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He looked confused, and I leaned up and kissed him. He kissed me back, deeply. I had seen his bare chest every day in the pool, but it was extraordinary up close. I stroked his abs and felt his muscles twitch. He gripped my thigh and kissed me again and again, his hand creeping up higher, until I pushed him away once more.

“I thought you said you wanted to?”

“I do, I just—” The truth was I would have, if we had been on the outside. But I was worried he wanted to sleep with me for a PersonalTask. It happened very rarely, and generally the public were outraged, but it still happened. A couple of years ago, an odious boy named Brian had received a pool table for convincing a girl who was not his bedmate to have sex with him. They had fallen asleep afterward, but he got up in the middle of the night to assemble the pool table.

Ryan pressed his forehead against mine. “I want you,” he said. He did want me, I knew that. I had known it for a while. I wanted him too, and though I kept thinking that the viewers must want me to be with him, there was still a part of me that wasn’t sure. “There’s no door,” I said. “Anyone could walk in.”

He sighed, and kissed my neck lightly, then let me go. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry for jumping on you like that. You’ve been driving me fucking crazy.”

“I have?”

He groaned. “Are you serious? Seeing you in your bikini, day after day, sleeping next to you every night. Christ.” He rubbed his face. “It’s enough to drive any boy crazy.”

We went out of the bathroom, heading downstairs, then toward the kitchen. I saw Sam walk up the stairs.

“Would you make me an iced coffee?” I asked Ryan. “I want to change into my evening clothes.”

“Sure,” he said. I went upstairs slowly, so as not to seem that I was chasing after Sam. He was in the nice bathroom, putting hooks onto the wall for our bath towels. Some of us had been complaining about certain residents throwing their towels on the ground wrinkled and damp. The towels were monogrammed, so it was easy to see who the culprits were, though it didn’t stop anyone from doing it. I watched Sam from the doorless doorway, listening to the measured thud of his hammer against the nail. There was something soothing about it. I would have liked to have watched him for longer, but he glanced up after a few moments. I felt caught, as though I had witnessed something private.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He placed the hammer down on the lip of the bathtub and looked atme.

I had thought that we’d patched things up between us when we killed the ducks together. It only struck me then that it wasn’t necessarily that we were on better terms—only that it had become clear to me how attracted I was to him. Watching him fix the bathroom wasn’t helping matters.

“Builder,” I said.

“What?”

“Were you a builder, before?”

He smiled at me, his brown eyes warm, and I felt that things were well between us again.

“You’ve never tried to guess what my job was,” I said.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t do to get caught up with titles and the like. We’re all equal here, at any rate.”

I wondered if he was right. If Tom wanted Sam to encourage the rest of us to work, was that the formation of some sort of hierarchy?

“Tom wants your help to get everyone back on task,” I said.

He looked surprised. “He asked you to ask me?”

I nodded. He picked one of the towels up from the ground and hung it on a hook. I handed him another towel, my hand briefly brushing against his.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “People are upset about all the banishments. A reprieve might be healthy. These things take their toll, I think.”

“There’s still things we need,” I said, gesturing to the space behind me. I wanted better shampoo, and tea towels, and a lamp for the bedroom, and more food, and more clothes.

“Right,” he sighed.

I didn’t know what Sam had been before coming here, where he lived or what job he had, or what kind of family, but I knew that he was an impressive guy. I think the same things that attracted me to Sam were the things that intimidated Tom: he was strong and smart and capable. Even though I couldn’t really picture Sam outside of the compound, I knew that I wasn’t the kind of person he would be with outside of the show. I wondered, though, if I might be the kind of person that he wouldconsider being with here, even if only for a brief period. I also knew that downstairs there was Ryan, who wanted me, and I knew that we made sense together—we were precisely the sort of couple who I would have paired together if I had been watching. And yet, I was fairly sure that Ryan’s interest began and ended with his physical desire for me. I couldn’t blame him; I felt the same way about him.

“Would you have sex in the compound?” I asked.

He looked up. “What?”