The Charm Offensive, page 29
His dad does his best attempt at a stern face. “Your friends did fly all the way from LA, and it would be rude to make that all for nothing.”
“Okay, fine.” He consents, if only because he’ll go to therapy again tomorrow, and he’ll be able to tell Alex he stopped avoiding it, and maybe then, maybe after watching Charlie date the women for nine episodes, Dev will finally stop missing him.
Dev settles onto the couch between Skylar and Jules, and everyone else finds a seat. The sweeping theme music fills the room, and Mark Davenport is on the screen, looking ageless and dashing. “Are you ready to meet your Prince Charming?” he asks cloyingly. Dev’s heart constricts in his chest, knowing he is going to see Charlie on the screen soon. Jules takes his left hand. Skylar takes his right. They both hold tight.
“You’re in for one wild ride,” Mark says on-screen. “This season is quite literally like nothing we have ever seen before. It’s a game changer.”
“We say that every single season,” Dev mutters. Jules punches him in the leg to shut him up.
Mark Davenport continues the voice-over. The first shot of Charlie is him blurry on a horse at the infamous shoot that led to Ryan’s job reassignment. Then the camera cuts to Charlie standing on a cliff looking windswept and lovely, and Dev chokes on all the old feelings. It barely looks like his Charlie—his limbs are stiff, and his posture is too good, and his face is twisted into a grimace. He is still the most beautiful man Dev has ever seen.
Mark wraps up the show’s intro. “Are you ready for a new quest for love, America? This is Ever After.”
They go to the title card, and this is usually where the show begins in earnest. Instead, it cuts back to Mark Davenport, this time in the studio where they’ll film the live finale, pacing elegantly. “Now, before we dive in, I should warn you… our prince this season isn’t polished. He isn’t always camera ready. This season of Ever After is different. We’re going to peel back the curtain for you a little bit, give you unprecedented access to what really happens on set. Nothing is off-limits.”
Dev knows several things are off-limits, but he’s still sucked in by the time the show truly begins. A commercial break, and then Daphne Reynolds is stepping out of a carriage, and Dev is thrown back into that night, embarrassed for Charlie all over again. Charlie’s interaction with Daphne is cringey. He’s wooden and uninteresting, and the secondhand humiliation is so extreme, Dev’s about to insist they turn it off when something truly unprecedented does happen.
Dev is on-screen. He steps into the shot and waves his hands at the cameras. The boom picks up the words give me five before he darts across the shot into the limo.
“Wh—”
“Just watch,” Jules hisses.
He watches, and he sees something he didn’t see that night while he was in the limo convincing Angie to dance with Charlie. Mark Davenport steps over to Charlie and puts a hand on his shoulder. “I know you’re nervous, but don’t worry. Dev, your handler, is the best. He’s going to take really good care of you. He won’t let you look like an idiot in front of twenty million viewers.”
Mark laughs, and Charlie kind of squawks, and then Dev is out of the limo again bounding over to Charlie. Dev reaches up and his fingers are in Charlie’s hair, adjusting his crown. Charlie blushes at Dev’s touch, and it’s right there for viewers to see. Charlie, an hour after they met, falling over himself because of Dev instead of Daphne.
“You can do this,” Dev says, and Charlie gives a shy little smile, twisting something inside real Dev’s chest on the couch. “I believe in you.”
Dev steps out of the shot, and the normal show starts up again, with Angie getting out of the horse-drawn carriage.
“You guys, what is this?”
“This is what we’ve been trying to get you to watch,” Jules says smugly. “This is Ever After.”
Back on-screen, they show what happens after the carriage exits are over, after Skylar calls cut. “You’re doing bleeping spectacular!” Dev tells Charlie. Charlie smiles back, earnest and huge, and it feels like watching part of Charlie open for the first time.
