The Charm Offensive(54)
“How?”
“You talk about him a lot, and when you look at him, your whole face relaxes,” she says so matter-of-factly, Charlie feels like he might as well be ass-naked on this bench, completely exposed to the world. “Plus, as soon as I saw him, it just made sense. He’s your type.”
“You think my type is six-foot-four skinny dudes with unfortunate haircuts?”
“I can’t really explain why, but yes.”
“And you’re not mad at me?”
“Mad? Hot-Ass, you know I don’t legitimately want to marry you, right?”
“I do, but you also sent me on this show to get engaged to a woman, so…”
“Quite frankly, you kissing your producer is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened on this heteronormative cesspool of a shitty television show.”
He waits for her to pull out the rug, waits for the other shoe to drop. He waits for her to tell him he needs to keep this new development hidden away. But of course she doesn’t. “That’s… it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“I don’t see the need to have a whole sexual identity crisis about it,” she says, dismissively waving her hand in the direction of a tour group of loud French teenagers. “Unless you want to have a sexual identity crisis about it. Are you freaking out about being attracted to dudes?”
“Not really,” he says. “Besides, I’m not really sure I am attracted to dudes. Like, plural.”
“Are you sexually attracted to women?”
“I don’t know.… I don’t think so, no. I never have been before.” Then he collapses against her soft side. “What do you think that means?”
“So, you do what to have a whole sexual identity crisis about it? Okay. Do you think you might be asexual?” She asks it so simply, without any judgment or pressure, and he can’t believe in four years of friendship, they’ve never had this conversation. He wonders how many times Parisa wanted to initiate it and was patiently waiting for him to open the door just a crack.
“I’ve never really considered… but based on recent developments, no, I don’t think I’m asexual,” he finally says. “I’m definitely not sex-repulsed.”
“Not everyone who is asexual is. Asexuality is a spectrum.” Parisa holds her hands two feet apart like she’s measuring for a very small Ikea bookshelf. “On one end, you have allosexual people, or people who experience sexual attraction, and on the other end you have asexual people, who do not. But there is a whole range between those two things.”
“Very informative.”
“I’m just saying, you might be into dudes but also demisexual, which means you need emotional connection to feel sexual attraction. Or you might be demiromantic or graysexual or—”
He cringes. “I don’t know if the specific label is important to me.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” she says, “and you’re not obligated to figure it out, or come out, or explain yourself to anyone, ever. But also”—she drops her hands from their spectrum and tucks an arm around his shoulder—“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. I mean, if you didn’t have the correct label for your OCD, you wouldn’t be able to get the treatment you need, right?”
He stares out at the muddy road winding up to the castle. “That’s just it. I feel like I’ve been shoved into different boxes with different labels my whole life. I don’t know if I want more boxes.”
He can feel Parisa nod against him. “That’s fair, and look, for me, sexuality is fluid, but I want you to know, you’re allowed to have whatever feelings you have toward Dev, even if they don’t fit into some fairy-tale idea of what relationships are supposed to be. You’re allowed to want the romance parts without the sex parts. Or the sex parts without the romance parts. All of those feelings are valid. You’re deserving of a relationship in whatever form you want it.”
He holds his breath like he’s trying to hold Parisa’s unquestioning acceptance, her unwavering love, inside his chest for a little longer. “That means a lot to me, but…” He puffs out his cheeks and just says it: “What if I maybe do want both parts with Dev?”
“Oh.”
“But Dev doesn’t want either part with me.”
“Seems highly improbable.”
He tells Parisa everything—about practice dates and practice kisses, about the script and realizing what he felt at three in the morning, about the Bourbon Stain Incident and tequila shots and Lady Gaga. “And now he’s pretending to have the flu to avoid me because he doesn’t feel the same way.”
“How do you feel?”
“What?”
“You said Dev doesn’t feel the same way. So how do you feel?”
He wants to slowly back away from that question like it’s a bomb about to go off in his hands. “I feel so much,” he hears himself say, running toward the bomb, opening himself up entirely to the injury of it. “I think about him constantly. I always want to be talking to him, or touching him, or looking at him, and I want him to look at me in a way I’ve never wanted anyone to look at me before. That doesn’t… make sense.”