Page 3 of The Charm Offensive
Skylar gestures to the rest of the tent. “And this, folks, is why Dev is the best.”
Dev does a little mock bow in the direction of a sound mixer. Skylar claps him on the back. “Here’s what you’re going to do, Dev. Hustle down to the west gate to meet Charles’s car and get him to his mark.”
As much as Dev loves a good hustle, especially on the first night of filming, he doesn’t move. “Shouldn’t Ry—I mean, shouldn’t Charles’s handler get him to his mark?”
“You’re Charles’s handler now. This is me reassigning you. And unless you want this show to go the way ofAverage Joe, I suggest you stop standing there with your mouth hanging open andreallyfucking hustle.”
Dev still doesn’t move. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I’m a contestant handler, and… Ryan is the prince’s handler.”
Ryan Parker is good at douche-bro camaraderie and Dev is good at coaching women. As the entire crew recently learned after their public breakup at Dev’s twenty-eighth birthday party, they were never good for each other.
“Except Ryan couldn’t get the shots at the prepackage shoot, so now he’s being moved to supervising producer, and you’re taking his prince. Listen.” Skylar cups Dev’s face in her hands in a flagrant disregard of recent network memos about workplace boundaries. “You’re the best handler we’ve got, and it’s gonna take the best with this guy.”
The only thing Dev loves more than this show is being flattered about his abilities as a producer on this show. “If we’re going to make this season work, I need Dev ‘Truly Believes in Fairy Tales’ Deshpande coaching our star. Can you do that for me?”
He doesn’t think about his own failed fairy tale. He simply says what his boss wants to hear. “Of course I can.”
“Excellent.” Skylar turns to Jules. “Go find Charles’s folder and bring it to Dev. You’ll work as his PA for the season. Help him with Charles. Go, both of you. It’s almost sundown.”
Dev can’t even enjoy the repulsed look on Jules’s face at being named his personal production assistant because all he can thinkabout is seeing Ryan for the first time in three months now that he has stolen his job.
There is no time to dwell on that right now. He does what he was ordered to do. Hefucking hustlesdown the flagstone path toward the west gate, where the town car is waiting with their star.
And maybe this is good. Maybe this is better. Dev can coach women in his sleep, but Charles Winshaw will be a challenge, the kind of thing he can throw his entire mind and body into, getting lost in the bright lights and the beautiful stories.
He barrels toward the town car, reaches for the back door handle without pausing, and perhaps, in his enthusiasm, wrenches open the door with more force than is strictly necessary, because their Prince Charming comes spilling out of the car in a mess of limbs and lands squarely at his feet.
Charlie
“Do we think the crown is a bit much?”
Maureen Scott doesn’t look up from her phone or in any way acknowledge he’s spoken.
Charlie shifts awkwardly in the town car backseat, the tux pulling across his chest in all the wrong ways. His body hasn’t felt like his own since they waxed it and tanned it and drenched it in very pungent cologne. The least they could do is let him remove the crown, so he doesn’t look like Stripper Prince William. He even had to double-check the tux wasn’t a tear-away.
(It’s not. However, there were enough nudity clauses in his contract to raise legitimate concern.)
He looks down at the magazine lying casually on the seat between them and experiences the cognitive dissonance of seeing photos of himself. If he could look in a mirror right now, he knows his face would be sweaty and red, pinched together anxiously at the corners of his eyes and the corners of his mouth. But the man on the magazine cover isn’t anxious about anything. His face is smooth, his eyes friendly, his mouth casually tilting in the corner. The man on the magazine cover is a stranger.
The man on the magazine cover is alie—a lie he has to live for the next two months. He’s made a deal with the proverbial devil, and he can’t control much about his circumstances at the moment, but at the very least, he can take off this stupid plastic crown. He reaches up.
“Don’t do that, dear,” Maureen Scott snaps, eyes still on her phone.
Even with thedear, there is an edge to her words, and his hands fall limply at his sides. He’s stuck with the crown, then.
Or… he could jump out of the moving vehicle and abort this foolish, misguided publicity stunt right now. He tests the door handle, but of course it’s locked. He’s been labeled a flight risk, which is why the show’s creator is personally escorting him from the studio to the set.
Two days ago,Ever Aftertook him to a beach where they expected him to ride a white horse for the intro package, like the Prince Charming he’s supposed to be. Prince Charmings are supposed to intrinsically know how to ride horses. They’re definitely not supposed to beafraidof horses. Instead of looking strapping and manly, he kept slouching and delaying production and grimacing with every uncomfortable jostle of the saddle until the sun was gone and everyone was generally pissed with the shots. The bald woman running set called him “fucking uncoachable.”
Which sounds about right, honestly.
He tries to remember what his publicist said before he left: “You’re CharliefuckingWinshaw. You built a billion-dollar tech company before you got your braces off. You can handleEver After.”
“But I lost my company,” he had muttered in response. Parisa pretended not to hear him. She knows what he lost. That’s why he’shere. This is his last chance to get it all back.
He feels the pressure of it weighing down on him, and before his generalized anxiety turns the corner into full-blown panic attack, he runs through his coping strategies: three deep breaths; count to thirty in seven languages; tap out the Morse code for “calm” thirteen times on his knee.
Maureen Scott stops jabbing her thumbs against the phone screen and looks at him—reallylooks at him for the first time all evening. “What are we going to do with you?” she muses, her voice sickly sweet.
