He can feel the mattress shift slightly under her weight. “Come on. Talk to me.”
He cocoons himself deeper into the bed, and he doesn’t think about Munich, when Charlie grabbed onto the blankets and refused to let go. Jules goes with a different approach. She somehow weasels her way into the blankets, too, and slides down into the middle of the bed with him. “Dev, please. I care about you,” she whispers into their blanket fort. He feels those words gather in the back of his throat like a sob. “Tell me what happened.”
“You shouldn’t care about me. I’m a monster.”
“No, you’re not.”
Little light makes it through the hotel comforter, and he can only see the outline of her face, not her actual expression, when he says, “I’m sleeping with him, Jules.”
For a second, she’s quiet, a foot in front of him, their bodies angled like parentheses. “Am I supposed to be surprised you’re having sex with the man who literally shares your bed?”
He curls himself into a tighter ball. “Jules—”
“Dev.” Her hand reaches out for something in the dark and finds his throat. It’s still comforting. “I know you and Charlie are hooking up. I’ve known since you first kissed in New Orleans. I mean, Parisa and I easily could’ve shared the king-size bed, Dev.”
He groans into the mattress. “Why did you let me do this? I’m ruining everything!”
“First of all, I did not let you. You’re an adult. And second, what are you ruining?”
“Um, the show. That we work for. Where we help hot people find love with someone of equal hotness.”
“Honestly, after tonight, fuck the show.”
“I can’t.” This conversation is somehow so much easier to have muffled by starched sheets. “You don’t understand. The Delilah and Megan thing doesn’t matter. It’s a distraction from the love, which is what he wants. Charlie wants a happily ever after, and my horny ass is destroying his chance to have it!”
“Is that really all this thing is with Charlie? Just sex?”
“Of course not. It’s…”
Shit, Dev doesn’t even know what it is, but he feels like it’s been happening the whole time, since the first night when they shook hands on their agreement and Charlie forgot to let go. In the beginning, he told himself it was about helping Charlie open up, helping him fall in love with one of the women, but when he thinks about Charlie with his two black eyes and Charlie on the curb after kissing Angie and Charlie in the kitchen the first time he let him tap Morse code onto his shoulder, Dev isn’t sure that’s true.
“The thing with Charlie is over,” he eventually says. “I messed it up and pushed him away. It’s for the best. Better to end things now than delay the inevitable.”
Jules kicks her legs frantically until the blankets scrunch down toward the bottom of the bed and their heads are exposed to the soft light of the room. Dev blinks and realizes he no longer feels trapped underwater.
“Have you thought about, I don’t know, apologizing to him?”
He covers his face. “What’s the point? Charlie has to get engaged to a woman at the end of this.”
“Then why did you kiss him in the first place?”
“Tequila shots,” he says. But he isn’t sure that’s true either.
“Look,” Jules says, sounding pissed. “I’m shit at this kind of stuff, but… you are kind of my best friend, okay? And I… I, like, love you or whatever.”
“Wow, Jules,” he says sarcastically. “That was very sweet.”