Page 71 of Hot Summer

She tapped her white trainer against Cas’s, and Cas grinned.

“Great minds.”

There was a Jeep waiting when they walked outside, and Ada waved to the driver as she opened the back door and climbed inside.

“This feels like our first day here,” Ada said, buckling her seat belt. “I was so nervous then.”

“Were you?”

Ada took Cas’s hand as the driver started down the hill, her thumb tracing Cas’s knuckles. “Terrified. Weren’t you?”

“I didn’t feel that nervous,” Cas said. “I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.”

“I bet you spent every possible second studying this show before you arrived,” Ada said, leaning back in her seat. “Party planners love details, don’t they?”

“I—” Oh god. This conversation was uncomfortably close to the truth.

“Cas.” Ada was grinning, her expression absolutely wicked. She clearly thought she was catching Cas out, but Cas wasn’t panicking because she was afraid to admit she was an obsessive Hot Summer consumer.

“I actually watch this show every summer,” Cas said. “It’s unironically one of my favorites.”

“Oh my god.” Ada was smirking with something like victory in her eyes. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’re a superfan.”

“I wouldn’t say that...”

“You’re a superfan,” Ada said. She was grinning, absolutely fucking grinning. “You are obsessed with Hot Summer. That’s why you’re really here.”

“You caught me,” Cas said. Her laugh was tight, but if she noticed, Ada didn’t say anything.

There wasn’t much to look at out the window for the first few minutes they were on the motorway, just red soil and low scrubland, but as the road curved higher up into the white hills, the bright blue sea appeared beyond the cliff’s edge. There weren’t many houses visible from the road, but Cas sometimes caught glimpses of towns by the seaside or on the hills in the distance.

After thirty minutes in the car, they turned off the motorway onto a smaller side road and, five minutes later, a tan gravel drive through a wooden gate with a large hand-painted sign hanging on the beams.

Fruit Orchard

“I knew it!” Ada pressed her hand into Cas’s knee, leaning over her so she could stare out the window. “I knew we were going fruit picking!”

The driver stopped along the edge of the gravel car park and switched off the engine.

“Okay,” the driver said, turning around, “wait here for about thirty seconds. We’ve got a few camerapeople at the edge of the grove”—he pointed out the window to the rows of trees that seemed to stretch out toward the horizon—“and you’ll follow them into the orchard. You can also follow the yellow string they’ve tied at the edges of the trees. There’s a picnic set up there with more instructions.”

“Okay.” Ada ran her free hand over her dress, smoothing it out. “Do they want us to do anything in particular, or...”

“Just walk, laugh, that kind of thing,” the driver said. “They’re going to use it for B-roll.” He unlocked the door and smiled at them in the rearview. “Have a good date, you two.”

Cas climbed out first and Ada took her hand as she stepped out into the car park. Their hands swung easily as they walked, and Cas was glad, as the dust kicked up, that she hadn’t worn sandals today. The gravel gave way fairly quickly to grass, and with the camerapeople leading, Cas and Ada made their way through the orchard.

As much as Cas wanted to take in their surroundings, it was unsettling seeing people behind the cameras again. She had gotten so used to the mix of hidden and not-so-hidden cameras in the villa, that it was easy to forget at some points that they were being filmed. To believe that what they were experiencing was for them alone, not for a team of producers and editors, and then the hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Now, though, walking through the orchard with two guys wearing Steadicams, it was a lot more difficult to ignore the reality of their situation.

“It’s so weird, seeing them. It almost feels like we’re actually on TV,” Ada whispered.

Frankly, the reminder of the cameras was sobering. As much as she’d been choosing to ignore it lately, all of the real reasons why she was here—her contract, Friday, a shiny new job—suddenly it felt overwhelming. It was becoming harder and harder to keep it from Ada.

---