Queen Shawty

Beach Hut — Y/N 

“I believed him.”

[long pause, jaw tight, eyes wet but not crying]

“That’s the part I keep coming back to. I stood on that platform, and he chose me before he said anything else, and then he told me himself — didn’t wait for me to find out, didn’t make me ask twice, just — told me. And I believed him. That it was a mistake. That it meant nothing.”

[exhale]

“I’m still angry. I get to be angry. But I keep measuring it against every other time someone hurt me and didn’t tell me, and I…I don’t know what to do with the fact that it still doesn't look the same.” 

Beach Hut — Logan

“She took my hand.”

[quietly, like he still can’t quite believe it]

“On the platform. I told her everything — didn’t soften it, didn’t try to manage how it landed — and she stood there and heard it all, and then she took my hand. And she told me we’d talk tonight, and I know that conversation is going to be hard, and I deserve every second of it being hard.”

[looks at camera directly]

“I’m not asking to get off easy. I just need the chance to show her that the four seconds were the worst thing I did this whole time here, not a preview of something worse. Because it’s not. She’s — she’s the whole point of being here. She’s been the whole point since night one.”

They didn't talk that night the way the cameras probably wanted them to — no tearful confrontation at the fire pit, no dramatic walk-off. Y/N asked for an hour to herself first, and Logan gave it to her without arguing, which she noted, distantly, as another data point in the column that kept stubbornly filling up in his favor even now. 

She found him on the beach a little later after midnight, away from the villa lights, sitting in the sand with his forearms on his knees in the exact posture of a man bracing for something. He stood when he saw her coming, didn’t reach for her, just waited. 

“I’m still angry,” she said, sitting down a careful foot away from him. 

“You should be.” He sat back down too, matching her distance, not pushing for more. “I don’t want you to perform being okay with this for my benefit. Not after everything we’ve actually said to each other about not performing.”

That, more than anything else I could have said, was what cracked something loose in her chest. “Tell me about her,” she said. “Grace. What she was like. Not to torture myself. I just want to while I picture instead of imagining one.”

Logan exhaled slowly. “Sharp. Funny. Reminded me a little of you, honestly, which I think is part of why I let the conversation go on as long as I did instead of shutting it down the way I shut down everything else.” He looked at her, steady even though this clearly cost him something to say. “Nothing happened beyond what I told you. The dare, four seconds, and then I felt sick about it before it was even finished. I didn't develop feelings for her. I didn’t want to kiss her. I wanted to prove to a room full of strangers that I wasn't taking the show too seriously, and I picked the single dumbest possible way to do that.” 

“You said no to her plenty of other times.”

“I did.”

“Why not that time?”

He was quiet for a moment, turning the question over honestly instead of reaching for the waist answer. “Because I was drunk enough to stop trusting my own judgement, and because some stupid, performative part of me thought refusing one more thing would make me look like I was taking this more seriously than the show wanted anyone to take it. Which is an explanation, not an excuse. I know the difference.” 

Y/N looked out at the dark water, turning that over. “I believe you that it didn’t mean anything,” she said finally. “I do…I watched your face on that stage, Logan. That wasn’t a man who hated himself for four seconds of bad judgment.” She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them. “But I need you to understand what it cost me to watch, regardless of what it meant to you. I spent a week in a villa with my ex, needling at the exact insecurity that made me believe for years I wasn’t enough to keep someone faithful. And then I came back and found out the one person who’d spent two weeks proving that insecurity wrong had kissed someone else.” 

“I know.” His voice had gone rough. “I know exactly what that looks like from where you’re standing, and I hate it. I hate that the timing made it land on the exact bruise Marcus already pressed on all week. That’s not an excuse either. It just — I need you to know I understand the size of what I did, even if the act itself was small.”

“It wasn’t small to me.”

“I know that too.”

They sat with the quiet for a while, the waves doing their steady, indifferent work against the sand, and Y/N found herself, slowly, doing the thing she’d been doing since day one without quite meaning to — measuring this against every other version of being hurt she’d lived through, and finding it, despite everything, fundamentally different in shape. 

“Marcus would have hidden it,” she said eventually. “If our positions were reversed. If he’d done what you did, I wouldn’t have found out until months later, from someone else, the way I always did. You told me yourself, immediately, with your voice shaking, before I even had to ask.” She turned to look at him. “That matters. I need you to know that matters, even while I’m still angry.”

“It should matter,” Logan said quietly. “But I don’t want it to be the thing that lets me off easy either. I’d rather earn this back properly than get to skip past it because I handled the confession well.” 

That, more than the apology itself, was what finally loosened the last of the tightness in her chest — the fact that he wasn’t trying to talk his way out of the discomfort, wasn’t rushing her towards forgiveness for his own relief. He was just sitting in it with her, the way he’d exactly as much room as she needed and not an inch less. 

“I’m not ready to be okay yet,” she said. “I want to be clear about that.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t want to walk from this either. I want to be angry and still choose to work through it, because the alternative is throwing away two weeks of something real over four seconds that you clearly already hate more than I could make you hate them.” 

Logan reached for her hand, slow, the same careful offering he always gave her, room to refuse. She took it. 

“I’m going to spend the rest of this however long we have left proving that was the worst decision I made the entire time I’ve known you,” he said. “I mean that as a promise, not a line.”

“It better be,” Y/N said, and let herself, finally, lean into his shoulder, feeling him go still with relief and then carefully, gratefully solid around her. “I love you. That hasn’t changed. I just need you to know it’s possible to love someone and still be furious with them for a while.”

“I know,” Logan said, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I’ll take furious. I’ll take all of it, for as long as you need.”

Beach hut — Y/N 

“We talked. We actually talked — not the kind where one person explains, and the other listens, and you shake hands at the end of it. The real kind. Where it’s uncomfortable for a long time, and nobody rushes it, and you say things that are hard to say and the other person stays anyway.” 

[pause]

“He said he’d rather earn it back properly than get to skip past it because he confessed well. And I just — I didn’t expect that. I expected an apology, maybe a good one. I didn’t expect him to refuse the shortcut.” 

[softer]

“I’m still working through it. But I think I’ve been working through it with the right person.”

The fallout from Casa Amor rippled through the rest of the villa for days, in smaller, quieter ways than the headline drama of Y/N and Logan’s reconciliation. Garrett and Hannah had come through clean, both of them having spent the week so thoroughly uninterested in anyone else that the other islanders had eventually stopped trying. Dean and Allie had somehow managed to make their loyalty into a running joke that the whole villa found endearing rather than smug. Tucker and Sabrina had their own small wobble — a near-miss neither of them fully discussed — but came out the other side tighter than before, the way couples sometimes did when a scare reminded them what they actually wanted to protect. 

Marcus’s collapse was the loudest of all, mostly because he made it that way. Olivia — sharp-eyed, unimpressed, the kind of woman Y/N suspected had seen a hundred versions of Marcus before she ever met this one — had apparently caught him in Casa Amor doing the exact thing he’d done to Y/N eighteen months ago: charm stacked three girls deep before anyone compared notes. By the time the villas reunited, Oliva had compared every note there was to compare, and the recoupling had been less a ceremony than a public execution. 

“He told me I was the only one he was talking to,” Olivia announced to the group at dinner two nights later, with the flat furious calm of a woman who’d decided humiliating him publicly was cheaper therapy than crying about it privately. “Turned out he told three different girls that. Turns out it's apparently his whole personality.”

“In my professional opinion,” Y/N said, not looking up from her plate, “it absolutely is.”  

Marcus left the villa entirely by the end of the week, voted out by unanimous and entirely unsurprised consensus, and Y/N watched him go with a feeling that surprised her with how light it was — not triumph, not even satisfaction, just a clean, quiet closing of a door she’d thought had already been shut. 

“You okay?” Logan asked, watching her watch the gate close behind him. 

“Yeah,” she said, and meant it. “I think I am.”

Beach Hut — Logan 

“Marcus left today. I watched Y/N watch the gate close behind him, and I saw something go out of her — not in a bad way. In the way you stop bracing for something that’s finally just gone.”

[pause]

“We’re okay. I think we’re actually okay. Not okay like we pretended the last week didn’t happen — okay like we went through it properly and came out the other side still choosing each other. Which is the only kind of okay that means anything. 

[quiet, certain]

“There’s a final date text coming. I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say when it’s just us. When there’s no platform and no cameras close enough to matter. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

Beach Hut — Y/N 

“Yesterday was the kissing challenge. Today I woke up, and Logan made coffee and handed me a cup without asking how I take it because he already knows, and I just — sat there holding it for a second thinking about how quietly this happened. How I wasn’t looking for it, and now I can’t imagine looking away from it. 

[pause]

“Which is probably exactly when the show decides to blow everything up.”

Y/N woke up on day ten to the sound of nothing. 

Not the usual nothing, not the pre-alarm quiet of the villa settling before everyone surfaced for coffee. The specific, textured nothing of a space that had fewer people in it than it was supposed to. She lay there for a moment processing it, and then she sat up and looked at the other side of the room and understood. 

