Dev scrapes his fingers painfully through his hair. “Shit. No. That’s not what this is about—”
“Then why are you taking this so personally?”
He wants to find a way to explain it to Ryan, but he knows it’s pointless. He broke up with Ryan because he finally realized Ryan was never going to understand Dev—not his too-big heart or his too-busy brain—and as much as it hurts, the beauty of the breakup is Dev no longer has to try.
“It’s nothing,” he finally says.
But it doesn’t feel like nothing.
Charlie
Something is wrong with Dev.
First he screamed at Ryan. Then he didn’t talk to Charlie for the rest of the shoot, which Charlie chalked up to the disastrous conversation with Daphne. But now Dev sits in the backseat of the town car angrily working his jaw. Jules hitched a ride back to set in an equipment van, probably because she didn’t want to deal with Dev’s sulking, so there’s no buffer between Charlie and Dev’s stormy mood.
He tiptoes cautiously toward the problem. “Are you… upset?”
“No,” Dev snaps. Sounding very upset.
“Okay, but uh… you don’t seem like yourself.”
Dev keeps his eyes on the window. “I’m so sorry my bad mood is ruining your night,” he says in a clipped tone. “I will try to only be Fun Dev from now on.”
Charlie is somehow screwing this up in record time, and he desperately tries to save it. “I don’t need you to be Fun Dev, but if you’re upset about what happened with Daphne, I’m sorry.”
Dev finally turns his head toward Charlie, his face damp in the passing street lamps. Dev is crying. “It’s not you. It’s Ryan. Ryan and I sort of dated… for six years. We broke up three months ago.”
“Oh,” Charlie says.
Oh, Charlie thinks, something important about Dev clicking into place. Something he probably should’ve pieced together sooner. So he asks, inelegantly: “Wait, are you gay?”
The tension in the backseat of the town car breaks, and Dev starts laughing. “Yes, Charlie! Oh my God. How did you not know I’m gay?”
Honestly, the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. “In my defense, you’re obsessed with helping straight people find love, and your cargo shorts are heinous.”
“The way I dress has nothing to do with the fact that I like dick.”
Charlie flinches involuntarily.
Dev groans and runs his fingers through the stubble on his angular jaw. “Please don’t be awkward about this. Don’t be one of those straight guys who acts like every gay dude wants to date you. I’m not trying to get in your pants.”
“Eh, I mean… obviously.”
“You’re going to be awkward about this, aren’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you going to freak out every time I touch you now?”
“I already freak out when you touch me.”
Dev’s mouth slides open before promptly snapping shut.
“That… that came out wrong. I didn’t mean…” Charlie feels the sweat gather on the back of his neck, and he pivots, hard. “Why did you and Ryan break up?”
“Because he bought me a girl’s T-shirt for my birthday.”
“I know I don’t have a lot of relationship experience, but what?”
Dev sighs. “For my twenty-eighth birthday, Jules threw me this huge surprise party with half the crew at my favorite bar, and Ryan showed up with a Goonies T-shirt still in the brown paper Target bag as his gift. I’m not materialistic, but we had been together for six years, and he bought me a novelty T-shirt for twelve bucks in the girls’ section at Target. It was clear he had forgotten my birthday and picked it up on the way to the party. And it was an XXL, so it didn’t even fit me. It was like a wide crop top, and not in a sexy, A Nightmare on Elm Street kind of way.”