When the second episode starts up instantly, Dev doesn’t move from his seat. There’s so much footage of Charlie and Dev he didn’t know existed: footage of Dev sitting beside Charlie the day Megan faked her injury at the jousting Quest; footage of Dev trying to calm him down later that night after Charlie kissed Angie for the first time; footage of them laughing on set, footage of them joking between takes, so much footage of Dev fixing Charlie’s hair.
Through it all, it is still a normal season of Ever After. There are still Group Quests and women gushing about Charlie, and Charlie gushing about the women. All the drama unfolds like it’s supposed to, with the women fighting back at the castle, and Megan’s perfect turn as the villain, and the suspense of the Crowning Ceremonies. The editing team has simply gone through and expanded the scope of the show just a little to make room for Dev.
The episodes are flying by. When Charlie has his panic attack with Daphne at the ball, and he runs into Dev’s arms, it’s so obvious on Dev’s face that he cares in ways he shouldn’t. Watching himself fall in love with Charlie is like falling in love with him all over again.
Dev sits in the living room where he first discovered Ever After, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t get up to go to the bathroom, only eats when his mother directly inserts food into his mouth. He watches a scene with Charlie and Angie in Germany he didn’t know existed. “I just want Dev to be okay,” Charlie says, sounding pitiful.
“Sweetie, I know. I know,” Angie says in return, and America must know, too.
Dev watches the Leland Barlow night. There are interviews he never saw. Daphne, looking giddy: “He told me about the plan the other night! I think Dev is going to be really surprised.”
Angie, looking knowing as hell: “I think this might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for their producer.”
Then Charlie explains for the audience: “Dev, my handler, went through a difficult time in Germany, and I wanted to do something special to cheer him up. The show was going to fly this country singer down to Cape Town, but I was able to change their minds.”
They show Dev losing his damn mind over Leland Barlow, and then they show the dance party with the contestants and crew. Jules twirls Dev into Charlie’s arms, and they do their awkward dance together on the night Dev realized he was in love with Charlie.
And then he’s watching that last night.
At the Crowning Ceremony in Macon, Daphne asks to speak to Charlie, and the cameras follow them to the alcove. Right there, on his parents’ television screen, Daphne tells Charlie she’s done pretending until Maureen Scott calls cut and steps viciously into the frame.
The show abruptly cuts to Charlie sitting on a bed in a hotel room. It takes Dev a second to recognize it as the hotel room. At the Courtyard Marriott. The last place he saw Charlie Winshaw.
“It is time for me to be honest,” he is telling the cameras in a confessional. “I came on this show for the wrong reason. I wanted a chance to rebuild my career, and I know now that what I did was unfair—to the women who came on this show for love and to the people who work here. But the thing is…” There are tears filling his beautiful gray eyes. “I didn’t think it was possible to find love on this show. And I was wrong.”
They cut back to Mark Davenport in the studio. He stands onstage, wearing his bespoke suit, his face somehow grim and optimistic at the same time. “It’s been quite a journey up to this point, and I’m sure it hasn’t been the journey you were expecting. To be honest, we weren’t expecting it either. But that’s the thing about love, isn’t it?” he says with a glimmer in his eye. “Sometimes it comes when you least expect it. When it comes down to it, this show is about helping people reach their happily ever after. Will our star find that? Tune in next week for the heartbreaking finale you won’t want to miss.”
And that’s it. It’s over. There is nothing more to watch, because they don’t have the live finale. It hasn’t happened yet.
Dev leaps up out of his seat, unable to contain the nervous energy inside of him. His body explodes with shooting pain from sitting in the exact same position on the couch for an entire day. He looks around the room. At his dad, sitting at the kitchen table. At Ryan, asleep in his dad’s recliner. At Parisa, sitting on the love seat with his mother, and at Jules and Skylar, still flanking him on the couch. They never left his side. Not once, for twelve hours straight.
Everyone looks back at him, and Dev isn’t quite sure where to start, so he starts with the obvious. “How did you get Maureen to do this?”
Skylar answers. “Maureen Scott is no longer affiliated with Ever After.”