The boy’s bags were gone. 

All of them. Logan’s — the battered duffel he’d shoved under the bed on night one never fully unpacked — gone. Tucker’s trainers that he always left in the middle of the floor despite everyone’s complaints. Garrett’s book. Dean’s ridiculous collection of baseball caps. Gone, gone, gone, the whole lot of them cleared out while she slept, quietly and completely, without a word. 

Hannah appeared in the doorway, already dressed, with the expression of someone who had been awake long enough to move through the initial panic into a kind of grim, resigned comprehension. “They’re gone,” she said. 

“I can see that,” Y/N said.

“Ariana texted. There’s a card on the kitchen table.”

The card — cream envelope, wax seal, the show’s whole production — was propped against the fruit bowl like a small, elegant grenade. Y/N picked it up. Read it. Set it back down.

“Boys — welcome to Casa Amor. Girls — you have a villa to yourselves. For now.”

“For now,” Allie red over her shoulder, voice flat. “They couldn’t even let us say goodbye.”

“That’s the point,” Sabrian said, from the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, jaw tight with the controlled fury of a woman who understood the game and was furious about it anyway. “If we’d said goodbye, we’d have had something to hold onto. The way we just — wake up and they’re already gone, and we have no idea what they walked into.”

Y/N thought about the coffee this morning, made and waiting on the counter. About the note tucked under the cup in Logan’s handwriting — back soon. Don’t let anyone in your head — that she’d found after she’d finished reading the card, and that she’d folded into her pocket and hadn’t mentioned to anyone yet. 

Back soon. 

She held onto that. 

Beach Hut — Y/N 

“They left without saying goodbye. That’s…I know why they do it that way. I understand the mechanics of it. And I still woke up to an empty bed, and it felt like a door slamming.”

[pause, looks at hands]

“He left a note under my coffee. I’m not going to say what it said. But I’m holding onto it. Whatever happens this week, I’m holding onto it.”

The new boys arrived at noon, six of them, the particular kind of confidence that came from walking into a situation knowing you were the variable. Y/N assessed them with the professional efficiency of a decade in PR and gave each of them a warm, friendly smile that communicated absolutely nothing beyond basic human decency, and went back to her drink. 

“You’re not even a little curious?” Jade asked, from the next sunlounger.

“I’m on vacation from being curious,” Y/N said. 

She held that position for two days. The new boys tried — she’d give them credit, they genuinely tried — and she deflected each attempt with the polished, friendly distance she used on difficult clients. Engaged enough to be decent. Closed enough to be clear. It became, after a while, almost comfortable. 

Then, on night three, the gate opened, and Marcus Webb walked through it, and comfortable became something else entirely. 

“You have to be kidding,” she said out loud, to no one.

Marcus looked delighted. “Small world.”

“It’s a thirty-person production. It's not that small.”

He dropped onto the bench across from her with the same easy, presumptuous confidence he’d worn into the original villa weeks ago. “Figured the universe was giving me a second shot.”

“The universe had nothing to do with it. A producer with a clipboard did.” She kept her voice level, professional. “And there’s no second shot, Marcus. I’m with Logan.”

“Logan’s in a villa full of new girls right now.” He let that land carefully, watching her face for the flicker. “You don’t think that cuts both ways?”

It found something uncomfortable; a small, cold seed of doubt she hadn’t let herself examine too closely, and she hated him extra for locating it so efficiently. “I think I trust him,” she said, standing. “Which is more than I could ever say for you.” 

She walked away before he could find the next thing to press on, and didn’t let herself shake until she was in the bathroom with the door locked. 

Beach Hut —Y/N 

“Marcus is here. Of course he is. And I know exactly what he’s doing; I’ve watched him do it, I lived it for eighteen months, and he still managed to plant the one thought I’d been working very hard not to have.” 

[jaw tight] 

“Logan’s in a villa with new girls and I have no idea what’s happening, and Marcus knows exactly which part of me that lands on. And I hate that he still has access to that. I hate it.”

[quieter]

“He left a note under my coffee. I keep coming back to that. He thought about me before he walked out the gate.”

Marcus tried twice more over the following days. Both times she shut it down fast, no opening, no hesitation. It wasn’t hard. It was just exhausting, the way resisting something familiar and tired always was. 

What was harder was the postcard. 

Ariana appeared on day four with the calm, pleasant expression of someone delivering something she personally found entertaining. Each girl would send a photo back to her original partner, one of the new boys of their choosing, no context, no explanation. Just the image. The boys would receive theirs at the same time. 

“You won’t know what they sent until the recoupling,” Ariana said. 

“That genuinely evil,” Y/N said. 

Ariana smiled. “See you at the recoupling.”

Y/N chose carefully: a group shot, herself and the other girl plus two new boys in the background, nothing intimate, nothing with any possible reading beyond deliberate blankness. She held the image for a moment before handing it back, imagining Logan turning it over on the other side of the island, trying to read something she’d specifically given him nothing to read. 

I hope yours is just as boring, she thought at him. I hope you’re exactly where you said you’d be. 

Logan — Casa Amor

The villa was different from theirs, smaller, newer-feeling, the kind of designed-for-disruption aesthetic that told Logan immediately what the week was going to look like. He found Tucker in the kitchen on the first morning, and they stood there for a moment with their coffees, taking stock. 

“We don’t say anything we wouldn’t say in front of them,” Tucker said. Not a question. 

“Agreed,” Logan said. 

“Dean’s already written Allie’s name in the sand.”

“Of course he has.”

The new girls arrived midmorning. Logan was friendly and polite and mentioned Y/N early and often, hanging her name like a sign on a door, and most of them respected it the way in this situation usually did — acknowledged, noted, moved on. 

Grace Ivers didn’t. 

She arrived with the quiet confidence of someone who’d done her research, who knew exactly who was in the villa and what she was walking into and had decided none of it was as settled as it looked. She was sharp, funny, warm in a way that felt genuine rather than performed, and she looked at Logan with the particular attention of someone who’d already decided he was interesting before she’d said a word to him. 

He noticed all of this. He also noticed that noticing it made him feel vaguely guilty, which told him most of what he needed to know about where his head actually was. 

“You’re the one who’s locked in with someone,” she said, on day two, not accusatory, just direct. 

“Yeah,” Logan said.

“What’s she like?”

He looked at her sideways. “Why?”

“Because you’ve mentioned her four times in two conversations and you don’t even realize you’re doing it,” Grace said it without edge, almost curious. “That’s not someone who’s going through the motions of being loyal. That’s someone who’s actually thinking about someone else the whole time.”

Logan was quiet for a moment. “She walked into the villa on day one braced for everything to go wrong,” he said finally. “And she was wrong about all of it. Every single thing she thought was going to happen didn’t, and she’s been surprised by that every day since, and she still won’t fully admit it.” He paused. “She’s the most genuinely interesting person I’ve been around in a long time.”

Grace looked at him for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. I get it.” And she moved on, with more grace than the situation required, and Loagn found himself, quietly, grateful for it. 

That should have been the end of it. I would have been fine, he was certain of that even later, except for the dare game on night five. 

Beach Hut — Logan 

“Grace is — she’s good company. She’s smart. She asked me what Y/N was like on day two and listened to the answer and then basically left me alone after that, which I respect more than I can say.” 

[pause, rubs jaw]

“I’m not confused about what I want. I just need this week to be over.”

Night five. Fire pit low. The group loose and warm and several drink deep, the particular kind of easy that made bad decisions feel smaller than they were. 

“Truth or dare,” Grace said. “Logan.” 

“Truth,” he said, the same answer he’d been giving all night. 

“Boring.” The group pushed. Tucker, to his credit, threw Logan a look across the fire that very clearly said don’t, but Logan was four beers in, and some reckless, performative part of him reasoned it was just a game, that the dare couldn’t be bad, that refusing again would make the whole thing bigger than it needed to be. 

“Fine. Dare.”

Grace’s expression shifted, something careful in it. “Kiss me. Just once. Just to prove you can do it and walk away.”

He should have said no. He knew it the second the words landed, knew it with total clarity — and kissed her anyway, four seconds of complete wrongness, wrong mouth, wrong warmth, wrong everything, the cold immediate certainty of a mistake made in real time, and pulled back before it was finished, jaw tight, stomach already turning. 

“That was a mistake,” he said, standing. Voice rough. “That’s on me. I shouldn’t have agreed.”

He didn’t sleep. Lying in the dark, running four seconds on loop, and under all of it the worst, quieter fear: what does this look like for where she’s standing? 

Beach Hut — Logan

“I kissed her.”

[long pause]

“It meant nothing. I knew it was wrong while it was happening, and I walked away, and I’ve been in this Beach hut three times tonight trying to figure out how to say this, and no version of it doesn’t just — be what it is.”

[looks down at the floor]

“I’m going to tell her. The second I see her. She deserves the truth from me before she gets it anywhere else.” 

