The Charm Offensive(37)
As a contestant handler, Dev usually travels economy, so he excitedly orders his free mimosa while Skylar and Jules both sleep across the aisle. It’s just the four of them. A travel crew has been in New Orleans setting things up for the past two weeks, and Skylar will meet with them as soon as they land. The rest of the crew and his ten contestants are flying out later tonight, but they wanted to give Charlie extra time to settle in.
His only consolation at the moment is that Maureen Scott doesn’t travel with the show. She remains in LA with the editing team splicing together the first few episodes. For the next four weeks, she won’t be around to haunt him with her fake-sweet voice and her overt manipulation of the women.
The flight attendant hands Dev a hot towel, and he looks thoroughly confused by its existence. He reaches over and drapes it across Charlie’s forehead. For the length of two wild, frantic heartbeats, Dev’s fingers are on Charlie’s face. He shoves them away. “Stop. I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sleep? How can you sleep right now?”
Dev has an inexplicable level of energy for someone who, based on the sound of his anxious pacing through the wall, didn’t sleep last night. Dev jostles his knee and impatiently beats his fingers against his armrest and gets up to walk around when the seatbelt sign clicks off, presumably just for the hell of it. Charlie will take whatever Dev-reprieve he can get.
Not that distance from Dev actually helps. He tried that.
He tried avoiding Dev; he made sure they were never alone together; didn’t look at him, didn’t touch him. Charlie still couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Then, when they were alone together last night in the bathroom, Charlie tried to dry-hump Dev mid–panic attack.
The terrifying thing is, he doesn’t know what any of it means. He’s pretty sure he’s never been attracted to a man before. He’s not bothered by this turn of events, though he wishes he could’ve chosen a different man for this particular sexual awakening, one who isn’t his producer.
No, it’s more that he can’t quite wrap his brain around being attracted to anyone. He can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of other people, and he’s had intellectual crushes on women—he’s admired women, respected them, had a vague desire for an intimacy and a closeness he’s never been able to achieve. But he’s never really wanted a woman before, and his sexual fantasies about women are usually vague and abstract. They’re not usually even about him.
But this—this is something else entirely. This feels wild and intoxicating, and all of his fantasies involve Charlie himself. Charlie and Dev.
If that were always the issue, though—if the reason he could never make things work in his relationships was simply because he was dating the wrong gender—then isn’t that something he would’ve figured out about himself by now? It’s not like he hasn’t had opportunities with men. He’s generally hit on by people of all genders equally, and he’s been told on several occasions by well-intentioned men that he would make a very successful gay (whatever that means).
The first time Parisa told him she was pansexual, she said she always knew but repressed it for a long time. And that’s not his situation. He hasn’t been repressing anything.
Well, technically speaking, he’s repressed a lot of things, but not that thing. He hasn’t been subconsciously suppressing being attracted to men. Has he?
An image rises to the surface of his mind. He’s sixteen, meeting Josh Han in their dorm room for the first time, lingering on a handshake. Then he thinks about his brothers, the names they used to call him when he cried about dirt and germs, the hateful words his father used to say, until he learned to only cry on the inside, and maybe he learned to repress it before he ever knew what “it” was.
“Whoa.” Dev slides back into his seat. “What are you spiraling about right now?”
“I’m not spiraling.”
“I know your spiral face.”
“Well, stop knowing my spiral face.”
“Can’t. It’s too distinct.” Dev reaches over and grabs grabs one of Charlie’s AirPods right out of his ear and inserts it (disgustingly) into his own. “Huh… I would not have pegged you for a Dolly Parton fan.”
“Everyone loves this song,” Charlie says as “Jolene” reaches the chorus. Dev nods in agreement and slumps down in his seat. If Charlie were judging by Dev’s behavior alone, he would never guess that twelve hours ago, this man had held him through a panic attack. He would never guess Dev had stroked his hair and called him love and—no, he’d probably only imagined that last part, because Dev is acting like nothing happened at all. And if that had happened while they were hugging, Dev wouldn’t be acting so cavalier. Except sometimes…
Sometimes Charlie wonders if maybe, maybe these wild feelings aren’t completely one-sided. If maybe, beneath Dev’s burning desire to make Charlie fall in love with Daphne Reynolds, there isn’t something else.
When “Jolene” ends, Dev syncs the AirPods over to his Spotify, and Leland Barlow’s “Those Evenings of the Brain” cues up.
“Can I ask, what is it about Leland Barlow? He seems like just another generic, early-twenties British pop star with a cute face.”
Dev sits up too quickly. “Excuse you. He’s not just a generic British pop star! How many pop stars are openly bisexual and second-generation Indian and have achieved Leland’s level of fame? And this song”—Dev shakes his phone—“this song’s title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, and it’s a metaphor for depression. Leland is super outspoken about destigmatizing mental illness, and he manages to work that into his music while also writing, like, legitimately amazing pop songs. Songs that make you feel.”