“But Dev doesn’t want either part with me.”
“Seems highly improbable.”
He tells Parisa everything—about practice dates and practice kisses, about the script and realizing what he felt at three in the morning, about the Bourbon Stain Incident and tequila shots and Lady Gaga. “And now he’s pretending to have the flu to avoid me because he doesn’t feel the same way.”
“How do you feel?”
“What?”
“You said Dev doesn’t feel the same way. So how do you feel?”
He wants to slowly back away from that question like it’s a bomb about to go off in his hands. “I feel so much,” he hears himself say, running toward the bomb, opening himself up entirely to the injury of it. “I think about him constantly. I always want to be talking to him, or touching him, or looking at him, and I want him to look at me in a way I’ve never wanted anyone to look at me before. That doesn’t… make sense.”
“Yes, it does,” she says, her words a quiet invitation for him to keep talking.
“I can’t explain it, but when I’m kissing Dev, I’m not in my head about it. I don’t feel the pressure to make it work. It just works. And I don’t have to force myself to feel anything. I feel everything.”
He stops himself and cuts his eyes to Parisa on the bench beside him. She’s making her soft, gooey face, and she reaches up to brush his hair off his forehead. He continues. “And I’ve got these eight women, who are actually all kind of spectacular, but I just don’t want to kiss any of them. And I signed a contract that requires me to propose to one of them at the end of this. And I’m stuck here on this show with Dev for another four weeks, and he doesn’t want me.” His voice cracks at the end, and he tries to disguise it as a cough.
Parisa doesn’t buy it. “And you asked him that? Directly? You asked Dev if he wants you, and he said no? Like, to your beautiful face?”
“Well, not exactly…”
“Has it occurred to you that Dev also had to sign a contract to work on this show, and that his legally precludes kissing you?”
“Uh…”
“That kissing you is probably going to get him fired from a job he loves so much?”
“I mean, I considered—”
“And don’t you think there is a good chance Dev’s current depression was triggered by the fact that he likes you, too, and that it’s literally his job to help you fall in love with someone else?”
“Dev doesn’t have depression,” he corrects.
“Take it from someone who has been in a committed relationship with Lexapro and cognitive behavioral therapy since she was eighteen,” Parisa says, “your handler is in the midst of a major depressive episode.”
Charlie shakes his head. She’s wrong. Dev doesn’t struggle with his mental health. Dev is Dev. He’s always happy, always smiling, always thinking about other people. He usually thrives on set, fluttering around to everyone, helping and chatting and feeding off the energy of it all. He’s the most charming person Charlie’s ever met. That’s not the description of a depressed person.
And yeah, maybe he loves Leland Barlow because he sings about mental illness, and maybe sometimes he gets sad—like after his fight with Ryan, or outside the club in New Orleans—but that’s not the same thing as being depressed. Just because he hasn’t been his usual Fun Dev self lately…
Charlie remembers what Dev said in the town car, about Ryan only ever wanting Fun Dev, and it hits him. “Oh, shit. Dev struggles with depression.”
Parisa claps him on the back. “Knew you’d get there eventually.”