The Recoupling

The reunion stage was set on the beach at sunset, the full production, fairy lights strung between palms, the whole villa assembled on opposite sides of a central aisle with the charged, careful quiet of people who’d spent a week not knowing what they were walking back into. 

Y/N filed in with the girls, and her eyes found Logan immediately, and she felt something in her chest unclench at the sight of him right up until she caught his face — jaw tight, eyes finding hers across the space with the specific expression of a man already apologizing before he’d opened his mouth. 

Oh, she thought, cold and still. Something happened. 

Ariana stepped forward. “Welcome back, islanders. Tonight, the girls will decide — stay loyal to your original partner, or recouple with someone new. Girls, when I call your name, you’ll stand with either your new boy or return to your original place. Boys — you’ll find out when everyone else does.” 

The decisions unfolded one by one. Hannah stepped back to her original place without hesitation, and across the stage, Y/N watched Garrett exhale like he’d been holding his breath for a week. Allie returned to her place with such decisive energy that her new boy actually looked relieved to be let off the hook. Sabrina paused a half-second longer than anyone else, something flickering across her face, before she stepped back — and Tucker, across the stage, closed his eyes briefly. 

Then it was Y/N’s name. 

She looked across the stage at Logan. At his face, doing the thing it did when he wasn’t managing anything — braced, guilty, watching her with the particular attention of someone who’d already decided to tell her everything and was just waiting for the chance. 

She stopped back at her original palace. 

Logan crossed the stage to stand in front of her before Ariana had even finished the next name, and said, low and urgent” “I need to tell you something before you hear it any other way.” 

“I know,” she said. “Your face told me the second I walked in.”

“Y/N —”

“Tell me,” she said. “All of it.”

He did. The dare, Grace, four seconds, the walking away, the Beach hut three times that night. No softening, no managing how it landed, just the full plain truth laid down between them, his voice steady and his hands not quite. Around them the stage continued its ceremony — other decisions, other erunions — and Y/N stood in the middle of all of it and heard every word. 

“Did you want to kiss her?” she asked when he’d finished. 

“No,” he said, no hesitation. “I wanted to prove something to a room full of people I don’t care about, and I made the worst possible call doing it. That’s the only truth there is.” 

Across the stage, Marcus’s reunion with Oliva was going precisely as badly as Y/N had suspected it would — Olivia standing three feet away, arms crossed, with the expression of a woman who’d compared all available notes and arrived at the unambiguous conclusion. Y/N watched it happen with a distant, clarifying satisfaction. 

She looked back at Logan. At the difference.

“I’m angry,” she said. 

“You should be.”

“And I believe you.” She held his gaze, throat tight. “Those are both true at the same time. We’re talking about this tonight, properly, not on a stage.”

“Whenever you want.” He reached for her hand, slow, offering. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

She took it. Not because it was fixed- it wasn’t, not yet—but because she knew the difference between this and every other version of this conversation she’d lived through, and that difference still counted for something even now.

Beach Hut — Y/N, Day Eight

“So. Last night happened.”

[pause, fighting a smile]

“Logan told me he wanted to kiss me. In my kitchen. At midnight. He didn’t — he didn’t do it; he just told me he wanted to, and then left, and I stood there for about four minutes trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person. Which … is not something I expected to report back on when I signed up for this show.” 

[quieter]

“I think I’m in trouble. I think I’ve been in trouble since the railing on night one, and I’ve just been professionally managing the fact of it. I don’t think I can manage it anymore.”

“Absolutely not,” Tucker said, the second that the bing of a text hit his phone with a challenge. It was the flat, immediate conviction of a man already plotting his exit. “No. I refuse. This is a workplace, and I have boundaries.”

“It’s a villa,” Hannah said. “You signed a release.”

“I want it on record that I tried.”

The challenge — was simple in concept, and, in the group’s unanimous opinion, deeply unfair in execution. Each couple would kiss in front of the others. A panel of three “expert judges” flown in for the occasion, who turned out to be a retired Olympic figure skater, a romance novelist, and a man named Gary whose actual qualifications nobody ever managed to extract, would score each kiss on a scale of one to ten. Technique, chemistry, and what the card called, ominously, “believability.”

“Believability,” Allie repeated. “As opposed to what, faking it?”

“Some of you are better actors than others,” Hannah said, entirely unhelpfully, and walked off to meet up with Garrett. 

Y/N sat through the lead-up to her own turn with the specific, building dread of someone who’d spent two weeks getting genuinely, thoroughly used to kissing Logan in Private and was now expected to do it in front of a panel that included a man named Gary. 

“This is insane,” she told him, low, while Tucker and Sabrina took their turn first, Tucker hamming it up so shamelessly that the romance novelist actually laughed out loud and docked him a point for it. 

“It’s a seven,” the figure skater announced. “Good extension, weak landing.”

“What does that even mean?” Tucker demanded.

“It means commit to the bit,” the novelist said. 

Garrett and Hannah went next, and theirs was almost unbearably sweet rather than performative; Garrett’s hand came up to cradle her jaw like she was something rare, Hannah’s going soft and a little breathless against him, the whole thing over in a few unhurried seconds that left the judges visibly charmed. 

“Nine,” Gary said, with feeling. “Genuinely lovely. Bring it home next time, though. Don’t be shy.”

Dean and Allie’s turn devolved almost immediately into bickering about whose idea the dip was, the kiss itself nearly an afterthought to the argument, which the judges scored an eight purely for entertainment value and noted, dryly, “chemistry undeniable, focus questionable.”

Beach Hut — Logan

“The kissing challenge.”

[long pause, jaw working]

“Yeah. I’m not — I don’t have a lot to say about this one ahead of time. Y/N and I are — we’re good. We’re really good, actually, and I think that’s going to be very obvious to everyone today whether I want it to be or not.” 

[glances at the camera, almost embarrassed]

“Gary’s going to have a field day.” 

And then it was Y/N and Logan, and the whole villa’s attention swung toward them with the specific, charged anticipation of a crowd that had clearly been waiting for this pairing all along. 

“Hey,” Logan said quietly, just to her, ignoring the judges’ table entirely for a second. “You okay?”

“I’m being judged by a man named Gary on my believability.”

“You don’t have to perform anything.” His hand found her waist, easy, familiar. “Just kiss me the way you actually want to. That’ll be plenty believable.”

“That’s the part I’m worried about,” she admitted, low enough that only he caught it, and watched something pleased and a little wicked cross his face. 

“Good,” he said, and kissed her.

It wasn’t performative at all, which was, in retrospect, exactly the problem. His hand slid from her waist to the small of her abc, pulling her in slow and certain, and Y/N’s hands found their way into his hair without her quite deciding to put them there. The kiss went from challenge-appropriate few seconds into something considerably longer and considerably more thorough, his mouth unhurried and sure against hers, her breath catching against hers that she heard Tucker, somewhere in her peripheral awareness, mutter “oh, come on” with real anguish. 

By the time they broke apart — and it took a deliberate effort, on both parts, to actually do that in front of an audience — Y/N’s face was warm. Her composure was nowhere to be found, and Logan looked entirely too pleased with himself for someone who’d just been ostensibly behaving for a panel of judges.

There was a beat of silence at the judges’ table. 

“Ten,” the figure skater said, fanning herself slightly with her own scorecard. “Flawless. I don’t even have notes.”

“I have notes,” the novelist said, “but they’re for my own personal use later, not for broadcast.” 

“Ten,” Gary agreed, looking faintly shell-shocked. “Believability: extremely high. Possibly too high. I felt like I was intruding.” 

“You were intruding,” Y/N  said, still catching her breath, and the whole villa erupted into laughter and a few scattered, delighted whoops, Allie literally clutching Dean’s arm for support.

“In my defense,” Logan said, entirely unrepentant, his arm settling around Y/N’s waist like he had no intention of releasing her any time soon, “she asked me not to perform. I took direction well.”

“You took entirely too much direction,” Y/N said, but she was laughing now too, leaning into him despite the very public scrutiny, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn’t actually mind the audience nearly as much as she’d expected to. 

The final score, when Ariana tallied the cards at the end of the round, put Y/N and Logan comfortably in the first place, a fact that Tucker contested loudly and at length because “the judges were clearly biased toward whoever made Gary the most uncomfortable,” a theory nobody bothered to dispute because it was almost certainly true. 

Later, after the judges had packed up and the group had scattered back into their ordinary villa rhythms, Logan found Y/N at the railing — the same railing, she was starting to think, that had quietly become the place where the most honest version of whatever this was kept happening — and leaned against it beside her, close, composed.

“For the record,” he said, “I wasn’t performing for the judges back there.”

“I know.” She glanced sideways at him, still a little warm from the whole ordeal. “That was alarmingly clear to everyone present, including a man named Gary.” 

“Good.” He turned her gently to face him, his hand finding her jaw with the same easy reverence he always brought to touching her, like it was a privilege rather than a given. “I don’t think I know how to do the performance version of you anymore. I think you ruined that for me entirely.”

