The One Read online

  Table of Contents

  The One

  Copyright

  The One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Julian’s Journal Entry

  Zoe’s Journal Entry

  Unaired Finale Footage

  The One Playlist

  Danielle Allen

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Danielle Allen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, pirating, or by an information storage and retrieval system - except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or - without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editor/Proofreader: Script Easer Editing/Shawna Gavas

  Cover Design: Cover Me Darling (www.covermedarling.com)

  Cover Photo Credit: Shutterstock

  Formatting: CP Smith

  The One

  The cattiness.

  The fights.

  The shaming.

  I don’t generally watch reality television, but I definitely don’t watch reality dating shows. Besides the fact that it’s completely staged, it’s a horrible depiction of people—women especially.

  Women are pitted against each other to compete for the affection of a man they “fall in love” with after a week or two.

  I call B.S.

  It is complete crap.

  So when my best friend, Koko, was hired as a makeup artist on the set of the most popular reality dating show, The One, I teased her mercilessly.

  She told me that if I didn’t stop teasing her, she would get me back.

  And she did…

  Which is how I ended up as a contestant on The One.

  Chapter 1

  “What?” I screeched aloud in the empty room.

  I reread the congratulatory letter stapled to the top of the confidentiality agreement and other contractual forms to be a contestant on The One. “This has got to be a joke. This has something to do with Koko.”

  Although I didn’t let my best friend forget that she was working for a television program that set women back decades, I was so proud of Koko for following her dreams and landing a big time job on a network TV show.

  But what does that have to do with me?

  Putting my law degree to work, I carefully read each document addressed to me, starting with the one welcoming me to join the “most popular dating show on TV.” With each line I read, I became uncomfortable.

  This almost looks real.

  When I finished, I tossed the stack of papers on the wooden coffee table and picked up my cell phone. Standing in the center of the rustic living room of my parents’ Virginia home, I tapped my bare foot against the cold hardwood floor as I pushed the call button. With a hand propped on my hip, I waited for my call to be answered.

  I glanced at the clock hanging over the crackling fireplace, calculating the time difference between Virginia and California. It’s only four o’clock over there so she should be—

  “Zoe!” My best friend’s light airy voice chirped as she answered the phone. “Oh my God!”

  “Kumiko Liane Green,” I barked her full name, walking toward my childhood bedroom and closing the door behind me. I flipped on the light and the oceanic blue walls lit up. “This bullshit has your name written all over it.”

  The gasping sound of her laughter was infectious as my suspicions were confirmed.

  “You ass!” I exclaimed, my smile taking the bite out of my words.

  Koko laughed harder.

  “This is not funny,” I argued, stifling my own amusement. “I don’t even watch reality TV so as soon as I saw The One in the first line of the letter, I knew your ass had something to do with it!”

  My mass of curly hair flopped around my shoulders with each shake of my head.

  “Two months after you are attached to the show, I get this mysterious paperwork in the mail. Tsk tsk. Your pranks are usually a little more elaborate. You have to step your game up, my friend. You’re slipping,” I teased.

  She scoffed, her light voice cackled like an evil villain in a cartoon. “Remember when I first got the offer letter to work with Julia Jones on The One and you kept giving me shit?”

  I smiled even though my eyes narrowed suspiciously. Standing by my desk, I let my fingers slide across the old leather bound book of poems by Pablo Neruda that I took everywhere.

  “Yes,” I replied slowly, before making a beeline to the oversized reading chair in the corner of the room. I tucked my legs underneath me as I got comfortable in the chair. “When my best friend gets hired to work with the Makeup Guru, we celebrate. Even if she’ll be working with her on a show that highlights the death of the feminist movement.”

  We both chuckled.

  “Do you remember how wasted we were when we celebrated?” Koko asked.

  “We?” I laughed, shaking my head at the memory. “Do you remember that night at all? You were the one who got drunk.”

  “I was so drunk,” she giggled again. “But do you remember how I kept saying that I was going to get you back once I was sober again?”

  “Mm-hm. And the next day you told Ethan that I wanted to hook up with him.”

  “No…” She stretched the word out longer than necessary. “Well, yes, I did do that. But that wasn’t to get you back; that was a favor. You need to keep Ethan interested and on your radar. He’s a catch!”

  I closed my eyes and groaned. “When are you going to let that go? Ethan is my boss and we are just friends.”

  Ignoring my protests, she continued, “So anyway, that was a favor, not retaliation. You’re welcome.”

  “Ugh,” I grunted in exasperation, throwing my arm up and kicking my legs out. “When I get back to Los Angeles, I’m going to fight you.”

  “So as I was saying, I knew exactly how to get you back for saying that I would be painting the faces of—.”

