Runaway Groom (I Do, I Don't 2)

The knock at the door is louder this time. “Twenty-one, you ready?”

Twenty-one. My life has come to this—being known as a number. I’m surprised they don’t tag my ear.

I take a deep breath. “I’ve gotta go, Mom.”

“Okay, call me after!”

“I can’t,” I remind her. “Per the contract, we’re not allowed outside phone calls once we meet Barrett and the show kicks off.”

My mom squeals. “My little girl is meeting Gage Barrett!”

I roll my eyes. “Did you hear the part where I won’t be able to call you until I get eliminated?”

“Oh, honey, then I’m certain I won’t hear from you for months. You’re sure to…enthrall him.”

“Goodbye, Mom,” I say with a smile.

I hang up the phone. Enthrall him, my ass. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back in San Diego by tonight.

Gage

“So…” I pause for a second, waiting for one of the assistant producers to hold up the cue card with the contestant’s name. “Samantha. It’s nice to meet you.”

That’s a harmless beginning, right? Nice to meet you can’t possibly blow up in my face like the greeting with the last one did. I complimented her dress, she said thank you—and then she started to take off the dress, assuring me that what was beneath was better than the dress itself.

While the cameras were rolling.

She’d been escorted (dragged) aside, and I’d scrapped Nice dress from my list of platitudes.

So here we are with Nice to meet you, and…it’s not going well.

Instead of uttering the usual Nice to meet you too, Samantha is still laughing, a bray of staccato laughter that’s so manic, I’m wondering if she needs medication.

I catch the eye of the Jilted host, who motions for me to keep going. Of course. The show must go on, the weirder the better.

I smile patiently at the petite brunette. She’d be pretty if her blue eyes weren’t glazed with crazy.

I proceed as though she answered my first question, and try for another one. “Why are you here?”

I’ve been encouraged to be “spontaneous” with my questions, but Why are you here? is nonnegotiable—I’ve been instructed to ask that of every woman. Apparently viewers want a chance to search out “ulterior motives.” Although I confess to being a bit baffled as to what non-ulterior motives would be—what sort of woman wants to marry a man who’s dating twenty-four other women simultaneously?

I take another sip of my cocktail. They’ve told me to pace myself, but that started to get hard when contestant number six told me (and the rest of America) that her hobbies include Brazilian waxes and flossing, and so help me God, I don’t even know if she was talking about her teeth.

I’ve earned this drink. And the next one.

Sabrina?—no, Samantha—has yet to say a single word. She’s still giggling.

“I’m really good at fighting,” she blurts out eventually.

Um, what?

I say exactly that. “Um, what?”

She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear and wriggles to the edge of her seat. “I have four sisters, and I’m in the middle. We had to share two bedrooms among the five of us, so I learned real fast how to fight for what I want, and I already know I want you. Those other girls should watch their backs.”

I don’t really know how to express what I’m thinking right now with anything other than Holy shit. It just got all Fight Club in here.

Raven frantically waves her arm, signaling time. Each of these women gets only two minutes to make their case to me and America, and as far as Samantha goes, it was about one minute and forty seconds too long.