#tatlib

It’s not like she doesn’t think Peter K., tall Peter with his dark, unruly curls and his quick smile, isn’t attractive. Or funny. It’s that, well, she’s been watching this show for as long as she can remember, and she knows he was on two seasons ago, when Gen was the Bachelorette. He was third runner-up, and he was devastated. You could tell it was real. Lara Jean already decided, when she signed the contract, that she wasn’t going to fall for a return contestant. She wasn’t going to be someone’s second choice. 

“We’ll level with you,” the producer tells her. “We’re thinking of him for the next Bachelor, okay? So you need to take him at least as far as fantasy suites, and then you can pick Josh.”

That makes her feel a little better, at least--the knowledge that this is fake for him too, that they’re both getting something out of it. And it’s not like she really has a choice, anyway, so she decides to make the best of it.

The problem, though, is that the longer she keeps Peter K. around, the more roses the producers tell her to give him, the harder it is to maintain her emotional distance. So much about the show seems fake, all the time: the dinner dates on empty sound stages where they barely touch their cold food, the “surprise concerts” where she’s forced to act excited about a crappy band she’s never heard of before. 

When she takes Peter on her mandated one-on-one, though, all of that suddenly fades away. It’s still fake, sure--both the sets and the set-up, the conceit that they’re both here to fall in love with each other and not because it’s the narrative ABC wants. But maybe she forgets all of that, just the tiniest bit, when Peter opens up about his dad leaving at dinner. That part feels real, so real that she talks about her mom without the producers guiltily prompting her. She wants to tell him about it, is the thing. It feels like he’ll understand--like he does understand, like he’s really hearing her.

After dinner, too, when he makes her laugh so hard whispering jokes into her ear while they’re pretending to slow-dance that they’re forced to re-shoot half the footage. 

And after that, when he kisses her, and she forgets the cameras are even there.

It’s all kind of a muddle after that. It feels like her control over the season is slipping away, even when both she and Peter know that what they’re doing is a set-up. Is fake. It’s just that it’s harder and harder to remember that. She finds herself looking forward to the five minutes she’ll have to talk to him after a group date, meeting his eyes carefully during rose ceremonies, as though reminding herself that he’s still here.

She takes him on hometowns and meets his family, his mom and brother, and feels like she already knows them. 

The next week is fantasy suites, the last week of her unspoken contract with Peter and the producers. She’s sad, and then relieved, because now she can just end it and focus on Josh and John Ambrose, the way she should have been doing the whole time. It’s not like she actually has to sleep with him, either--the show makes a big deal about fantasy suites for the fans, but she’s been consuming Bachelor-related tell-alls for long enough to know that really, what you do is just get a good night’s sleep in a nicer hotel room than usual.

That’s what she does with Josh and John Ambrose, and that’s her plan for Peter, too. 

She doesn’t know what goes wrong along the way. Maybe it’s something about the date itself, the quiet snow-covered mountain with the sunset in the distance, the way Peter’s arm settles around her shoulders in the hot tub. When he leans in to kiss her for the cameras she lets herself fall into it, just for a second, and then it’s too late: his mouth warm against hers, the way his hands come up to cup her face. He brushes her hair back, then gathers it up and holds it out of the water. 

“Let me,” he says, when she reaches for her scrunchie, and she can barely breathe while he gently winds her hair up into a messy bun and secures it.

“There,” he says, smiling at her, “it’s too cold for wet hair, Lara Jean,” and then she’s kissing him, and kissing him. She can feel his hands against her waist, under the water, the big span of them, and she shivers even in the heat of the tub.

He must be able to feel it, because he pulls back, concern on his face. “Whoa,” he says, “you okay?” 

She nods, but she thinks for the first time that maybe she isn’t, not at all. When she reads Chris Harrison’s sappy letter to him after dinner, the one that officially invites them to use the fantasy suite together if Peter wants to, her voice trembles.

“As if I’d say no, Lara Jean,” Peter says, and he sounds serious, he sounds so real. 

When the cameras are finally gone, when they’re in private--real private, for the first time since they’ve known each other--he sits across from her on the bed and looks at her carefully. 

“So what do you wanna do, LJ?” he asks. 

“Just--we can talk,” Lara Jean says, because she has a plan, and she’s sticking too it. 

And they do talk. They talk all night, about high school and families, what it was like to meet his mom and how much she misses her sisters and her dad. About favorite movies, and her favorite things to cook. He asks her about that, about learning to cook her mom’s family’s food and she tells him about loving her dad and still feeling like he wasn’t always enough, sometimes, not when it came to things like that. 

