They say, "You gotta stay hungry"

Neither Nick nor Gina quite knew what to say after Gina’s explosive confession, and Nick’s attempts to comfort her after the fact. They both just sat there, baking in the hot sand, while mulling over the words they had said to each other.

While the two childhood friends were very different people, the thing they were most similar in was their dedication towards self-criticism. Whenever either of them thought they had done or said the wrong thing, they couldn’t help but overanalyze every last detail, tearing themselves apart through criticism and agonizing over every last word.

“What if I had said this?”

“What if I had done that?”

“Should I have said this instead of that?”

“What about something else?”

These useless, pointless thoughts continued to swirl around in their brains without end, because neither of them could confront the reality of the situation- or the fact that, in the end, even if they hadn’t expressed themselves perfectly to one another, the conclusion that they had arrived at was still the correct one.

They couldn’t go back in time and erase the things that they’d done. But that didn’t just apply to their past with Dakota, or what happened after- it applied to this conversation, as well.

Words could not be unsaid. Feelings could not be unshared.

There was nothing they could do but accept that they had both confronted the most painful parts of themselves, opened their hearts up to one another, and expressed themselves with everything they had, for better or worse.

And now that they had done so, there was nowhere to go but forward, for either of them.

But whether or not that “forward” resembled genuine progress, or a regression to the painful experiences of their past, was up to each of them, individually. No matter what they tried to do for one another, they could not push someone towards a direction that they were not capable of going down on their own.

It had to be Nick. He had to be the one to say something. Because he was the one who knew. Knew that Gina didn’t have it in her right now.

If they were ever going to break through this impasse and become more to one another than they currently were, it was him who would have to do it.

He summoned up his strength and raised his head, and looked over at Gina once more.

She contemplated the sand. Because she wasn’t ready. He knew that, and yet… he could not accept that conclusion.

“Gina.”

She had asked him not to say her name. But it was the first word to pass through his lips, of course. Because… that was who he wanted to talk to.

Gina.

His friend.

His lover.

The girl he had shared his first kiss with. The girl who had experienced an incredible tragedy beside him, and carried the same guilt over that tragedy as he now carried.

That was why he needed to reach out to her, even if it was painful.

“Nick… just stop.”

This wasn’t how Gina had wanted today to go. She’d hoped that, by trapping the both of them here, that she could finally confront her feelings and express herself to him. She’d foolishly believed that if she did that, then they could finally move on. That she could finally allow herself to be happy again, and maybe even have a real relationship with him that went beyond meaningless sex.

Gina had wished for that so very hard.

But now…

Now, that time had passed. She hadn’t been aware of- or had tried to ignore- the darkness buried deep in her heart, and once she’d trapped herself, it was impossible to run away from it. She revealed it to him fully, and now…

He had a choice to make.

What that choice would be, and what it meant for her… she didn’t know.

She couldn’t guess at it.

All she could do was hope… hope that, in the end, the two of them could find some semblance of happiness in one another.

But Gina didn’t have the strength to keep hoping… or rather, she felt like she didn’t deserve that hope he was offering her.

Even though she knew every word Nick had said to her was the truth, even though she knew with even greater certainty that her own words held the truth…

That didn’t make her magically believe she deserved it.

“I want you to be able to love me, just the way I am.”

More than anything, that’s what Gina’s heart ached for.

But…

So what?

So… nothing.

That’s what.

Gina had nothing. Nothing to offer but herself. And what a worthless prize that was. Sure, she had the body, but Nick didn’t care about her body. He wanted her. Gina. The girl he liked as a little kid. He wanted to know her, to truly understand her.

She could give him a lot of things. She would give him her body a thousand times over if she thought it would make him happy.

But the only thing that would make him truly happy was knowing and loving her, in spite of the damage and the scars.

And she couldn’t give him that.

Even if Nick could truly love her, scars and all, it didn’t matter. Gina was toxic. She wouldn’t be good for him, she knew that.

Not even her own parents wanted anything to do with her anymore.

“I’ll just drag you down,” she muttered to him. “Me, being in your harem… what a fucking joke. I’m just a burden.”

“Gina, no, that’s not true!” Nick protested.

“I really tried… I tried to change…” Tears rolled down her cheeks again. “I tried to be more organized, like Amelia taught me. I tried to be friendlier, less… less jade… I-I tried to learn how to cook, and I thought… I thought it went pretty well…”

“It did,” Nick urged her. “I really loved that pasta you made yesterday, Gina, and everyone else enjoyed it too, you saw!”

“But all of that… it’s just… just acting!” Gina cried, shaking like a leaf in the sand. She couldn’t even hug herself for comfort. “Don’t you get it, Nick!? That isn’t… it isn’t the real me! I’m more than just the things I do that are nice for people, I’m… I’m broken! Even if you try to patch me up, paint me over, pretend like I’m whole, the cracks are still there! I can’t be fixed!”

Nick didn’t know what to say. How were they back to this again? Hadn’t… hadn’t his words gotten through to her at all?

