One To Watch (41 page)

Bea stepped forward and took Wyatt’s hand, and he pulled her into a tight hug.

“I’m gonna miss you,” he murmured into her hair.

“Not as much as I’m gonna miss you.”

He kissed her forehead, and with a small wave, he turned and walked out of the room.

“Wow.” Johnny guffawed, trying for levity. “That was a first.”

But no one laughed—the room was still in a state of stunned silence.

“Well, Bea,” he went on, “I guess that leaves us with one order of unfinished business.”

“Oh,” Bea said, realizing. “Right.”

She turned to Luc, suddenly filled with trepidation. She’d just rejected him on television—would he even want to stay another week, after all that?

“Luc, I owe you an apology,” she said softly as he approached her.

His expression was something she hadn’t seen from him before, a mix of his usual mischief with something earthier, more sad.

“You see?” he said, taking her hand and kissing it. “I told you that you were the one in control, but you did not believe me. Perhaps now you understand?”

“So you’ll stay?” she whispered. He nodded, and she threw her arms around him, unable to fathom that just a few minutes ago, she’d been ready to send him away. Yet here he was—not punishing her, not sulking. Just rubbing her back. Just making her feel loved.

“Why are you so good to me?” she intoned, burying her face in his chest.

“You know why,” he murmured.

She kissed his cheek, and he went to stand beside Sam and Asher so Johnny could bid them farewell and they could finally wrap this shoot. Looking at her three remaining men, Bea felt good, felt
right.
This was what she was supposed to do, this was how she pushed herself to find something real, to overcome the loneliness that she had mislabeled, for so many years, as safety. For the first time all day, Bea started to relax.

It was almost enough to ignore the dark look that briefly crossed Asher’s face as Luc took his place beside him.

Everyone on Earth has a happy place. For Beatrice Schumacher, that place was France.

Bea couldn’t quite trace the origins of her Francophilia, though she had a shameful suspicion it had something to do with childhood viewings of the movie
Sabrina
(and the remake at that) on cable TV.
Paris is always a good idea,
she’d repeat, emulating the titular character and imagining herself being swept away along the banks of the Seine. She thought the story was so romantic—a shy duckling who grows up to be a sophisticated swan, changing from someone you don’t even see into a woman you can’t stop staring at, with handsome men battling one another for her affections, breaking her heart over and over in the process.

As the
Main Squeeze
crew touched down in Paris for Bea’s week of three overnight dates, Bea found herself wishing that perhaps her
Sabrina
fantasies hadn’t turned out quite so literally.

Juggling relationships with three men was one thing when Lauren and the other producers were supervising every moment, but this week was set to be something else entirely: For the first time (save Luc’s little Moroccan escapade), Bea would have the option to share a hotel room with each of her remaining suitors. Away from the cameras. With the expectation that if they were serious about their relationship, they’d have sex. Bea hadn’t spent the night with a man since Ray, and on one hand, she was buzzing with excitement—but on the other, she was terrified to be completely vulnerable with three men who still had the capacity to hurt her so much, and so publicly.

Bea thought again of Wyatt, how courageous he’d been to share the truth about himself with an audience of millions, even if it meant risking alienation from his family. There was so much Bea hadn’t told Asher, Sam, and Luc for fear of being judged or rejected. But she knew that if she had any hope of finding a real relationship with one of these men, she needed to follow Wyatt’s example.

Her first date of the week was with Sam in Épernay, at the heart of the Champagne region of northeastern France. They met at the Avenue de Champagne, the grand boulevard in the center of town. Set against rolling, vine-covered hills, the avenue was upright and stately, but not overly stuffy. Gray paving stones were arranged in graceful arches, and the road was lined with beautiful brick buildings with gated courtyards, all perfectly painted and landscaped, showing the pride these houses took in their centuries of tradition.

“
Bonjour, Sam!
” She waved when she saw him, and he rushed up to greet her.

“
Enchanté, chérie
.” He bowed dramatically.

“Wow, your accent is so bad.”

“Wow yourself, I was trying to be
romantic
.”

