For a minute, the dressing room is quiet, seven adult bodies packed together in horrified silence.
“What America wants?” Daphne echoes slowly.
“What if I was gay?” someone asks at the same time.
It’s Charlie’s voice that slices through the tension in the room like a felled tree in the forest. Everyone looks at him. No one breathes. Especially not Dev.
“What if I told you I was gay?” Charlie says again, his gray eyes steady as they fix on Maureen. “What if I told you I can’t get engaged to any of the women at the end of this season, because I’m gay? What if I told you I was in love with a man—”
Charlie has never said that word before. Love. Dev wants to bask in the sound of it sweeping past Charlie’s lips, but Skylar and Ryan both turn to look at him while Daphne’s tongue gets caught on a vague sound of disbelief. “You’re… what?”
“What if I told you I was in love with a man,” Charlie pushes forward, like the brave, beautiful, na?ve man that he is, “and I wanted to choose him instead?”
Maureen puts her hands on her hips, stares down the man Dev loves, and says, “You do not want to play that game with me, Charles. You think we’ve never had a gay prince before? Of course we have! I don’t give a shit what you do or with whom when the cameras aren’t rolling, but when they are, you’re going to pretend to be head-over-heels in love with her.” She points angrily at Daphne.
Charlie looks around the room—at Dev, at Jules, at the people who know the truth and are saying nothing out of fear. “And what if I refuse?” Charlie asks, each word clipped.
Maureen is still for the length of one shallow breath. “Then I’ll give you a terrible edit and let the entire world see just how crazy you really are.”
All the air is pulled from the room by Maureen’s words, and Dev’s brain doesn’t have the oxygen it needs to understand. But it tries. The boyfriend on night one. The wool suit. Daphne throwing herself at him at the ball. Megan and Delilah. The massage Group Quest. The entire season, Maureen kept putting Charlie in situations to exploit him （because she knows about his mental illness, knows about WinHan, of course she does） and now she’s standing in a back room using that footage to blackmail him.
All Dev can think is six years.
He made so many excuses for Maureen—justified so many of her actions—for so long and somehow only now does he understand the truth. Maureen was never his ally, never his friend, and this show was never about love. He threw away six years of his life.
Charlie looks around the room at the silent producers who still aren’t sticking up for him. At the producers he thought cared about him. He looks at Dev. “Well,” he says, and Dev can hear it in his voice. He’s trying so hard to be strong. Dev wishes he could help, but he doesn’t have any strength left in him to give to Charlie. He’s hollowed out, emptied of feeling, a husk on the bottom of a pool. “I guess we’ll have our happily ever after, then.”
Daphne is the only person who calls out for him as he shoves his way toward the door.
Charlie
“Charlie, wait!”
Charlie doesn’t wait. He storms down the hall and out into the ballroom where Angie and Lauren L. are still waiting with confused looks on their faces. He should feel anxious right now—he waits for the panic to take over—but the anger is taking up too much room inside him at the moment. He’s so fucking angry.
He’s angry at Jules, who only supported his and Dev’s relationship when it was convenient for her to do so. He’s angry at Skylar, who knotted his bow tie and told him to choose Dev and still didn’t speak up for him. He’s angry at Maureen, obviously, for being exactly who he thought she was.
And he’s so damn angry at Dev.