Chapter Eight

Ornette went back to Fen’s every day for the rest of the week. She helped with the fitting by modeling and after she had watched the way his seamstresses worked, she was allowed to help with a few of the stitches at the cuff. It was really nothing. It was just them being nice to her. Fen’s seamstresses were ruthless terrorists. They wouldn’t have let her help with anything but Fen kept her under his arm the whole week, asking her questions and kissing her like he was a teenager and she was his new girlfriend.

One of the seamstresses looked at Ornette from under her unibrow and said in an unusually gruff voice, “I’ve never seen him like this.”

Ornette wanted to laugh. Usually, it was some pretty girl like a hero’s sister or cousin in a romcom saying how he’d been with dozens of women but they never meant anything to him, but now that the heroine had come along, she’d never seen him like this. The seamstress talking had three one-inch hairs coming out of her chin, but she was so good at cutting, it was clear it didn’t matter what she looked like.

They spent a day sizing her for high heels.

They spent a day choosing her jewelry. Fen was quite serious about choosing a piece for her. They were only allowed to put two pieces of jewelry on her so he had decided that they would put a bracelet on her and a pair of earrings. The earrings were long, dangly things that touched her shoulders. The bracelet he decided on was a ridiculous piece of gold beads. Each bead was as fat as two of her fingers, so she thought it was too big for her, but he insisted it was the perfect piece.

Then on the last day, Ornette was sent to a spa where she had a couples’ treatment with Fen.

“Do you know how they matched us up?” she asked him as he had his shoulders massaged.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “It’s by lottery. They didn’t show the first round in the show because they needed to get on with things and they decided it wasn’t worth the screen time. They didn’t even do it with the contestants around. They announced the lottery right before they led you all out. That way they could show the girls who were won alongside the designers who get to work with them for the first event. They did a split screen in post-production. It was aired later that night.”

Ornette didn’t say anything in response to that. She just lay on the table and absorbed the information along with the massage.

“How come you’re not asking me what my first response to seeing you was?” Fen questioned. “Surely, you noticed that I didn’t talk to you after Varner made such a big deal over you.”

Ornette almost snapped her fingers in reply to that. Yes, she should have asked Fen what he thought of her at first sight. She should have asked, but the truth was, she didn’t care. She had to tell him the truth, but she had to tell him the truth in a way that didn’t spoil anything. “If I were to guess, I’d imagine that you were disappointed when you saw me,” she said quietly.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He rolled over and discarded his masseuse. “Why?”

Ornette followed his lead and waved hers away too. “I’m short. You would have been able to see it from the stands.” Then she artfully lowered her eyes. “I wouldn’t have blamed you for being disappointed in me.”

He looked away. What she said was true.

He put his hand out and touched hers. “That was before I knew you. I’m really excited to get to know more about you as we go forward in this competition.”

Ornette rolled onto her side. “When ‘we’ go forward? Unless I’m mistaken, the next phase of the competition will be introducing me to the businessmen. I’ll get assigned to a businessman and he’ll show me what he does for a living. Won’t we be parted then? I’ll spend my days with him instead of with you. We aren’t going forward together.”

Fen sighed. “The episode after this one, they’ll go into elimination rounds.”

“I’ll be eliminated in the second round. You should expect that,” Ornette informed him like it was already a fact.

“Why are you so positive about that?” he asked angrily.

The way he moved made all the muscles in his bare chest ripple and Ornette was reminded who she was dealing with. Her head hurt like she’d already hit the wall.

“There are a lot of really beautiful women in this competition. I’m not the same as them. You’ll see.”

“I’ll see them in a different light after tomorrow. I’m dressing you personally. When I see the other models backstage, I’m sure I’ll see them in a way that not even you can predict.”

“I hope you get me in the end,” Ornette said candidly. In the moment she said it, she really meant it.

“That’s all I wanted to hear.” Fen smiled, patted her hand, and waved for the masseuse to come back.

Ornette got back into position. She couldn’t tell Fen any of the things she really wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him about how she had fourteen owners before she had been purchased this time. She wanted to tell him that her body was thirty-two and her age was forty-three because of the time she’d spent in cryostasis. She wanted to tell him about the design work she had done and about the kinds of owners she’d had. She even wanted to tell him about how her hand had been burned black.

Except, if she did… the bloom would come off the rose in a big way. He was a luxurious person. He had been born rich. He had something to prove about how clever he was and how sexy he could be, but that didn’t stop the fact that he had probably never been forced to do something he didn’t want to do in his whole life.

She didn’t know why, but at that moment forgotten Desmond popped into her mind. He knew all those things without her telling him. He had seen her file and read her history. He had removed her makeup and seen her bare-faced. He even knew all about her black hand and what had happened to her to cause it. It was very black when there wasn’t any makeup on it.

Her hand started trembling. She tucked it under her thigh.

Nothing else interesting happened during their spa day. Fen kissed her when he said goodbye and promised that he would make her look dazzling at the show the next day.

Ornette knew he would.