Charlie grabs his tennis shoes off the floor by the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to the hotel gym,” Charlie grunts as he shoves his feet into his sneakers. He doesn’t bother tying them. He needs to get the hell out of this room before Dev sees him cry.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Then I’ll go for a run.”
“Wait!” Dev shouts as Charlie barrels out of the room. “We’re in the middle of a conversation.”
“I think the conversation is over.”
Charlie pushes past Jules and Parisa, who are standing in the kitchen eating a midnight snack, pretending they haven’t been listening to this entire argument.
“Charlie, stop!”
Charlie doesn’t stop. He’s out the door, down the hall, taking the stairs to the ground floor two at a time.
“Charlie.”
Dev reaches for his shoulder, and Charlie wheels around. He’s angry and he’s tired and he’s so damn heartbroken he doesn’t know what to do with himself except exercise away this horrible knot in his chest.
“You know what, Dev,” he says, and he fails in his chief mission of not crying in front of him. “For someone who claims to love love, you’re really good at pushing it away.”
Then he turns and heads down the last flight of steps, knowing Dev isn’t going to follow.
Dev
Charlie takes the last few steps two at a time, pushes through the door at the end of the stairwell, and vanishes. He’s gone, and there is something about the whoosh and click of a closing industrial-strength door that feels final. It feels like twenty-four days, gone in an instant.
A creeping numbness starts in his fingertips. It claims his hands, his forearms, his elbows, until he’s standing in a stairwell unsure of how to move. What did he do?
He was so angry with Charlie for screwing up the scene with Megan and Delilah, and still, Charlie was so utterly Charlie. Earnest and vulnerable and sweet. He took Dev’s face in his hands and told him he cared, and Dev took Charlie’s affection and smashed it at their feet.
For someone who claims to love love, you’re really good at pushing it away.
But Charlie could never love him. Charlie’s story ends with a Final Tiara, and maybe it’s better he realizes that now and not in twenty-four days. Charlie unburdened his whole self to Dev, unwrapped himself like a present, gave himself away. Dev would have to be stupid to think that means he gets to keep him.
Dev never should’ve started this thing. He never should’ve let Charlie start this thing.
Dev shoves open the door to their hotel suite. He’s not sure how he got back here. His brain is trying to do the breaststroke under twenty feet of water. Jules and Parisa are both standing in the kitchen. It’s two in the morning, and they still haven’t changed from today’s Group Quest at Kirstenbosch. Parisa is wearing a bright yellow caftan that falls over her curves like honey, Jules in her corduroy shorts and a homemade Stormpilot T-shirt, Finn and Poe’s screen-printed faces in a giant puff-paint heart. They’re both wearing expressions his water brain can’t understand.
“I’ll go after mine,” Parisa says. “You stay with yours.”
Parisa floats out of the room, and Dev is somehow in his bed now. Their bed. The bed where Charlie opens up for him every night.
“Dev?” Jules asks, cautious. “What happened?”
She obviously knows. She heard them fighting.
He buries himself in blankets that smell like oatmeal body wash and tries very hard not to cry. “Go away, Jules.”