Walk of Shame (31 page)

I spent Sunday morning pacing. I
paced in my bedroom. I paced from the dining area to the kitchen. I got into
the pool and swam lap after lap, in yet another form of pacing. I drove Goldie
crazy. She finally started barking at me and wouldn't quit until I stopped to
look at her. "What?" I asked with more impatience than she deserved.

She picked up a nearby tennis
ball and tossed it out in front of her with her mouth, then used her nose to
nudge it forward.

I climbed out of the pool, put on
my cover-up, picked up the ball, and walked around the house to the backyard. I
proceeded to throw the ball and then I paced while she fetched and brought it
back to me, over and over again.

My afternoon looked pretty much
the same, except I paced around the island in my kitchen, eating a sandwich.

Evening rolled around quicker
than I was ready for it. I wondered off-lot with Goldie and wound up sitting on
the beach, staring off into the horizon. Night fell, and Troy came to fetch me
so I could get ready, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.

A jewelry box was delivered to
the house for Stephen. All five guys were present as he opened it on camera.
Inside was a simple, braided, red-stringed bracelet. Stephen grinned as he put
on the anticipated display of red. The guys looked around for another box or
two, but found none.

Four nervous guys stood on risers
around a grinning Stephen as Troy introduced me and called me in. I was
shaking. Troy took my hand, felt my trembling, and frowned.

"Are you okay?" Troy
asked as he maneuvered me around to my mark.

I forced a smile and nodded. I
looked up at the guys and found five sets of intense eyes staring back at me.

After his typical speech, Troy's
eyes bounced from me, to one camera, to another camera, to the show's director,
and back to me. "Whenever you're ready, princess."

I closed my eyes and tried to
take a calming breath. I blew it out slowly and opened my eyes as Troy stepped
back. "Stephen."

His smile returned and he moved
to pick a spot on the line across from all the cameras.

"Mike."

He flashed a smile before he
dropped it and the concerned expression returned by the time he'd taken a spot
on the line.

"Jared."

A gentle smile and a nod in my
direction before he moved to the line.

My trembling got so bad that it
became visible, and I was wearing a silver, sequined gown. The light bouncing
off the dress was wreaking havoc with the cameras, so they panned over to Liam
and Phillip on the risers.

I'm going to throw up.
My
breaths started coming quicker. My head swam for a second or two. Then I turned
panicked eyes on Troy.

"Do you want to change your
mind and have one of the guys step back onto the risers?" Troy asked.

I shook my head.

He took a few steps forward.
"You don't know who to send home, do you?" he whispered.

Again, I shook my head.

He smiled and winked. "So,
break the rules."

I looked at him in confusion.

"It's our job to make sure
you go home with the right guy at the end of this. What do you need in order to
make sure that happens?"

I smiled as I finally got it.
It's something that had crossed my mind before, but not something I actually
thought of as a viable option. I turned back to the guys with more relief than
I'd felt all week. "Liam and Phillip," I declared.

They looked at each other and
then back at me.

"I'm keeping you both,"
I told them. "I'm not sending anybody home this week."

Troy had to gesture at them to
move over to the line, hoping that it would be edited out before airing.

"I'm sorry, I am," I
told the five guys. "I'm scared. I don't want to mess this up and you guys
are all so great. You have ideas and plans as to how we can combine our lives
and manage kids with our lifestyle. I like the way you guys work, I like the
way you think. And I'm stuck. I'm overwhelmed by how great you all are. I keep
looking for duds and I don't think there are any more. I know I can only have
one. But right now, I'm scared that I'm so overwhelmed that I'll camp out on
one fault and ditch the wrong guy based on it. I don't know what else to do
except keep you all around for another week and keep trying to sort it
out."

"Unless, of course,"
Troy stepped forward and said, "one of you would like to call it quits and
decline the invitations to stay."

The guys all looked at each
other, but stood their ground.

"Looks like they all like
you, princess."

I smiled. "I don't know if
that makes me feel better because my desire to keep them around is returned, or
worse because the pressure is still all on me."

"Oh, sweetheart, America
will not feel sorry for you because you're surrounded by too many great guys."

I laughed because I knew that if
I were watching someone else going through this, I'd be rolling my eyes,
thinking that she couldn't possibly be this clueless. Except, I was. I didn't
have the luxury of being on the outside looking in on this one. I was smack dab
in the thick of it, and didn't have the advantage of hearing all the interviews
and seeing all the footage.

Troy gave his traditional end of
the episode speech, threw in a little comment about next week being even more
exciting as we find out whom I finally decide to send home, and then grabbed my
arm and pulled me into the interview room.

"Production will be fine
with this," he said as he sat me down. "You just bought them another
week to put back in their schedule."

I just looked at him, dumbstruck
as to what he might want from me.

"All right," he said
and took a seat opposite me. "Go ahead and run down their big selling
points to me, one by one."

"Stephen was never given a
fair chance simply because he's a rule follower. He never really exerted
himself in making an impression because he was content to let me get around to
him. On the one-on-one date, he proved himself. I had such a good time that I
couldn't justify sending him home until I got to know him a bit more.

