Chapter 9: The Private Suite
The corridor to the private suite was the first part of the house David had ever walked alone. He had not noticed before how the neon died out past the atrium, how the glass walls gave way to something softer, matte, upholstered in the same deep red that ran through the whole villa. His footsteps sounded loud on the slate floor. Above him the ceiling rigs were still, the cameras gone dark except for one small red eye that tracked him as he passed, and then the corridor bent and the eye was gone too.
At the end of the corridor was a door with a brass plate, no number. He knocked.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
"Come in."
Zola's voice, unamplified now, was lower than it was on camera. Quieter. Her voice was more intimate. It made the room feel smaller than it looked, and the room looked enormous.
It was a suite built for a different kind of show. Low crimson light bled from concealed strips along the baseboards, pulsing slow, like breath. There was a curved sectional upholstered in black velvet, and a bar, and a wall of glass that looked out onto the dark garden where the pool lights drifted like submerged moons. The only camera in the room was tucked high in the corner, its lens wide and its red light dimmed to a single patient eye.
Zola sat on the sectional with one leg crossed over the other, a crystal tumbler resting on her knee. She changed out of her famous emerald jumpsuit. She gestured to the chair opposite her.
"Have a seat, David."
He sat. The velvet seemed to swallow him.
"You did something extraordinary tonight," she said. "I want to talk about it. But first, a drink?"
"I don't really drink."
"You do now." She rose, poured two fingers of something amber into a second tumbler, and set it in front of him. When she sat again, it was closer than before, close enough that he could smell the citrus of her perfume sitting underneath the smoke of the room. "This debrief isn't a punishment. You're not in trouble."
"I didn't think I was. I won immunity again.”
"Yes. Yes you did. But you are sitting like you are." She smiled, and it was not unkind. "Shoulders at your ears. Hands in your lap. Eyes on the exit. That's a man who thinks he's about to be graded."
"I'm always about to be graded."
"I know." She took a sip. "I read your file, David. Data analyst. No romantic history to speak of. First kiss on national television at thirty-one. Do you want to know what I thought when I read that file?"
He did not answer, so she told him.
"I thought, this man is either going to be a star or our first epic failure. And then I watched you tonight, blindfolded, kissing someone who had spent the better part of a week treating you like a joke. And you did not perform. Not once. That is the rarest thing that has ever happened in this house." She swirled her drink. "So yes. I have something for you. But it's not the bonus. The bonus goes to Remy. That's a rule, and I don't break rules, I only write them."
"Then what are you offering?"
"The truth." She leaned back. "You don't know anything about Remy Richards. He is a three-time contestant of this franchise. He’s never won. Three seasons of this franchise. He's done Lust House Miami, Lust House Cancun, and now this. He is the most famous person in this house and you would not know it to look at him, because the audience is told to hate him and he does not care."
David's fingers found the tumbler. He did not lift it, but the cold glass steadied him.
"He has a pattern," Zola said. "I could recite it to you like a menu. Week one, he finds the most socially isolated person in the cast and attaches himself to them. He protects them in public. He criticizes them in private. He gets them to trust him. And then, at the exact moment it will hurt the most, he discards them and uses the wreckage to advance. It's a strategy. It has worked three times. He is very, very damn good at it."
"That's what everyone here thinks he's doing to me."
"That's what I know he's doing to you." She held up a finger. "With one exception. And you need to hear this one carefully, because I have been watching this man for three seasons and I have never once seen it."
David waited.
"Remy Richards," she said, "has never kissed a man."
The room's low hum seemed to get louder. Or maybe that was just his pulse.
"Do you understand what I'm telling you?" Zola asked. "Not in the challenges. Not in the confessional booths. Not in the showers, which are filmed, and not off camera either, which we track through the exit logs. Three seasons. Hundreds of contestants. He has kissed women, he has seduced women, he has been seduced by women. He is a… excuse my language… complete fuckboy by every means. However, he has never put his mouth on a man. And tonight he was paired with you by a random draw, and he didn't tap out, and he didn't do the polite version you do when you don't want to be there. He kissed you like he meant it."
"You don't know that he meant it."
