But You Said You Can't Change the Way You Feel

"Remember what I told you," Mandy warned.

"Yeah, yeah, I should work on improving myself and all that," Paige waved. She was wearing a lightly colored crop top with thin straps and a dark short-ish skirt. Something fitting for the weather, she wasn't exactly dressed up in fashionable attire.

"I'm serious, Paige," Mandy's eyes narrowed.

"Sorry, you're just sounding a lot like my mom," Paige amended. "I'm just a little bummed that I can't go through with my original plan of trying to get this game done and dusted with."

"You need me to help you?" Mandy suddenly asked in a youthful-sounding voice.

"Wha-huh?"

"Sorry, I don't know where that came from," she composed herself and cleared her throat. "What I meant to say is that there's no way you could get that many points tonight. There's no way you're winning this thing on week two of the game."

"I know, it just would've been so nice to get everything finished in a timely manner."

"And do what? Go back home to your boring job?"

"...You do have a point."

"So go out and embrace the opportunity!" Mandy all but pushed Paige out the door into the evening sunlight. "Have fun on your date with Turner!"

With that, Mandy slammed the door after Paige had exited the house, and she heard it latch.

"That was so fucking weird," Paige thought. "Whatever, she's probably just upset with what's going on with Liam and is trying to act like everything is alright."

Since she had essentially been kicked out of the house, Paige started making her way to the hotel to meet up with Turner for her date. On her way there, she passed by the beach where six girls were trying—unsuccessfully—to make a fire. She spotted Abby, Becca, Charlotte, Sara, Kathryn, and oddly enough, Lauren in the group.

"What is Lauren playing at?" she wondered. "This is completely unlike her, did she just get dragged out of her house by Charlotte or is this what she's actually like and she just shuts down with me?"

She shook her head and continued on her trajectory. Jumping to conclusions like this was gonna get her nowhere aside from a possible trip to the psychiatrist for mental overstimulation if she kept it up.

"Although...it is a little weird that Emma wasn't there," she noted, continuing the walk towards the hotel. "Wonder where she's off to? Maybe it'd be prudent for me to go and see if I can find her, that way I can ap-nope, gotta stay focused."

The walk felt longer than normal, but that was likely due to her mind trying to make sense of what was going on in the game. Eventually, she reached the hotel and rang the buzzer at the bottom, feeling an eerie sense of deja vu from last round. Thankfully, though, this time there was no Kendra to sedate Turner for the date, so she could actually try to mend her relationship with him.

After what felt like decades, Turner's silhouette appeared on the other side of the door, which he opened for her seconds later.

"Hello again, Paige," he said. She noticed the less-than-friendly tone in his voice. It wasn't hard to figure out why; his guard was up around her now.

"Hi Turner," she responded more cordially.

"How are you doing?" Turner asked after a few seconds of awkward silence between the two of them.

"It's been a little rough," she admitted, which took him a bit by surprise. "But it's nothing I can't handle. You?"

"I...I suppose you heard what happened last night?" he rubbed the back of his neck.

"Last night..." Paige tried to wrack her memory to think if anyone told her what happened, but drew a blank. "No...? What happened?"

"Oh, it's no big deal," Turner nonchalantly answered, the color slightly draining from his face. "So...what do you have planned for tonight? Please tell me it's not another walk down memory lane."

"It's not," Paige honestly answered. "In fact, it's almost the opposite. I want...a bit of a reset, shall we say. A clean slate. Where we don't have this history and all this baggage between us; we're just two people who happened to have met on the street one day."

"I don't know if I can fully commit to that," Turner winced. "It's not really easy for me to just forget everything that happened."

"Can we at least try, though?" Paige pleaded.

"...Sure," Turner eventually relented. "I'm not supposed to play favorites here, so I'll try this. You didn't really answer my question though, what are we doing?"

"Oh, right!" Paige exclaimed. "Well, since we don't really know each other and haven't been out together yet, what say we go see a movie?"

"A movie?" Turner arched his eyebrow. "What kind of movie?"

"I have no idea," Paige responded. "Whatever's playing in the theater."

