Dev feels that same tug in his chest from earlier. “Careful, Jules. Your crush is showing.”
She rolls her eyes. “My crush?”
“What?”
“Dev.”
“Seriously, what?”
“Dude.” Her voice cuts through the noise of the club. “If you really wanted to find a random hookup tonight, you would have done it.”
“It’s not my fault no one even notices me with Charlie around.”
“You could try not being around Charlie.”
“It’s my job to take care of him.”
“You’re not working tonight.”
He feels like his brain is trying to swim upstream through a powerful current of Patrón as understanding reaches him. This is his career and his professional reputation she’s questioning. He conjures drunk flippancy, strives for humor. “Gay men can be platonic friends with straight men, Jules. This isn’t some non-hetero When Harry Met Sally.”
“I am sure gay men and straight men can be friends. But I am also seventy percent sure you and Charlie aren’t.”
Dev needs to find the right thing to say, the right line of dialogue, because what Jules is suggesting is not an option. It would be wrong on a million different levels. On a professional level, and a friendship level, and a too-old-to-crush-on-a-straight dude level. On every level, feeling anything toward Charlie other than professional regard would be catastrophic, and he doesn’t. He can’t.
Strobe lights and music and bodies pressing in on all sides, and he can’t find the right thing to say to Jules to convince her she’s wrong, so wrong. “I just broke up with Ryan.”
“I thought you were ready for a rebound?”
He sucks in his cheeks. “Charlie is our star.”
“Okay,” Jules says with a casual shrug, as if they both didn’t sign contracts forbidding fraternization with the talent. As if the entire future of their franchise isn’t hanging in the balance, depending on Dev helping Charlie fall in love with a woman. “But if it makes a difference, I think he’s into you, too.”
Dev can’t afford to think about that. “I’m going to head back to the hotel.”
“Dev, wait!” Jules calls after him as he turns toward the exit, but he doesn’t stop until he’s outside. And air… air is what he needs. He takes greedy gulps of it as he stumbles past the bouncers and a line of clubgoers and a twenty-one-year-old puking her guts out on the curb. Dev makes it a good twenty feet before he collapses against a brick wall.
He’s too drunk and too hot inside the jean jacket to process all of this. He searches for an emotion and lands on anger. How dare Jules accuse him of having feelings for Charlie?
He cares about Charlie, of course. Because Charlie is their Prince Charming, and it’s Dev’s job to care. And because Charlie is Charlie. Sure, he might be attracted to Charlie, but only because Charlie is objectively attractive, and Dev is objectively lonely.
And then he’s thinking about what Charlie said about him in the club. He’s so fucking beautiful.
No one has ever told him he’s beautiful before. High school boyfriends and college boyfriends and Ryan, and how is Charlie Winshaw the first person to ever say that to him, blackout drunk in a dance club surrounded by Lady Gagas?
But he already knows the answer. Hell, Charlie Winshaw somehow knows the answer.
I’m worried you don’t know what you deserve.
Charlie
Dev was here. Dev is now not here.
Charlie’s fairly certain he has an exceptional brain—he’s maybe even won awards for it—but right now, it doesn’t seem capable of understanding where he is or what he’s doing. He thinks there are hands on him. He thinks he’s dancing. He thinks someone gave him another drink. He knows Dev is gone.