenge. You've learned to talk. You've learned to listen. Now you learn to feel."
She paced a slow circle, making eye contact with each contestant.
"Each of you will be blindfolded. Each of you will be assigned a partner at random. You will have two minutes to kiss. Not to perform. Not to impress. To taste. The house will vote on the most passionate kiss. The winner receives immunity for the week. And the winner's partner receives a private bonus."
A murmur rippled through the group. David felt it pass through him like a current. His palms were damp. He wiped them on his jeans and hoped no one noticed.
"Blindfolds go on before you are paired," Zola continued. "You will not know who you are kissing. And for those of you who think you can guess by scent or breath or the way someone stands, you can. But you will not be able to rely on it. Two minutes is not long enough to be certain."
She gestured, and a production assistant began moving through the group with a tray of black silk strips.
"Form a line," Zola said. "The bowl will decide the order and the pairings."
David moved on autopilot. He was aware of Mia's hand brushing his back as he stepped forward, a brief pressure that said be careful. He was hyper aware of Renee's eyes on him, steady and knowing. He was aware of the twins somewhere to his left, their matching laughter floating above the hum. And he was aware of Remy, standing near the front with his arms crossed, watching the bowl like it was a business negotiation.
David reached the front of the line. A production assistant tied the blindfold over his glasses, and the world went dark.
He had expected it to be this disorienting. What he had not expected was the way it sharpened everything else. The cool air of the atrium brushed against the thin skin of his forearms. The whisper of other contestants' shoes against the polished floor mapped them in space. He could hear Zola moving, could hear the click of her heels, could hear the dice rattling in the bowl.
"Pair four," Zola announced. "David Dupree and Remy Richards."
The room went quiet in a way that was different from before. This was not the hush of curiosity. This was the hush of a room realizing something was about to happen.
David felt a hand on his shoulder, guiding him forward. He knew it was not Remy. The touch was too impersonal, too professional. He stepped up onto what he assumed was the dais. The platform felt slightly warm under his feet.
"Face me," said Remy's voice.
David turned toward the voice. He could feel Remy's presence, not touching him, but close. Close enough that he could hear the fabric of Remy's shirt shifting, could smell something expensive and faintly woody.
"You didn't expect this," Remy said quietly. The words were pitched for David's ears only.
"No. I didn’t.”
"Neither did I." A pause. "Are you going to run?"
"I don't run."
"Good."
Zola's voice cut through. "Sixty seconds."
David felt Remy's hand find his jaw. The touch was light, almost careful, the way you might handle something you were not sure would break. A thumb brushed his cheekbone, just below the blindfold, tracing the edge of the silk.
"Remember," Remy said, his voice barely above a breath. "It's not a performance. It's a conversation."
The first contact was not a kiss. Not exactly. It was Remy's mouth hovering just above David's, close enough that David could feel his breath, warm and steady. The anticipation was its own kind of touch, drawn out over three seconds that felt like thirty.
Then Remy kissed him.
It was not hungry. It was not rough. It was slow, deliberate, a kiss that unfolded in stages, like a paragraph being written one line at a time. Remy's lips were firm and dry, and they moved against David's with a patience that David had not known he was capable of. It was a kiss that took its time. It was a kiss that asked questions rather than making demands.
David had never been kissed before. Not like this. Not by anyone. The irony. The cruel irony. He got his first kiss by a reality TV Show rival.
His body did not know what to do, so it did everything at once. His breath stopped. His heart hammered. His hands, hanging uselessly at his sides, curled into fists and then uncurled. He felt the heat of Remy's chest through the thin cotton of his shirt, not quite touching, but close enough that the space between them felt electric.
The kiss deepened. Remy tilted his head slightly, changing the angle, and David felt the shift in his stomach, a low pull that he had only ever read about, that he had only ever imagined in the dark of his room with his hand and his screen and his loneliness. This was different. This was real. This was happening to him.
Remy pulled back, just enough to speak against David's mouth.
"Breathe," he whispered.
David breathed. He had not realized he had stopped.
"Fifteen seconds," Zola said.