"You think they're gonna be playing ordinary movies in this theater?" Turner incredulously asked.

"Nope, we're not on Harem Hotel right now," Paige made an X shape with her arms. "Right now, we're just two people who happened to meet on the street, and we're going to go see what they're playing in the theater. You in?"

"Sure, I'm in," Turner accepted. "Although I don't recall seeing a theater around here before..."

"I have," Paige said. "Follow me."

She simply led the way. She didn't take his hand or try to coerce him into a dark alleyway to apologize for her previous actions. She knew that she would have her chance to apologize later, which was all the reasoning she needed to abate her current transformation for now.

"I thought I might find you here," Liam said, taking a seat next to Emma at the bar.

"Oh, hey, what're you doing here?" Emma asked, her voice sounding far away.

"I could be asking you the same," Liam responded.

"I just...I-I don't really know what to do," Emma stammered. "Last night...I had this dream about Sara and I...both with Turner..."

"Stop," Liam held out a hand. "I know I'm supposed to be a girl now, but I'm still somewhat a guy in here, and I don't really want any more details, I get the point."

"Sorry..." Emma apologized. "Anyways, but now I can't stop thinking about it. It wasn't this bad when it was just with Becca, but now Sara too..."

"I'm not really the best at this kind of thing," Liam tried to look sympathetic, but all that ended up showing on his face was a neutral face. "This seems like something that Sara would be better at."

"I can't tell her though!" Emma pouted. "She's the one this is all about!"

"Right...right..." Liam trailed off.

"So I just came here to blow off some steam and drown my sorrows in ****," Emma finished. "Anyways, why are you here? You said you thought you would find me here, why did you come looking for me?"

"I just needed someone to be with," Liam simply explained. "There's that gaggle of six girls on the beach, and my mom wasn't an option..."

"...So you decided on me because I was the only option left?" Emma finished.

"That's...that's not what I meant," Liam covered his mouth.

"Sorry, I've just been a little pessimistic the last couple of days," Emma semi-apologized. "I mean, Abby and I were out last night, but she's friendly with pretty much everyone here, so I didn't want to get too excited about having a friend here."

"Don't sell yourself short like that," Liam responded, a bit quicker than he expected. "I mean, she helped you look for your swimsuit the other day when you lost it, forfeiting her chance to win the challenge. That doesn't mean nothing, right?"

"I suppose so..." Emma agreed slowly.

"And it's not like she's spent a day in town with anybody else, right?" he continued.

"Aside from Becca," Emma countered.

"Well, that doesn't really count, because they're sisters," Liam sighed. "My point is, you're not alone out here. People care about you. You may not see it, but they do. I'd be willing to bet that even Paige, in her own twisted way, has a soft spot for you."

"I think she's got a soft spot for everybody so long as they accept her advances," Emma grumbled.

"Okay, Paige is a bit of a bad example, but you get the gist of it, right?"

"Yeah, I do," Emma nodded. "Thanks, Lana, that helped a lot."

"Lana-?"

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry!" Emma quickly apologized. "That came out without me thinking, I didn't mean it!"

Lana didn't really respond, just left in a bit of a hurry. She wasn't super upset, she was just miffed about the incident.

"Where on Earth did I pull out all of that advice?" Lana wondered as she briskly walked back to her place. "I don't know the first thing about how to comfort people."

What she didn't realize was that there was a third person who was listening in on the conversation. She hadn't meant to, but as it went on longer and longer, she didn't want to butt in uninvited.

"Dunno if that'll be useful in any way, but I gotta take what I can," Kathryn said as she made her way back to the beach.

"Looks like it's all rom-coms and...explicit...films," Turner said, reviewing the selection of titles in the lobby. "Fitting."

"Ooh, you wanna go see this one?" Paige asked. Turner followed where her finger was pointing, thankfully towards something with a fairly benign name, and breathed a sigh of relief. She really was just trying to make this feel like a first date.

"Sure," he acquiesced. Not like he could find anything better here.

As they walked into the theater itself, it was unsurprisingly empty. Regardless, Paige led him to the seats in the back-center of the room.

"Why all the way in the back?" Turner asked as she filed into the row farthest from the screen.

