This chapter is going to feel so short after that giant last chapter. But next week we're back in London for the finale! Who's excitedddddd

Also can I just take a moment to say thank you to everyone that has taken time to leave a comment (or multiple comments like omg) on this story? You have no idea how much each and every one of those comments mean to me. I've been in a difficult place with writing over the last few weeks (such is life) and it has really meant a lot to see feedback from you all about something that I've written (especially something that I struggled to write and something that I still, sometimes, struggle to edit). So thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

Enjoy, my friends x

Lily woke early the next morning to the warmth of the sun on her face.

The sun was pouring in through the window, and though there was a bit of noise floating up from the street, Lily knew it had to be early because it was nowhere near as loud as she knew it could be.

She opened her eyes.

James was lying on his side facing her, and though he was on his own pillow, his face was only a few inches from her own. One of his calves was resting on top of hers, and their hands were barely touching on the bed in the space between them.

She'd never seen him look this easy, this comfortable. This bloody adorable.

His long eyelashes looked like they could almost touch his cheek bones, his lips were parted just a touch, and the normally hard lines of his face, his jaw, his cheekbones, were softened in sleep. His hair — half of it smashed underneath his head, the other half flopping up towards the head of the bed — was going to be a complete disaster when he sat up, and Lily felt the smile overwhelm her face.

It was phenomenal, what she felt for him. Staggering.

Even though she knew, in the back of her head, that this wasn't going to be able to continue with them just now, she couldn't carry on pretending that she didn't feel this way when she looked at him. That her heart didn't swell in her chest and make it hard for her to breath in the best possible way.

She knew she should leave, knew they had a full day ahead of them, a day when they'd be thrust back into the reality of their situation and this bubble they'd created for themselves would be swiftly and soundly burst. She knew they couldn't carry on with this, not at the moment, but she was, finally, going to allow herself a few minutes to just revel in the enormity of the things she felt for him.

They were terrifying feelings, if she was honest. And they were terrifying for all sorts of reasons. The main reasons were obvious — she and James were who they were and their situation was what it was and she was so afraid of being able to walk the incredibly thin line she needed to walk to make this work that, more often than not, she ended up toeing the line before turning tail and running in the complete opposite direction. She knew that wasn't fair, showing up and disappearing and going back and forth, but she sometimes wondered if it really would have been fairer to stay, if it would have been fairer to subject him to the constant stress and anxiety and lashing out that her brain would be doing as she attempted to maintain her balance in the totally ham-fisted way her brain always seemed to balance emotional things.

Running away was, she told herself, the kinder option. But she also knew that that was, probably, just what she was telling herself.

Because James would want to hear about all those things going on in her mind, would want to talk about them with her and support her through them, because that was just the kind of person that James was. He was wonderful to a fault — it was one of the things, especially lately, that she'd come to really love about him — and though that understanding started to chip away at the walls she'd built around herself, it didn't dismantle them entirely.

And there was still so much about this, her decisions about their relationship and her job and everything else, that he didn't know. And she could tell him, he would listen, but dragging it all back up — she wasn't ready for that.

Even thinking about going back and remembering it, living it again —

But that, maybe, was where the rest of her terror about James sat. It sat in the fact that she wanted — as much as she ever wanted to sit down and do such things — to talk to him about those things. She wanted, despite all her usual ways of going about life, to tell him about those things that scared her. Those things that she didn't talk about. She wanted to tell him because she wanted him to understand her, she wanted him to know everything he could possibly know about her, and she, in turn, wanted to know everything that she could possibly know about him.

She wanted to know him inside out. She wanted to know what made him tick.

And, for her, getting to know James could be something that she could pass off as an experiment, a human interest type of thing, even though she knew that that absolutely wasn't what it was. But reckoning with just how much she wanted him to have of her… that was something that terrified her in a way that she couldn't even begin to describe.

All she knew was that she wanted it. She wanted him to see her. Understand her. And the immensity of that feeling, the one that made her feel like she didn't want to leave this bed, leave him ever again… it was like nothing she had ever felt before in her entire life.

And while part of her found the newness of that feeling exciting, the reserved, emotionally defunct part of her saw all of that as a reason to pull back.

But she couldn't tell — and the distinction seemed important — if it was James she wanted to pull back from or if it was just the situation they were in.

She suspected she knew which one it was.

She'd been watching him sleep for a few minutes, her own breath synchronising with the slight rise and fall of James' chest, when he shifted his head a bit on the pillow and his eyes opened.

Lily's first inclination was the shut her eyes and pretend she hadn't been watching him, but James smiled the moment his eyes found hers and she knew she'd already been caught.

James hummed and let his eyes fall closed again as he reached his arm out and wrapped it around her waist. He slid towards her, buried his face in her neck, and whispered, 'Good morning,' into her skin.