“That’s either the most romantic or the most concerning thing anyone’s said to me on this show.”

“Both, probably.” He kissed her again, slower this time, no judges, no scorecard, no audience but the dark water and the citronella candles, and Y/N decided, somewhere in the unhurried middle of it, that she’d happily forfeit every single point Gary had ever awarded her if it meant getting to keep doing this in private, ungraded, exactly as long as she wanted. 

Beach Hut — Y/N 

“Ten out of ten.”

[pause, pressing lips together]

“Gary gave us a ten out of ten and said he felt like he was intruding and honestly? He was. He absolutely was. And I…I don’t know what to do with how not sorry I am about that.”

[softer]

“He said he doesn’t know how to do the performance version of me anymore. He said I ruined that for him. And I just- I keep turning that over. Because I think he might have done the same thing to me without either of us noticing.” 

From The Villa Diary: I am thinking that once I finish this fic, I want to write a Harry Potter x Off Campus story! Let me know your thoughts.

The booth itself was almost comically small — a single carved wooden chair facing a camera, tucked into an alcove just off the main villa that nobody had paid much attention to until Ariana announced its actual purpose. 

“It’s simple,” she said, addressing the group with the card in her hands, ready to ruin everyone's day. “Each of you goes in alone. You’ll be asked a question. You answer honestly, on camera, no editing it down, no taking it back. Then the next person goes.”

“Define honestly,” Tucker said warily. 

“Honestly means honestly, Tucker.”

“That’s not a definition, that’s just the word again.”

“Get in the booth,” Ariana said, and Tucker, visibly regretting every choice that had led him here, went. 

Y/N watched as the parade of confessions from the kitchen doorway with the specific dread of someone who understood, structurally, that she would eventually have to go in there too. Tucker came out laughing, refusing to say what he’d been asked, which everyone agreed meant it had gone well. Sabrina came out with her composure slightly dented, as usual, and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes for several minutes, which the group interpreted, correctly, as evidence of something significant. Dean came out grinning so widely that Allie threatened him with violence if he didn’t disclose immediately, and he did, cheerfully, in front of everyone, which was apparently the answer to “what’s the most you’ve ever liked someone after one week,” and the answer was, unambiguously, Allie. 

Hannah went pale and came out pink, and Garrett, watching her cross back to the group with her hand pressed briefly to her own cheek like she was checking her own temperature, looked like a man who’d just been told something he badly needed to hear and hadn't expected to get it this way. 

Logan went in before her. Y/N watched him disappear into the alcove with the same unhurried calm he brought everywhere, and felt an unreasonable amount of anxiety about a conversation she wasn’t even a part of. 

He came out four minutes later. He didn’t say anything about what he’d been asked. He just found her in the doorway, held her gaze for a beat longer than strictly necessary, and said quietly, “Your turn,” like the words meant something underneath the words. 

The chair was less comfortable than it looked, which Y/N decided was probably intentional. The camera in front of her had a small red light that felt entirely to judgemental for an inanimate object, and a card was taped underneath it, wondering if the person was going to read it was gonna cry on national TV. 

Y/N picked the card up and read it aloud. “What’s the thing about yourself you were most afraid people here would notice, and has anyone proven you wrong about it?”

Y/N sat with that for a second. She’s expecting something about Logan specifically — who do you see yourself with, what’s your connections ranking, the norm — and this was a different shape of question entirely, the kind that didn't have an easy deflection built in. 

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Honest answer.” She looked at the little red light like it might be kinder than the people watching. “I was afraid of people looking at me and immediately deciding I didn’t belong here. Specifically because of my body. I’ve spent most of my adult life being the funny, competent one in the room and quietly assuming that was the consolation prize for not being effortless, automatically wanted the way some women just are. I walked in here fully expecting to be sent home in the first cut, and some small, exhausted part of me had already made peace with that, because it fit the story I already believed about myself.”

She paused. The camera kept rolling, the light steady, patient, unembarrassed by her honesty in a way that made it slightly easier to keep going. 

“Has anyone proven me wrong?” She let out a laugh that was barely a laugh. “Yeah. Pretty thoroughly. There’s a guy here who’d spent two weeks looking at me like I’m the only interesting thing in any room I walk into, and he’s never once made me feel like I need to apologize for taking up space, physically or otherwise. He just…wants me. Loudly. Consistently. In front of the cameras and production people and a truth booth whose whole mission was to make me cry.” She wiped under her eyes, annoyed at herself, laughing a little. “So. Yes. Proven wrong. Extremely, embarrassingly wrong.”

Logan was waiting just outside the alcove when she came out, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and the moment he saw her face, a little flushed, a little watery-eyed, entirely ungurared in a way the villa didn’t usually get to see — he straightened immediately, all easy posture gone.

“Hey.” His hands came up to her face, thumbs brushing under her eyes, gentle. “What did they ask you? 

“I’m not telling you. House rules. No spoilers before the reveal.” 

“That’s a terrible rule, and I want it overturned.” But he didn’t push, just kept his hands at her jaw, searching her face with that particular attention she’d stopped being able to brace against weeks ago. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.” She leaned into his hands, eyes closing briefly. “It was a good question. Knocked something loose I didn’t expect to talk about.”

 “Good knocked loose, or bad knocked loose?”

“Good. Mostly good.” She opened her eyes, found him watching her with that steady unhurried focus, and felt the truth of what she’d just said into a camera settle somewhere warm in her heart now that she got to say a version of it to him directly. “Can I tell you something? Not for the cameras. Just you?”

“Always.”

“I came into this expecting to be a footnote. The girl nobody picked, the one who lasted two episodes and went home with a nice tan and a story about it. And instead I got …” she gestured vaguely between them, helpless. “This. You. Looking at me like I’m not a consolation prize for anyone.”

Logan’s expression did something complicated, something that started soft and ended fiercely. “You were never a footnote,” he said low. “I noticed you the second you walked through those hedges. Everyone else was performing confidently. You were just real, underneath whatever nerves you were holding onto. That's the only thing I’ve ever been interested in since.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, slow. “If the booth asked you something that made you cry a little, for what it’s worth, I’d like to know eventually off camera. Just for me.”

“Maybe,” she said, voice gone soft. “Eventually.”

“I’ll take it eventually.” He kissed her, slow and unhurried, his hands sliding from her jaw down to her waist, and Y/N felt the truth booth’s small humiliations dissolve into something that mattered considerably less than the solid, steady weight of him pulling her closer. “For what it’s worth,” he murmured against her lips, “I don’t need to know what you were afraid of in there. I just need you to know I’m proof it isn't true.”

“You don’t even know what I said.”

“Don’t need to.” He pulled back just far enough to look at her properly, something unguarded in his own face now, matching hers. “I know you. That’s usually enough.”

She kissed him again because she didn’t have a better response than that, didn’t need one, and somewhere down the hall, the rest of the group was still cycling through their own confessions, oblivious, and for once, Y/N did care at all who might be watching. 

The date card arrived on day four, slipped under the villa door sometime before breakfast in a cream envelope with a wax seal that was objectively excessive and yet somehow worked in context. 

Tucker found it. Tucker read it out loud with the theatrical gravity of a man who had absolutely no business being this entertaining at eight in the morning. 

“Sun-kissed,” he announced, holding the card at arm’s length like a proclamation, “the island has chosen two of you to discover what lies beyond the villa walls. Logan and Y/N, your adventure begins at noon. Don’t be late.”

There was a beat.

“Beyond the villa walls,” Dean repeated, with the expression of a man who had been in the villa for four days and was beginning to feel it. “They get to leave.”

“They get a boat,” Tucker said, with naked envy. “It says boat. There’s a postscript about a boat.”

Y/N was standing in the kitchen doorway with her coffee, and she kept her face very professional and neutral and did not look at Logan across the room, who she could feel looking at her, and said: “Great. Fine. A boat.”

“You don’t sound fine,” Allie said from behind her. 

“I’m fine.” 

“You sound like you’re preparing a press statement.”

“I’m fine,” Y/N said, and went back to her coffee. 

She was not fine. 

Not in a catastrophic way — not in a I don’t want this way, because some honest, inconvenient part of her absolutely wanted this — but in the specific way of someone who was very good at managing impressions professionally and was now going to spend four unstructured hours on a boat with a man who noticed things, without the buffer of six other people and villa routine and the comfortable noise of group dynamics.

She’d built an entire career on knowing what to say and when to say it and how to say it so that people left the conversation having heard exactly what she intended. Logan, in four days, had already twice gotten her to say things she hadn’t intended. That was two times more than any reporter, a client, or boardroom had managed in four years. 

She changed three times. Settled on a swimsuit she liked herself in, emerald green, with a wrap skirt over it, and went to find Hannah, because Hannah had the specific quality of being honest without being unkind, which was exactly what Y/N needed before she got on a boat. 

“Tell me something real,” Y/N said, finding her on the terrace. 

