Page 50 of The Charm Offensive
To which Daphne responds by swiftly marching across set, picking up a paintbrush, and running it down the front of Angie’s romper. Angie half gasps, half laughs, nothing like the usual fights that break out between the women on set. “How dare you? You’re buying me a new romper!”
“That’smyromper! You stole it out of my luggage!”
Then both women turn to him with very grave expressions, paintbrushes outstretched. Charlie holds up his hands. “You know, I’m really not feeling well today, and I think you should strongly consider your chances of receiving a tiara if you ruin these shorts—”
It’s a useless plea, and they both flick him with drops of paint until it covers the front of his T-shirt, his legs, his face. “You’re both going home immediately,” he threatens, but the womenjust laugh hysterically, loud enough for the other contestants to wander over. And from there, the float-making competition quickly devolves into an all-out paint war.
The producers don’t intervene on anyone’s behalf as the women run around like children, covering each other in paint. Sabrina dips Daphne’s braid in blue paint and uses it like a brush across Delilah’s crop top and Lauren L.’s skirt. Charlie tries to protect Jasmine from a paint bomb concocted by Becca and ends up with paint drenched down the front of his shirt. So, he takes off his shirt.
“Big mistake,” Angie tells him. “Now we know what we have to do to get you naked.”
Someone—Whitney, he thinks—has the bright idea to add glitter to the mix, and even Megan bonds with the rest of the contestants as they all become human Mardi Gras parade floats. Charlie has never laughed this much or this hard in his entire life.
Ryan is livid. “They’re allcoveredin paint and glitter!” he shouts when they finally call cut. “We can’t take them to the restaurant like this for the social hour!”
“Ryan, this is the best footage we’ve gotten all season,” Skylar argues. “It’s the most likeable Charlie has ever been.”
“But what are we going to do with them now? We need at least ten minutes’ worth of footage for tonight’s social hour.”
Dev, who has been keeping his distance from Charlie all day, raises his hand. “I might have an idea.”
They forget about the competition and the social hour and haul the cast back to the hotel. The women and Charlie go to their respective rooms to shower and change into their pajamas. Theneveryone rendezvouses in Charlie’s hotel room, where the cameras and lights are set up. They order massive amounts of takeout, and for the first time all season, Charlie and the contestants are just allowed tobetogether. The previous bonding of the day has created some temporary illusion that makes the women forget they’re here to compete against each other. Instead, they sit on the floor with wet hair, eating jambalaya and passing around bottles of rosé.
When he’s not feeling pressured to kiss them, Charlie really likes all of these women. That realization is quickly chased by guilt.
Charlie knows, realistically, that most of these women are not here for him, just like he’s not here for them. Megan is here to promote her exercise videos, and Sabrina is trying to get more hits on her travel blog. Rachel wants to brick-and-mortar her food truck, and Jasmine is trying to expand her brand as the former Miss Kentucky. And all of them want more Instagram followers.
Still, it seems impossible that he’s going to get through the next five weeks without hurting one—if not all—of these wonderful women.
“Have we entered the hotel dance party stage of the evening yet?” Angie asks the room, and Lauren L. immediately cues up an upbeat Leland Barlow song on her handler’s phone and grabs Sabrina’s hand to pull her into a tango. Charlie instinctively looks for Dev. He’s standing in the doorway between their adjoining rooms, hiding behind a camera, and their eyes meet across the budding dance party. Charlie tells himself to look away. But he doesn’t.
“I think we should discuss your relationship trajectories with the remaining contestants before the next Crowning Ceremony,” Dev says a little after midnight, when the contestants have goneback to their rooms and the production team has finished cleaning up the mess.
“Everyone knows you and Daphne are like identical blond wedding-cake toppers, and you have amazing chemistry with Angie, though I get the impression Angie Griffin would have amazing chemistry with a cactus. But Lauren L. was a real surprise today, and I think we’ve been sleeping on Sabrina.” Dev is holding a bag of Double Stuf Oreos, and he sits down on Charlie’s bed beside him. “What are your thoughts?”
At the moment, his thoughts are about how close Dev is sitting next to him. “My thoughts are solely preoccupied by you brazenly eating Oreos in my bed.”
Dev leans over, so when he takes a bite, little black Oreo crumbs fall into Charlie’s lap.
“You’re a monster.”
“As I was saying…” Dev continues to talk about the contestants while absentmindedly brushing crumbs out of Charlie’s lap. Charlie feels his entire body seize up: Dev’s fingers and Dev’s smoky-sweet smell and Dev’s body close to his on his bed like it’s nothing. Which is why Charlie has to keep pretending the kiss never happened, even though the secret churns his stomach every time he thinks about it. Because the kiss clearly meant nothing to Dev—he can ignore it, let it vanish into the drunken ether, carry on being friends like normal.
Charlie isn’t sure what he wants the kiss to mean, but he knows it wasn’t nothing.
On the day of his Courting Date with Lauren L., Charlie turns twenty-eight years old.
He’s done everything in his power to conceal this information from cast and crew alike because he hates his birthday. He hates the attention and the pressure to do something memorable and the feeling he’s failing at life. Another year has passed, and he’s still the same old Charlie.
(Except now he’s a Charlie who was brave enough to kiss a person he likes but is still too much of a coward to admit it.)
Birthdays are always a twenty-four-hour anxiety trap, and he would happily pop a Xanax and sleep through the whole day if he didn’t have to get up for filming.
He wakes to a Bitmoji of Parisa throwing confetti. He receives a few messages on social media from old Stanford acquaintances and women he barely knows. He doesn’t hear anything from his family and doesn’t expect to. It’s fine.
He goes down to the hotel gym and exercises through the birthday blues, then showers while Jules kindly lays out his preapproved outfit for the day. When he gets out of the shower, the door between his and Dev’s room is open.
“Charlie, get dressed, and come help me with something!”
