Liz smirked. “As long as you’re not afraid of messing up both our lipstick.”
“That’s actually the one cosmetic I seem not to be wearing right now,” he said, and then—outside the lodge, behind the boulder, he in a tuxedo and she in a lavender bridesmaid dress—their faces met and they kissed at such length that the kiss contained multiple phases, including the one in which they both were smiling, practically laughing, and the one in which she forgot where she was.
When at last they paused, he said, “I guess it would be a violation of our Eligible contracts to go to my room right now.”
They were eyeing each other, silently conferring, as Anne Lee came around the side of the boulder, followed closely by a camera crew. Darcy and Liz instinctively stepped apart.
“You guys, your mics are down,” Anne said in a brisk tone. “We need to fix them.” Already, a sound guy was reaching inside the top of Liz’s dress; he was doing it as professionally as possible, which still didn’t eliminate the weirdness. “Did you disconnect your mics on purpose?” Anne asked.
Liz said, “No,” just as Darcy said, “Yes.”
Anne looked between them. “Why’d you disconnect them?”
“We wanted privacy,” Liz said.
“Are you two involved?” Anne asked.
After another pause, Darcy said, “That hardly seems relevant.”
“I know you are,” Anne said. “I just saw you making out.”
Was she bluffing?
Liz said, “Then I guess that answers your question.”
“How long have you been hooking up?”
Yet again, there was a silence, and with undisguised irritation, Anne said, “Fine. We need you both at the reception right now.”
As they followed the path back to the courtyard, Liz could sense Darcy behind her, and her body quivered with joy. Hate sex, she thought gleefully. Hate sex! Except without the hate!
The reception lasted until well past midnight, and during that time, she and Darcy were frequently near each other and rarely spoke, except to sometimes exchange banal pleasantries. “Are you having a good time?” he asked her at one point, with the utmost politeness, and she replied in kind, “I am. Are you?”
“I am, too,” he said. They danced just once—apparently, Darcy would only slow-dance, and even then he was a bit awkward, neither of which surprised her—and they hardly talked; but she rested her head against his chest, and the solidity of him felt like the promise of their future together.
As the various reception rituals were enacted and filmed, including Liz’s toast (ironically, her distraction seemed to make for a smoother delivery), Liz knew that the Eligible crew was only doing what they were supposed to do, what the Bennet and Bingley families had agreed to allow. But still, Liz was unwilling to grant them access to her new and wondrous romance; she loved Darcy too much to try to prove her love to anyone except him.
INCONCLUSIVE DISCUSSIONS HAD occurred about the circumstances under which the Bennets would watch the Eligible wedding special when it aired, and the likeliest option seemed to be that Ham and Lydia would host dinner and a viewing in their living room. Liz and Darcy were still sharing his Madison Road apartment—she had left New York in February, and they had purchased but not yet moved into a recently renovated loft in downtown’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood—and Liz was frankly wary of watching with her family members. The injuries to their vanity could, she worried, be so extensive as to require triage on her part.
As it turned out, all of the Cincinnati Bennets were caught by surprise when Jane’s first appearance came not on Eligible: Chip & Jane’s Road to the Altar but, rather, two weeks prior to the special’s debut, on Eligible: Fan Favorites’ Reunion. Though Liz had expected to need to avert her eyes as Chip kissed his way through the reunion season, he had thus far paired off only once. And while the heavy petting that had transpired in a hammock between him and Rachelle B. (not to be confused with Rachelle T.) had seemed in every way consensual, the next morning, Chip had with great sorrow told Rachelle B. that his heart was somewhere else. In the next episode, he mentioned Jane by name during a confessional, yet still neither Liz nor any other Bennets were prepared for Jane herself to show up onscreen the following week in the reunion’s penultimate episode.
In the hot tub at the Malibu compound, the contestants were recuperating from a nude obstacle-course competition when a phone rang audibly. A contestant named Lulu sprang from the hot tub and ran inside in her dripping bikini. From a table in the living room of the main house, she lifted the receiver of a black rotary phone that Liz felt confident was a prop; she was nearly certain that, up to that point, there had been no phone anywhere on the compound. “Chip,” Lulu called. “It’s for you!”