The Charm Offensive

he grabs onto the back of Dev’s T-shirt
with both hands, presses his forehead into Dev’s throat, telling Dev what he needs in the only way he can communicate right now. He needs to be hugged. Held.

“You know you still deserve to have this love story. Right?”

Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help.

Dev tried to understand, which people almost never do.

Let me take care of you.

“I can’t just not stress about it!” Charlie’s fists slam onto the countertop. “My mind doesn’t work that way!”

even though he loved words—loved using words to build stories and escape hatches from the real world—he could never find the right ones to help his parents understand his heart and his mind.

In this moment, it feels like Charlie is wide open for him. A week of puzzle pieces, sci-fi shows, and the smallest hints of a hard childhood, but at two in the morning in the guesthouse kitchen, it almost feels like he’s glimpsing Charlie Winshaw in his entirety—anxious and obsessive and still so fucking beautiful—leaning into Dev like there’s some secret part of Charlie that wants to let other people in but doesn’t know how.

“I’ve seen you do this on set when you’re anxious. When it gets like this, how can I help?”

Charlie swallows. “No one has ever asked me that before.”

He is twenty-eight years old, sitting in the back of a limo with five drunk women on the first night of filming a new season of Ever After.

Without thinking, he reaches out for the bottom of Dev’s white T-shirt and pulls. “Take off your shirt!”