Dev pulls back. “Charlie, we’re in broad daylight on a busy street.”
Charlie simply yanks him back down with his teeth, kisses his thank you against Dev’s mouth, Dev’s jaw, Dev’s throat, like Morse code. “So you’re not mad I screamed at him, then?” Dev asks as Charlie nuzzles himself against the curve of Dev’s neck.
“Not mad.”
Charlie is something else entirely, and he doesn’t know what to do with all this certainty.
* * *
According to the show, Daphne and Charlie will reunite after their week apart in a sun-dappled park in downtown Macon, running toward each other, Daphne leaping into his arms.
In reality, they reunite in an empty hotel gym at six in the morning without cameras or crew members. The contestants aren’t allowed to stay with their families during Home Kingdom dates—Dev explained that it has something to do with access to the outside world, but Dev also had barbecue sauce on his chin at the time, so Charlie wasn’t really listening. Daphne and Charlie are staying at the same Courtyard Marriott, and they clearly have the same restless need to exercise before their staged date.
“How was Dallas?” Daphne asks from the elliptical, her blond ponytail swishing behind her. She’s wearing a sports bra and a pair of spandex shorts, and she is undoubtedly the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. Which resolves some of his sexual ambiguity, at least. He’s unequivocally not attracted to women.
“Dallas was awful,” he says from the free-weight bench. “I feel terrible that Lauren doesn’t know the truth. She seems to genuinely think our relationship is working.”
Daphne considers this for a moment. “We all sort of knew the truth coming into it, though. Anyone who has seen this show knows people always have ulterior motives for coming on Ever After. And we knew the risk of getting our hearts broken.”
“I suppose.”
Dallas was also awful because of Dev—because Dev is slipping away again, not all at once like before, but incrementally. There are moments when his voice hollows out, moments his gaze goes somewhere Charlie can’t follow. Then he’ll snap back, laughing at something Charlie said, or lip-syncing to the Proclaimers in their Dallas hotel room, kissing Charlie until they both forget everything else.
When Daphne finishes her thirty minutes on the elliptical, she comes to sit beside him on the bench. “It’s weird, isn’t it? That you’re going to meet my parents today?”
“Do you feel guilty about lying to them?”
Daphne gathers her ponytail and begins to weave it into a braid. “Honestly? No. Does that make me a bad person?”
Before he can reassure her, Daphne plows on. “I’m sort of relieved. My mom and dad constantly pester me about getting a boyfriend. Even though it’s fake, my parents will be so happy to see us together. And I want to—”
“Please them?” Charlie tries. Daphne bites her lip, and Charlie thinks about Josh Han. He thinks about trying to please other people and trying to please himself. “Will it make you happy, though? When we’re lying to people about our engagement?”
She doesn’t say anything, but he already knows the answer. Daphne wants fairy-tale love, but she also simply wants other people to see her with it, to have them approve of her normalcy. They really are so fucking similar.
“Will it make you happy?” she finally asks. “To be able to work in tech again?”
He stares up at a television screen mounted to the wall playing the news on mute. Daphne reaches over for his hand. “You still want that, right? To propose to me at the end? To make people think we’re in love?”
The glass door to the gym opens before he can answer—before he can figure out what his answer even is—and Dev is standing there in his ratty basketball shorts and Charlie’s Stanford T-shirt. He’s silent for a second, staring at Daphne and Charlie close together on the bench, their fingers intertwined.