The Charm Offensive(90)

Charlie looks around the room—at Dev, at Jules, at the people who know the truth and are saying nothing out of fear. “And what if I refuse?” Charlie asks, each word clipped.

Maureen is still for the length of one shallow breath. “Then I’ll give you a terrible edit and let the entire world see just how crazy you really are.”

All the air is pulled from the room by Maureen’s words, and Dev’s brain doesn’t have the oxygen it needs to understand. But it tries. The boyfriend on night one. The wool suit. Daphne throwing herself at him at the ball. Megan and Delilah. The massage Group Quest. The entire season, Maureen kept putting Charlie in situations to exploit him (because she knows about his mental illness, knows about WinHan, of course she does) and now she’s standing in a back room using that footage to blackmail him.

All Dev can think is six years.

He made so many excuses for Maureen—justified so many of her actions—for so long and somehow only now does he understand the truth. Maureen was never his ally, never his friend, and this show was never about love. He threw away six years of his life.

Charlie looks around the room at the silent producers who still aren’t sticking up for him. At the producers he thought cared about him. He looks at Dev. “Well,” he says, and Dev can hear it in his voice. He’s trying so hard to be strong. Dev wishes he could help, but he doesn’t have any strength left in him to give to Charlie. He’s hollowed out, emptied of feeling, a husk on the bottom of a pool. “I guess we’ll have our happily ever after, then.”

Daphne is the only person who calls out for him as he shoves his way toward the door.





Charlie


“Charlie, wait!”

Charlie doesn’t wait. He storms down the hall and out into the ballroom where Angie and Lauren L. are still waiting with confused looks on their faces. He should feel anxious right now—he waits for the panic to take over—but the anger is taking up too much room inside him at the moment. He’s so fucking angry.

He’s angry at Jules, who only supported his and Dev’s relationship when it was convenient for her to do so. He’s angry at Skylar, who knotted his bow tie and told him to choose Dev and still didn’t speak up for him. He’s angry at Maureen, obviously, for being exactly who he thought she was.

And he’s so damn angry at Dev.

He has virtually no awareness of Daphne returning from the back room, her makeup redone, taking her place between Angie and Lauren, but he knows it must have happened. He knows he picks up a tiara and calls her name, and that she steps forward. When he asks, “Are you interested in becoming my princess?” Daphne Reynolds says yes, despite everything. He knows he gives Angie the second tiara and sends Lauren home, but he can’t recall any of the particular details of that or anything else, because the anger is ringing too loudly in his ears.

After, Ryan tries to talk to him. Skylar pulls him aside. Jules apologizes. The anger drowns out all their words.

He ends up in the back of a town car. He ends up in an elevator. He ends up outside of his hotel room door. When he fumbles with his card key and gets the door open, he finds Dev there, sitting on the edge of the bed they wrecked together the night before. And Charlie is angry, but he’s also hurt, and he can’t quite help himself from falling into Dev’s arms as soon as they’re alone.

“That was awful,” Charlie cries into the crook of Dev’s neck.

Dev runs his fingers through Charlie’s hair, teasing apart the curls like he always does, but when he speaks, it’s with his hollow voice. “I know, love. I know. I’m so sorry.”

Charlie lets himself cry a bit longer, lets himself enjoy the feeling of Dev’s arms and Dev’s body before he pulls back. “What are we going to do?”

Dev’s eyes are glassy. Faraway. “There’s nothing we can do. We all signed contracts. You’ll propose to Daphne and get engaged, and the show will air, and then you’ll finally get everything you want.”

“I want you,” Charlie says. Because he does. Even though Dev stood there like a coward while Maureen threatened him, and even though Charlie is angry right now, he understands. Dev spent six years—hell, Dev spent most of his life—thinking this show was the perfect fairy tale, and he only just witnessed the ugly truth of it for the first time. Charlie understands why Dev couldn’t stand up for him, couldn’t stand beside him.

What he doesn’t understand is why Dev is pulling away right now.

“We both knew how this was going to end, Charlie,” he says, as he slides out from beneath Charlie’s weight. He walks over to the hotel desk and rubs his finger along the edge of a Courtyard Marriott notepad. “We both know this has an expiration date.”

“What if I don’t want it to end? What if I want”—he almost says forever, but Dev is standing in front of the desk with his closed-off posture, and the word can’t make it past his lips—“more.”

Dev folds his arms across his chest. Charlie sees it for what it is: a feeble attempt on Dev’s part to protect himself. “There isn’t any more to have. We want different things.”

“I thought we both wanted that house in Venice Beach?”

“That was a fantasy!” Dev erupts. “It would never work!”

“Because of me?”