Dev removes his hand from Charlie’s leg and waves over the waiter, who is never more than ten feet away from Charlie’s gravitational pull. Dev asks for the bill. “Before we go, a quick experiment, okay?”
Charlie looks skeptical but nods. “Okay.”
“I want you to say exactly what’s on your mind at this moment.”
Charlie folds his lips into a thin, worried line and stares down at his empty plate.
“No self-censoring, no worrying about saying the wrong thing, no overthinking it,” Dev orders. “Just say what’s on your mind this exact instant.”
“Um—”
“You’re overthinking.”
Charlie makes sudden, unexpected eye contact, and Dev forgets his previous commitment to only staring at Charlie’s ear. He’s now confronted with the whole image of Charlie’s face—the stormy gray eyes with their faint bruising and the blond curls and the chin dimple, and it’s a lot, and Charlie keeps staring at him, and when Charlie opens his mouth, Dev feels something drop in his lower stomach.
“You have Hollandaise sauce all over your face!” Charlie blurts.
The tension in Dev’s chest uncoils. “Well,” he says, reaching for a napkin, “I guess that’s a start.”
Charlie
“This is your idea of a romantic time?”
“I never claimed to know anything about romance,” Charlie clarifies from his cross-legged position on the floor of the guesthouse living room, “but I enjoy a good puzzle, yes.”
Dev is sitting on the opposite side of the coffee table slowly sorting out the edge pieces while trying to watch the television show playing on his laptop. After the disastrous brunch full of germ-related crises and verbal idiocy and far too much leg touching, Dev asked Charlie what he would do with his ideal afternoon. So now they’re working on a jigsaw puzzle while watching the first season of The Expanse, because Dev has never seen it.
“The fascinating thing about this show is,” Charlie explains, “in most science fiction, they totally ignore the physiological repercussions of FTL.”
Dev looks the opposite of fascinated. “What’s FTL?”
“Faster-than-light travel.”
“Right. Okay, so to recap”—Dev points to the actors on-screen—“the hot skinny guy, the hot buff guy, the hot maybe-Indian guy, and the hot lady just fly around in the ship solving mysteries like Scooby-Doo in space?”
“That’s not remotely the premise of this show. Are you even paying attention?”
“Any of these hot dudes ever going to hook up with each other?”
“No…”
“Then what is even the point of it?”
“The science!” Charlie says, perhaps a little too passionately.
Dev does this infuriating crooked smile, and Charlie understands they’re playing a different game, in addition to the puzzle, with Dev trying to coax out little tidbits of who Charlie is, the things he usually keeps tucked away so they can’t be used against him.
Charlie falls silent, and for a while Dev does too, his tongue tapping his front teeth as he concentrates on the image displayed on the front of the box. With Dev, silence never lasts long, though. “Would you say you’re looking for a lady to puzz with you on a Saturday night?”
“I do not believe that is the correct verb form of puzzle. Just organize your edge pieces.”
“I haven’t puzzed since… shit, middle school trips to Nag’s Head with my parents, maybe? I don’t usually sit still for this long.”