"No," she agreed. "I don't. Which is the entire point." Zola set her glass down and studied him, and for a moment the host was gone and there was only a woman in an expensive jumpsuit, curious about another human being. "Here are the three possibilities. One: He has decided that the audience needs to see him be vulnerable, and what better way than with the virgin, and the kiss meant nothing. Two: He had a plan tonight and you broke it, and what he did was genuine but he'll never admit it, not to you, not to himself. Or three: He has been standing at the edge of something for three years and tonight the dice pushed him off it, and he has not decided yet what to do about that either. What none of those three possibilities is, David, is nothing. This kiss meant something. The meaning? It’s up to you to find out.”
David sat with that. The amber liquid in his glass did not move, because his hand had gone very still.
"Which one do you think it is?" he asked.
"I think the interesting answer is the one where I don't know." Zola picked up her drink again. "You should know what's coming. The network has reviewed tonight's footage. They want you, they want the kiss, and they want a storyline out of the two of you. That means next week's challenge will likely put you near him again. That is not a warning. That is leverage, remember? You can say no. You have that power in your contract. Most of them don't read it."
"I did."
"Of course you did." She smiled. "You're the only contestant who has ever brought a printed copy."
They sat there a moment, the crimson light breathing in and out, the single red eye in the corner watching without sound. David thought about the kiss in a way he had not allowed himself to yet, not properly: the slowness of it, the hand that threaded through his hair, the small hesitation at the end that Mia had spotted and named. Three moves in a chess sequence.
"She said the best I can do is keep the memory," David said.
"Who said?"
"Mia. She said whatever he meant by it, the kiss is mine to keep. Nobody can take it back."
Zola considered this with the expression of someone logging a piece of data for later. "She's right. And she's also wrong, because she doesn't know the thing I just told you. Do you know what you have now that you didn't ten minutes ago?"
"Remy's history."
"You have a question the whole house is going to be asking by morning. Was that kiss the only real thing Remy Richards has ever done on this show, or the most elaborate lie he's ever told? And David." She set down her glass and stood, smoothing the silk along her hip. "You are now the only person in that house who can possibly answer it. Because you are the only person who felt it."
He stood too, because standing seemed to be what was happening.
"The bonus is settled," she said, walking him to the door. "Curfew is in twenty minutes. Everyone will want to talk to you downstairs. They'll ask you what happened in here. You don't have to tell them the truth. But whatever you do tonight, don't waste the fact that you got close enough to him to matter." She held the door. "This is a house of performance, David. But every season, there is one person who stops performing. I did not expect it to be the data analyst. And I suspect Remy didn't either."
He stepped into the corridor, and the door clicked shut behind him, and the crimson light spilled after him across the slate like blood in cold water.
The atrium, when he reached it, was still full. He could hear it before he saw it, the low chatter of fifteen other people deciding what to do with a night that had already gone wrong for half of them. And somewhere in the middle of that noise, he knew, was a man with pale eyes and a raised glass, who had kissed a virgin on camera and then walked away like it had cost him nothing.
David touched his mouth once more, without thinking, and went to find out if that was true.
The atrium had thinned by the time he crossed under the ceiling rigs. The production crew had finished striking the dais, and the hexagonal platform had left behind a faint scuff on the polished floor, a ghost of where the kiss had happened. Half the cast had drifted toward their bunks, trading the neon for the dim corridors. The other half clustered at the bar, where a single bartender was still pouring and the music had been turned down to something low and forgettable.
David did not decide to walk to the bar. His feet decided for him. He told himself it was for water, then told himself that was a lie, then stopped telling himself anything at all.
Remy was there. Of course he was there. He stood at the far end of the bar with his jacket still draped over one arm and his glass down to its last inch of amber, talking to no one, watching the room the way a man watches a map he already knows by heart. He did not look up when David approached. But his shoulders shifted, a fraction of a degree, and David understood that he had been seen the moment he entered the room.
David reached the bar. He asked the bartender for water. The bartender gave it to him without looking up, and David stood with his fingers wrapped around the cold glass, a foot of polished walnut between himself and Remy, and did not say anything.
Remy spoke first.