Bea laughed and walked with him into the house of Moët & Chandon, where they were to have a private tour of the cellars. A deadpan young woman led them through a vast system of caves where thousands of bottles of champagne lay in various stages of the aging process.

“Do not touch these,” she said, casually waving toward a wall full of bottles.

“Why not?” Bea asked.

“If you were to drop one during this stage of fermentation, it would explode with the force of a small bomb. Glass would be everywhere, very messy.” She clicked her tongue and kept walking.

Bea shot Sam a dramatic look behind their tour guide’s back, and he laughed and kissed her; ever since he’d told her he loved her, his energy was even more buoyant than usual.

At the end of the tour, they visited the house tasting room, where everything was furnished and painted in lustrous shades of gold. Bea and Sam sipped coupes of grand vintage champagne, those special bottles created when the vintner deemed it a particularly good harvest, as opposed to the house’s usual bottles, which were blended from two years’ worth of grapes to create a consistent taste from year to year. The sommelier was exuberant—they chatted about their favorite wines and Bea fell in love with a coppery rosé champagne with a lovely dryness; he gifted her with a bottle to bring back to her hotel.

“Or perhaps you two will share it?” He smiled knowingly at Bea and Sam.

“That’s up to her.” Sam kissed Bea’s cheek.

“We’ll see.” She tried for a playfully sexy tone, but the words came out as more of a high-strung squeak. Sam gave her hand a reassuring sort of pat.

After the tasting was done, it was off to their next activity: a sunset hot-air-balloon ride over the vine-covered hills of Champagne. Their balloon operator was a rotund, jovial, mustachioed fellow named Albert who wore a tan three-piece suit and a top hat, like he’d arrived for the tour by way of the turn of the twentieth century.

“This will be a beautiful tour, a spectacular tour, for two spectacular lovebirds!” He spread his arms grandly, waiting for Bea and Sam to mirror his excitement.

“I think I need to say something.” Sam looked a bit wan. “I don’t … feel terrific about heights?”

“Oh my God.” Bea shot the producers an accusatory stare. “Did you guys know this? Sam, I’m so sorry, we don’t have to do this.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, this is our romantic adventure, and I’m not going to ruin it. You’re sure that thing is safe?”

He pointed to the balloon silhouetted in the distance, and Albert nodded vigorously.

“But of course, monsieur, the balloon is extraordinarily safe! You will see, it is as gentle and as graceful as a cloud.”

“A graceful cloud. Yeah. I can do that.” Sam sounded like he was psyching himself up.

“Are you sure?” Bea asked. “Really, we can skip it—just head back to the hotel and drink our wine.”

Sam nodded. “Let’s do this.”

“
Alors, allons-y!
” Albert cheered, and led them over to their balloon, which was absolutely gorgeous: It was made of nylon, but treated to look like old-fashioned canvas, ivory with a pattern of vines and flowers in tones of sepia and muted rose.

The fire was whooshing into the balloon’s opening, and Bea expected the launch to be filled with jerks and bumps, like an airplane taking off, but it wasn’t at all—when Albert’s support staff untied the ropes that had been tethering the balloon to the ground, they simply floated off into the air. Bea also assumed it would be loud, but it was nearly silent, just the sounds of the fire and the soft wind as they drifted past countless vineyards, where thousands of grapevines were showing their first hint of green.

“This is breathtaking,” Bea said reverently, not wanting to break the spell. She turned to Sam. “You doing okay?”

He nodded. “A graceful cloud.”

“That’s us,” Bea agreed.

“Maybe if you hugged me a little? Help steady me?”

“You’re shameless.” Bea laughed, but she nuzzled into his arms all the same, and it felt so good to hold him, the countryside spread below them like a picnic.

“So, what do you think?” Sam asked her.

“I think it’s amazing,” Bea replied.

“No, I was asking—what I said to you in New Jersey. We haven’t really talked about it.”

“Oh.” Bea looked up at him. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Was it too much? Too soon? I’ve been nervous.”

“No, not at all. In fact, I actually …”

“What?” Sam urged, tipping up Bea’s chin.

