Summer House Recap: Head to Toes
In this episode, West and Jesse Solomon (always both names!) continued to have absolutely no boundaries with each other. During the second half of the shipwrecked-themed party, they’re off at the edges of the lawn peeing together, which is already weird enough. Then they mention that Jesse is about to finish his second bottle of Hamptons Water, a rosé brand I wouldn’t even wish on a demon twink who stole my chicken fingers. But as they’re peeing, they’re also talking about it. There is nothing worse than someone who wants to get chatty at the urinal, and I don’t even get pee-shy. But then, they start passing the unopened bottle back and forth, surely getting a glimpse and quite possibly crossing streams, which, you may remember, is what murdered the Ghostbusters.
That wasn’t the only wild thing; this entire episode was essentially about Jesse Solomon having as few boundaries as a mushroom party at a swingers convention. But before we get to that, there are a couple of other things we need to clear up, mostly having to do with Craig. Kyle finally goes up to the Pillow Prince and tells him he wants to chat. Craig says to wait in the dingy for him, he’s going to get another drink. Craig then goes upstairs, pees, checks his email, opens a bag of chips, stares into the mirror for a few minutes, checks his stocks, sends his mom a few dank memes he found on Insta, clips his toenails, checks the Ring cameras he put all around his Charleston house so he can check on the bees, and then goes to sit down with Kyle. The disrespect!
Kyle starts off by telling Craig that he was upset not about the business proposal but about how he went about it. Craig says he informed Kyle and doesn’t think he did anything wrong. He’s mad that Kyle called him a liar in front of the whole world. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Kyle said it on Watch What Happens Live, so it wasn’t in front of the whole world; it was in front of the Bravosphere. If there is one thing the Bravosphere knows, it is that Craig is a liar. There’s even a storyline on the season that just wrapped up. I mean, just look at when Craig tells West and Jesse he pulled Loverboy from all of his stores. Which stores? The pillow stores? What was Loverboy even doing there? Yes, he and Austen just opened a restaurant, but stores? Come on.
The conversation ends with Kyle apologizing for calling Craig a liar, Craig apologizing for hurting Kyle so much, and the two of them hugging it out. Kyle also says that he knows he needs to work on his reactions to things and be better at processing his emotions. Exactly correct. Now, if we would only see Kyle’s calm, rational side when he’s talking to the women in his life instead of the dudes, that would be great.
On the Paige and Craig front, it’s interesting to see their breakup play out on Summer House as opposed to Southern Charm. Craig was clearly caught off guard when Paige dumped him, so we didn’t quite see any of the real rumblings about it like we do here. When Paige is talking to Ciara in her bed (I almost died when she got on that duvet with paint all over her legs), they talk about how Craig gets upset when Paige is successful and that he might be a secret hater. Yes, this whole thing is starting to make a lot more sense.
Now we have to start with Jesse Solomon, and, ugh, I think I’m gonna need that demon twink to give me a chicken finger and a swig of that Hamptons Water because there is much to discuss. First, he starts a quest to get Ciara and West to become friends again and implores Ciara to give West a hug. She denies him and walks away. Later, when Jesse pulls Ciara in for a chat on their own desert island, he asks what West needs to do to get back in her good graces. She basically says it’s impossible. “If we’re going to act like he didn’t use me the entire summer last summer, I’m sorry, but you guys are fucking nuts,” she says. Jesse of course tells West about this and he does not love what she’s saying.
At the end of the party, West is alone outside because he doesn’t want to sit with the whole group since things are awkward with Ciara. Amanda, always the emotional center of the show, comes outside and asks West what the problem is, and he’s clearly upset about how Ciara continues to “villainize” him. I really see both sides here. As Amanda points out, Ciara is hurt and this is how she is processing this hurt and West, as the one who did the hurting, needs to stay out of her way.
However, I also believe West when he says that he really cared about her and that the relationship they had last summer was real. They’re both in this bizarro situation where they have to remain friends, remain in close proximity, and also remain in close proximity to each other’s friends. That means Ciara is, as West says, continuing to talk shit about him to his friends. Yes, how and why West ended things was bad, but I think he’s right that saying he “used her” for the whole summer is a mischaracterization. Let’s hope that West can use some of his own hurt and frustration to find even more empathy for Ciara and how this all ended.
West will have more problems with Ciara, however, because it seems like she and Jesse Solomon are getting even closer. When they’re having their little chat, Ciara says that she didn’t like West, but he talked her into it. Jesse sees that as a window that he could have gotten with Ciara if he had tried. She asks him why he didn’t, and he says that his friend called dibs. Bros before hos. That’s what I like to hear. Later, when Amanda asks him if he would date Ciara, he says, “I’m a heterosexual man. Yes.” Girl, I am a homosexual man, and I would still date Ciara; that’s how hot, funny, wonderful, and charming she is.
