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It’s like the movies he watches with his babysitter Marissa, stories about corsets and handsome men with dour faces and silent dances that say everything. Stories that make his heart feel too big for his small body.
Her eyes fall to his outfit. He’s wearing his standard first-night uniform: cargo shorts with deep pockets, a T-shirt—black, to mask the pit stains—comfortable shoes to get him through a twelve-hour shoot. “You look like an Indian Kevin James in an ‘after’ weight-loss photo.”
She’s wearing corduroy overalls and a Paramore concert T-shirt with her giant Doc Martens, a fanny pack across the front of her chest like a sash, and her thick hair in its usual topknot. Jules Lu is every twenty-four-year-old LA transplant with mountains of student debt, settling for something less than her delusions of Greta Gerwig grandeur. “You look like the sad old person at a Billie Eilish concert.”
“Oh, is that why we’re stuck with a constipated computer nerd?”
The least they could do is let him remove the crown, so he doesn’t look like Stripper Prince William. He even had to double-check the tux wasn’t a tear-away.
“You need to relax,” she drawls, as if telling someone to relax has ever once in the history of human beings yielded that outcome.
“It’s confusing,” Dev notes in a tone that almost makes Charlie think he’s laughing with him, “because you look like the guy in a fancy cologne commercial, but you’re distinctly acting like the guy in an IBS medication commercial.”
He’s like a terrified baby bird. Like a two-hundred-twenty-pound baby bird with crippling anxiety and a fairly intense germ phobia who can’t navigate his way through a complete sentence.
He tries not to obsess over what he did to anger Dev. Naturally, he obsesses over it.
Camera three has cut to an assistant producer and a security guard escorting what seems to be the anthropomorphic embodiment of toxic masculinity.
“Being on is really hard for me. It drains me emotionally, and sometimes I’ll need time. To recalibrate my mind. Or else I’ll, um… I’m not sure… does that make sense?”
Dev ignores the way his skin hums at the touch, because they’re finally making progress, and Dev isn’t going to screw that up because a pretty man with a weak understanding of socially appropriate handshake lengths is touching him.
Lauren L., 25, Dallas, professional cat cuddler:
“Yes, you caught me,” he says, the strange tension easing from his shoulders. “I have spent the last four years secretly pining for you, and I’ve only rejected your drunken proposals of marriage because I’m playing hard to get.”
Sabrina Huang, 27, Seattle; travel blogger; tattoo sleeve on her left arm; used to play bass in a punk band; too cool for you? Probably.
“Oh my God, yes. I’m so sorry. I’ll take care of that immediately.” The waiter comes back thirty seconds later with four different forks for Charlie to choose from.
“Was that sarcasm? What, you’re capable of sarcasm now?” “My system must have upgraded.”
He doesn’t explain that he never enjoyed those dates either, that he hated the pressure to be perfect, to conform to the assumptions people made about him based on how he looks. He doesn’t explain how the dates were something he did out of obligation, because dating was something he was supposed to do. He doesn’t explain how they always felt wrong, like Charlie was putting on a costume that didn’t fit quite right.
Charlie doesn’t tell Dev it’s the best date he’s had, period.
“In my defense, you’re obsessed with helping straight people find love, and your cargo shorts are heinous.”
Charlie would politely disagree; Ryan looks like a pirate who is going to try to upsell you rental car insurance, some befuddling blend of scruffy and preppy that almost disguises the fact that he’s rather boring to look at.
Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help.
There is a meet-cute, as Dev would call it. A miscommunication. An enemies-to-lovers trope Charlie remembers from his days of reading Star Trek fanfic on his home-built laptop.
Then, when they were alone together last night in the bathroom, Charlie tried to dry-hump Dev mid–panic attack.
In this moment, in this light, his eyes remind Charlie of the dark wood Mendini violin he played in his high school orchestra, almost black around the strings, a well-loved umber brown on the edges of the lower bout.
Charlie settles on periwinkle shorts and a cream-colored chambray with little flowers stitched into the fabric. Jules snorts. “Charles, you look like a stockbroker vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, as always.”
“Imagine Drunk Charlie interpretive dancing to Whitney Houston at a wedding with a guest list of two hundred. He looks over at my cousin with her new husband and he points at them—I mean points, like noticeably across the dance floor, people were staring—and he says to me: ‘I want that.’ ”
Charlie wants to eat that sound, pour it like sugar over fresh strawberries.
“You think my type is six-foot-four skinny dudes with unfortunate haircuts?”
“Quite frankly, you kissing your producer is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened on this heteronormative cesspool of a shitty television show.”
“labels can be nice sometimes. They can give us a language to understand ourselves and our hearts better. And they can help us find a community and develop a sense of belonging.
Most of the time, Dev is like a human bonfire walking around generously warming everyone with his presence. But burning that bright and that fiercely must be exhausting; no one can sustain it forever. Charlie wishes he could tell Dev it’s okay to flicker out sometimes. It’s okay to tend to his own flame, to keep himself warm. He doesn’t have to be everything for everyone else all the time.
Kissing Charlie—and coming to terms with the fact that he needs to stop kissing Charlie—shouldn’t have been enough to trigger his depression, but unfortunately, that’s not how his depression works. It’s not logical or reasonable. It doesn’t need some catastrophic tragedy to turn the chemicals of his brain against him. Tiny tragedies are more than enough.
“Are you asleep?” he asks into the dark. “It’s been three minutes, so no.”
Dev shakes his head in feigned disgust. It’s so quintessentially Charlie: looking like a cologne model from the shoulders up with his five-hundred-dollar sunglasses, and like a soccer mom from the waist down, with his sweater tied around him and his sensible shoes.
“I’m not afraid of anything. Except emotional intimacy and abandonment.”
He’s tired of numbing himself with alcohol every time his heart feels too big inside his chest.
Not the shy smile, but the bigger one—the one he usually saves for when they’re alone together, like he invented a new type of smiling just for them. Dev loves that smile.
“Any other problematic romantic fantasies I can fulfill while we’re here?” “Unless you have a pottery wheel or the prow of a ship stashed away in your meticulously organized luggage, I’m not sure what you can do for me.”
“The real problem is, I was planning to send Sabrina home on Saturday, but would it be… untoward… to reject a woman two days after she offered me a hand job?”
And Dev needs a drink. Or a package of Oreos. Or a lobotomy.
If Charlie wanted him, he would do just about anything for that little house in Venice Beach, including hiding away there like a gay Rapunzel, waiting for the moments when Charlie could come to him in secret.
“But this show hinges on appealing to a wide viewership. I’m giving America what it wants, and it does not want a bisexual princess.”
I realized my happiness can’t be contingent on another person.
