The Charm Offensive(6)

The petite foul-mouth shoves her arm toward Charlie. “Jules Lu. Nice to meet you. I’m your production assistant. It’s my job to make sure you’re where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. And you are not where you’re supposed to be right now.”

“Sorry.” He stares at her hand but doesn’t take it. “Uh, you… also meet.”

“Does he think that was a sentence?” Jules asks Dev. “God, we’re screwed.”

Jules yanks Dev out of the car, and Dev yanks Charlie out of the car, and anything Charlie was going to say to Dev gets swallowed up by the madness all around them. They head up a path toward the set, which is supposed to look like a fairy tale. The castle is lit up in the distance, and the show’s host, Mark Davenport, waits in front of an ornate fountain. There are twinkle lights and flowers and a horse-drawn carriage ripped straight out of Cinderella.

It should look like a fairy tale, but the castle is actually just a millionaire’s house in Pasadena, and there are crew members dressed in black, shouting and vaping. Mark Davenport screams at his assistant about kombucha until she cries.

So, like, not quite Walt Disney’s vision.

“Stand here for me.” Dev motions to a little tape x, and he warns Charlie before he slides his hands around Charlie’s back again to click on his mic. Charlie tenses. This is it. He can’t undo it, can’t back out, can’t hide. If he thinks too hard about the past year and all the things that led him here, to this single act of desperation, he knows he won’t be able to keep it together.

“Remember,” Dev says low and close to his ear, “everyone in Command Central can hear you now.”

Charlie swallows the lump forming in his throat.

“You look miserable.”

“Oh, that’s probably because I am miserable.”

“Mic.”

“I’m… ah… miserably happy to be here.”

“Very convincing save. You’re a natural at this.”

Charlie smiles despite himself, and Dev explodes with an enthusiastic, “Yes! Yes!” He turns his fingers into a box and squints one eye like he’s lining up the shot. “Just like that! Smile just like that when the cameras are on.”

Unfortunately, Charlie’s smile collapses in on itself as soon as Dev draws attention to it.

“Well, now you look like you’re going to vomit.”

“I probably am.”

“You’re not going to vomit! You’re about to meet twenty women who are all here on a quest to find love with you!” Dev seems to think this is a delightful prospect, as if all of Charlie’s fairy-tale dreams are about to come true. As if Charlie has fairy-tale dreams. “This is going to be amazing!”

Dev forgets the advance-notice-for-touching rule, and his hand folds around Charlie’s bicep, burning through the layers of his tux. Charlie isn’t sure what’s happening to his body right now, but it’s not good. It’s maybe very, very bad.

Dev leans in even closer. His breath is hot on Charlie’s cheek. He smells like sugar and chocolate and something else Charlie can’t quite place. “I know you’re freaked out right now, but at the end of all of this, you’re going to find love,” Dev whispers. “In nine weeks, you’re going to have a fiancée.”

And that’s when Charlie truly does vomit, all over Dev.





Dev


There is vomit on his Chucks.

Granted, there is always vomit on his shoes the first night of shooting, but it usually happens at dawn, not dusk, and the vomit typically belongs to an overserved contestant, not to Prince Charming himself.

Then again, it turns out Charles Winshaw is no one’s definition of a Prince Charming, no matter how much he might look the part. And he really does look the part. Broad-shouldered, with the tux doing little to conceal his muscular build. Straight-nosed and square-jawed and sweet—it’s the sweetness that caught Dev off guard when Charles fell out of the town car. All the men who come on this show are handsome. None of them have ever been sweet.

Then again, none of them have ever been quite this handsome. Charles Winshaw is somehow the most beautiful man Dev’s ever seen in real life, even with vomit in his chin dimple. Even talking absolute nonsense. Even with all the nervous sweating.

(Maybe especially with all the nervous sweating.)

“I… I’m s-so, so, so sorry,” he sputters.

Any annoyance Dev feels about the vomit disappears when he looks up into Charles Winshaw’s enormous eyes. 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.

A man from set design comes over with a hose to casually clean the puke off the pavement and douses Dev with a burst of cold water, which is pretty par for the course on his night so far.

“I… seriously… so sorry,” Charles says again as the makeup team swoops in to fix his face without missing a beat.

The vomit is cleared from his chin, the lights are adjusted, and from somewhere in the dark, the first AD shouts, “Final checks, please!” whether Charles is ready to become Prince Charming or not.

He’s definitely not. He looks gray and sickly, and Dev wants to stay by his side, but the AD calls to lock it up, and Dev jumps out of frame at the last second.