“Jesus, Parisa, I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
He thinks about Megan and her exercise videos. He kind of was.
“You’re the one who told me these women aren’t really here to find love.” He bristles. Then he thinks about Dev, his crooked grin at four in the morning. I know I can make you fall in love.
Charlie shakes off the dread of that thought. “You said that’s why it’s morally justifiable to use the show. Because the women are all here for shameless self-promotion, too.”
“I’m sure most of them are,” Parisa concedes, “but that doesn’t give you permission to condescend them like a sexist a-hole. Also, are you listening to Leland Barlow right now?”
“It’s not me. It’s my new handler. Dev.”
“Dev?” Parisa smooths out her perfectly smooth ponytail and pushes her round face close to the screen. “Is your new handler cute?”
“Why… why would it matter if he was cute?”
“Because I’m thirty-four and single and these things matter to me.”
He sighs. “You can’t date my handler, Parisa.”
“Because you’d be jealous?”
“What? No. Why the heck would I—jealous?”
She preens in front of her camera. “Because you’re secretly in love with me. That’s why you’re blushing right now.”
“Yes, you caught me,” he says, the strange tension easing from his shoulders. “I have spent the last four years secretly pining for you, and I’ve only rejected your drunken proposals of marriage because I’m playing hard to get.”
“I have only drunkenly proposed to you twice, and I assumed you rejected my offers of a marriage of convenience because you intend to fall madly in love with a former Miss Alabama.”
“That… will not happen.”
“Because there is no former Miss Alabama on this season? Seems unlikely.”
“Because I’m not exactly lovable.” He means to say it jokingly, but the sentence sags in the middle, becomes heavy and tinged with sadness. Shit.
“Charlie.” Parisa stops her teasing instantly, her voice tender and sweet.
“You are so lovable and so deserving of love,” she insists.
Dev yells his name from the kitchen over the sound of his blaring music. “I… I need to go.”
“I just want you to be happy. You know that, right?”
“I know, but not everyone needs a romantic partner to be happy.”
“So you’re happy now, then?”
“I will be happy, when I can work in tech again.”
“Makes sense, given how happy you were at WinHan before.”
“Goodbye, Parisa.”
“Just remember, you have the world’s biggest heart and the world’s finest ass and—”
He doesn’t hear what she says next. He’s already hung up.
* * *
“I made flash cards!” Dev shouts in lieu of a morning greeting when Charlie enters the kitchen dressed in salmon-colored shorts, boat shoes, and an oatmeal V-neck. Dev, meanwhile, is wearing a slight variation of his first-night outfit: tragic cargo shorts, an oversize T-shirt, and the same sneakers Charlie vomited on. He’s got a breakfast burrito in one hand and a coffee thermos in the other, and Charlie barely has time to grab the index cards off the kitchen counter before Jules is shoving a plate of craft services food into his other hand and ushering them both into a town car. On the drive to set, Charlie reads through Dev’s study tool. On one side of each card is a photo of a woman next to her name. On the back is Dev’s handwritten commentary in a sloppy script, little asides to Charlie.