Page 16 of The Charm Offensive
“You’re going to be okay, Megan,” Dev says breezily. He’s so effortlessly good at all of this. Charlie feels miserably out of place attempting to play the part of the concerned boyfriend. Megan leans into Charlie, cries into the front of his chambray shirt.
Charlie thinks, if they edit Dev out of these shots, it will be a nice moment between him and Megan. He might even seem like a decent prince.
“You know Megan wasn’t really injured at the Quest, right?” Lauren S. tells him. Or maybe it’s Lauren L.? “That whole thing was just for attention.”
“Hmm.” He nods and pretends to take a sip of his glass of chardonnay.
She takes a gulp of her gin and tonic. He mentally addscopious amounts of free alcoholto the list of things he didn’t expect. “I’m glad her team didn’t win just because she pitched a fit.”
“I think… our time is up,” he attempts, and a producer steps in, escorts one woman out and another woman in. They call this the social hour, though it’s actually a period ofseveral hourswhere he’s poured into a Tom Ford suit, escorted to a closed bar, and plunked down on a couch to talk to contestants one-on-one.
Or, more aptly put, they talkat him.
As soon as Rachel is brought in, she says she has something to confess to him, and promptly launches into a rehearsed speech about her recently broken-off engagement to a man she dated for two months. Becca shows him pictures of her dog, who suffers from arthritis, and a woman named Whitney, who he swears he’s never seen before this moment, talks for twenty minutes about her parents’ divorce when she was three.
Not a single one of the women asks him a personal question about himself. Theytellhim a lot about himself—about how he’s so handsome, so smart, so ambitious, and so generous. Delilah, the software engineer, announces that they have similar values. He almost asks her to cite her sources. He thinks about his phone call with Parisa, her insistence that he’s lovable. He can almost see the early stages of love in the sparkly eyes of these women. But they’re infatuated with someideaof him. Charles Winshaw: millionaire tech wunderkind philanthropist with a slight addiction to physical exercise. In their eyes, his silence makes him mysterious, and he’s filled with dread thinkingabout what will happen when the Cologne Charles guise begins to slip.
A little before midnight, it’s finally Angie’s turn, and Dev suggests Charlie take her outside for a stroll. The show has shut down the street in front of the bar, and Angie takes Charlie by the arm. With her other hand, she reaches up to press her fingers gently to one of his black eyes, concealed beneath the layers of his makeup. He flinches. “Does it still hurt?” she asks, pulling her hand away.
“Uh, not really, but I—”
Angie doesn’t wait for him to puzzle his way through the sentence. She grabs his arm and tugs him forward until his body falls against hers, so he’s pinning her back against a brick wall.
“Sorry!” Charlie scrambles. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No,Imeant to,” Angie says with a smile. Charlie doesn’t understand her tone. He moves away from the wall.
“What the fuck?” Ryan bellows from behind the camera, breaking the illusion of the scene. “Why did you pull away like that?”
Dev also emerges from the dark along with Angie’s handler. “Ryan, please don’t yell at my talent.”
“Then talk to your talent, D! We’ve only got another ten to do the kiss shot, and then—”
Kiss shot.
The words are like a bullet tearing through what’s left of Charlie’s ability to hold it all together. His skin flushes hot, then cold, becomes itchy and ill-fitting inside his suit as he struggles to take a deep breath.
Dev takes a step closer. “You okay?”
Charlie tries to speak, fails, shakes his head, tugs at his collar. Why is his collar so tight all of a sudden?
And then Dev is gently guiding him down an alley away from Angie, who’s now being coached by her handler on proper kissing technique for the camera angles. Warm fingers are on his back as Dev clicks off the mic belt. Underneath the mounting panic, Charlie is dimly aware he might vomit again.
“What’s wrong, Charlie?”
“I… I can’t kiss Angie. I don’t even know her.”
Dev nods in slow understanding. “Right, but you’re getting to know her, and kissing is part of this whole process. You knew kissing was going to be required when you came on this show, right?”
He did know. Abstractly.
Dev is looking at him like he’s trying to learn the language of Charlie’s eyebrow furrow.
“Tell me what you need in order to make this work.”
Ryan shouts, “Come on, D. We don’t have all night!”
But Dev shrugs his shoulders, like they do have all night, like they’re not going to do anything until Charlie’s ready. He manages a deep breath. It’s just kissing. Maybe if he tells himself it’sjust kissingover and over again, he’ll start to believe it. “It’s fine,” he tells Dev. “I’ll be fine.”
