Charlie smiles. “Hmm, yes. I think you’ve mentioned.”
“And marriage.”
“Also sounds familiar.”
Charlie is right here, and Dev knows it’s his turn to reach out. So, he reaches. He takes Charlie’s hand, intertwines their fingers, and when Charlie lets him, it fills Dev with a stupid kind of hope.
Charlie bites down on his bottom lip. “Is the white tux a negotiable though?”
Dev shakes his head grimly. “It is not.”
Charlie grabs the collar of Dev’s coat. “Unfortunately,” he starts, and Dev holds his breath, “you look so damn sexy in this jean jacket, I can’t resist you.”
The tension breaks in his chest, and Dev laughs, truly and fully, for the first time in three months. “That is the reason I wore it, obviously.”
Dev is so hopeful, he feels like he’s choking on it, and he leans forward an inch, the smallest of tests. Charlie meets him more than halfway, pushes himself up on his toes, and kisses Dev on this show about fairy-tale love. In front of Mark Davenport and a live studio audience and twenty million viewers. He kisses Dev with hands and with teeth and with tongue, and Dev kisses him back with I’m sorry and I love you and I promise.
Kissing Charlie is like all the pieces of himself coming together, confident and sure. Kissing Charlie is like the scene at the end of the movie, and it’s nothing like the scene at the end of the movie, and he wants to spend the rest of his life telling Charlie what he needs and being what Charlie needs. “I love you, Charlie.” He tucks the words into the hollow base of Charlie’s throat, just for the two of them. “All of you.”
Charlie leans back so he can see Dev’s face. “I love all of you, too.” Then he kisses him again, deeply, then tenderly, then like he did in the shower in Bali, as if Dev is something precious and rare.
“Well, Fairy-Tale Family,” Mark Davenport interrupts, probably to keep the kiss on this side of prime-time television standards. “There you have it. Our Prince Charming did manage to find love, and now there’s just one thing left to do.”
Mark Davenport reaches for something beside his chair, then rises and moves toward them. He’s holding a royal blue pillow with something glistening atop it in the studio lights.
Dev covers his face in his hands. “Oh my God.”
“There is only one way this season ends,” Mark Davenport says, and he hands Charlie the pillow holding the crown, a twin of the one on Charlie’s head. It’s the Final Tiara, the Crowning Ceremony that never was, here, on this stage, in this studio, with two men. Dev knows it’s all stupid—grown adults, playing at fairy tales—but he feels ten years old, watching for the first time.
“Please don’t laugh,” Charlie says, his tone serious even as his face breaks into a ridiculous grin at the absolute absurdity of it all. Not just the show itself, and not just this moment, but every moment from the first, when Charlie fell out of a car at Dev’s feet. Practice dates and real dates and New Orleans and Cape Town and maybe, maybe, other places, too. Places they’ll visit together, side by side in adjacent first-class seats. Food to eat and mountains to be carried across and a house to come back to, always.
“Dev Deshpande. Are you interested in becoming my prince?”
If happily ever after is something you choose, then Dev decides to choose it for himself. “Yes,” he says.
THE PREMIERE
Los Angeles—Monday, April 11, 2022
20 Contestants and 64 Days Remaining
Dev
“Are you ready to meet your princess?”
Mark Davenport stands in his signature spot in front of a gurgling fountain with the castle in the background, perfectly framed on their fifty-inch television screen. “Last season of Ever After broke all of the rules, and we ended up with a new couple in our Fairy-Tale Family.”