The Charm Offensive(89)
He knows what he really wants. He just doesn’t know how to get it. “I—”
“Cut!” Maureen Scott stomps in her high heels into the alcove, shoving a camera operator out of the way. “Cut! Turn off these cameras! What the hell are you doing?”
Charlie shrinks at Maureen’s anger, but Daphne stands firm. “I’m sending myself home.”
“Like fucking hell you are,” Maureen snaps. Charlie feels the panic creeping up his esophagus and wishes he could see Dev through the glare of lights. Maureen is screaming at various crew members and Skylar is trying to salvage the scene and somewhere, beneath the steadily increasing thrum of his anxiety, is the creeping realization that everything is about to fall apart.
Dev
It’s all falling apart.
It’s been slowly falling apart for days. Ryan knows and Skylar knows and now Daphne Reynolds is talking about fake engagements in front of the cameras. The season has been hanging on by a thread, and now Daphne has chopped that thread with a machete.
“Production meeting! Now!” Maureen shouts, and Jules has to grab Dev by the elbow and guide him behind Skylar and Ryan as Maureen cuts a path toward the cramped room where Charlie changed before the Crowning Ceremony. Daphne and Charlie are here, too. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Maureen asks Daphne. “Are you truly as stupid as you look?”
Daphne backs herself into a makeup mirror.
“You can’t send yourself home,” Maureen continues. “You signed a contract. We’ve built the entire season around you!”
“But we don’t… we don’t love each other,” Daphne mutters.
Maureen Scott throws her head back and laughs. “No one gives a shit if you’re in love. This show isn’t about love.”
Something sinks inside of Dev, and then he’s sinking, sitting on the bottom of the pool with the pressure of nine feet of water pushing down on him. He looks across the room and finds Charlie, and he tries to use his blond curls and gray eyes and chin dimple to anchor himself.
“Maureen, maybe we could discuss this calmly,” Skylar tries. She’s holding up both hands between Daphne and Maureen.
“There’s nothing to discuss. Our perfect princess is going to get engaged to our prince. That’s the story we’ve been telling, and that’s how it’s going to end.”
Dev stares at his boss and watches her silvery bob swish elegantly around her mean face.
“If Charlie proposes to me,” Daphne says, her voice surprisingly clear, “I will say no. You cannot force me to say yes.”
“And you can’t force me to propose to her,” Charlie adds. Dev feels a weird mixture of pride and dread at the sudden certainty in Charlie’s voice. “Daphne is right. I’m done pretending to be something I’m not.”
Maureen points an angry finger at Charlie’s face. “You’re not done pretending until your contract is over.”
“Maybe Charlie can propose to Angie instead,” Jules tries in a soft voice almost muffled by the screaming.
Maureen wheels around to face her and scoffs. “I’ve already told you we are not going to have a bisexual win this season.”
Dev watches the way this statement registers on Daphne’s face, watches the way her mouth slides open in horror. Charlie looks equally stricken. He meets Dev’s gaze, and his expression asks a simple question. Did you know? Did he know that his boss refused to let a bisexual woman become the next star or the winner of this season?
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Maureen snaps at the pair of them. “None of this is about me or what I believe. I’m a Democrat. I support gay rights. I hired all of you,” she says, gesturing to Dev, Skylar, Ryan, and Jules. Dev has never felt more like a prop, like a checked box. Maureen plows on. “But this show hinges on appealing to a wide viewership. I’m giving America what it wants, and it does not want a bisexual princess.”
For a minute, the dressing room is quiet, seven adult bodies packed together in horrified silence.
“What America wants?” Daphne echoes slowly.
“What if I was gay?” someone asks at the same time.
It’s Charlie’s voice that slices through the tension in the room like a felled tree in the forest. Everyone looks at him. No one breathes. Especially not Dev.
“What if I told you I was gay?” Charlie says again, his gray eyes steady as they fix on Maureen. “What if I told you I can’t get engaged to any of the women at the end of this season, because I’m gay? What if I told you I was in love with a man—”
Charlie has never said that word before. Love. Dev wants to bask in the sound of it sweeping past Charlie’s lips, but Skylar and Ryan both turn to look at him while Daphne’s tongue gets caught on a vague sound of disbelief. “You’re… what?”
“What if I told you I was in love with a man,” Charlie pushes forward, like the brave, beautiful, na?ve man that he is, “and I wanted to choose him instead?”
Maureen puts her hands on her hips, stares down the man Dev loves, and says, “You do not want to play that game with me, Charles. You think we’ve never had a gay prince before? Of course we have! I don’t give a shit what you do or with whom when the cameras aren’t rolling, but when they are, you’re going to pretend to be head-over-heels in love with her.” She points angrily at Daphne.