“I told you, I don’t care about that!” He exclaimed. “I don’t care about you being cracked, or broken, I already told you, Gina, there’s no going back! So, all we can do is move forward, together!” He pleaded with her.

It tore his heart to pieces, watching Gina regress right before his eyes. Seeing her rip herself apart with criticism, spite, and hatred, and being unable to stop any of it.

Someone he cared about was suffering right in front of him, and what could he do?

Nothing.

Not a damn thing.

He couldn’t even get out of the sand to go comfort her.

“Together, move forward together…” Gina repeated his words like a curse. Shaking her head was all she could do, so she did. “What… I’m going to go back and move in with you and Mary, is that it? Gonna be a nice little domestic life of pampering and bliss? What kind of twisted dream do you imagine?”

Once, Gina had envisioned herself as Nick’s sex slave, like Holly. It was a nice fantasy.

But that’s all it was. A fantasy.

Gina knew that eventually, the dream that was Harem Hotel would come to an end. They would go back to the real world, back to their old lives- or rather, their new lives, after everything that had been done to them.

And Gina? What about Gina?

What was waiting for her at the end of all this?

Nothing that she could see. Nothing that she believed would come with any true substance, any true change in her existence.

Would any of her new friends want to be with a burnout loser with no future like her? Of course they wouldn’t.

Nick would take her in, because that’s who he was. He would support her with all his heart, because that was who he was.

And Gina would take advantage of him. Because that was who she was.

“I’m just a parasite,” she whispered to him. “I can’t get a job. I can’t even pass a fucking drug test. I’m a loser with nothing ahead of me, and if you don’t cut me loose, then you’ll just be looking after me for the rest of my fucking life.”

When her parents cut her off, Gina had scorned, resented, and cursed them. She had yelled at them and pleaded with them and lied to them until she couldn’t keep the lies straight, but in the end, none of it had mattered.

Now, she understood.

Gina couldn’t offer anything to anybody. Just her body. Just her devotion. She had all of those things to give in spades, but so what? All she would be was Nick’s beast of burden, then. Someone who he took care of because he loved her, but couldn’t do anything for him other than love him back.

A relationship… love… it needed more than that. She couldn’t live her life with Nick and have him just support her. They were supposed to support each other.

But Gina couldn’t do that. She couldn’t stand on her own two feet and be a responsible adult, no matter how much Amelia tried to help her.

Gina wanted Nick to love her in spite of all that. “Just the way I am” that was what she’d told him from the bottom of her heart.

But who Gina “was” was a woman who amounted to nothing but sex, drugs, and some good company, that was it.

She could cook for him, but Mary was already doing that. She could serve him sexually, but he already had several women who could offer him that.

No matter how Gina compared herself to the other women in Nick’s life, she kept coming up short. There wasn’t anything she could give Nick that he couldn’t get from someone much better than her. So, that just…

…Left Gina with being the burden. The girl who sat around doing nothing, being a lazy couch potato who had sex with Nick whenever he liked, but otherwise contributed nothing. And, in return for all the nothing she gave him, he’d take care of her for the rest of her life.

Once upon a time, that would have seemed like the ideal relationship.

Look at how far she’d come since then.

“I just want… to be loved…” Gina whimpered out. “I deserve to be loved, don’t I?!”

No, she didn’t.

“Yes, of course you do!” Nick said, arguing with a voice he didn’t even know existed. He looked desperately at Gina as she came unwound again. “You do deserve to be loved, Gina! I don’t know why you’re calling yourself a parasite, but you’re not! Your life is just getting started! You can still turn the page and make something of yourself!”

His words came out crueler than he intended. It felt like he was calling her a loser, but that was how Gina saw herself, wasn’t it? So maybe… maybe his words might resonate in some-

“I can’t!” Gina cried. “Don’t you get it, Nick!? If I was capable of that, then I wouldn’t be feeling this way, would I!? I wouldn’t be… wouldn’t be torn apart inside… knowing how pathetic and useless I am! Knowing that there’s no way that anyone could ever love me… that I don’t deserve to be loved, because I can’t give anything back…”

“Isn’t it enough for you to just be there?” Nick asked. He didn’t understand why this was so hard for her. He didn’t need anything more from Gina than just her being there. “I want you in my life, Gina, I want you to-”

“Well, maybe I want to be more than someone’s kept woman!” Gina exploded. And as her words roared from her lips, the sand exploded around her. She rose up from the pit and towered over Nick with fury in her eyes, as sand tumbled off of her trembling figure.

Tears rolled down her sand-caked cheeks.

“I don’t want to be your charity case!” She exclaimed. “I don’t want to be useless and pathetic and worthless! I want to… I want…!”

Nick’s eyes stared up at her, full of sincerity, and it made her heart quiver.

I want to be worthy of those eyes.

Realization struck Gina, leaving her weak in the knees. She fell to the ground and started to shake, looking down at Nick as her lip quivered.

“I…” Gina struggled to get the words out as Nick continued to stare up at her, waiting for her to open up to him.

“I want to look in the mirror… and see the me that you see when you look at me,” she finally confessed to him.