  “Of women who possibly have Stockholm Syndrome,” I interrupted, finishing the statement with thinly veiled amusement. Unable to hold back, my head tilted upward and a deep belly laugh erupted out of me. “That was funny. I crack myself up.”

  “It’s still funny… which is why I had to come up with the perfect way to get you back.”

  I stared at my black tipped fingernails, focusing on a small chip I hadn’t seen earlier. “Faking this letter and this paperwork is pretty good,” I admitted begrudgingly.

  “Wait, I haven’t even told you the best part,” Koko insisted between giggles.

  “The best part? The best part was how good of a job you did with the legal jargon. Maybe you should’ve attended law school with me.”

  The line went silent as my words hung in the air.

  Shit. Here it comes.

  “Well…now that you brought it up, are you ready to talk about the bar yet?” Koko’s tone shifted abruptly
from flighty to serious, catching me off guard.

  She wasn’t talking about Breakers Bar, the bar in which I worked. She was talking about the California State Bar Exam, the exam in which I skipped.

  I frowned, shaking my head even though she couldn’t see me. “Nope.”

  Koko made a grumbling noise from the back of her throat. But it wasn’t a judgmental noise. It was the noise she often made when she was struggling to hold her tongue.

  I exhaled nosily in defeat as I slumped deeper into the chair. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate her concern, because I did.

  “I just couldn’t do it. It’s—it’s hard to explain.” I lowered my voice so my mother couldn’t hear me if she was walking around. “My mom is here and I haven’t told my parents yet. But as soon as I get to the airport, I’ll spill.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear. But you mentioned something about the best part?”

  “Oh yes!” Her voice cracked before she broke into her gasping giggles. “The best part is that it’s real!”

  I felt my brows crease in confusion as a smile pulled at the corner of my lips. “What? I can barely understand you.”

  No matter what, the loud gasping screeches of Koko’s laugh amused me without fail.

  Okay. I pulled the phone from my ear with a rueful smile. It’s a decent prank, but it’s not that funny. I shook my head.

  “Hello?” I called out, hoping to get her back on track. “What are you talking about?” My stomach plummeted when the realization hit me. “Did you steal this from work? Kumiko! I know I gave you shit about it, but this really is a great opportunity for your career. Don’t get fired over this.”

  For whatever reason, my warning just made her gasps turn into a wheezing, choking sound.

  I rolled my eyes, trying not to be amused by her. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. “Koko.”

  “No, I didn’t steal it. The letter is real!” She explained between pants as she calmed down.

  I froze. The word ‘real’ echoed in my head as I struggled to pull what she meant from it. Part of me knew, but I needed confirmation. “Real? What do you mean it’s real?”

  “My goal was to submit a packet for you to be a contestant and then post the response letter up at Breakers to get everyone in on the joke. Just being on the set this early, I already know they send out ‘thanks but no thanks’ letters and confidentiality agreements. I should’ve waited for you to get back so I could’ve seen your face! But I had waited too long already for this day so I had the package forwarded to your parents’ house as soon as it arrived here.”

  “So you’re saying that the package is real?” I jumped out of the chair and marched out of the bedroom toward the living room. “No, no, no. You’re bullshitting me right now. There’s no way. The paperwork said that I passed the background check. There’s no way it could’ve gone that far without…”

  My sentence trailed off.

  Over the course of our seven-year friendship, Koko and I told each other everything. We shared our L.A. apartment and we stored all of our personal information in the same safe. Koko knew almost everything about me. She could’ve easily filled out the necessary paperwork.

  Gripping the thick stack of papers, I returned to the bedroom. The door closed with a louder bang than I anticipated. “You illegally accessed my personal information and forged documents in order to submit an application for me to compete on a show that I don’t watch and don’t believe in to get me back for joking on you?”

  The question was met with immediate silence.

  After thirty seconds, Koko cleared her throat. “Too far?”

  “Hell yes!”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I’m mad that I’m now associated with this crappy show and there’s a paper trail and electronic proof floating around. I’m mad that if I want to get elected to the Supreme Court, someone is going to pull out the list of applicants to The One and I will lose my bid because this clearly displays poor judgment.”

  “But are you mad?”

  “Am I mad that you’re a diabolical bitch? No.”

  I had to hand it to her. She waited two months for her prank to come full circle. That’s a hell of a commitment.

  “I wish I could’ve seen your face when you got the letter. I can almost visualize you noticing the title and then climbing on your soapbox about the sexist undertones of the show and then the shock of realizing that you applied to be on it. Are you going to write a strongly worded letter about the selection process?” Koko joked.

  “Ha ha,” I replied without any inflection in my voice. My eyes kept scanning the paperwork.