"Jared has the best plan for
having a family, he's put a lot of thought into it, and he's serious. I can
tell he's totally ready for marriage and a family. And while he has a certain
amount of roots, I like the idea of a family business to be somehow involved
in. I'm not too keen on the swamp, but he's so great, it makes me want to go
give it a shot.

"Mike is Mike. I know he and
I can get along on a day-to-day basis. I confide in him more than anyone else.
He has a plan for our future, as well. And I still come back to the fact that I
like the places his job will take me. I just like everything about him.

"Liam is confident, solid,
and surprising. He's a man's man, and yet romantic at the same time. I'm
telling you, the man belongs in a soap opera. He's that yummy. There's just
something about him. I'm smitten and intrigued by him.

"And Phillip is so damn
mature and thoughtful, very cerebral. His plan for our future allows our lives
to just sort of slide together. It sounds like he would be the easiest scenario
for our careers to continue as they always have, and that counts for a lot.
He's always so serious all the time, but then he does something like pour
bubbles into the hot tub and ends up creating a memory that I'll carry for the
rest of my life."

"Wow," Troy said when I'd
finally shut up. "You just rattled all that off the top of your
head."

"I didn't freeze up tonight
because I hadn't taken this seriously enough. I've done nothing but think about
this every moment I wasn't focused on spending time with one of them. All that
these one-on-ones did for me this week was reinforce how great and good all
these guys are. There's seriously not a stinker in the bunch."

"You're going to have to
come up with someplace to go this week. We're not travelling around to five
different families. There isn't enough time. So is there a city or another area
you'd like to visit? Unless, of course, you can think of more stuff to do
around here."

Troy sat patiently for a few
moments while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with this seemingly
stolen time. Finally, an idea struck and I looked up at him with a smile.

I'd kept the guys up late Sunday
night. I'd taken them down the beach for a bonfire. Each of them had pulled me
aside to let me know they weren't upset that I'd just delivered a shocker and
that they each were all glad to live to fight another day.

I didn't climb out of bed early,
no one came looking for a workout, and Troy and his makeup artist left me alone
until ten.

By eleven, I was in the kitchen
of the main house, waiting for the guys to assemble.

"All right, Princess
Emmaline," Phillip said. "What's the plan for the week?"

"Our traditional day off has
been cancelled. Everyone now has three hours to pack up your stuff and prep
your rigs to head out. We're going to drive to Fishlake National Forest, Utah,
and boondock it for the night, then hit the road again to Placid Lake State
Park in Montana. We'll setup and hook up there for the week. We'll be camped on
the lake, surrounded by woods, with mountains in the distance. It's my favorite
kind of place to park it for writing."

"And we all get to spend the
nights in our own rig?" Liam asked.

I smiled. "Yes. The days of
you all having to live with each other are over, so you all can relax a bit. Hang
out with each other all you want, but then separate away from each other and go
home. I'm not going to drag out the forced pleasantries required for all of you
to share both a house and a girl any longer. I'm told it ain't easy. So,
everyone up and at 'em!"

I left them to rush around and
pack, in order to return to the house and pack up my own stuff. Except, when I
got back to the cottage, people were there, packing up my stuff for me, in
order to move me out.

I ran into the office and
snatched the envelope Troy had written his guess down on, folded it, and
stuffed it in my pocket.

"Em," Troy called out
to me from the living room.

"Yeah?"

"The guys have to pack and
drive themselves. But you, as you can see, are the princess, and we'll pack for
you and have someone prep the rig and drive your truck up there."

"What's the catch?"

He smiled. "I have an RV and
a driver for the next week. Which means that you and I are free to sit at the
table and interview our brains out the whole way there."

I rolled my eyes. "Wonderful."

"Oh, yeah. Big time fun.
We're going to go back to the beginning of the season. I'll show you clips and
get your current reactions to them, looking back in retrospect. We'll work our
way up to now and get your thoughts about the upcoming week at the lake."

"I think maybe I'd rather do
the seventeen-hour drive."

"I'd just follow you into
the cab and interview you from the passenger seat. And show you the clips
during red lights and traffic jams."

My eyes rolled again, behind
closed eyelids, as I shook my head at my life. "So what am I supposed to
do for the next two hours and forty minutes?"

"Whatever you want, just
don't wreck your clothes or makeup."

I went out to my rig, calling for
Goldie to follow behind me. My thought was to start putting stuff back in its
place once they started bringing boxes out to me. But rather than pace while I
waited for them, I pulled out my phone and dialed Chloe.

I explained the situation and new
plan to her and reiterated my dilemma in trying to pick a guy to send home.

"That's it," she said. "I'm
booking a flight. Tell someone to pick me up from whatever airport is closest
to the state park."

I laughed at her. "You think
you can come out and pick my guy for me? What about Ardent?"

"Ardent's cool. Maybe I'll
go visit him after I filter through your guys for you."

"Are you seriously
coming?"

"Do you want me to?"

"Can you actually help me
figure this out?"

