The Charm Offensive(78)
He wakes right up, however, as Sabrina creeps closer to massaging something else entirely.
“Sorry. So sorry. Sorry!” He says as he half falls off the massage table, feebly trying to conceal himself behind the towel. “I’m so sorry!”
“I lied,” Dev hisses five minutes later as Charlie struggles to put on the rest of his clothes in a back room. “I was really jealous.”
“Sweetheart, I know.”
* * *
“Be honest with us, Charlie: was that your first time?”
Dev throws the rest of his fried banana at Skylar’s face. “Leave him alone.”
“You got to give it to Sabrina, though,” Ryan says. “It was a bold move at the eleventh hour. A real Hail Mary.”
“Do I have to give it to her?” Charlie borrows Jules’s signature head tilt. “Do I really?”
The whole poolside patio erupts with laughter. Jules spills a tiny bit of red wine onto her pajamas from her position at the foot of Dev’s lounge chair. The blooming stain doesn’t bother him in the slightest.
Charlie holds the sweaty neck of his third lemon radler. “Poor Wayan was still standing right there, holding the massage oil. I’m pretty sure she got an eyeful of my dick.”
“Charles, I got an eyeful of your dick,” Skylar clarifies.
“Can we all please appreciate the fact that Charlie just said the word dick out loud without hyperventilating?” Dev says, and he raises his soda water into the air to toast. “To corrupting Charlie!”
“Hear, hear.”
Skylar, Jules, and Ryan all raise their glasses high in the air. “That’s the heart and soul of Ever After, right there,” Ryan says. “Getting innocent tech millionaires to expose themselves on national television.”
Dev leans across his lounge chair to clink his can against Charlie’s bottle.
Charlie takes a long drink. “The real problem is, I was planning to send Sabrina home on Saturday, but would it be… untoward… to reject a woman two days after she offered me a hand job?”
The entire pool patio thoughtfully considers this moral quandary. Jules answers first: “Would we call it an offer, or would we call it attempted sexual assault?”
“I think her hand really did slip,” Skylar says, probably to prevent Charlie from suing.
Dev looks grim, reaches over, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “I think you know what you have to do.”
Charlie sighs. “Marry her?”
“Exactly.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Skylar leans forward so enthusiastically she spills half her beer and almost herself onto the concrete patio. “If you know you’re sending Sabrina home this week, does that mean you know who you’re going to choose?”
Dev tenses on his chaise, his joking mood swallowed in an instant, an edge of darkness cutting across his face. Charlie wishes he could tell him, Don’t worry. It’s you. It’s only you.
He takes three deep breaths and answers carefully. “I know who I would like to choose, yes,” Charlie says, and he shoots Dev the briefest glance before he returns his attention to Skylar. “But I am not quite sure how it’s all going to play out yet.”
Skylar’s drunk face melts into a scowl. “Are you going to choose Daphne? Of course you’re going to choose Daphne. It’s what we’ve been planning all season. It’s going to be such a boring and predictable season.”
“If I had it my way, Sky, it would be neither boring nor predictable.”
* * *
“When did you come out to your parents?” Charlie asks hours later, after he’s managed to undo Dev’s bad mood with a second dinner, a fashion show involving a stolen frangipani robe, and lots of kissing.
“God, I love when you talk dirty to me,” Dev says, nipping at his ear. They’re tangled up on top of the bed, the ceiling fan whirling, an empty plate of midnight chicken satay on the bedside table.
“Dev.”
Dev sighs, sits up, crosses his legs. “My sexuality wasn’t much of a mystery to my parents. When I was five, I told my mom I wanted to marry Aladdin, and my parents just gave me space to be exactly who I was without making a big deal out of it.”
Charlie hugs a pillow tight against his chest.
Dev pushes his glasses up his nose. “Do you… Have you thought about coming out? As bisexual? I mean, in like two years, after the show airs and everything settles down?”
“Well, I don’t think I am bisexual, actually,” Charlie mumbles. Dev props himself back on the pillows and stares at Charlie expectantly. He’s not sure why, after everything else he’s shared with Dev, this still feels hard to talk about. “I… I don’t experience sexual attraction very often. I mean, almost never. Present company excluded.” Dev does a charming little bow at that. “And I’m not really sure if that’s because the way I was raised taught me to repress the fact that I’m attracted to men, or if it’s because I’m maybe”—he pushes his hair off his forehead—“maybe on the asexual spectrum? Or, I don’t know. Parisa used this word demisexual, and I think maybe that could be me? Or maybe graysexual, which I googled, and it means you only rarely experience sexual attraction. I mean, I know I enjoy both giving and receiving sexual pleasure, but I don’t know what that means.”