The way Jesse was acting with Ciara was totally on another level. Yes, he was absolutely smashed at the party, but when he was in his very tight, very revealing boxer briefs in the backyard, bumping and grinding on her like an 8th-grade dance, that is way over the line from friends. Everyone — Amanda, Craig, Paige, Kyle, Gabby, Lil, the weird nerd Carl brought to the party, the other seven-foot tall dude dressed as a captain to try to steal Jesse’s look, the guys who set up the pirate ship in the backyard — is talking about it. Not Imrul. He’s talking about how he met a girl named Polly at Burning Man, and my eyes rolled so hard that they’re like Imrul after his third molly. OMG, imagine if he met a Molly at Burning Man?
The consensus seems to be that there is some kind of sexual tension between Ciara and Jesse, but she would still rather sit in bed and eat McDonald’s with the girls than go with Jesse to the club. Now, I am all for gross food in your bed, but if you’re going to get something delivered, can’t you go Domino’s? McDonald’s does not travel! It’s gross. This season is sponsored by Uber Eats. They could do better.
It’s after the club when things really go down. It starts when Imrul brings back two girls from the club who are probably named Polly and Molly. We don’t see their faces because they have not signed waivers, and Imrul puts the towel over his bedroom camera. I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I love that we have an unabashed slut in the house, because representation matters and it’s great to finally see myself. However, Imrul is starting to drive me a little crazy.
It’s one thing if you want to bang one girl who doesn’t want to sign a release and then put the towel over the camera. That might have been her idea. But if he’s doing the same thing three times in a row, Imrul probably tells the women not to sign releases and that if he takes them home, he can cover up the cameras. This seems to go against the ethos of being on a reality show. If you want to be on the show, then you have to take what comes along with it, which is your activities — in the bedroom and out of it — being on camera. If girls don’t want their faces on TV and it gets in the way of him getting some, then so be it. Such is the price of fame.
If Imrul doesn’t want that, then he can just go back and hang out with the ladies wherever they live. But here’s the thing. Imrul wants us to know he gets more bones than a Petco. West had a hookup and did it outside of the property. Same with Gabby. They told us about it, but that’s not enough for Imrul. He needs us to know he’s shagging and for us to know it’s happening all the time. This could be a fun little addition to a well-rounded person, but so far all he’s giving us is that he can fuck. Okay. Great. You can fuck. Give us something else. Anything else. If he can do magic, he could bang Lil, Carl’s wannabe girlfriend. But as Ciara says in the mid-season trailer, at some point it’s just going to get annoying.
Anyway, Imrul brings back two girls and Jesse Solomon wants to go see what is going on. He barges into the room and stays, the editors tell us, for 37 minutes. The way he tells the story, he goes into the room, the girls tell him to get into bed, and he gets on the bed but so that his feet are pointed at the girls’ heads. Imrul tells one of them to suck his toe, and she does, even though his feet are probably ranker than Kyle’s undies after he passes out in his clothes on top of the bedspread following a full day of partying, half of it spent in an inflatable shark costume. After this Jesse leaves the room and goes into his own bed.
The next morning, he tells everyone this whole story, thinking there’s nothing wrong with it. He says he turned the girls down because being with Lexi is better than a foursome. (Everything I said about Imrul would be forgiven if he hooked up with another dude in the house, btw.) But, oh, Nelly, is Lexi not going to feel this way. As a man (and a gay one at that) and slut in long standing, I don’t think that Jesse did anything wrong. He got his toe sucked as a joke. It was a silly little lark. He went into the room just to see what was going on. Jesse always wants to be a part of the excitement, always at the center of the group. That’s what makes him great at this show. And he had the opportunity to go whole hog, as it were, and decided to leave the room of his own accord because he chose Lexi over being a man whore.
However, I can’t think of a single female I know who would agree with any of what I just said. Jesse is so fucked. Lexi has also admitted to being more jealous and possessive than most. If Jesse wanted to stay with Lexi, he should have gone nowhere near that room, nowhere near that bed, nowhere near that girl’s mouth, even if it was with a toe so disgusting that not even noted foot enthusiast Quentin Tarantino would go near it. However, if I were Lexi, I’d be way more upset about grinding on Ciara in his boxers than this silly toe suck, except for the fact the editors dropped that he said, “And now I’m hard,” which means maybe there was a little bit more happening there.
To make things with Lexi even worse, Jesse then goes and tells everyone about it. I think that shows he thinks what he did was entirely innocent, but now it is absolutely going to get back to Lexi, and she is going to rip this man’s dick off so that he can never stand next to West while peeing and opening wine ever again.