Remy kissed him again. This one was different. Slower, somehow, if that was possible, a kiss that was not about the time on the clock. His hand slid from David's jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading through the short, tapered hair at the base of his skull, and David felt his knees buckle, just slightly, just enough that he had to lock them to stay upright.
Then it was over.
The crowd was silent. Not a whisper, not a shift of weight, not a single breath. David stood on the dais with his blindfold still on, his lips still tingling, his entire body vibrating like a struck bell. He did not know what his face was doing. He did not know if he was standing or floating.
"Time," Zola said.
It was not her usual voice. It had gone soft at the edges, the way a person's voice goes soft when they witness something they were not expecting.
David reached up and pulled the blindfold off.
The first thing he saw was Remy, standing close, his pale blue eyes unreadable. The second thing he saw was the room. Mia's hand was over her mouth. Renee was staring at him with an expression he could not name. The twins were frozen, mid-whisper, their mouths open. Kyle looked like someone had knocked the wind out of him. Even Lance, who prided himself on his composure, had gone still.
David looked back at Remy.
Remy was already walking away, stepping off the dais, his expression smooth and unbothered, like nothing had happened. But David had felt it. He had felt the small, almost imperceptible hesitation in Remy's lips, the moment when the kiss had stopped being a game and become something else.
The crowd erupted. Not in applause, exactly. In noise. In voices, overlapping and urgent, asking questions no one was answering.
David stood on the dais, alone, and touched his mouth with two fingers.
He had wanted to taste. He had tasted something. He just did not know what it was yet.
After all the competitors kissed their respective partners, David had so many questions that it was unreal. The winner was to be announced in mere minutes when all of a sudden, another feminine touch grazed him.
“Hey…”
David jerked back and looked. It was Beatriz.
“Sorry if I scared you. Bet you have questions, huh? Beatriz Cardoso.” She introduced.
“David. David Dupree. And yes. I do.”
She was gorgeous as well. She was Latina, with a beautiful face, a fit and athletic build of a body with curves in the right places that had David stopping himself from staring.
“Mucho gusto, David. So, what you wanna know? After that kiss… I’ll tell you anything you want.”
Anything you want.
The phrase hung there, sweetened by her accent, and David felt the room's attention pressing in from all sides like humidity. Beatriz was a study in controlled curves, her body a series of athletic angles softened at the edges, and she looked at him the way a chess player looks at a surprising move on the board.
"I have so many questions I don't know where to start," David admitted.
"Start with the one that's eating you."
He thought about it. The cameras were still rolling, the red lights blinking their steady rhythm, but the room had broken into murmurs and side conversations now that the kissing portion of the evening had ended. No one was watching him too closely. This was, in its way, the first private moment he had been granted in three days.
"How do you know if it was good?" he asked. "A kiss. How do you know if you did it right?"
Beatriz smiled, and it was not unkind. "You do not know if you did it right. You know if you liked it. You know if your body wanted more. That is the only report card that matters."
"That's not what they taught in school."
"They do not teach anything useful in school." She stepped closer, the way a trainer steps in to correct a form. "You are thinking of it like a test. It is not a test. It is a conversation. Zola said it herself. You do not win a conversation by saying the correct words. You win it by listening."
David absorbed that. It was, he realized, almost exactly what Remy had said before the kiss. Remember. It's not a performance. It's a conversation.
"The kiss was good," Beatriz said, reading his face with unsettling accuracy. "I could see it from where I stood. The whole room could see it. That is why they are all staring at you like you grew a second head."
"Because I kissed a man?"
"Because you kissed a man and it meant something." She tilted her head. "Or it did not. I cannot tell yet. Which is it, David?"
He did not know how to answer. He had spent his whole life being certain about things. His code either compiled or it did not. His models either predicted or they failed. But this, this was a variable he had no training for.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "It was the first time anyone ever kissed me."
Beatriz's expression flickered, surprise breaking through the polished surface, and then something else, something that looked almost like respect. "Your first kiss. And you did it on camera. In front of everybody. For a challenge."
"When you put it that way it sounds insane."
"It sounds brave." She said it simply, without flattery. "Most people guard their first kiss like a secret. You gave it away to the entire world. That is either stupid or fearless. I have not decided which."