“I should tell you—God, this is embarrassing.” She felt her face flush.

“I’m a grown man afraid of a hot-air balloon, so whatever it is, I think I can handle it.”

Bea tried to smile, but her heart was suddenly pounding. “What you said to me, um. No one’s ever told me that before. In a romantic context.”

Sam frowned. “Are you serious?”

Bea nodded. “I know I’ve made a whole thing about how young you are, but sometimes I feel like I’m the young one.”

“Have you ever said it to anyone?”

Bea shook her head. “I haven’t.”

She’d wanted to say it to Ray—at least, she thought she had—but he’d never given her the chance.

“Okay.” Sam nodded, taking this in. “How did it make you feel to hear that I love you?”

“Exhilarated.” Bea smiled. “Really, really happy—and also terrified.”

“Sounds serious.” Sam was only half-joking. “Can you tell me why you felt scared?”

“I can try,” Bea said quietly, taking a moment to feel the sun on her face, the breeze in her hair, the strange steadiness of this good man standing beside her in the sky.

“I’ve spent a lot of time falling for people who weren’t really available,” she said carefully. “Which means, sad as it sounds, that a lot of my romantic life has taken place in my own imagination. Picturing what it would be like if we were together, extrapolating meaning from subtext, from things left unspoken. But then you go and tell me that you love me, and …”

“And what?”

“It’s like, all of a sudden, I’m confronted with what I’ve been missing. Like, do other people actually live this way? They just fall in love, and they tell each other, and they never have to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or certain the other person doesn’t feel the same? And then—if you’re in love with me, and if I could really fall in love with you, does that mean I have to learn how to need you? To depend on you? What happens when you disappear on me like everyone else always has?”

“There’s always the other option,” Sam said pointedly. “The one where I stick around.”

“And that doesn’t scare
you
?” Bea prodded.

Sam’s face changed. “Bea, no, not at all. Before, in my other relationships, it’s always been like, I knew there was a timeline for a natural endpoint, when we’d graduate college or leave a certain job or whatever. I
needed
to know there was a timeline so I could be comfortable. With you, it’s the opposite. I don’t want to think about a timeline for this ending, because I don’t want this to end.”

“But Sam, you’re only twenty-four! I don’t know, don’t you want to live in Japan for a year, or join the circus or whatever?”

“First of all, clowns are terrifying, and I’m already dealing with one fear right now, you know, high above the Earth, so I’ll thank you not to compound things.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“But to answer your question—you make me feel like a whole different person. Not in a bad way. It’s like I’ve spent my entire life in a building, but just on one floor. And I’m like,
Cool, I’ve got this ranch house, it’s got everything I need, I could live here forever
. But then I meet you, and you show me this thing has an elevator, and we’re going all the way to the top. It turns out that I’ve been living in a skyscraper this whole time.”

“That makes your fear of heights pretty ironic,” Bea whispered.

“Haven’t you noticed?” He leaned in to kiss her. “When I’m with you, I’m not afraid.”

It was dark by the time they made it to their hotel, a beautifully converted eighteenth-century manor with a face of carved white stone. Bea and Sam’s last scheduled shot of the night would be of them entering their shared room, a lavish suite, no doubt. The cameras would leave them alone for eight uninterrupted hours as soon as they hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door—or, since this was France,
Ne pas déranger.

But before they got to that part, Bea had to officially invite Sam to spend the night together, and he had to accept. This part of the evening was basically a formality: On
Main Squeeze,
couples didn’t always have sex, but they always, always spent the night.

At least, that’s what Bea was telling herself to calm her nerves as she and Sam stood on the hotel’s grand front steps, bathed in artificial light.

“Sam, I had a great time with you today.”

“Me too—despite the persistent fear of death.”

“What can I say? I bring out the best in people.”

He laughed, and she held out a clunky brass key tied to a red ribbon. It wasn’t the actual key to any room in this hotel—it was the same symbolic prop that had been used for dozens of similar invitations throughout
Main Squeeze
history.

“Sam, I’ve loved getting to know you, and I think we’re ready to take the next step. Would you like to spend the night together?”