Dev sits back down. “Wait, what?”
“Funny thing about discriminating against someone based on their sexuality,” Parisa says humorlessly. “It’s illegal. Maureen forcing Charlie to get engaged to a woman after he came out to her was illegal. Charlie called me after what happened in Macon, and we lawyered up.”
“Maureen thought that because Charlie signed a contract, she could force him to stay closeted,” Jules adds. “But the network saw things differently when Parisa filed a discrimination lawsuit. They quickly decided it was best to sever their working relationship with Maureen.”
Parisa does a little mock bow when she sees Dev’s mouth swing open.
“Maureen got a ten-million-dollar buyout, so it’s not exactly a win for social justice, but once she was gone, the network had no problem adapting the narrative to reflect the truth of the season. We were able to do a quick reedit of the first few episodes and then a total overhaul of the back half.”
“We had the waiver you signed to release any footage of you, but we still tried to contact you before the show aired. Unfortunately, you did this really cute thing where you refused to talk to any of us for three months,” Parisa says, her tone suggesting genuine hurt hiding somewhere beneath her usual bravado.
“We?”
Parisa smooths out her ponytail. “You know I love a good public relations clusterfuck, and Ever After is the biggest clusterfuck there is. They hired me as the new head of PR during their transitional rebranding.”
He never thought that any of this was possible. Never thought this version of Ever After was possible. Couldn’t envision this ending. “I… I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you aired this.”
“It was the truth,” Skylar says with a little shrug. Dev studies her. No antacids, no stress. Her hair is even starting to grow back. Slowly. But still. “But to be honest, the season wouldn’t have happened if Charlie hadn’t fought for it. We all made mistakes working for Maureen. Let things slide we shouldn’t have. Stayed quiet when we should have spoken out. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better boss to you, Dev. I should’ve spoken up when I knew you were having a hard time.”
“I didn’t want you to know about my depression,” he says plainly. “I didn’t want anyone to see that side of me.”
Skylar shakes her head. “We all have stuff, Dev. You think I’m not in therapy for my anxiety? You think I don’t need meds sometimes, and help?”
They never talked about it on set, so he honestly didn’t know. With Maureen in charge, the mantra was work hard and shut up about it. There was no room to discuss emotions. No room to breathe, because that was the cost of making the kind of television people demanded to see.
“God, if the show was in trouble before… how did the Fairy-Tale Family react to this season?”
“There were some tough parts.” Skylar puffs out her cheeks. “Not everyone in the Fairy-Tale Family wanted to stick with the show when it became clear that we were promoting a gay relationship. Of course, they didn’t say that outright. They claimed to be upset that we let our star hook up with his producer off-screen, but it was obvious what it was really about. There were some… boycotts.”
“But,” Ryan cuts in, suddenly very awake, “we also brought in a ton of new advertisers and new viewers. Honestly, breaking the rules might be the thing that saves Ever After.”
Dev’s busy brain keeps spinning around these revelations, stacked like Jenga pieces. “What about Us Weekly? The photo of Daphne and Charlie?”
Parisa rolls her eyes. “You’ve been in this business a long time, Dev. Shouldn’t you recognize a publicity stunt when you see one?”
“Daphne is our next princess,” Jules explains, “and we need to keep her relevant in people’s minds before we make the announcement at the finale.”
Dev shoots Parisa a look. “Ever After is in transitional rebranding, but you chose vanilla Daphne Reynolds as your next star?”
The four of them all exchange weird looks. “Things with Daphne got”—Ryan searches for a vague enough word—“interesting after you left.”
“We were so sure there was no way you didn’t know about this season,” Jules cuts in. Dev thinks about his therapist, who definitely knew and respected the boundaries he set. He thinks about his parents watching in secret every Monday night. He’s not sure if he’s grateful or furious they kept this from him.
“And then I reached out to Shameem, and we discovered you’ve been living in a social-media-free hole,” Ryan continues, “and we figured we had to try to show you, to see if there is any chance you might—”
“Any chance I might what?”
