Dev wraps his arms tighter around his legs and feels himself collapse inward, like a dying star.
Charlie
His fingers clumsily fidget with the bow tie on his tux, and he watches himself in the mirror, the sweat gathering on his brow. They’ll have to redo his makeup before the Crowning Ceremony. Assuming he can figure out how to properly dress himself first.
Skylar pops her shaved head through the dressing room door. “We need you in five. Everything coming along in here?”
“Have you seen Dev?” Charlie tries to keep his voice steady around this question, but instead the words convey the panic grinding through his internal organs.
“Ryan asked him to lock up the set. Anything I can help with?”
“The t-tie,” he stammers as his fingers slip through the fabric again. “I can’t get it.”
Skylar comes closer and places her steady hands over his trembling ones. “Let me.”
The head director is shorter than he realized, standing on her toes to get a good angle on the bow tie. She seemed larger than life, indomitable, when he first met her two months ago. “Big night,” she says. “How are you feeling?”
He’s sweating and shaking and barely able to form cogent sentences. “I think you can tell exactly how I’m feeling.”
She smiles up at him as her hands deftly arrange the fabric into a perfect bow. “Do you know who you’re going to send home?”
He nods. The anxiety isn’t about sending Lauren home tonight. She is the obvious choice, the only woman remaining who doesn’t know it’s all a ruse. He’s anxious because of what sending home Lauren means. He’ll be one step closer to the end of this journey, and he still hasn’t figured out what to do about the certainty and the glittering something and the fact that Dev is already pulling away.
She steps back and admires her handiwork. “Then what are you worried about?”
Something in her tone suggests she’s not asking as Ever After’s head director; she’s asking as the woman who taught him the dance moves to “Bad Romance” in a New Orleans club. As the woman who got drunk with him on a patio in Bali.
“I never thought it would feel real,” he starts. He can’t answer her as anything other than the star of her show, so he quickly adds, “with Daphne, I mean. I never thought I’d develop real feelings for anyone on the show, and I’m not sure what to do. How do you know when you’re going to love someone forever?”
Skylar stares up at him, her face an unknowable mask. She takes two steps backward and collapses onto a folding chair. “Did you know I was married to a man for ten years before I met my current partner?”
He obviously did not. Skylar never talks about her personal life outside of the show. For all he knows, she doesn’t have a life outside of this show.
“Mm.” She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out a roll of Tums. “Diego. He was a good man. He treated me really well, and even though I wasn’t attracted to him, and even though I was repulsed by the idea of having sex with him, I was pretty happy.”
Charlie shifts uncomfortably on his feet but doesn’t let himself break eye contact with her as she carefully unfolds her private self to him in a slow, rhythmic voice.
“I was aware of the fact that I was more drawn to women, but I didn’t particularly want to have sex with them, either, so I swept it aside for years and years, until finally, I decided to try a support group for questioning adults. That’s where I met my current partner, Rey. They were the first person I ever heard use the word asexual as anything other than the punch line of a joke.”
Skylar pauses, and Charlie drops his gaze to the floor. “Why are you telling me this?”