"You took your sweet time."
"I didn't know I was supposed to come."
"You really weren't." Remy turned his head, and for the first time since the kiss, David saw his face without an audience. The striking blue eyes were tired. Not drunk-tired. The other kind. The kind that came from holding something up for a long time and not being sure the arm could keep doing it. "You want to sit?"
"No. I want to stand. I've been sitting for three days."
"Fair." Remy set his glass down and turned fully, leaning one elbow on the bar, his body angled toward David in a way that felt less like an invitation and more like a confession. "What did she tell you?"
"Who?"
"Come on, David. You were in there thirty minutes. Your face when you walked in here looked like a man who'd been handed something heavy. Zola doesn't hand out the bonus herself. She sits you down and she gives you a piece of information she thinks you can't do anything with yet. So. What was it?"
David thought about lying. He had lied plenty in his life, mostly by omission, mostly to his mother, mostly about how he spent his Friday nights. But there was no version of a lie that would survive contact with Remy's eyes, so he told the truth in the only way that felt survivable.
"She told me you've never kissed a man. In three seasons of this show.”
Remy did not flinch. He did not look away. He picked up his glass and finished what was left in it, then set it down with a soft click, and the sound was the only thing in the bar for a long three seconds.
"That's true," he said. “Before you I haven’t.”
David's stomach dropped. He had not expected a confirmation. He had expected deflection, or anger, or a joke, or one of the seven smooth things Remy had used on him all week. He had not expected the flat, unadorned word.
"I'm going to ask you a question, and I want a straight answer," David said, and his own voice surprised him. It came out lower than he meant it to, steady in a way that did not match the tremor in his hands. "Was it a move? The kiss. Tonight. Was it strategy."
Remy looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, a short exhale through his nose, no humor in it.
"You know what the answer is," he said. "You're the only one in the house who does."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." Remy pushed off from the bar and stood in front of him, close enough that they were eye to eye, close enough that the space between them had narrowed to a slot of amber light and warm air. "You want me to tell you it was theater so you can put it in a drawer and stop thinking about it. Or you want me to tell you it was real so you can decide what that means. I'm not going to give you either one. Because I don't know which one is true, and I'm not about to lie to the first person in three years who would be able to tell."
David's grip tightened on the water glass.
"That's one hell of a thing to say to somebody at one o’clock in the morning."
"It's a hell of a night." Remy held his gaze. "You want the whole truth? The whole truth is this. I have played this show like a piano. Three seasons. I know every damn note. Tonight I looked at that bowl and I saw your name, and I did not know what I was going to do until the second before I did it. I told myself it was because you were the softest target in the room. I told myself it was because the camera would eat it up.”
“But…” David said.
"But the camera didn't eat it up. It ate me up." Remy said it without flinching, the way he said everything, like he had rehearsed it in the mirror and then decided the mirror was a liar. "I have done a hundred things on this show for the audience. I know what the audience wants. They want to watch a man like me get humbled, and they want to watch him get humbled slowly. They do not want to watch him mean it. So when I kissed you, I was not playing to them. I was not playing to you either, which is the part I have not figured out yet."
David set the water down. His hand was not shaking anymore. That surprised him more than anything Remy had said.
"Then why did you walk away?” He asked. "Afterwards. You saluted me like we were at a business lunch and then you disappeared."
"Because I needed to see if I could." Remy's jaw worked. "If I stayed, I was going to do something I could not take back, and this house has a hundred eyes and none of them blink. So I left before I decided anything I would have to explain in the morning."
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me."
"That's the most honest thing I've said to anyone since the divorce," Remy said, and then he looked almost startled by his own words, like they had escaped a room he had locked years ago. He picked up his empty glass, looked at it, and set it down again.
“Divorce?”
“Yeah, I married someone else who was on the show. My first time. You know most reality TV relationships don’t end well.” Remy said.
“That’s true.”
The bar had emptied around them. The bartender was wiping down the far end with a rag, pretending not to hear. The music had gone down another notch, some low synth thing that made the silence between them feel deliberate rather than accidental.