“Dev,” Parisa says. “Charlie put it all on the line. He fought for a season of television that tells the truth, and the last thing the world saw was you leaving him in Macon without a word. He had his heart broken.” She sounds so hurt, and he understands it’s because he hurt the person she loves most in the world, and loving someone means carrying around their hurt, too. “But the season isn’t over. There is still the live finale, still a chance for you to make this right.”
The real reason they flew across the country is finally clear. They have a show to make, a story to wrap up, a fairy tale that needs its happy ending. Dev thinks about the season he just watched and about the Charlie-shaped sinkhole in his chest. He thinks about the house in Silver Lake, the plants by the window, Charlie in a soft sweater. He thinks about a bed where the sheets always smell like oatmeal body wash and a life that’s always filled with him. On an end table in his parents’ living room are a serving platter and bowl, flown halfway across the world by Charlie Winshaw.
Then he thinks about who he was three months ago and who he is now and who he wants to be and—
“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
And he turns and walks out of the living room.
* * *
It’s Jules who comes, Jules who finds him sobbing into a jean jacket on his childhood bed. She sits down on the corner, and he waits for her impassioned speech about why he should risk everything to profess his love for a man on national television.
“You left me, too, you know,” she eventually says, with no sympathy and all bite. “So that sucked.”
Since he’d rather be yelled at than cajoled at the moment, he sits up and reaches for her hand.
“Jules.”
She stops him. “I don’t want you to apologize, okay? I get it. You weren’t in a healthy place, and you had to do what was right for you. And the reality of our friendship is, you always kept me at a distance. You never really let me in. I’ve been talking to my therapist about it—”
His right eyebrow shoots up.
“Yes, I have a therapist. Everyone has a fucking therapist,” she snaps. “I’m not exactly good at letting people in, either. I don’t like to be vulnerable with anyone, but I’m worried you never let me see the real you because you were afraid I wouldn’t love all of you.”
Jules’s words cut as deep as the image on the magazine cover, exposing the fear he carries around with him, always. Still.
“In case I’m right, I want to make sure you know that I love you for who you are, even when you’re a cowardly asshole who bails on his friends for three months,” she says in a very Jules Lu–like fashion. Then she does something very un-Jules. She reaches for both of his hands, gathers them to her heart, right over the face of J. C. Chasez. “You are deserving of my love just as you are, and you’re deserving of his love, too.”
He starts crying again, but Jules doesn’t let go of his hands, doesn’t let him hide the evidence of his tears. “You deserve the love you’ve been orchestrating for other people for the last six years. You deserve a happily ever after.”
“A happily ever after?” he snorts, and an unseemly wad of snot gathers on his upper lip. Jules kindly pretends not to notice while she lets him reach for a tissue. “You don’t believe in happily ever afters. You think our show is stupid.”
“Our show is stupid. We once made women downhill ski in Switzerland while wearing bikinis. In the dead of winter. People come on our show so desperate for marriage, they delude themselves into thinking they’re in love. Barely half the couples make it past six months.”
“What about Brad and Tiffany? They’ve been married for fifteen years, and they have three kids.”
“Yes, we parade them around a lot.”
“Or Luke and Natalie, or Greg and Jane, or Brandon and Lindsey—”
“The point is,” Jules interjects, “most people don’t fall in love in two months. But sometimes you meet someone, and you just know. And then we put them on a boat in Bali, because who can resist falling in love on a boat?”
“Don’t quote me to me.”
She squeezes his hands impossibly tight. “That list you just recited of our rare successful couples… do you notice any patterns?”
“They all have names you can easily find on a souvenir license plate?”
“They’re all white, yes. White and passably straight and middle class and Christian and incredibly hot.”
Dev laughs, narrowly avoiding another snot situation.
“Ever After is good at selling one very particular kind of love story. Most of the people who come on our show are all the same, but Charlie—”
