The Charm Offensive(66)
Except now—now he falls asleep each night with Dev’s arm around his waist and wakes up every morning to the sight of Dev’s pillow drool, and suddenly, there are only twenty-four days left, and Charlie is having a hard time imagining how this all ends.
He tries to pay attention to the women on the Group Quests, but the show doesn’t make it easy. Despite the fact that he’s down to his top six, the women are still forced to compete in ridiculous challenges for his time and attention. Charlie cannot fathom how anyone actually falls in love on this show; he’s spent maybe five hours with each woman individually.
Thursday, the show films at Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, where the women learn pseudo-botany and make love potions he’s actually forced to drink. When Mark Davenport traipses out for his weekly fifteen minutes of work to announce Daphne as the Group Quest victor for the week, everything erupts into the same old drama. Megan locks herself in a bathroom, Delilah calls Daphne a con artist, and Angie jumps to her defense. Charlie is exhausted with all of it.
When they get back to the suite, Dev gets word that Megan is coming to speak to Charlie. The suite is quickly prepped for filming, and when Megan shows up an hour later, it’s clear her handler has goaded her into this late-night visit. She’s wearing next to nothing, and she immediately throws herself at him. It’s week six, and Dev finally got approval from Maureen back in LA to send Megan home at the Crowning Ceremony. This is clearly Maureen’s way of making sure Megan goes home as dramatically as possible. The other five women, back in their suite, are probably talking about Megan’s desperate plan to seduce him for the cameras. Charlie has been doing this long enough to see the strings, which Maureen can somehow pull from ten thousand miles away.
“I just really needed to see you,” Megan purrs into his throat. He diplomatically leads her to the couch. She clearly is here to try to seduce him. As soon as they sit down, her mouth finds his, her hands rove his body. He counts his Mississippis until it’s an appropriate time to stop her.
She looks devastated by his sudden distance. Charlie studies the tight lines around her mouth, the purple bags peeking out beneath her eye makeup. He’s been so distracted by Dev the past few weeks, he hasn’t really paid attention to the women at all. Looking at Megan, he can see she’s not in a healthy place. She’s lost weight, and in her glassy-eyed expression, he can see his own struggles with anxiety mirrored back to him. She’s been poked and prodded into fitting the villain narrative they wrote for her, and now she’s about to snap from the stress.
“Megan,” he begins.
“I love you,” she blurts before he can say anything else. He briefly registers that this is the first time anyone has said these words to him. He wishes it weren’t coming from a woman who just wants to win.
“Megan,” he tries again, but this time he’s interrupted by another knock on the door. It’s Delilah, also heavily made up, with her handler in tow. “Charles, I’m sorry,” she announces as she swans into the room, “but I had to come tell you that Megan is crazy.”
Charlie flinches at the use of the c-word.
“She told me she was going to have sex with you tonight so you couldn’t send her home.”
Megan leaps off the couch. “Delilah is just slut-shaming me because she’s an uptight virgin!”
“Because virgin-shaming is much better,” Charlie says. No one hears him. Delilah and Megan are screaming at each other, and the cameras are gleefully capturing the scene. Delilah keeps throwing out words like psycho and unstable, and he’s back at WinHan, hearing the whispers in the hallways. It’s offensive. Horrible.
Behind the cameras, Jules looks livid, but she holds Parisa back before she impales the producers on the heels of her Louboutins. Even Ryan Parker looks mildly ill. But when Charlie finds Dev across the room, he’s watching the fight with cool detachment. He doesn’t understand how Dev can just stand there and let this play out, let two women emotionally abuse each other for entertainment.
But that’s what Ever After does. It exploits people during their most vulnerable moments, and a crew of mostly decent people lets it happen. Dev has stood by before—while the boyfriend screamed at Kiana, and while Megan bullied Daphne—and he shouldn’t be surprised Dev is standing by and letting this happen now. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing behind their closed hotel door, in their shared bed, because at the end of the day, Dev will always put the show first.
Charlie can’t believe, after everything, that he’s only just now realizing this.
He’s suddenly furious. He wants to defy Maureen Scott and her entire toxic franchise, but he doesn’t know how, doesn’t have any power over this situation.
Except—“Enough,” he hears himself say. “I am done condoning this behavior.”
“Charles,” Megan starts, falsely apologetic.
He pulls himself up off the couch and tries to look confident. “I’m sorry, but I think you both should leave.”
“You’re right,” Delilah says. She gets to play the role of the reasonable one. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow when we’ve all cooled off.”
“No, I think you should both leave the show. Permanently.”
Both women break the fourth wall, staring at the cameras and producers, clearly confused. This isn’t how they were told the night would end, but Charlie isn’t going to back down. He knows that right now, somewhere in Los Angeles, an editing team is mining thousands of hours of footage—almost every minute of his life on this show has been documented so the whole thing can be trimmed down into eighty-minute episodes without commercials—and Maureen Scott is there, manipulating Megan’s footage so this scene becomes the culmination of her villain arc. Charlie doesn’t have power over much, but he does have the power to ruin this scene.