Lily shivered and pressed closer to him, reached up and wound her fingers through the hair at the base of his neck. She felt him, a little hard, against her stomach, and she breathed a soft chuckle into his hair. 'Good morning.'

James huffed and tightened his hold on her waist. 'Don't make fun of me. I can't help it.'

Lily leaned her head back and pressed a kiss to his cheek, then another to the corner of his mouth. 'I'm not making fun of you.'

James curled back into her and pressed his nose into her neck. 'Now you're lying to me.'

She laughed then, her laughter shaking both of them, and she felt James smile. He spread his hand out over her back, started trailing his fingers lightly over her skin.

She could lay there like that forever. But now that he was awake and they were talking and she could see the look in his eyes….

She wasn't regretting it — she couldn't, wouldn't regret it — but she was starting to think that perhaps a bit of distance — especially because today was going to be —

'I should get going.' Lily slid her leg from between James' and moved her arm so it was resting between them again. 'I shouldn't've even stayed over — what if someone had come by?'

James' fingers flexed against her back and he slid his calf back over hers. 'You're the only one that stops by.'

She knew he was right, but, now that she'd let it in, given it voice, she couldn't help the anxiety starting to creep up into her throat.

'Benjy —'

'Knows about us,' James said. He pulled back so he could look at her and frowned at the look on her face. 'Stay.'

She sighed, but, and she was sure that James noticed, she didn't pull away. 'James —'

'Stay. Please. Evans —' He moved his hand from her hip, cupped her cheek, and wove his fingers through her hair.

And that alone —

That alone told her all she needed to know just now. She could feel the anxiety easing out of her, like the brush of his fingers against her skin was literally drawing it out of her, and the tension starting building immediately in her stomach.

She was sure that the anxiety was still there in the back of her mind, but she couldn't hear it, couldn't feel it clawing at her throat. Right now, all she could think about was his hands in her hair and his words against her skin.

She wound her legs tighter through his, pulled herself across the mattress until she was pressed up against him again. His hand moved from her hair to her back again, and the feeling of his fingers pressing into her skin —

She felt electric.

He leaned forward, pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat. She hummed and pulled him closer.

'Lily,' he ran his tongue up the column of her neck, kissed the shell of her ear, 'I don't want you to leave. I don't ever want you to leave.'

She wasn't even interested in leaving anymore — she knew James knew it, too, because he was now brushing his lips lightly underneath her ear and, with every pass of his lips, she was pressing herself closer to him — but she needed to at least make one last attempt at something resembling an interest in their schedule for the day.

'The shoot —'

'Is in a few hours. What else do we have to be doing until then? Hmm?' He pressed his lips to her pulse point.

She pulled back then, just a touch, just far enough that she could look him in the eye.

'I guess you're right.'

James barely had time to smile before she kissed him.

She could still feel the nerves lurking on the edges of her consciousness the rest of the time they were in Paris — like she was waiting for Peter to burst into her hotel room and tell her she was fired or for Liza to point at her while she was following James around on their date that afternoon and say that she knew she and James had fucked the night before — but, overwhelmingly, Lily found herself worrying far more about what her relationship with James was now that they'd finally cleared a few hurdles and she'd allowed herself to relax into her feelings a little bit.

Maybe they hadn't talked about any of the emotional things, but there had to be something to be said for clearing the physical ones. And she'd certainly done more thinking on the emotional front than she had done before.

It was a dangerous line of thinking, the idea that physical change between them meant anything overly significant, and she knew it, but she couldn't help indulging in it, especially when James snuck glances at her whenever he had a spare moment. The moments were fewer and further between now that he was on one-on-one dates with the finalists, but he still found them.

It only made Lily feel a little guilty every time.

The trouble with small amounts, though, is that they tend to add up.

By Sunday night, ceremony night, the guilt pressing on Lily's chest was almost too much to bear. She'd spent the last three days watching Liza and Summer and Claire look at James like he was the goddamn sun in the sky. They laughed at his jokes, found excuses to touch him — they beamed whenever he was around and Lily knew what that felt like. She knew the way that James got under your skin, knew how he made you feel warm and light and happy and like nothing else in the world mattered. She knew how that felt and watching them, the contestants, feel it?

On top of her own all-consuming guilt, Lily also found herself, still, quietly obsessing over the way that James acted when he was with the other women.

The way he leaned in when they kissed him. The way his hands found theirs easily as they walked. The way he laughed with them.

She was sure that the contestants were going through something similar — this obsessive concern about where they stood and what their relationship was and how it compared to the relationship James had with the others — but the trouble was that Lily wasn't supposed to be having any of these issues.

She wasn't supposed to be part of this. Wasn't supposed to care. And, while she was busy worrying about everyone else, they didn't know that they had to worry about her.