Hannah looked up from her book. “About Logan?” 

“About anything. About whether I’m being stupid.” 

Hannah set the book down and thought about it genuinely, which Y/N appreciated. “I’ve watched you two for four days,” she said. “The way he looks at you isn’t, it’s not how boys look at you when they’re performing for a camera. It's how he looks at you when he forgot the camera was there.” She tilted her head slightly. “And I think you already know that, and the thing that’s scaring you isn’t whether it’s real. It’s what you do if it is.”

Y/N stared at her. “You’ve known me for four days.”

“I know.” Hannah picked her book back up serenely. “Go get on the boat. Wear sunscreen.”

The boat was a catamaran, crewed by two production people who had clearly been instructed to be invisible, and it took off at the reef into water that went from pale lagoon-green to the deep, serious blue of the open Pacific. The Mamanuca islands receded behind them into green humps on the horizon, and ahead of them, there was a stretch of private beach on a small island whose name Y/N had tried to ask about and received only a cheerful, non-committal smile from the production assistant. 

She sat at the bow with her feet over the edge, watching the water, and let the motion of it do something to the tightness in her shoulders. 

Logan dropped down beside her after a few minutes, not immediately, giving her the space of it, which she noticed, and for a while they just sat like that, with the wind and the engines and the water between them and the need to be anything in particular. 

“You went quiet,” he said eventually.

“I’m watching the water.”

“You were thinking.”

“I’m allowed to think.”

“I know.” He wasn’t pushing. He was just noting it, in that way he had, that she was beginning to understand was just how he operated. He didn’t smooth things over or fill the silence with noise. He just sat in it with her and let her decide what to do with it. “You don’t have to perform out here,” he said. “There are cameras, but they’re a long way back. It doesn't have to be, whatever it feels like it has to be.” 

Y/N looked at the water. The horizon was so flat and clean out here that it looked like something had edited it. “I’m not performing.”

“I know you’re not. I just meant —” He paused. “You hold yourself a certain way. Like you’re waiting for something to require managing. I notice it because I used to do it too, on the ice. Always braced.”

She looked at him then. “You’re going to do that thing again where you say something I wasn’t expecting.” 

“Probably,” he admitted. “It’s not intentional. I just —” He lifted one shoulder. “I notice things about you specifically. More than I’m used to noticing things about people.” 

“Why specifically me?”

He looked at her steadily. “You know why.”

She did know why. That was the problem. She’d known since the firepit on night one, and she’s managing it with the same contained professionalism she managed everything, which was working less and less the further they got from the villa. 

“I’m good at keeping people at a comfortable distance,” she said, which was more honest than she’d planned. “Professionally, personally. I’m good at being warm enough that people feel close without actually letting them be. It’s useful. In my job. Less useful in —” she gestured vaguely at the water, the boat, him.

“I was going to say in general.” 

“Right.” He was quiet for a moment. “Can I tell you something that might be annoying?”

“You’re going to tell me anyway.”

“Probably. I’ve been watching you with everyone in that villa for four days. With Tucker, with Hannah, with Allie. And you’re not — you’re not actually that good at the distance thing. Not when you forgot to do it. When Garrett said that thing at dinner about his college team, and you laughed, that was real. When Hannah said something dunny yesterday morning, and you actually snorted and then looked horrified about it —” 

“I didn’t snort.”

“— You’re not half as guarded as you think you are,” Logan finished. “I think you’re good at the performance of being guarded. I think the actual distance is less than you’re accounting for.”

Y/N looked at him for a long moment. The boat rocked slightly on a swell. Somewhere behind them, at a discreet distance, a production camera was probably recording whatever her face was doing. 

“That is annoying,” she said.

“You’re not sorry.”

“A little sorry.” The corner of his mouth served. “Thirty percent, sorry.” 

She laughed, startled out of herself, and felt the last of the tightness in her shoulders finally release, like something that had been too tight for too long just — let go. Logan watched it happen with an attention that had gone slightly less careful than before, his eyes tracking the line of her throat when she tipped her head back to laugh, and she didn’t mind him watching, didn’t mind it at all, which was in itself a data point she decided to file and examine later, somewhere quieter, somewhere she could actually sit with how much she liked being look at that. 

“Tell me something real,” she said, because Hannah said sait and it had worked. “Not a villa thing. An actual thing.”

He thought about it. She liked that he thought about it, didn’t just reach for the first available answer. “I almost didn’t play this season,” he said. “Hockey. I had an injury last year that was bad enough that the prognosis was not great, for a while. They weren’t sure what the recovery would look like. I did the work, and it came back, but I spent about four months not knowing if it would.” He looked out at the water. “I wasn't great at that. I’m used to knowing what I’m doing, physically — my body’s been something I could count on since I was seven and someone put skates on me. Not having that was…” he paused. “I got a little lost.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Partly. Tucker’s fault, mostly,” a half-smile. “He has a gift for talking people into things. But also —” he paused again, longer. “I think I’d been holding myself at a distance from things I wanted. Using training as an excuse. I wanted to try the thing where I didn’t.” 

Y/N held that for a moment, turning it over. Outside, the water was doing something extraordinary in the late afternoon light, going gold and green all at once, the kind of color you couldn’t photograph correctly. She thought about what Hannah had said — the thing that’s scarring you isn’t whether it’s real, it's what you do if it is — and thought about the last two relationships where she’d been someone’s eventually, where she’d made herself smaller,  more manageable, and less inconvenient, and still ended standing in her own kitchen at ten pm realizing she’d been let down so gently she’d almost missed it. 

“I’m a lot,” she said, which came out less polished than she’d intended. “Professionally, I mean, I have a big job, and I’m good at it, and I take up space at it. My last relationship, he said, once he felt like he was dating my voicemail.” She laughed, a little sharply. “Which was funny. Less funny later.” 

“His loss,” Logan said, and the simplicity of it, the complete absence of qualification, made her chest do something complicated. 

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ve been watching you for four days.” He turned to look at her, and she made herself hold it, that steady, direct gaze. “I know that.” 

The beach appeared around the point — white sand, palm fringe, a table set up for two that production had clearly been here setting up for hours — and the boat slowed, and the production people became briefly visible to manage the anchor, and Y/N had approximately thirty seconds before they were on camera more deliberately. 

She used about twenty of them, looking at Logan, who was looking back at her, and thinking that Hannah was right, it wasn’t whether this was real that scared her. 

It was that it was. 

The beach dinner was the kind of thing that would look beautiful in the episode‘s edit, candlelight in a glass jar, the sound of water on three sides, food that was objectively better than it had any right to be in the middle of the Pacific. Y/N ate, and talked, and let herself be easy in a way she hadn’t managed with another person in longer than she wanted to count. 

Logan told her about growing up in a hockey family, the early morning, the rink smell that she suspected was permanently embedded in her memory, the particular love language of a group of guys who’d learned to communicate entirely through actions and would die before admitting how much they care about each other. 

“Tucker,” he said, “told me he loved me for the first time by driving four hours in a snowstorm because my car broke down, and then spent the entire drive back complaining about the detour.”

“Did he say the words?”

“Never. That’s not —” Logan shook his head. “That’s not how it works with the. It’s what you do.”

Y/N thought about that. “I believe in saying the things,” she said. “I think people should say the things. Leaving people to interpret actions is how misunderstandings happen. I’ve cleaned up enough of those professionally.”

“So you’d rather have the words.”

“I’d rather have both.” She looked at him. “But if I had to choose, yes. Words.”

He nodded slowly, like he was filling it, and Y/N noted with something between appreciation and alarm that he did that, actually absorbed what she said and held it, rather than waiting for his turn to talk. She wasn’t used to that. She’d thought she’d been used to it, but apparently she hadn’t been. 

The candles got low, and the production team materialized at a respectful distance, indicating the boat was ready, and they walked back across the sand side by side, close enough that their arms brushed with every other step, and Y/N didn’t move away from it. 

At the boat’s edge, Logan reached up to help her board, and she took his hand, and he held it a second longer than necessary once she was on, not gripping, just present, and she looked down at her with that expression she was beginning to be able to read: something was careful and certain at the same time, which she’d decided was just how he held things he wanted.

She didn’t pull her hand away. 

They rode back across the darkened water with the stars coming up overhead, and somewhere around the reef she shifted, and his shoulder was there, and she let herself lean into it, just slightly, and felt him stay very still and then relax, his arm coming around her without either of them deciding it out loud, his hand settling warm at her hop, thumb moving slow against the fabric of her wrap skirt in a way that was absolutely not innocent and that they both pretended was. His mouth dropped briefly to her hair, not quite a kiss, just breath and warmth against her temple, and Y/N felt it land low in her stomach, felt herself go still wanting under the deliberate, unhurried weight of his attention. 

She didn’t say anything. Neither did he. They didn’t need to; the quiet had its own kind of charge to it, taut and patient, the promise of something neither of them was rushing. 

Some things, she was learning, you didn’t need to narrate. 

