Ryan pushes back from the bar and pulls a wad of rand out of his wallet. He throws it onto the counter before polishing off the last of his wine. “You love orchestrating big romantic gestures, Dev, but you’re scared shitless of anything that’s real. That is why you stayed with me for six years even though you knew we didn’t have a future.”
For someone who claims to love love, you’re really good at pushing it away.
Ryan leaves. Shockingly enough, making Ryan feel like shit didn’t help at all. Dev reaches for his wine again, then stops himself. He’s tired of numbing himself with alcohol every time his heart feels too big inside his chest. He doesn’t want to bury all his feelings and he doesn’t want to keep hiding them from everyone in his life. He doesn’t want to push away love.
What he really wants is to be as healthy as he says he is.
* * *
Dev crashes in a shitty Airbnb with Jules and five other producers, and the next morning, he gets up to watch a single camera film Charlie and Daphne emerging from their room hand in hand. They’re both fresh-faced and sharing secret smiles. Jules hands him a box of Romany Creams cookies, and they sit in the back of a van eating Dev’s feelings together.
With both Megan and Delilah gone before the Crowning Ceremony, the show is in a weird spot. They can’t send any more women home going into week seven, but they also need Crowning Ceremony footage to round out the two-hour episode. In a production meeting when they get back to Cape Town, Skylar breaks down the plan. They’re going to do a “super-special surprise” concert.
Usually around week five or six, the show brings in a musician to do a private concert. It’s never that surprising, because they do it literally every season, and it’s definitely not special, because the musician is usually some no-name country singer the cast doesn’t actually like. Whoever they got this season has to be desperate enough to fly twenty hours one direction for ten minutes of publicity, so Dev is sure it will be particularly awful.
When he gets back to the suite to help Charlie prep for the night, everyone is acting weird, perhaps on account of the fact that Dev and Charlie were having sex, and now Daphne and Charlie are having sex, and everyone has to pretend like this is a perfectly normal situation. Still, Parisa is more aggressive than usual, taking angry phone calls in her room, and Jules is more placating than usual, constantly hovering around Dev to see if he needs anything. And Charlie, who hasn’t spoken to Dev since the stairwell, looks at him before they leave for the music venue and snaps: “Is that really what you’re going to wear tonight?”
Dev double-checks that he’s wearing what he always wears: cargo shorts, an oversize plain T-shirt, his high-tops. “Uh, yes?”
Charlie disappears into their former shared room and emerges five minutes later holding a folded pair of khakis, a button-down shirt, and the jean jacket. “Can you put these on, please?”
Dev can’t imagine why Charlie cares what he looks like, but he notices Jules has her hair down and is wearing the same outfit from the night out in New Orleans, and Parisa has changed into a floral jumpsuit, her breasts spilling out magnificently. “Y’all, what’s going on?”
“Just put on the damn clothes,” Parisa orders.
Dev puts on the damn clothes.
* * *
When the van pulls up to a small music venue on Long Street, the block is already barricaded for filming, and production vans are lined up out front. When the four of them stumble inside, filming has already started for some reason, and everyone turns to stare when they enter. Ryan and Skylar are off to the side looking more excited than this shoot should warrant, and when he turns, he finds Parisa filming something on her phone against Ever After rules. She’s filming Dev, he realizes, and the crew and contestants aren’t staring at Charlie. They’re staring at him. What the hell is going on?
He turns to the stage for answers. A young man sits on a stool in the center of the stage, glowing under a soft yellow light. As soon as he has Dev’s attention, he plucks at the strings of a guitar and starts singing into a microphone and Holy Mary mother of God, it’s Leland Barlow.