"Even if I can't, you won't
be any worse off than you already are."

"All right."

"All right, as in
come?"

"Please?"

She laughed in my ear. "Do
you see how I did that? You never thought to ask me to come out and help you. I
brought it up and the next thing you know, I get you to say please."

I snorted. "Only because
I've realized how desperate I am."

"Text production for me,
will you?"

"Yep. See you in a day or
two."

"I'll be there."

We hung up and I waited until
Troy came down to get me before saying anything about Chloe meeting us up there,
knowing that she'd need a few hours to pack, figure out how long she could
stay, and call her part-time job. I started putting stuff away as the boxes
came in. It was good to be back in my own place, surrounded by the familiar
that I had established for myself. Troy led me over to the other RV after I'd told
him and he'd nodded. Then he spent a few minutes going back and forth with
texts.

"She'll be on the first
flight out in the morning. She'll get there before we do," Troy told me. "Come
on. Grab a drink and get comfortable. We're pulling out in ten minutes."

I looked down at the table and
booth and sighed.

Many, many boring hours of
interviews later, we pulled into a parking lot while members of production went
into the park office to ask where, specifically, they wanted us all to park for
the night.

The manager came out to get a
look at exactly how many rigs we had. He'd thought it was just six, one for me
and each of the five guys. When he realized that Troy had one and production
had packed up another half-dozen, he almost threw a temper tantrum.

He went on to claim that with
that many rigs, there wasn't enough space to boondock them all. We'd have to
occupy two spots with hookups for water, sewer, and electric. And while we
didn't have to use the utilities if we didn't want to, we'd still have to pay the
standard rates for the spots anyway.

Troy and I just looked at each
other. He crooked an eyebrow and I nodded. Then he went off and claimed that I,
as the chosen one, and he, as the host who still had to interview the guys
about their drive up here, should have the hookup sites.

The guy from production, who'd
driven my rig this far, tried to back my fifth wheel into the spot and darned
near tore my retracted awning off.

I ran up to my truck and banged
on the driver-side door to get the guy to hit the brakes. He opened the window
and I stepped up on the runners, putting myself about eye-level with him.
"Put the truck in park," I said through gritted teeth.

With a wary look, he put it in
park.

"Get out of my truck,"
I said, and stepped down and away from the door.

"I can do it," he
protested.

"My truck. Get out.
Now."

Troy came to stand behind me and
gestured for the guy to get out. The other guys were beginning to gather,
having already easily parked their vehicles for the night.

He left, mumbling to himself the
whole way, never bothering to stop and see how he had my awning jammed up into
branches.

"If you just pull straight
forward," Liam said from the rear of the rig, where he'd gone to take a
look at the situation, "you won't do any damage."

I gave him a curt nod, trying to
cover my anger, and started for the rig.

Jared stepped forward into my
path and held out his hand. "I can park it for you, if you want."

"Thank you, but I don't
want," I answered as I went around him and climbed into my truck.

Stephen stepped out front and
tried to start directing me.

I leaned out the window and
called out to them all. "Do you all see the look on my face?"

They stepped closer, smiling and
nodding.

"When you see this
particular look, just keep quiet and get out of my way. I have zero patience
left right now and there's no reason for any of you to step into it. Don't try
to fix it, just let me do it." With that, I put the window back up before
any of them could respond or question me.
Just let me park the damn thing
and make sure it's okay.

I pulled straight out of the
spot, lined it up, put it in reverse, and parked it. Then I got out, climbed up
the ladder on the back of the fifth wheel and checked for scratches.

"Is it okay?" Troy
called up.

"Has my head exploded
yet?" I called back down to him.

"Not yet."

"Then that means I haven't
found any marks."

"You know," Troy said
with a wry tone as all the guys looked on, "if you're looking to thin the
herd, letting them see you like this is one way to do it."

I leveled a look down on him.
"Anyone who drives their rig like that, when they do this full-time, is
someone I don't want anyway. Let me go ram a tree into that guy's house and let's
see how well he takes it. I've looked at these guy's rigs, they have some wear
and tear on them, but not negligence, or they would have been long gone."

My guys started chuckling and
smiling.

I turned to the group of them.
"You all get it, don't you?"

They nodded and gave me
affirmations that made Troy shake his head. People who didn't do this fulltime
normally just didn't get it.

After we were all settled into
the spots, the guys started a campfire in between Troy's rig and mine. I was
told my rig had been supplied with food and drink. I opened my fridge and
pulled stuff out to feed all the guys dinner. Then I opened the window looking
out onto the group and pushed the screen aside. "Head's up!" I called
out and started throwing packages of hot dogs, buns, and condiments out the
window for the guys to catch.

They laughed at me as the cameraman
then followed me outside to open up my outdoor kitchen. The makings for s'mores
were tucked beside the small fridge that now held drinks for us.

We spent the
evening cooking over the campfire, joking, and trading stories of our journey
together so far. They launched into a game of trying to one-up and embarrass
each other in front of me. And I laughed my butt off at the tall tales they
told.