The villa was still up when they got back — Tucker had found a card game and recruited everyone into some kind of elaborate tournament that appeared to be generating significant grievances, and Y/N slipped into the noise of it gratefully, letting it absorb her, letting the evening become ordinary again. 

But later, when the tournament had devolved, and people were drifting toward bed, and Y/N was rinsing her glass in the kitchen, Logan appeared in the doorway, shoulder against the frame, unhurried. 

“Hey,” he said. 

“Hey”

A pause. The villa sounds around them, distant, the hum of the refrigerator, waves through the open window. 

“Thank you,” he said. “For today. For the … real things.” 

Y/N set her glass down. Turned to face him. The kitchen light was low and he was standing in the doorway like he was standing in the doorway like he was giving her an out if she wanted it, not coming further in, not crowding. 

“Thank you for making them easy to say,” she told him. Which was the truest thing she’d said all day, and watched something in his expression go quiet and warm.

He pushed off the doorframe. Crossed the kitchen in two steps. Stopped close — close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, his hand coming up to rest at he waist, light, testing, and Y/N felt that single point of contact like a current running straight up her spine. Neither of them moved for a second. She could feel her own pulse in her throat. His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth and came back up, slow, deliberate, and the air between them went thin enough that she had to remind herself to breathe. 

“I’m going to be very honest with you,” he said, low, his voice rougher than it had been a moment ago. 

“You’ve been relentlessly honest with me all day.”

“I know. One more.” His eyes held hers, dark, and his thumb moved once, slow, against the curve of her waist, like he couldn’t quite keep his hand still even while he was being careful. “I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to since the boat. Possibly since the railing on night one, if I’m being fully honest, which apparently I’m committed to now.” His gaze dropped to her lips again, lingered. “I’m not going to yet, because this is day four and I think you’d like a little more time, and I think that matters more than what I want right now. But I wanted you to have the words. And I wanted you to know exactly how much I’m not acting on, so you understand what restraint looks like on me.”

Y/N’s breath had gone shallow somewhere in the middle of that. “That is,” she said, voice not quite steady, “an extremely effective and slightly unfair thing to say to someone standing this close to you.” 

“I know.” His hand was still at her waist, warm, not moving further, a deliberate kind of patience that felt almost more intimate than if he’d just kissed her. “I’m aware of exactly how unfair it is. I’m choosing it anyway.” He leaned in, just slightly, his mouth grazing her cheekbone, close enough to her ear that his voice dropped to something low and private. “Goodnight, Y/N.”

He stepped back, slow, like it cost him something, and left the kitchen. And Y/N stood at the sink for a moment, alone, one hand pressed briefly to the spot on her cheekbone where his mouth had been, listening to the waves and the refrigerator hum and her own completely undignified heartbeat, and thought:

Four days. She had been here four days. 

She was in so much trouble. 

The morning after the firepit, Y/N woke up to the sound of someone’s phone alarm going off three beds away and the immediate disorienting realization that she was in Fiji, on a reality television show, and had somehow not been sent home yet. 

She lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling fan turning lazy circles above he, cataloguing the previous night like a case file. The walk-in. The introductions. Allie’s surprisingly firm handshake. Sabrina’s assessing once-over that Y/N still hadn’t fully decoded. Hannah’s earring compliment that had felt genuinely kind thing anyone had said since she’d landed. And Logan — that voice, that steadiness at the railing, the shoulder bump at the firepit that she’d replayed approximately fourteen times before falling asleep and was absolutely not going to replay a fifteenth. 

She was a professional. She managed crises for a living. She could manage one very attractive hockey player who’d said two nice things to her. 

“You’re doing the thing,” said Allie from the next bed over, already awake, propped on one elbow with mascara she hadn’t quite removed, making her look like a very pretty raccoon. 

“What thing?”

“The ceiling-stare thinking thing. I could practically hear your brain from here.” Allie sat up, tucked her knees under her. “Is it about Logan?”

“It’s about coffee,” Y/N said. “I need coffee before I’m a person.”

“That’s a yes.”

Y/N threw a pillow at her. Allie caught it, laughing, and that was how the morning started — easy, like they’d been sharing a room for years instead of fourteen hours, and Y/N thought again that she hadn’t expected to like anyone here, had been so braced for competition that she’d forgotten women in proximity could also just be friends. 

The villa kitchen, when they found it, was already populated by Tucker — standing in front of the espresso machine in a t-shirt and board shorts, squinting at it as it had personally offended him. 

“It’s been ten minutes,” he said, without turning around. 

“Is it broken?” Y/N asked. 

“It’s foreign.” He gestured vaguely at the buttons. “Everything about this machine is in a language I don’t speak, and it’s judging me.”

Y/N stepped around him, assessed the machine for approximately four seconds, pressed two buttons in sequence, and it began to hum obediently. Tucker stared at it. 

“How did you do that?” 

“I speak Italian,” she got three cups down from the cabinet. “Milk?”

“Please.” He leaned against the counter, watching her with the open, uncomplicated approval of someone who had no ulterior motives whatsoever, which made him immediately one of her favorite people in the villa. “You know Logan talked about you for like an hour after you went to bed last night.”

Y/N kept her eyes on the machine. “Did he?” 

“Just so you have that information.” Tucker accepted the cup she handed him with both hands, reverent. “Not telling you what to do with it.” 

“Noted,” Y/N said, and heard her own echo of last night’s word and felt warmth climb the back of her neck that she refused to acknowledge. 

The producers called them all to the firepit at eleven, which meant something was happening, which meant everyone arrived with varying degrees of performance anxiety disguised as casual confidence. Y/N sat between Hannah and Allie on the curved bench and watched the group settle, counting bodies, noting who sat near whom, reading the room the way she read a boardroom — because in PR you learned fast that every space was a room with power dynamics and everyone was performing something. 

Dean sat with his legs spread wide and his elbows on his knees, radiating that particular ease that came from never having had a reason to feel unwelcome anywhere. Garrett — quiet until now, who’d given Y/N a firm handshake and two words during introductions last night — was watching the producers with the narrow, assessing eyes of someone who played a game for a living and was already mapping the field. Sabrina had positioned herself with a calculated half-distance from everyone, close enough to be social, far enough to be unreadable. Tucker was eating an apple. 

Logan was across the fire from Y/N, and she was not looking at him. 

She was looking at him. 

He caught her at it immediately — of course, he did, he’d established last night that he was irritatingly good at noticing things — and the corner of his mouth went up just slightly, private, a smile that wasn't for the camera, and Y/N looked back at the unlit firepit with the dignified composure of a woman who absolutely had not just been caught staring. 

“Good morning, islanders.” The host, the one and only Ariana Madix, stepped in with the news of what the events looked like for today. “Today’s your first official coupling ceremony. The boys will choose.”

The energy shifted. Not dramatically — everyone here was too camera-aware for drama before noon — but Y/N felt it in the slight straightening of spines, the recalibration of expressions, the way Sabrina’s chin went up a quarter inch, and Allie smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from her shorts. Y/N made herself sit still and breathe through her nose and not do the math she was already doing: six girls, five boys so far, someone went home uncoupled, it probably wasn’t going to be her, probably, statistically, although statistics had not historically been kind to her in matters of…

“Tucker,” Ariana said. “You’re up first.”

Tucker stood, finished his apple, handed the core to Dean with the casual presumption of a man whose friends had always accepted his apple cores, and turned to face the girls with a grin that was genuinely warm, rather than performative. Y/N had already clocked that about him — he was exactly what he looked like, which in a place like this was either a strategy or a miracle.

“Sabrina,” he said, without hesitation. 

Sabrina’s composure cracked just slightly, a surprised blink before she reassembled it, and she stood and crossed to him with the controlled grace of someone who’d been hoping for this and wasn’t going to let on. Tucker said something low to her when she reached him that Y/N couldn’t hear, and whatever it was made Sabrina laugh, quickly, like it escaped before she could stop it, and Y/N thought: okay, that’s going to be interesting to watch 

Dean chose Allie — and Allie, to her credit, did not do a victory lap, just walked over with a firm handshake, energy, and immediately said something that made Dean bark a laugh, which told Y/N exactly what she needed to know about how that pairing was going to go. 

Garrett chose Hannah with a quiet, “Hannah, if you’ll have me,” that was so earnest and unperformed that a couple of people actually made sounds, and Hannah’s cheeks went pink as she crossed to him, and Y/N caught her eyes, she passed and mouthed adorable, and Hannah pressed her lips together trying not to grin.  

That just left Y/N and the two remaining girls — Jade, who’d arrived the same day as Y/N and had spent most of the previous evening being effortlessly gorgeous in a strapless yellow set that made Y/N feel like a houseplant — and Priya, a London-born event planner who’d laughed the loudest at Tucker’s road trip story and had a mile-long neck that photographers probably wept over. 

And Logan. 

Y/N breathed in. Breathed out. Did not do the math again. 

“Logan,” Ariana said. 