"Oh, I'm farsighted," Paige offered.

"Really?" Turner wondered. "I never knew that about you."

"There's a lot you don't know about me, considering this is our first date," Paige struggled to try and keep up the façade."

"Right, sorry, forgot about that," Turner said mostly to himself.

Paige had "bought" a large bucket of popcorn in the lobby that she was holding in her lap, in an attempt to make this feel as realistic as possible. This was almost a carbon copy of what their actual first date was like, minus the ice cream at the start and the hundreds of other people in the theater. Turner realized that too, and shook his head while smiling. Even when she was trying to be someone different, some things never changed.

"Why the fuck does this show need advertisements and trailers at the movie theater?" Turner wondered as the, well, advertisements and trailers started playing. "It's gotta just be for immersion, right? There's no way that they're actually broadcasting this to the audience or something stupid like that." He didn't dare say that out loud, however, realizing it would be another instance of him screwing up the atmosphere that Paige was trying to go for. A few minutes in, however, and he realized that these were the exact same trailers that were being played at the movie that he had seen with Paige all those years ago on their actual first date.

"Did she just take me out on the exact same date as last week, but in a more realistic setting?" he wondered. "Or is she really being genuine and actually wanted to start over, and this is Kendra trying to throw a wrench in her plans in the hopes that things will end up the same as they did last week?"

He wished he could trust Paige and her statements, he really did, but it was really hard to take all of her statements at face value nowadays, especially given what had transpired last week when he'd given her too much benefit of the doubt.

"Are you okay?" Paige asked. Turner whipped his head around to look at her, and she was looking back at him, concerned. She wasn't wearing her traditional coy smile, nor were her eyes glazed over in boredom. She was genuinely asking about his well-being.

"Yeah, I'm okay," Turner fibbed. He didn't want to tell Paige what was going on in his mind, lest he ruin the aesthetic, so he said something he would've said on a first date. "I just got lost in the clouds, that's all."

Paige smiled contentedly at that and refocused her gaze back on the screen in front of them, absentmindedly dipping her hand into the popcorn bucket to eat some periodically.

"You mind if I eat some of that?" Turner asked suddenly.

"Of course!" Paige quickly assented. "Eat as much as you want!"

The two of them sat in peaceful silence as the movie started, and much to Turner's dismay, it was exactly like what you'd expect from a stereotypical high school girl's dreams. He was prepared to tough it out, though. For Paige.

"I don't know why I'm willing to go through all of this for her," he thought to himself as the movie was playing. "I know I should be unbiased here, but it's a bit weird that I'm toughing it out for Paige's benefit two weeks in a row. Maybe I am a little too easy on her, or maybe Becca's thoughts are starting to get to me a little bit."

As the movie wore on, Turner was silently and secretly counting up all of the overused Hollywood tropes in the movie. The main theme of the movie seemed to be "popular guy is with popular girl, but shy and nerdy girl eventually ends up getting with the popular guy in the end", which seemed a little weird, considering the role that he was in on this island as the "popular" or more fittingly, only guy here, whereas the ten girls were trying to compete for him. Man, being **** to act as the master of a harem sure does change perspective on a lot of things.

While rolling his eyes at some super corny line said by a character of whom Turner had forgotten the name, Turner reached down to grab another bite of popcorn absentmindedly. Only, instead of meeting the fluffy surface of dried starch, he met the feeling of fabric and realized that his hand was not in a popcorn bucket, but was resting on Paige's upper inner thigh. Paige looked over at Turner with a flirtatious smirk and their eyes met before Turner jerked his hand away.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you had moved the bucket..." he quickly apologized.

"Don't be, seems like you found something a lot better than popcorn there," Paige quipped, before refocusing her brain back to her idea for the night. "I mean...it's okay, if you wanted to hold my hand, all you had to do is ask..."

Like the demure teenager on screen, Paige timidly reached out for Turner's hand, which was resting between the two of them after he had swiftly removed it, and after finding it, grasped it with her own. He didn't shake her off this time like he had on the last date, so this was progress. How much progress she could make tonight remained to be seen, though.