Page 112 of Unscripted

“I’m going to just pop out and see what our timing is,” he said, standing up and pulling the door open.

Callum’s dressing room door must have been opened as well because when Harry stepped out into hallway, leaving my door swung wide open, I heard a loud, booming laugh come from next door.

A laugh that I knew. A laugh that I had laughed along with many times until very recently.

Hearing Callum laugh in such a carefree way flipped something inside of me.

Suddenly, everything I had been holding back, every emotion and feeling I had been repressing for the last two days because of him, rose to the surface.

I stood up, walked out of my dressing room, and straight into his.

He was sitting there, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, laughing with Ben.

I stopped a few feet inside and waited until he looked up at me.

“We need to talk,” I said.

Ben immediately got the hint and walked out without questioning me or Callum, closing the door behind him.

For the first time in three days, we were alone.

He started, “Poppy, let’s just—”

But I cut him off.

“No. We’re not going to just get through another interview. We need to talk about what happened.”

“What happened?” he said, a spark lighting somewhere in him.

Good, it was better than the cold indifference he had reverted to.

He stood up as he continued. “What happened was the second your ex was back in the picture, you went running back to him. Was it some kind of a game you were playing? Have a bit of fun with me, win some money, and then go back home to him when it was all over?”

“Of course not! He came here. He kissed me.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“I did! I don’t want him. It was all just bad timing.”

He was shaking his head, but I pressed on. “Yes, it was a shock to see him after all these months, and I know what it looked like. But it meant nothing. He means nothing.”

Callum was staring down at me, and for a moment I thought maybe it was about to all work out. That his tense features would relax into a smile, and he would tell me everything was okay, that he knew it was all one big misunderstanding. It was a scenario I had been hoping would happen for the past few days: that the ice would eventually thaw and we would be okay.

“I can’t do this,” he said instead.

Something cold and tight snapped in my chest.

“You don’t mean that,” I said, tears prickling the corners of my eyes.

Our conversation was escalating to a place I didn’t know how to come back from, and I needed to right its course.

He couldn’t be ending it. This couldn’t be it for us.

Callum seemingly felt the opposite.

“This whole thing was a mistake, Poppy. Coming on the show, making the deal with you, pretending to be together.”

I realized then, with sickening clarity, that I was too late. That the conversation was always going to end this way. That he had already made up his mind about us well before I walked into his dressing room.