Eight Weeks to Mr. Right (8 page)

“January. It’s Maria, with
Mr. Right
,” said the no-nonsense voice when I answered. Maria was one of the producers, and had been my favorite when we were filming. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d just been playing nice to get me to open up more and say things I’d later regret. Things that they could use to make me look bad.

“Hi Maria,” I said, guarded.
 

“Look, have you seen the tabloid?”

“I was actually just reading it when you called,” I said. “I’m not a big fan.”

“Neither are we,” she said, and I noticed an edge to her voice that I hadn’t heard before. “January, we can’t have this. It is a stipulation of your contract that you not go on dates until after your elimination episode has aired. I know some spoilers are going to leak, that’s inevitable. But this is unacceptable.”

“I…it wasn’t a date,” I said, hurt. Hadn’t I always been the one who took the contract seriously, while the other girls interpreted it loosely and did what they could get away with? “I’m sorry, I’m as stunned as you are, but it wasn’t like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can’t have you going out in public on anything that looks like a date, whether it is or not. Don’t let this happen again.” There was a note of warning in her words, and I hung up the phone feeling awful.
 

I stared at Sophie, blinking back tears. There was only one person I wanted to talk to right now, one person who could comfort me the way I needed.
 

“I need to find Ben,” I told her.

A few days later, Ben asked if I wanted to cook dinner together. I chopped veggies while he prepared chicken breasts, trying not to think about how domestic this all felt, how we easily could’ve been husband and wife making dinner together on a random weeknight, rather than roommates spending time together.
 

“What herbs are you putting on the chicken?” I asked, and he looked blank.
 

“I usually just bread it. Sorry, I don’t really have anything else. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “I just love how the meaty smell of chicken interacts with herb smells in a dish.”

He looked at me. “You really are very into smell, aren’t you?”

“It’s my passion.”

He seemed to pause, as though unsure whether to say something. “I don’t really…get perfume,” he said, and glanced over at me. “It seems very fake to me.”

“Some of it’s fake,” I admitted. “Depends what’s used to create it.”

“No, I mean, the whole idea of it. You’re covering up your natural scent with some contrived scent. It’s like a sensory lie.” He was putting the chicken into the oven, and paused to look up at me again. “I hope I didn’t offend you by saying that.”

I considered. “Not at all. But…you’re not covering anything up. A good perfume should never try to hide someone’s natural scent. Every perfume is unique to the person who wears it. Each scent smells just a little bit different when it mixes with your body’s chemistry. You can smell it on a test strip, and then it can change into a whole different thing once it goes on a person. And can vary so much from one person to the next.”

“Hmm,” he said. “So you think it’s an expression of a person as an individual, even if they’re wearing something mass-produced.”

“I think so. Perfume is like any other choice we make in how to express ourselves. People choose a scent they identify with, but then their body makes it their own. Kind of like clothing,” I added. “You choose what to wear, but the same shirt can look completely different on different people. If perfume is a lie, then anyone who isn’t running around naked is also lying.”

“I guess so,” he said, doubtful.
 

“Everyone smells like the products we use already,” I insisted. “Perfume is just making a more active choice about that smell.”

“Some perfumes smell nice,” he conceded. “But so many of them are fake and gross.”
 

That I agreed with. “The trend toward using synthetic scents is gross to me,” I said. “When I make perfume, I only want to use natural essential oils, not trick the brain into thinking they’re natural. Though honestly, most people can’t tell the difference.”
 

“Oh yeah?” he asked.
 

“I’m not talking about the overall smell of a perfume,” I said. “But if you break it down into individual scents, you probably couldn’t tell the difference between real or fake.”

“Like with vanilla versus vanillin?” he asked.
 

“Sort of,” I said. “Vanillin is a compound in vanilla, but real vanilla is made up of hundreds of compounds.”

“Real vanilla smells so much better,” he said, and I smiled.
 

“I agree.”

“I’ve never understood when people say something is ‘plain vanilla,’” he continued. “Vanilla smells amazing! It’s not plain at all.”

“Yes!” I said, getting excited now. We were finding common ground. “It’s the most complex flavor there is.”
 

We worked in silence for a few minutes while he washed some dishes and I kept chopping vegetables.

“Bottom line, though,” I said, “smell is so much more than just smell. When you choose your own scent, you’re taking control over your effect on people.”

He leaned back against the counter and regarded me. “How’s that?”

“For one, scents have the power to change your mood,” I said.
 

He nodded. “Aromatherapy.”

“Exactly. The whole concept of aromatherapy is based on how much power scents have. They can make you more energetic, or calmer. They can make you happy, more focused, more at peace. But on the flip side, scents can also make you angry or disgusted or sad. Of course, those ones aren’t used in aromatherapy. But it just goes to show how much power scent can have. If you’re trapped in an room with a scent you dislike, it can mess up your whole day.”

“Like when my coworker sprays her overpowering body spray and I can’t concentrate on anything else,” he grumbled.

I laughed. “Just like that.”

“So what else? How is smell more than just smell?” He was watching me carefully, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. He seemed to really be listening, absorbing what I was saying. It was a feeling I hadn’t gotten from a man in a long time. I’d tried to talk to Andrew about the power of scent, but he’d nodded and agreed so quickly it seemed like he was bored, like he was implying he already knew everything I was saying so there was no point in saying it.
 

“Well, scent is strongly tied to memory and emotion,” I said. “So something you think you’ve long forgotten, maybe you smell something that reminds you of it, and suddenly you’re back in that time in your life, reliving what it felt like to be in that experience.”

Ben moved closer to me, and his hand touched my hair. My heart beat faster as I held my breath, waiting. “Like when I smell your hair and I’m suddenly back in high school.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Just like that.”

