The Charm Offensive(94)

He promises to look at the printer tomorrow, heats up the leftovers and eats them over the kitchen sink, then kisses his mother on the cheek before he goes to bed.

In his room, he imagines he’ll close the door and somehow feel stronger than he actually does. He’ll feel indifferent to what night it is and to the photo on the magazine cover and everything else.

He doesn’t, though, and instead he pulls the jean jacket out of the closet where he keeps it tucked away. He climbs into his bed, curls himself into a tight ball, and pulls out his phone.

In the first month after Dev left Macon, Charlie called every day, leaving short messages. Small, sad, desperate pleas.

“Please call me back. I just want to talk.”

“I love you, and you love me. It’s that simple, Dev.”

“I am trying to respect your health, but I can’t walk away from us.”

“Hey, it’s me. Just reaching out. I’m going to keep reaching, Dev. I will never stop reaching.”

Even though Dev deleted every text message without reading it and ignored every phone call from the crew, he would listen to five-second bursts of Charlie’s voice every night before bed. He would play them over and over again, bathing in the sound of each syllable sweeping over Charlie’s tongue.

The messages were never more than ten seconds, except the last one, which Charlie left five weeks ago. That one was one minute and forty-two seconds—a rambling mess of a voicemail that cuts Dev open every time he thinks of it. Charlie hasn’t called since.

Dev wants to be strong enough not to listen to it now. He also wants to be strong enough to not use the oatmeal body wash he orders from Amazon by the crate because smelling like Charlie is a way for those few weeks they had together to feel real. He’s come so far with his mental health in the past three months, and he thought as soon as he started to get healthy, he would realize Charlie was a giant, self-destructive mistake. He thought getting healthy would naturally mean the Charlie-shaped sinkhole in his chest would go away. He wants to let go of all those stupid romantic notions.

So why does he still miss him? Why was Charlie the first person he wanted to call when he signed with an agent to represent his script, and why is Charlie the first person he wants to talk to whenever he has a breakthrough in therapy? Why can’t he resist hitting the play button and pressing the phone to his ear?

“Uh, hey. It’s me. Again. I know you probably don’t listen to these messages, and I know you probably don’t care, and I know I should probably stop. The healthy thing to do is stop. Jules thinks I should get on a plane and show up at your parents’ place and tell you how I feel. She said that’s what Prince Charming would do. I told her that’s what a stalker would do.”

Here, Charlie laughs, as he always does, and the sound pokes at all the holes in Dev’s heart.

“If you wanted to see me, then we would have seen each other. You would’ve come to LA. Except, did I tell you I’m living in LA now? I mean, we don’t talk, so I guess I probably didn’t. I have so many imagined conversations with you—in the shower, on the way to the gym, while cooking dinner—I sometimes forget we haven’t actually spoken since Macon. But yeah, I bought a house. It’s out in Silver Lake, and my neighbors are all hipsters, so you’d probably hate it, but it was the only place for sale that could do a quick closing.

“It was so weird—after I bought it, I kept walking into rooms and feeling this overwhelming sense that something was missing. So I filled every room with furniture, and I let Parisa hang art on every wall, and I bought plants to put in front of every window, and it took me days to realize you were the missing thing. I kept expecting to see you standing by the window, or in the third bedroom at the desk working on your script, or in the kitchen burning pancakes. I guess I really liked the idea of you being in my future, and I haven’t quite figured out how to not have you in it.”

And here, the seconds stretch out in silence, static and the faint sound of three slow breaths. “That was selfish of me to say. This… this whole message is selfish. I’m glad you never listen to these. I just needed to say it, I guess. So I can learn to let you go.”



* * *



Dev listens to the message over and over until he falls asleep to the sound, and when he wakes up Tuesday morning before seven, he has thirty-six missed calls, some from the crew, but most from numbers he doesn’t recognize. There are dozens of texts and emails, and he shoves his phone under his pillow. He climbs out of bed, hides the jean jacket in the back of his closet, and goes downstairs for coffee. He has half a mind to ask his parents what happened on last night’s episode to prompt this unprecedented deluge, but when he comes into the living room, he’s taken aback by the presence of people who are not his parents in his house first thing in the morning.

He’s so shocked, it takes him a good minute to register it’s the Ever After crew. In Raleigh, North Carolina. A week before they film the live finale.

“What. The actual. Fuck?”

He isn’t sure if he’s asking this question of his parents, who are shuffling around the kitchen getting coffee for their guests, or if he’s asking the guests. Skylar Jones is staring at his baby pictures on the wall. Parisa Khadim is helping herself to coffee creamer in his parents’ refrigerator. Jules Lu is asking his mother where she got her house slippers. Ryan Parker is sitting in front of his parents’ desktop computer.