David thought about Zola in the red room, her three possibilities laid out like cards. He thought about Mia's rule, only the truth. He thought about the fact that he had spent his whole adult life parsing data sets for a living, looking for the one outlier that broke the pattern, and here was a man standing in front of him who had just handed him the outlier without being asked.
"Say the rest of it," David said.
"The rest of it is that I do not know how to want something without working out how to get it first." Remy turned his body fully toward him, both elbows on the bar now, his voice pitched so low that David had to lean in a little to hear it. "I have spent my whole life making people need me. That is the job. You show a room what it is missing and you sell it to them. I am very good at it. I am not very good at the other thing, which is standing in front of someone and letting them see that I want them for no reason that will help me."
"And you want me."
"I want to know why I want you," Remy said. "That is not the same thing, and it is closer to the truth than the version you were hoping for."
David laughed, a short, surprised sound that came out of him before he could stop it. "I was hoping for a version?"
"Everyone hopes for a version. I have watched you all week, David. You walk into every room like you are waiting to be corrected. That is not the walk of a man who wants to get laid. That is the walk of a man who wants to be wanted. There is a difference. I know the difference because I have spent my whole career selling the first thing to people who are dying for the second."
The words landed in David's chest and sat there. He wanted to argue. He could not find the handle.
"You have been studying me," he said finally.
"It is what I do. I meant it as a compliment." Remy straightened. "It is coming up on curfew. If you are going to ask me a third question, ask it now."
David looked at him. The tired blue eyes, the jaw that never quite loosened, the jacket over the arm. He thought about the kiss in a way he had not let himself think about it yet, not with Zola watching, not with Mia watching, not on a dais in front of a studio audience. He thought about the hand at the back of his neck and the single word Remy had said against his mouth. Breathe. He thought about how a man could know every note on a piano and still be afraid to sit down at it.
"I'm not going to ask you a third question," David said. "I'm going to ask you for something."
Remy's eyebrows lifted a fraction.
"Tomorrow, when we wake up, one of us is going to change their mind. That's how it works. I've read enough about this house in three days to know that tonight is the night everything feels enormous and in the morning it will feel like a rumor. So I want you to do something for me. Not tonight. Tomorrow. When the cameras are up and everyone is watching and the version of you that plays the room comes back on, I want you to look at me once like you looked at me on that dais. That's all. One look. And then I'll know which of Zola's three answers is the real one."
Remy was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost its smoothness, the thing David had come to think of as the promoter's veneer, the layer of polish that kept every word sliding off him.
"You think I can control that."
"I think you've been controlling everything in this house since day one. I think this would be the hardest thing you've ever had to do."
Remy laughed, and this time there was something in it, surprise and something close to respect, the same respect David had seen on Beatriz's face an hour ago.
"You are an interesting man, David Dupree."
"People keep telling me that tonight."
"Tomorrow, then." Remy picked up his jacket from the bar and draped it over his arm. He stepped past David, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and stopped. For a second David thought he was going to say something else. Instead Remy's hand came up, and two fingers pressed against David's collarbone, right on the silver chain, a touch so brief it could have been accidental. Then he was walking toward the corridor, unhurried, hands in his pockets, and David stood at the bar with his cold water and his racing heart and watched him go.
The bartender cleared his throat. "Curfew, man."
"Yeah," David said. "I know."
He went back to the bunk room the long way, past the glass wall that looked out onto the dark pool, and he stood there for a minute in the drift of the underwater lights, thinking. Somewhere down the hall a door closed. Somewhere else, two people were whispering, low and urgent, the way people whisper when they think a secret is still a secret.
Upstairs, past the bunks, into the room where fifteen other people were settling toward sleep and one man, wherever his bunk was, lay awake with the same question in his chest that David had.
He touched his chain, at the spot, and then his mouth, and then he climbed into his bunk and lay on his back in the dark, and let the night do what nights do.
In the morning, the cameras would come up. The house would wake. And somewhere across the atrium, a man with pale eyes would have to decide whether to remember his promise or pretend he had never made it. David pulled the thin blanket up to his chest and did not sleep for a long time, and when he finally did, he dreamed of a dais and a blindfold and a word spoken against his mouth by someone who had never said it before.