"Most people I know would say stupid."
"Most people you know are probably not in this house." She glanced over her shoulder at the cluster of contestants. "They are about to announce the winner. You should stand with your people, not with me. But David." She touched his wrist, a brief pressure, just like Remy had. "Come find me later. There is something I want to discuss with you. Business."
She was gone before he could answer, slipping into the crowd with the ease of someone who belonged everywhere and nowhere.
David stood still for a moment, then made his way back to the Heartbreakers. Mia reached for him first, pulling him into the circle with a hand on his elbow.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I think so."
Renee studied him with that unreadable expression, the one that made him feel like every wall he had ever built was made of glass. "That was not nothing," she said. "The whole room felt it. Even the cameras."
Tasha leaned in. "Beatriz talked to you. What did she want?"
"To ask if the kiss meant something."
Simone's eyebrows rose. "And what did you say?"
"That I don't know."
"You are not supposed to know," Mia said, squeezing his elbow. "You are supposed to feel. The knowing comes later."
Zola's voice cut through the atrium, amplified and clear. "Cast, gather. The votes have been tallied."
The room assembled in a practiced shuffle, contestants finding their marks with the ease of people who had already learned how a television show works. Zola stood on the dais again, her emerald jumpsuit catching the neon, and beside her was a small tablet that presumably held the results.
"The First Taste challenge has a winner," she announced. "The votes were cast by your fellow contestants on the sole criteria of passion, of presence, of truth. Several pairs delivered memorable performances. But one pairing silenced the room."
David's stomach dropped.
"The winner of the First Taste challenge, earning immunity for the week and a private bonus for his partner, is David Dupree."
The noise that followed was not applause, though there was some. It was the sound of a room recalibrating, of assumptions being discarded and new calculations being run. David heard the twins whispering. He heard Kyle muttering something he could not make out. He heard Remy, somewhere behind him, let out a low sound that might have been amusement or might have been something else entirely.
Mia was hugging him before he could process. Renee clapped him on the back. Tasha whooped. Simone nodded with her arms crossed, the closest thing to praise she had ever shown.
But David was not looking at any of them.
He was looking for Remy.
He found him near the bar, a glass of something amber in his hand, watching David with those pale, unreadable eyes. When their gazes locked, Remy raised the glass a fraction of an inch, a small, private salute, and then turned away.
David touched his mouth again, without thinking. Two fingers, pressed to his own lips, like he could still feel the shape of the kiss there.
He had questions now. More than he had before. The biggest one was this: if the whole thing had been a performance, if Remy had only been playing a game, then why had it felt like the truest moment of David's entire life?
And the second, quieter question, the one that scared him most.
Why did he want it to happen again?
“David, I know you have a lot of questions… but…” Mia quietly asked, trying to comfort him.
“Mia… did I get played? He was my partner. And two, does Remy like guys too?”
Mia did not answer right away. She guided him a few steps away from the others, into the shadow of the giant fern, where the neon fell softer and the cameras, though still present, seemed to hover at a respectful distance. Her hand stayed on his elbow, warm and grounding.
"That's two questions," she said finally. "Which one do you want first?"
"The played one. I need to know if I'm an idiot."
"You're not an idiot." She said it firmly enough that he almost believed her. "But answering whether he played you, that's not something I can do. I don't know what's in that man's head. Nobody does. That's the whole point of Remy. He wants it that way."
"That's not an answer, Mia."
"No. It's not." She let go of his elbow and crossed her arms, looking past him toward the bar where Remy had been standing. He was gone now, absorbed back into the crowd, leaving nothing behind but the memory of a raised glass. "What I can tell you is what I saw. I watched that kiss, David. I watched it the way I'd watch a man I care about walk toward a cliff, with my heart in my throat. And here's what I noticed."
"What?"
"He stopped."
David frowned. "What do you mean, he stopped?"
"When Zola called time, he had maybe half a second left. He could have kept going. He didn't." Mia's voice dropped. "A man playing a game plays until the whistle. Remy's a competitor. He's spent three days playing this house like an instrument. And for one moment, he chose to step back instead of push forward. Now." She held up a finger before David could speak. "That could mean the kiss caught him off guard. Or it could mean he wanted the room to see him stop, because stopping reads as restraint and restraint reads as class. Both are possible. I told you I wouldn't lie to you."