“I wish I could have met your mother,” he says to her, and she wishes that too, so fiercely it terrifies her. She kisses him so she won’t have to think about it, and when, minutes later, he pulls back to ask if she’s sure she wants to, she nods.

“I never thought I’d get this lucky,” Peter says to her, after, when she’s lying flushed on the sheets and he’s propped on one elbow looking down at her. She smiles and he kisses her again, gently, the warm weight of him like a promise above her. He runs a hand up her side and she leans into it, still wanting, and he answers.

Even when the producers wake them up in the morning, it still feels like a dream. She floats through her on-camera interviews, through the repeated shots of Peter bringing her coffee in bed. Her face hurts, a little bit, from smiling.

Maybe that’s what does it. Something must tip them off, let them know that she’s made her choice, whether she drops the word “love” on camera or not. They let her send John Ambrose home during the rose ceremony and then they pull her aside.

“We just want to make sure we’re on the same page here, Lara Jean,” they say to her. “Peter Kavinsky will be the next Bachelor, and he knows that too. We’ve even convinced Gen to come back as a contestant, now that she’s single again. It’s a whole new angle for the show, and we think it’ll play really well.”

It feels like being hit by a truck: she’s running along, and then she’s on the ground, aching, and she can’t breathe. The week is endless, miserable. All she wants is for the show to be over, to kick Peter off, to never see or speak to him again.

The proposals happen somewhere sufficiently exotic and beautiful, or at least Lara Jean assumes they do--she can’t focus on what’s around her, doesn’t care. All of her romantic fantasies seem worthless now. As though she really thought for a second that she might find love--love!--on this contrived reality show. 

When she’s finally face to face with Peter, when she can tell him he’s not the one, she sticks to the script the producers approved. She can’t talk about what she really wants to, of course--her anger about Gen, the fact that all of it was fake, all along. Instead, she tells him that she thinks he still has feelings for someone else, and that she can’t be his second choice.

When she says that he looks confused, and when she keeps going, relentless, his face crumbles with hurt. She can feel the cameras moving in around them like sharks in the water, scenting tears like blood. 

“You were never second best, Lara Jean,” Peter says, quietly, but it’s too late. It’s done.

She almost wants to laugh at the fact that they expect her to accept Josh’s proposal now--she hasn’t thought seriously about Josh in weeks, and when she turns him down, too, the producers fly into a frenzy.

“It’ll be dramatic, at least,” one of them says, finally, and then it’s over. The show is done.

She mopes around for three months, letting Margot and Kitty feed her and tease her in turn, until she feels mostly human again--just in time for the live finale show. There’s the flight back to LA, and then she’s sitting in the studio with Chris Harrison, fans surrounding them.

“Is it true that you didn’t watch the season?” Chris asks. “Not at all?”

“I couldn’t,” Lara Jean says, and the audience murmurs frantically. 

“So then--you haven’t spoken to Peter K. since the show?” Chris asks.

Lara Jean shakes her head.

“Well, it’ll be an interesting night for all of us, then,” Chris says, and turns back to the screen. 

Lara Jean is forced to watch it play out, the aftermath of her rejection. Peter does cry, it turns out. He cries angrily, like a boy who’s embarrassed about it but can’t stop himself, and he won’t talk to the cameras for a long time.

Finally they wear him down. When he turns to face the producers his face is red and blotchy, and his voice is hoarse.

“I really thought--” he pauses.

“I thought it was real,” he says, finally. “I thought it was real, that’s all. I guess I’m an idiot, right? It was real for me, that’s all I know.”

Chris Harrison is saying something to her, but Lara Jean can’t hear him. Her ears are ringing. It’s just that--no one’s that good of an actor, right? But it wasn’t real. It can’t have been. Like everything else on the Bachelor, it’s one big production.

And then doors open to the side of the stage and he walks out, Peter Kavinsky, pale and nervous and tall, so tall. 

Lara Jean takes one look at him and everything that’s been holding up inside of her for three months collapses, and she can’t breathe. She can feel the room spinning around her, can hear Chris Harrison calling out for help.

And then Peter’s there, in front of her--above her?--one hand brushing the hair out of her face.

“Whoa,” he says, “Whoa, whoa, Lara Jean. You okay?”

She knows he’s mad at her, furious, he has to be, but all that’s on his face is sweet, anxious concern. His familiar face. The face she loves.

“I am now,” she says, and kisses him.