Then I swallowed and remembered what we were doing. “I should get the veggies in,” I said, stepping away from him.
 

It was fun spending time with Ben, I had to admit. I was glad we’d reconnected, and not just because he was proving so helpful at my defense.
 

“So you still never told me,” I said as we were eating our meal. “What made you interested in working to match kids to mentors?”

He put down his fork. “When I was in high school, having a mentor was what saved me. My dad left when I was fifteen, and it was really hard on me.”

“Your dad…wait, but I met your dad,” I said.
 

“Yeah. That was right after he’d moved out. I saw him a few more times after that, and then he moved out of town, and that was it.”

“Ben…” I said, my heart hurting for him. “I had no idea.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t like to talk about it.”

“But I started seeing a mentor, Bruce. He’d come by once a week and take me out to lunch or to a baseball game or something. It really helped. I was so angry back then, and being able to talk to him went a long way toward healing the wound my dad left by abandoning us.”

I nodded. I couldn’t imagine how awful it must have been for Ben to go through something like that.
 

“Bruce,” I said. “I think I met him once, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“You told me he was a family friend.”

Ben looked down at his plate. “I was embarrassed, I guess.”

Now an uncomfortable feeling gnawed at the edges of my hurt for what he’d gone through. Had I misunderstood what had happened between us back then? I’d thought we were so close, but now I saw that there were huge parts of Ben’s life I hadn’t had any idea about. Had I thought we’d had something real, when in fact I’d hardly known him at all?

“So you wanted to help other kids get the same help you got,” I said, and he nodded. It made a lot of sense. I just couldn’t believe there had been so much more going on in Ben’s life than I’d realized back then.
 

He looked up at me then, as though he sensed what I was thinking. “Dating you was like a vacation from real life. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. It was just so hard to talk about, and it was easier not to say anything. I needed that time to just be a high school kid with my first girlfriend, making out in your bedroom after telling your parents we were doing homework.”

“And sometimes doing more than just making out,” I reminded him.
 

On Wednesday night, Ben and I watched episode 3 together.
 

“Now that you live here, you can drink as much as you want and just stumble into bed,” Ben said with a grin.
 

I batted at him playfully. “I don’t plan on doing that more than once a week,” I joked as he darted away from me.
 

There were six women left at the start of episode 3, and this was the first week we’d all had one-on-one dates with Andrew. The episode was called “Let’s Get Cooking,” and that’s exactly what we’d done. Andrew had made dinner with each of us, one night per woman, and we’d had the whole evening to spend time together and get to know one another.
 

It was that night, I remembered, when I’d realized my attraction to Andrew. Up until then I was still allowing myself to believe I was only in it for the professional connection, as the show had made it seem, but there had been a shift in week 3 that had led me down a very different path.
 

I was nervous as the opening credits came on, along with a recap from the previous week. I cringed when I saw myself, had to relive the moment when I’d told Brandi, “I’m not interested in him.”

As I recoiled from what was happening on screen, Ben, sitting beside me on the couch, reached out and put a hand on my leg, as though to calm me. It was a gesture of friendship, I knew, but it distracted my attention away from the show so completely that I almost had trouble paying attention. His hand felt warm against my skin, and I never wanted him to move it. Something inside me softened at his touch and made me feel like I could face this.
 

On the screen, we watched Brandi go on the first date with Andrew. “So do you like to cook?” she asked him.
 

“I, uh, I don’t do much of it,” he said. “But it’s fun. It’s fun.”

Ben turned to me, taking his hand off my leg. “He means he has a personal chef, right?”

It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but Ben was probably right. It was so different from how I was used to living that I hadn’t even considered it when Andrew had made a similar comment to me on our date, later in the week.
 

Brandi gossiped about the other girls while they cooked, and then it was Abby’s turn. I perked up. I was never able to view Abby as my competition, exactly, as much as it hurt when she remained after Andrew got rid of me. They made a chicken pot pie from scratch, and when they rolled out the dough and ended up having a flour fight in the kitchen, I recognized the scene of Abby laughing and covered in flour from the promo I’d seen in the bar before the show had started.
 

I swallowed hard when Andrew put his hand on the small of Abby’s back, then stood behind her and let her guide him with the rolling pin. They rolled out the dough together, and I tried to swallow the jealousy that was now rising within me.

Next was Isabella, and I groaned out loud to see her face appear on the screen. She batted her long eyelashes and flirted shamelessly, and I felt my eyes narrowing to slits as I watched her. I couldn’t understand why Andrew had kept her on for so long. She was so transparent with her flirting, so clingy and needy, and I had to wonder whether she’d “fallen in love” with him the moment she found out he was a CEO. She seemed like to type to surf the millionaire matchmaker dating sites late at night.
 

Yet Andrew was responding to her, and it made me feel sick to my stomach to see. Not being able to talk about the dates with the other women, I’d just assumed Andrew had had the same reactions to them as I had. It had been clear from our dates that he was into me, but now I saw that he was acting in the same flirtatious way with all of them.

And Isabella even more than the others.
 

“I really like you,” she told him as they cooked, though she looked terrified of everything in the kitchen.
 

He smiled at her. “I like you too,” he said, moving closer, and then he kissed her on the lips while their sauce boiled and popped behind them on the stove.
 

My chest constricted. He liked her. He was kissing her. The day before our date, he had kissed Isabella, while I was trying to convince myself that I was the only one he was into.
 

This was hard to watch.
 

“So he’s just trying to sleep with as many of these women as possible, right?” Ben said.
 

I tried to hide my hurt. “I guess so,” I mumbled.
 

The producers had inserted another date between mine and Isabella’s, playing with the timeline in a way that I was sure viewers wouldn’t catch. But then it was my turn.