Gina had several transformations that had twisted her mind, turning her thoughts towards being a “good girl”. Whether this was the work of another one of those or not, she couldn’t even say. All she knew was that looking at Nick left her feeling trapped and uncertain right now, and she knew… she knew that her heart was twisted again.

Before coming to this show, Gina was happy to bury herself in hedonistic pleasure as she chased her degradation to its logical conclusion.

But that wasn’t who Gina was anymore.

“I’ve changed… haven’t I?” She wasn’t even asking Nick at this point, her question was aimed at herself. “I’m not that woman anymore.”

She wasn’t the woman who would have been satisfied as just a sex slave basking at the foot of Nick’s bed, waiting to be pampered.

“You changed, too, didn’t you?” She raised her head and looked at Nick, who stared back at her in surprise.

“Gin-”

Gina placed her finger over his lips. Being the only one who could move had its perks. She didn’t need to hear from him right now. She needed him to listen.

“When I first saw you that day… when all this began… I thought you looked like a pathetic loser,” Gina confessed. “You were overweight, you looked like you hadn’t been taking care of yourself, and your eyes… they were so empty.”

For a brief moment, before Dawn had been brought onto the show, it had just been the two of them and Sylvia. For that instant, they had looked at what the other had gone through, and it had changed them both.

Nick had been stunned into disbelief by how much that sweet little girl had changed. And Gina, Gina had seen how much Nick had fallen… and felt ashamed that she had fallen even further than he had.

“You didn’t stay that way,” she continued, shaking her head. “I watched as the weeks went on, and you became more confident. More comfortable. More open to others. You weren’t just passing the time and letting life happen, you were trying to change yourself. And that’s what inspired me to try to change, as well.”

The irony tasted bitter on her lips, and she smirked.

“And now, here I am. I’ve changed. I’m not the same person I used to be, either. But I’m not better, no. I’ve changed… but not enough.”

She’d matured to the point where she was disgusted by the person she’d used to be. She’d reached the point where she could look at what her life would entail moving forward down this path, and be disgusted with it.

But she hadn’t changed enough.

Gina would never be satisfied with that pathetic, hollow, slovenly existence, but she hadn’t become someone who could move past that, either. She’d only been allowed so much growth, just enough to where her existence was an embodiment of misery and disdain for her own pathetic life, and without the skills or strength to move past that.

She’d traded one form of self-loathing for another. That wasn’t the kind of progress she’d wanted to make.

“Gina… I think that you’ve matured quite a lot,” Nick finally said.

She raised her head and looked at him, stunned.

“…What?”

“I think… this is something that you’ve needed to confront for a while, now,” Nick said to her, hoping that what he saw in her eyes wasn’t just a figment of his imagination. He needed Gina to have changed in the way he hoped she had. That she’d changed enough to make one last big step.

“You hate how useless and pathetic you feel, don’t you? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You said you don’t want to be my ‘kept woman’ so doesn’t that mean you want something more?” He asked her, hoping it was true.

Gina’s heart wavered. His words slid into her ears and burrowed deep into her brain, making her body tremble. “I… I…!”

“You want to change yourself, and that’s a good thing,” Nick continued, staring insistently up at her. “Don’t you see, Gina? You SHOULD want that! It’s the right thing! You want to move past this swamp you’re mired in, and make something out of yourself!”

“I… I can’t, though…” Gina’s voice wavered meekly and she hugged herself. Nick’s eyes landed on her tattooed arm and he grimaced as images of degrading sex flooded into her mind. He saw how much Gina wanted to be demeaned and punished and made to suffer for being so worthless, and he forced himself not to embrace them.

He couldn’t be that for her. He couldn’t help someone he cared about destroy themselves.

Nick wanted to build Gina back up and see her reach heights that she didn’t believe were possible. He wanted to do that for her more than anything.

“You can change, Gina, I know you can. You’re afraid that you’re too weak to make a difference in your life, but you’re not. Anyone can change. It just requires believing that it’s possible, and taking a step forward.”

He wished he could reach out his hand to her. And suddenly, the sand around his arm slid away, and he had Gina’s hand in his.

Her eyes widened with surprise and her lips parted in a pleased sigh. “Nick…”

“I don’t know what that first step will look like,” Nick admitted, giving her hand a squeeze. “But I want to help you become someone you can be proud of, Gina, alright?”

He slowly rose out of the sand, like it wasn’t even there, and he stood up to face her, guiding her to her feet as he stepped out of the hole in the ground.

Gina never let go of his hand. She clung to it like it was her last source of salvation, and her heart quivered with hope as she gazed tenderly up into his eyes.

“Nick…” her voice broke, and she fell crying into his arms. He held her there gently and patted her back, and told her that it would all be okay.

“You’re not a parasite,” he assured her, telling her all the things that he wished someone had told him back when his life had been mired by worthlessness and apathy. “You have people in your life who care about you and want to help you succeed. I promise, I won’t ever let you take advantage of me, Gina. I’m going to help you become the woman you want to be.”

A woman that she would be proud to see staring back at her in the mirror.