Daphne: [Cut to the close-up of her nervously pushing her hair behind her ear.] He obviously gets… I don’t know…anxious sometimes.
Sabrina: I don’t think you’re allowed to talk about things like that on Ever After.
Angie: [Shot of Angie reaching out to put a hand on Daphne’s thigh.] Girl, don’t take on the blame for this. You didn’t do anything wrong, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up.
Daphne: I shouldn’t have expected him to talk about serious stuff on our first real date.
Angie: Honestly, men. This is why it’s so much easier dating women.
Sabrina: You’re definitely not allowed to talk about that on Ever After.
Daphne: [Close-up of her staring down at Angie’s hand on her thigh.] You’ve dated… women?
Angie: What, they don’t have bisexuals on the Georgia pageant circuit?
Maureen’s note to editors: Cut this entire scene and replace it with the one of Megan and Delilah shit-talking the other women in the hot tub.
WEEK THREE
Pasadena—Wednesday, June 23, 2021
12 Contestants and 46 Days Remaining
Charlie
He can’t sleep again. He hasn’t been able to sleep in days.
It’s one in the morning, and he’s tried meditation, tried journaling, tried calling Parisa in the hopes the sound of her familiar voice might soothe him to sleep, but none of it has worked.
He should be exhausted, both emotionally and physically. At today’s Group Quest, the women competed in a relay race to rescue him from a tower （Ever After’s answer to feminism, apparently）， and when Daphne won again, half the women revolted, with Megan leading the mob, claiming the game was rigged. （Which, obviously, it was.） Angie and Sabrina defended Daphne, and Charlie spent most of the day trying to mend fences and prevent an all-out war. The producers loved every minute of it.
There’s no point in counting asbestos dots in the dark for the third night in a row, so he climbs out of bed, clicks on the light, and fishes out his iPad. He hasn’t opened the email Dev sent since the Bourbon Stain Incident, but he opens it now and climbs back in bed. He starts to read Dev’s script.
It is definitely all of Dev.
As he reads the dialogue, he can hear Dev’s voice, almost as if he’s lying on the bed next to Charlie, reading it aloud to him. He doesn’t know a damn thing about screenplays, and jargon like MCU and EXT means nothing to him, but somehow, he can imagine the world Dev is creating with his words all the same. The protagonist, Ravi Patel, is Dev: a hopeless romantic who has been unlucky in love but is still convinced of its almighty power.
There is a meet-cute, as Dev would call it. A miscommunication. An enemies-to-lovers trope Charlie remembers from his days of reading Star Trek fanfic on his home-built laptop. About halfway through the script, Charlie realizes he has never read a story about two men falling in love before.
He pushes himself back against the headboard and draws his knees up to his chest. There is a foreign pressure in his stomach, but he ignores it, completely engrossed in Dev’s story. The screenplay ends the only way it could, with an epic kiss and a happily ever after, and when it’s over, Charlie stares at the blank white space at the end of the PDF for a long time. Even though it’s the middle of the night, he feels compelled to talk about it. Right now.
He follows this urge all the way to Dev’s bedroom door.
Dev’s awake, sitting cross-legged with his laptop, wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt featuring a young man’s face surrounded by rainbow starbursts. When he looks up and sees Charlie, he smiles. “Hey. What are you doing awake?”
Charlie steps into the room, then pauses when he notices the white fingerprints down Dev’s shirt. “Are you eating white cheddar popcorn in your bed at three in the morning?”