He stood slowly unhurried, and for one horrible suspended second, Y/N was fourteen years old again in a gym class lineup to be last — and then his eyes found hers across the fire pit, direct and without ceremony, and stayed there. 

“Y/N,” he said. 

Just that. Her name, in that voice, in front of everyone, like there’d never been another option. 

She stood. Her legs worked, which was honestly impressive under the circumstances. She crossed to him on the opposite side of the pit, and when she reached him, he shifted slightly so she could stand beside him, shoulder-width, no crowding her, and said quietly, under the sound of the producers moving on to the next business of the day, “You looked like you were doing the math.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. 

“You were.”

“I was breathing.”

“You were doing the math while breathing.” He glanced sideways at her, that almost-smile. “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t what?”

“Doing the math.” He said it simply. “I knew when you walked in last night.”

Y/N looked straight ahead at Ariana, who was explaining the afternoon’s schedule, and felt the warmth she’d been managing since last night settle into something steadier, less panicked, less like the math she’d absolutely been doing and more like something she didn’t have a professional term for. 

“You’re very sure of yourself,” she said. 

“I’m sure of some things,” he said. “Not everything.” A pause. “You, specifically, I’m not sure of at all. That’s sort of the point.”

She looked at him then, because she couldn’t not, and found him already looking back, and there it was again — that steadiness, that lack of performance, that quality of paying attention that made her feel simultaneously seen and completely out of her depth. 

“You’re going to be a problem,” she informed him. 

Logan smiled, slow and real. “Probably,” he agreed. 

The afternoon dissolved into the loose, sun-drenched rhythm that Y/N was starting to understand the villa time, not quite real time, not quite vacation time, something in between where an hour by the pool felt like three, and a ten-minute conversation felt like a whole afternoon. She floated on an inflatable with Allie for a while, listening to Allie describe Dean’s entire personality with the forensic precision of a woman who’d assessed people for fun since childhood, which made Y/N like her more. 

“He’s a lot,” Allie said, chin tilted up to the sun, “but it’s a lot of good, I think. Like a golden retriever that also somehow plays hockey at a professional level.”

“They’re all hockey players,” Y/N said. “Have you noticed that? Every single one of them.” 

“Tucker mentioned something about a team thing. I didn’t fully follow it.” Allie turned to look at her. “Logan’s watching you from the daybed.”

“He’s not.”

“He has been for about twenty minutes. It would be creepy if he didn’t look so, I don’t know. Interested. Like you’re a puzzle he’s trying to be polite about.”

Y/N tipped her head back and stared at the sky instead, a blue so clean and total it looked fake, like a backdrop someone had hung above them for the cameras. She thought about what Tucker said that morning — talked about you for like an hour — and what Logan said at the coupling — I knew when you walked in — and the way he’d said her name across the firepit with that unhurried certainty that had made her legs uncertain. 

The thing was, she knew how this worked. She’d watched enough of this show to know the shape of it — its early connection that fizzled, the week-two recoupling that reshuffled everything, the way the person who walked in most confident usually walked out most surprised. She’s spent her career constructing narratives, and she could see this one from a hundred yards: a girl walks in, a boy makes her feel special, episode four, something changes. 

She knew all of that. 

She also knew that Logan had been across the pool from her for twenty minutes, looking over like she was something worth looking at, and that no amount of narrative awareness was currently making her feel anything other than warm. 

“Stop analyzing it,” Allie said, not unkindly.

“I’m not.”

“You’re doing the ceiling that but horizontally.”

Y/N laughed despite herself. “I hate this place.”

“You love this place.” Allie nudged her float with one foot. “Go talk to him.”

“I’m floating.”

“Float over there.”

Y/N pushed off from the wall with two fingers and drifted, lazily, approximately nowhere near Logan’s daybed, and then at somepoint in the next few minutes she was no longer on the float but on the pool steps, and Logan was no longer on the daybed but crouched at the pool’s edge with his forearms on his knees, looking at her with that expression she still couldn’t fully catalogue. 

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said.

“You floated over here.”

“The current.”

“There’s no current. It’s a pool.”

“You don’t know that,” Y/N said, and Logan laughed, and she thought: Okay. This is a problem. This is a real problem.

That evening, the producers set up a group dinner, long table, candles, the kind of staged intimacy that felt more real than it should have, and the conversation moved the way good conversation did when people were too warm and too fed to be guarded about it. Tucker told the full version of the road trip story (there had been a goat involved; Dean disputed the goat; everyone agreed there had absolutely been a goat), and Hannah turned out to have a genuinely filthy sense of humor that caught everyone off guard the first time and delighted everyone every time after that. 

Y/N was three seats from Logan, which she was not counting, and close enough to Garrett on her left that she learned, in the span of one dinner, that he was quieter than his presence suggested, funnier than his quietness suggested, and watching Hannah across the table wth an expression he hadn’t quite learned to regulate yet. 

“You’ve got it bad,” Y/N told him, low, under Tucker’s goat reenactment. 

Garrett looked at her sideways. “I’ve known her for thirty-six hours.”

“I know.” She smiled at him. “You’ve still got it bad.”

He looked back at Hannah, who was laughing, head thrown back, completely unself-conscious, and something in his jaw went soft. “Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “I’ve got it bad.”

Y/N felt something settle in her chest — some tension she’d been carrying since the van, since the walk-in, since the math she kept doing — ease back just slightly. Because Garrett Grahm, who’d looked at her across a fitpit with the narrow assessment of a professional athlete and said two words during introductions, was sitting next to her, telling her quietly that he’d got it bad for a girl he’d known for thirty-six hours, and there was something real in that, something the cameras couldn’t manufacture. 

Maybe some of this was real. Maybe she could let some of this be real. 

She looked down the table without meaning to, and Logan was already looking at her; he was always already looking at her, and this time she didn’t look away first. She held his gaze for one beat, two, and let herself smile, just slightly, just enough, and watched his expression do something complicated and warm in return. 

Three seats were not very far apart. 

AN: all I want to say is I am working on the other parts rn, but will most likely not post them till later this week. Maybe Saturday, Sunday, or Monday??? Not completely sure. Oh, and ask in the comments if you want to be in the tag list.

Y/N had given exactly one piece of advice to herself in the back of the production can, it was this: DO NOT CRY ON CAMERA BEFORE YOU'VE EVEN SAID YOUR NAME. 

Gipping onto this mantra, sandals in one hand, the hem of her cover-up damp with sweat she refused to acknowledge, while an assistant with a headset and a clipboard counted down from five on her fingers. Behind her, you could hear the voices and laughter, the noise that comes with a pool party that had been going on for exactly long enough that everyone already had a favorite person in mind. 

Y/N was the last girl in.

Of course she was. They’d saved her for the last, the way you save things you’re not sure what to do with. 

“Thirty seconds,” the assistant said, not unkindly, and pressed two fingers into her spine as if she could physically push confidence into her vertebrae. “You got this. Walk slow, smile at everyone, don't look at the cameras unless they tell you to.” 

“Right.” Y/N rolled her shoulders back. Twenty-three years old, a closet full of blazers that cost more than her first car, a corner office two floors below the partners at the largest communication company in Boston; she negotiated crisis statements for biotech CEOs, and she's even talked a senator’s chief of staff out of a press conference by sheer force of a phone call. She was not a woman who got rattled easily.  

But now she was extremely rattled. 

It wasn’t the cameras. It wasn’t even really the idea of dating someone on television, which she signed up for, on a dare from her best friend, and because she had spent two relationships being someone's eventually. It was the walk. It was knowing somewhere past the assistant were seven to eight girls who’d probably been doing Pilates since they were fourteen, who paked string bikinis like they were packing for a normal vacation and not for forty cameras and the entire internet and Y/N — Y/N, who’d cried actual tears of joy over the styling team finding a swimsuit that didn’t make her feel like a sausage casing — was about to walk into the middle of that and be compared. 

She’d survived worse. But she couldn’t currently remember what. 

“And … go!” 

The assistants parted a hedge in front of her. The heat hit her first, the thick Fijian heat that made the air shimmer over the pool, and the noise stopped, not fully, but enough that she felt it, the hush of a crowd deciding what they thought of you before you’d said a word. Y/N kept her chin up, shoulders back, and did what the assistant told her to do. She just let her eyes find the group draped over the daybeds at the far end of the pool deck. 

A tall guy with dark hair and a jaw that you could cut glass on, sprawled like he owned the furniture that one looked over first, gave her the kind of slow once-over that made her stomach flip in a way she immediately distrusted. Beside him, a guy who couldn’t stop laughing at something, easy and loud, the kind of laugh that made you want to know the joke. A golden-haired girl in a green bikini stood at the pool’s edge with her arms crossed, openly assessing. Another girl — long, dark-haired, pretty in a way that looked like it had never once had to try — was already sizing Y/N up head to toe, and Y/N felt that gaze land on her hips, her thighs, the soft curve of her stomach that no amount of shapewear fully hid, and she made herself keep walking. 

