The Charm Offensive(56)
Charlie wishes he could cup his hands around the feeble Dev flame, blow on its embers to keep him going before he burns himself out completely.
“Do you get like this a lot?”
A few quiet sobs dislodge from Dev’s throat. “I get like this sometimes, yeah,” he whispers. “Little funks. But I bounce back. I’ll bounce right back.”
“How can I help when it gets like this?”
Dev folds himself tighter against Charlie, all those lovely sharp points digging in. “You can just stay,” he says, at last. “No one ever stays.”
As Dev falls asleep on his chest, Charlie understands so clearly that Dev has spent four weeks trying to convince Charlie he deserves something Dev doesn’t believe he himself deserves. That whatever these little funks are—these evenings of the brain—they’ve convinced Dev he doesn’t deserve someone who stays. Charlie wishes he could find the words, find a way, to show Dev what he’s worth, even if this thing between them is already over. Even if it was only ever practice.
But Charlie doesn’t know how you show someone they’re worthy of being loved. So he just stays.
Dev
It was his seventh therapist—or maybe his eighth?—who asked him to describe it once, the way it feels when the depression is at its worst. Dev told her it was like drowning from the inside. Like his brain was filling with water. Like sitting on the bottom of the deep end of the west Raleigh public pool the way he would as a kid, letting the silence and the pressure crush him until he couldn’t stand it any longer.
That is how he feels when he opens his eyes Thursday morning, so it takes a while to figure out when he is and where he is and why Charlie Winshaw is sitting on the edge of his bed tying his shoes. Relief sweeps across Charlie’s face. “You’re awake.”
Dev clears his throat. “You stayed.”
A shy smile tugs at the corner of Charlie’s mouth. “How are you feeling?”
Like I almost drowned but didn’t. “That question is a little too much to handle pre-coffee.”
“You get in the shower, then, and I’ll go find some coffee.” One more smile, then Charlie climbs off the bed. Dev watches him move to the desk chair, watches him slip on his coat, watches him grab the hotel room key off the desk.
Charlie turns to look at him again, propped up against the headboard. He takes two uneasy steps toward the door. Hesitates. Pivots. Then he takes three determined steps toward the bed. Charlie grabs Dev’s face and kisses him firmly in the middle of the forehead. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
And then he’s gone.
When the door clicks shut behind Charlie, Dev takes a deep breath, gathers up what little energy he has, and gets out of bed. He takes an exceptionally long shower, trying to make up for the four days he didn’t shower, for the days he could barely get out of bed at all. He lathers the soap between his hands and imagines he can scrub off the days of fog, the days of never feeling fully awake, the days of climbing deeper and deeper into that place where he feeds the darkness with his self-loathing, his loneliness, his feelings of inadequacy. The depression has a special knack for listing all his shortcomings, and this time, it had his epic mistake of kissing Charlie to throw in his face.
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.
“I couldn’t find black coffee, but I got you a large Americano,” Charlie says as soon as Dev gets out of the bathroom. “Jules texted, and call time is in an hour.”
“Thanks.” Dev reaches around for the paper cup and Charlie startles.
“You shaved,” Charlie announces. He lifts his hand, like he’s about to touch Dev’s cleanly shaven cheek, but then he clasps both hands around his tea instead. “I… I missed your face.”
It’s a surprisingly honest thing to say. He doesn’t know what to make of Charlie saying sweet things to him, or of Charlie kissing him before he left, or of Charlie holding him all night, even after Dev gave him every reason to leave. Dev is usually the one who takes care of people. No one ever takes care of him. “Um, thanks for the coffee.”
He sits back on the edge of the bed. Charlie leans against the desk across from him. In the three feet between them is the kissing and the not kissing and Charlie holding him while he cried. “Do you want to talk about it?” Charlie asks.
“By ‘it,’ you mean my depression?” He means for the words to come out flippantly, but he’s still half-submerged, so he sounds bitter instead. Charlie doesn’t say anything. “I… I don’t really like to talk about it. Sunil and Shameem made me go to a dozen different therapists for ‘my moods’ as a kid, and I just got sick of discussing it to death. It’s not even a big deal.”
“Are you in therapy now?”
“I said it’s not a big deal.”
Charlie hesitates, then crosses the room and sits beside Dev, their thighs lined up against an ugly hotel comforter. Charlie doesn’t say anything, but it’s not his usual awkward silence. It’s silence as invitation. He reaches for Dev’s hand. Interlaces their fingers.