She did her best to bury everything, to smile at James like everything was alright, to sneak soft, quick kisses when she dropped him off at his room at night, but she didn't stay after that first night and she didn't make any extra effort to be alone.

If James sensed that she was starting to go distant again, he didn't say anything. And thank god, because half of Lily was already too busy shouting at herself for pulling back just when they'd managed to solve a few things and how could she honestly continue to be this fucking stupid? Was she really so stunted that she couldn't have an honest, open conversation with him about things? After all they'd been through? After all she'd already put him through?

But really, other than having had sex now (and having let herself admit a few things to herself that she still hadn't dared voice aloud), had they really changed the situation that they were in? Was there really anything to be gained from having another conversation where Lily basically said "you signed a contract please just carry on we have one more week left" and James got grumpy and distant again? But did she even have the right to decide what was to be gained and what wasn't? Did it even matter? Didn't she owe him this fucking conversation anyway, no matter what might happen?

She was already piling on herself so much in her own head. She didn't need to add James to that equation, too.

The ceremony that night was set on the rooftop bar and lounge on top of their hotel, so Lily waited until the absolute last minute before she left her hotel room and walked down the hall to go get James.

He was fiddling nervously with his cufflinks when she walked in.

'You ready?' She smiled and hoped that she didn't sound as stiff as she thought she did.

James shook his head. 'I want to talk to you first.'

She pulled in a sharp breath. 'James, we — we really don't have time to talk, we're due to be upstairs in —'

'Please, Lily,' he crossed the room and, when she didn't move away, put his hands on her hips, 'this'll just take a second. I promise.'

Lily couldn't think of anything to say, so she just nodded.

James took a deep breath and his fingers twitched on her hips.

'Is it —' he swallowed hard and Lily's heart started hammering anxiously in her chest. 'Is it too late? To back out? I — I know we've talked about this before, but Lily, I — I love —'

Lily shook her head at him and James fell immediately silent.

He —

Oh god.

He couldn't.

Not like this. There was no way that he — he couldn't.

'James,' Lily took a slow step back and James' hands fell from her hips. 'Yeah, it's too late. It was too late nine weeks ago when we started shooting. I — we've been over this —'

'I know.' James stepped back and started pacing slowly in front of her. 'I know. But I thought — the other night — I don't know what I thought.'

He raked a hand through his hair and was quiet for a minute, the soft scuff of his dress shoes against the carpet the only sound in the room.

'I thought,' he said, turning to face her, 'that maybe something between us might have finally changed. That maybe you'd realised that I mean it when I say that I can't go through with this. That what I feel for you… it's… Lily, it's —'

He looked down at his shoes and Lily had never hated herself more than she did in that moment.

She was doing this to him. She was taking his heart in her hands and she was fucking breaking it.

'What Benjy said the other day,' she was grasping at straws and she knew it, but she needed to give him something because she couldn't keep looking at him like that. 'Why don't you do that?'

James quirked an eyebrow at her. 'What did Benjy say?'

'To just pick someone at the end and then break up off camera. Would that be so terrible? These relationships almost never work out anyway — look at last year's Eligible bachelor. Look at the American show!'

'I — Lily, I don't want to get someone's hopes up. I don't want them thinking that I'm going to give our relationship a fair shot and them immediately turn round and say, "thanks for this, love, but I'm actually going to go be with my producer, now".'

'I just don't see what other choice we have.'

James looked at her for a long moment and Lily saw something like resolve settle in his eyes. 'What would you do if I went up to Peter's office right now and told him I was out?'

Lily's heart stopped.

'You better not.' Her tone was cold and hard, but James crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows at her, clearly bracing himself for the inevitable fight.

'Why not?'

Lily pressed her lips together to keep from snapping at him, took a deep, slow breath. Shouting at him was not going to get him to so what she wanted — it was only going to piss him off and send him off to do god knows what and get them both into trouble.

She wasn't a producer for nothing, though.

'James,' she softened her voice even more than she normally would have because she was still so angry that she was sure he would hear it in her tone. 'There are three women upstairs who are falling in love with you. And you can't just pull the rug out from under them like that. They'll be crushed. And that's not the kind of guy you are — we both know that.'

She felt sick and more than a little dirty for doing it, but sometimes, you needed to do what you needed to do to get your star on set.

James groaned and buried his hands in his hair.

'That's,' his hands fell heavily by his sides, 'Lily, that's not fair.'

She shook her head. 'None of this is fair, James. But it is what it is.'

His eyes were hard when he looked back up at her and, though Lily wanted to take it back, to apologise, to find a way out together, she pushed down the impulse.

'Are you ready?' she asked instead.

It took him a moment but, finally, he nodded slowly before he turned on his heel and strode towards the door.

See you next Sunday xx