  “Thousands of women enter and only twelve get selected to participate on the show. Well technically twenty-four but twelve are eliminated before the big cocktail party with the eligible bachelor. And there was less than a one percent chance that you’d get selected because of how many people apply so I felt like you were safe from actually being too attached to the show. They may not even keep it on file. I just wanted a letter or email that had your name and that you applied to be on The One.”

  “Like I said, diabolical.” I looked at the congratulatory letter once more before dropping the stack of papers on the desk and pressing my fingertips into my forehead. “But there’s just one little problem with your plan though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not going on this bullshit show and I’m going to burn all evidence that could link me to it.”

  “No!” Koko shouted, making my ear ring. “I’ve waited two months for this! I earned this Zoe Elise Jordan! And I heard that at the bottom of the letter, they actually say ‘Our bachelor is looking for the one Zoe…and it’s not you.’ Please, please tell me it says that. Please.”

  I let out a puff of air. “That’s not what mine says.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Mine says ‘our bachelor is looking for the one Zoe…is it you?’ And then a hefty stack of papers asked me to give up my right to privacy and go parade around on this demeaning show so that I can compete against other women for the affection of a man I don’t know.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I’ve been invited to be a contestant on the show,” I clarified, running my free hand down my face. “I’ve been given a week to decide. Well, a week from when they mailed the packet.”

  “Oh. My. God!”

  I pulled my phone away from my ear, but the damage to my eardrum was already done.

  Her words became garbled and then she continued, “Are you going to do it? You have to do it! When do you have to get it back to them?”

  Glancing down at the paperwork, I skimmed the paragraphs until I found what I was looking for. “Tomorrow. By close of business.”

  “You have to do it!”

  I started pacing from one side of the room to the other. “I most certainly do not. That’s a big hell to the no.”

  “I know you’re not a risk taker, but just think about it. If you win, you get prize money. That prize money, depending on when you get sent home, would be more than enough to pay for us to go on a shopping spree or for us to go to every Beyoncé and Rihanna concert on the West Coast.”

  I stopped in my tracks, trying not to laugh. “So in this scenario, I, alone, whore myself out on TV and we, together, spend the earnings if I win?”

  “Or if you don’t like those suggestions, it would be more than enough money for you to reapply to take the bar exam.”

  My lips pursed. I walked right into that.

  Before I could respond, she rushed on. “We would get to see each other all the time. I’m going to be there every day except Sundays. We can’t go that long without talking! The location is incredible. You’d be staying in a mansion with a pool, a hot tub, a steam room and a relaxing place to read. And, most importantly, the eligible bachelor is Julian Winters.”

  We were both quiet for a second. She was likely waiting for a reaction, but I was waiting for clarificatio
n.

  “Julian Winters?” I asked, starting to pace again.

  “Yes!”

  My eyebrows came together, perplexed. I threw my hand up in the air. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Julian Winters, the music producer.”

  As a music lover, I was still stumped. “I have no clue who he is or why you thought I’d care.”

  “Well, he’s a song writer and a music producer and he’s totally your type. He kind of looks like that Resident Assistant we had a crush on freshman year. And he was caught up in that copyright infringement lawsuit with that socialite, Janna White. I can’t think of the song now.”

  “Ohhhh, yeah,” I remembered, familiarity of the case and the names flooding my brain. “’Sweet’. That case ended her music career, didn’t it? I loved that song. I vaguely remember that he was the one who wrote it, but they settled out of court, right?”

  “Yes. But do you know what he looks like now?”

  “No… I just remember being fascinated by the case because—”

  “I’m going to go ahead and stop you right there,” she interrupted, cutting me off mid-sentence. “We are not going to talk law right now. We are going to talk about you having the chance to bump uglies with Julian Winters. He is the—”

  I frowned as I interjected, “The sheer fact that you said ‘bump uglies’ has disqualified you from giving me advice about anything in general, but sex specifically. You need to—”

  A quick knock on the door followed by the sound of it being pushed open forced my sentence to end abruptly.

  “Hi,” my mother greeted me as she poked her head into the room. Her bronzy skin glowed with a youthfulness most fifty-five year old women didn’t have. “Are you ready?”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “I’ll meet you in the car,” my mom whispered, closing the door behind her.

  “I’m going to call you later. I’m about to head out with Mom before we meet Dad for dinner.”

  “Okay, but search the internet for pictures of Julian and text me your thoughts.”

  I chuckled to myself. “Will do.”

  Slipping my phone into my back pocket, I quickly put on my socks and boots. Grabbing my grey and blue college hoodie, I pulled it over the white t-shirt and checked myself out in the mirror.