"Okay." David rubbed the back of his neck. "Second question."
"I heard it."
"Does he like guys too?"
Mia exhaled through her nose, half a laugh, half a sigh. "You really are new at this, are you?” She reached up and adjusted his glasses on his face, the way a sister might, or a woman who had known him since high school. "Here's the truth nobody tells you. In a house like this, in a game like this, men do things they'd never do at home. Not because they're secretly something. Because the stakes make them brave. Or stupid. Or curious. You put sixteen people in a box and tell them their job is to touch each other, and the box stops mattering as much as you'd think. Besides, we had a few girl-on-girl kisses too. I KNOW guys love that.” Mia said, jokingly.
"That's not an answer either."
"It's the answer you're going to get." She smiled, and there was something sad in it. "What I know is that Remy spent tonight teaching you, and then he kissed you, and then he walked away. Three moves. In chess, that's a sequence. He's planning something. The question isn't whether he likes guys. The question is whether YOU liked it, and what you're going to do about it."
David was quiet. From across the atrium, Zola was speaking to a producer, tablet in hand, and the crowd around the bar was thinning as contestants drifted toward their corners. The night was winding down, but David's mind was spinning at full speed.
Tasha appeared at Mia's shoulder, a glass of water in her hand. "You two hiding from us?"
"Strategizing," Mia said.
"Strategizing." Tasha handed David the water and looked at him with the gentle severity of a nurse who had seen a hundred bad diagnoses and never once softened the delivery. "Honey, you just won immunity twice in a row. You kissed the most dangerous man in the house in front of a live audience and you're still standing. Whatever's going on in that head of yours, drink the water and sit down. The floor's being mopped, not collapsed."
He drank the water. He let her walk him back to the sectional, where Renee and Simone had saved his spot.
Renee did not look up when he sat. She was watching the production crew dismantle the dais, her knee bouncing. "You're wondering if he felt it," she said, to no one in particular.
David turned. "What?"
"I've seen that face before. It's the face men make when something touches them and they don't know what to call it yet." She finally looked at him. "I told you earlier. Losing your virginity is an event that happens to you. The event is not the point. Here's what is. Tonight, something happened that you didn't plan. You got a real kiss from someone who wasn't doing it for the cameras, or wasn't only doing it for the cameras. That's a gift. Whether the giver meant it or not, you got to keep it."
"You're saying it doesn't matter if he played me."
"I'm saying it matters. I'm saying it doesn't erase the fact that you finally got to feel something. That's yours. Nobody can take it back, not Remy, not Zola, not the millions of people watching at home." She shrugged. "Keep the memory. Be careful with the man."
Simone leaned forward. "One thing you should know, David. That private bonus Zola mentioned. The winner's partner gets it. That's Remy. So whatever happens next, he's getting something out of tonight whether or not he wanted to. Which means he's going to have to decide how to feel about that. And how he decides is the only real tell we're going to get."
"A tell of what?" David asked.
"Of whether the kiss was a move," Simone said, "or whether it got him too."
David set the water down. The atrium had gone quiet, the hum of the crowd replaced by the low clatter of the crew breaking down the challenge. He looked across the room, past the twins drifting toward the bar, past Kyle hunched in conversation with Owen, past Beatriz talking to a producer near the exit. And there, near the corridor that led to the gym, Remy stood alone, jacket draped over one arm, watching David with that same pale, unreadable expression.
He did not come over. He did not wave. He simply stood there, still as a chess piece at the end of a long game, and then turned and walked into the dark of the corridor.
David's phone would not ring tonight. There were no phones in the house. But if there had been, he thought, there might have been a message waiting. And he would not have known what to type back.
Mia caught his eye. She did not say anything. She did not need to. Her face said what her mouth would not: go or stay, but choose. And whatever you choose, we will be here when you get back.
Zola's voice came over the intercom, calm and final. "Cast, curfew in thirty minutes. Winner, please report to the private suite for your bonus debrief."
David stood. His legs worked. That was more than he could have said twenty minutes ago.