Day one, she told herself. You only have to survive day one. 

“Hi everyone,” she said, and was relieved to hear her PR voice come out smooth and warm, no shake in it at all. “I’m Y/N.” 

There was a chorus of hellos, the easy reflexive kind, a couple of girls drifting closer to do the obligatory cheek-kiss-slash-assessment that Y/N had learned as the villa ritual. She caught names as they came, Allie, the one in the green, who has a handshake firmer than most men; Sabrina, the dark-haired and watchful one, who said hi like she was deciding whether she would need watching; and Hannah, the soft-spoken, kind-eyed, who actually said “I love your earrings” in a way that sounded like she meant it. 

The boys hund back the way boys always did, sizing up the room before committing to anything, and Y/N made herself look at each of them in turn instead of letting her eyes catch and stick anywhere —  except they did stick, because the laughing one introduced himself and Tuckerm and the dark-haired one with the jaw uncoilded off the daybed in one motion, easy as water, and said “Logan,” like it was the only word he needed. 

He had a voice like a low note held for too long. Y/N felt it somewhere under her ribs and hated herself a little for it. 

“Y/N,” she said again, because apparently that was the only word she had. 

“Pretty name.” His mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smirk, but more interested than that, more like he’d actually looked at her and decided he liked what he saw, which couldn’t be right, which had to be a villa thing…right? The charm was turned up to ten because the cameras were rolling, and somebody had to make the new girl feel welcomed. Y/N had built a career reading people’s faces for what they actually meant under the circumstances, and she still couldn’t get a clean read on him, which annoyed her more than it should have. 

“Thanks,” she said, and meant to leave it there, but her mouth, traitor that it was, added: “Yours is pretty unsubtle. Very ‘star of the show.’”

A beat. Then Logan laughed, like really laughed, head back, surprised out of whatever easy performance he’d been running, and beside him Tucker said “Oh, I like her,” with the cheerful, unbothered delight of a man watching this friend get knocked off-balance. 

“Careful,” Logan said, recovering, dark eyes still on her, warm now in a way that made the heat of the day feel better. “You’ve been here ninety seconds.” 

“And already running the place. I’m efficient.” 

“I'll bet,” he said it low, almost to himself, and Y/N felt the back of her neck go hot and told her body firmly to cut that out. 

Dean, the broad-shouldered, blue-eyed man, looking at her with the friendly assessment of a guy who’d clearly grown up the most-liked person in every room he’d ever entered, wandered over to introduce himself properly. The moment loosened, turned back into ordinary villa small talk: where was she from, what did she do, had the flight been brutal? Y/N easily, Boston, PR,  yes brutal, and felt the conversation absorb her the way these things did, felt herself become one more person at the pool party instead of the last girl who walked in to be judged. 

She still felt it, though. The girls’ eyes were on her, doing math. The way Sabrina’s gaze flicked, just once, down and back up, assessing in a different language that Allie’s was openly curious. Y/N had spent four years of high school and most of college being told, with varying degrees of kindness, that she had a great face and a great personality and wasn’t it too bad about the rest, and some old, well-worn part of her brain did the same math right alongside them: eight girl, two of them probably go home this week, you’re not built like the ones who stay. 

She smiled anyway. She’d gotten good at smiling anyway. 

The villa, once the introductions wound down into smaller conversations, turned out to be the kind of beautiful that felt slightly aggressive, white stucco and infinity edges and a firepit that had clearly never seen actual fire-pit weather, all of it built for the cameras mounted discreetly in the eaves. Y/N found her single allotted suitcase already deposited in a shared room with three other girls’ bags fighting for closet space, claiming the bed nearest to the window, and went looking for a moment alone before the producers found some new activity to herd everyone into. 

She found it, sort of, at the railing above the pool, looking out past the infinity edge to where the watch went from chlorine-blue to the real, restless turquoise of the Pacific, a thin strip of sand, and the dark hump of some uninhabited little island sitting out past the reef. Somewhere beyond that, she knew, was the rest of the Mamanucas, and beyond that, an actual ocean’s worth of distance between her and Boston. 

“You’re hiding,” said a voice behind her, and she didn’t have to turn around to know it was Logan; she’d apparently already memorized the register of it, which felt like a problem. 

“I’m acclimating,” she said. “There's a difference.” 

“Is there?” He came to lean on the railing beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off his arm, not touching her, careful about that in a way she noted and filed and didn’t examine too closely. “It looked like hiding from where I was standing.” 

“Where were you standing?”

“Watching you not-hide.” He smiled when she huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’m good at noticing things.” 

“Is that your whole personality, or do you have a backup?”

“Hockey,” he said. “I play hockey. Professionally, depending on who you ask.”

“That’s a backup personality that cost a lot in dental work.” 

“You’d be surprised.” He turned slightly, and Y/N made that mistake of looking at him properly, like really looking, not the quick assessing glance from before, and found him already looking back at her, steady, like he had nowhere better to be and nothing better to look at, which was such a deeply unfamiliar sensation that she didn’t know what to do with her hands. 

“Can I ask you something?” he said, “and you don’t have to answer if it’s — I don’t know, against the rules, or whatever rules apply here.” 

“You can ask.” 

“You walked in like you were bracing for a hit.” He said it gently, no judgment in it, just an observation laid down plain between them. “I’ve been hit by a lot of large men on purpose for a living, I know what that looks like. What was that about?” 

Y/N’s first instinct was to deflect; she had four different deflections loaded and ready. She used them on reporters for a living, but something about the directness of the question, the lack of performance in it, made her actually consider answering honestly instead. 

“I thought I’d last about four hours,” she admitted. “Maybe less. I’ve seen this show. I know what the girls usually look like, and I love my body most days, I really do…but most days I’m not standing next to seven girls who look like they were built in a lab specifically for swimsuits.” She made herself laugh lightly, like it didn’t matter, the way she’d practiced not minding things. “I figured I’d get my little moment of villa small talk and then be the first one sent home, and at least I’d have gotten a free trip to Fiji out of it.” 

Logan didn’t laugh. He didn’t do the thing some men did, where they rushed in with compliments like they were defusing a bomb — no, you’re so pretty, don’t say that. He just watched her for a second, something working behind his eyes, and said. “For what it’s worth, I noticed you before you said a word. Not because I felt sorry for you. Because you walked in like you already knew something the rest of us didn’t, and that’s a hundred times more interesting to me than knowing exactly what to expect from somebody.”

“That’s a very smooth thing to say to the girl who just admitted she expected to get sent home.” 

“I’m aware. I practiced it on the walk over.” The corner of this mouth tipped up, self-deprecating, and something in Y/N's chest loosened that had been tight since the van. “Doesn’t make it less true.” 

She didn’t have a smooth deflection for that one. She looked back out at the pool instead, at Tucker doing a cannonball that splashed three people who shrieked with theatrical outrage, at Hannah laughing on the daybed with her knees pulled up, at the while gorgeous absurd machine of the show churning along around the, and let herself, just for a second, believe that maybe she wasn’t only going to get a free trip out of this. 

“I’m not asking you to.” Logan bumped his shoulder against hers, light, easy, an invitation rather than a claim. “I’m just saying I noticed. Do what you want with that.” 

“Noted,” Y/N said, and was unable to keep the smile off her face when she said it. 

That night, the firepit got lit for real, propane-fed and camera red, but warm against the soft tropical dark all the same, the sound of ways somewhere pas the hedges filling in every quiet beat of conversation, and the group folded itself onto the curved stone benches around it with the practiced ease of people who’d watched a lot of reality TV and kew exactly how to look good doing it. Y/N ended up wedged between Allie, who turned out to be sharper and funnier than her first-impression once-over had suggested, and an empty stretch of bench that Logan filled about four minutes later with a beer in each hand, one of which he held out to her without asking if she wanted it, just correctly assuming. 

“You’re persistent,” she said, taking it anyway. 

“I’m efficient,” he said, throwing her own work back at her, and she laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh, surprised out of her chest. 

Across the fire, Tucker was holding court about some catastrophic road trop that has Sabrina laughing into her hand and Dean shouting “that is NOT how it happened” every ninety seconds, and Hannah had her feet tucked under her, content to watch occasionally catching Y/N’s eyes and smiling like they’d already agreed to be friends, which, Y/N realized with something like relief, they probably had. 

It didn’t feel like a competition, sitting there. It felt, for one suspended hour, like the kind of night you’d have with people you already knew, if the people you already knew happened to be unreasonably attractive and contractually obligated to fall in love with one of you on camera. 

She caught Logan watching her at one point — not staring, nothing intense enough to flag for the producers, just a glance that lingered half a second past polite — and when she caught him at it, she didn’t look away or pretend it hadn’t happened. He just held her eyes, unhurried, and let one corner of his mouth curve up, like he was perfectly happy to be caught. 

Y/N looked back at the fire, face warm for reasons that had nothing to do with the flames, and thought: okay. Maybe more than four hours.