Page 6 of The Charm Offensive
“Mic.”
“I’m… ah… miserably happy to be here.”
“Veryconvincing save. You’re a natural at this.”
Charlie smiles despite himself, and Dev explodes with an enthusiastic, “Yes!Yes!” He turns his fingers into a box and squints one eye like he’s lining up the shot. “Just like that! Smile just like that when the cameras are on.”
Unfortunately, Charlie’s smile collapses in on itself as soon as Dev draws attention to it.
“Well, now you look like you’re going to vomit.”
“I probably am.”
“You’re not going to vomit! You’re about to meet twenty women who are all here on a quest to find love with you!” Dev seems to think this is a delightful prospect, as if all of Charlie’s fairy-tale dreams are about to come true. As if Charlie has fairy-tale dreams. “This is going to be amazing!”
Dev forgets the advance-notice-for-touching rule, and his hand folds around Charlie’s bicep, burning through the layers of his tux. Charlie isn’t sure what’s happening to his body right now, but it’s not good. It’s maybe very, very bad.
Dev leans in even closer. His breath is hot on Charlie’s cheek. He smells like sugar and chocolate and something else Charlie can’t quite place. “I know you’re freaked out right now, but at the end of all of this, you’re going to findlove,” Dev whispers. “In nine weeks, you’re going to have afiancée.”
And that’s when Charlie truly does vomit, all over Dev.
Dev
There is vomit on his Chucks.
Granted, there is always vomit on his shoes the first night of shooting, but it usually happens at dawn, not dusk, and the vomit typically belongs to an overserved contestant, not to Prince Charming himself.
Then again, it turns out Charles Winshaw is no one’s definition of a Prince Charming, no matter how much he might look the part. And he really does look the part. Broad-shouldered, with the tux doing little to conceal his muscular build. Straight-nosed and square-jawed and sweet—it’s the sweetness that caught Dev off guard when Charles fell out of the town car. All the men whocome on this show are handsome. None of them have ever been sweet.
Then again, none of them have ever been quitethis handsome. Charles Winshaw is somehow the most beautiful man Dev’s ever seen in real life, even with vomit in his chin dimple. Even talking absolute nonsense. Even with all the nervous sweating.
(Maybe especially with all the nervous sweating.)
“I… I’m s-so, so, so sorry,” he sputters.
Any annoyance Dev feels about the vomit disappears when he looks up into Charles Winshaw’s enormous eyes. He’s like a terrified baby bird. Like a two-hundred-twenty-pound baby bird with crippling anxiety and a fairly intense germ phobia who can’t navigate his way through a complete sentence.
A man from set design comes over with a hose to casually clean the puke off the pavement and douses Dev with a burst of cold water, which is pretty par for the course on his night so far.
“I… seriously… so sorry,” Charles says again as the makeup team swoops in to fix his face without missing a beat.
The vomit is cleared from his chin, the lights are adjusted, and from somewhere in the dark, the first AD shouts, “Final checks, please!” whether Charles is ready to become Prince Charming or not.
He’s definitely not. He looks gray and sickly, and Dev wants to stay by his side, but the AD calls to lock it up, and Dev jumps out of frame at the last second.
They’re rolling. The sound of horse hooves on wet flagstone fills the now-silent set, and then the carriage comes into view, rolling up to the fountain where Charles is waiting. Camera one stays trained on Charles, while camera two films the door opening. A woman in a blue dress steps out: big blue eyes to matchher dress, blond beach curls, slender figure. She smiles shyly when she sees Charles, a cross necklace framed in her plunging neckline.
Her name is Daphne Reynolds, and she’s the former beauty queen from Dev’s limo. It’s no surprise Maureen sent her out of the carriage first. Quite frankly, she looks like someone fed a 3-D printer the algorithm for creating anEver Afterwinner. Dev knows from her file she has a college degreeandher father’s a reverend, which means she perfectly straddles the line of catering to the show’s large conservative fan base without alienating its even larger feminist fan base, which claims to watch ironically.
“Hi,” Daphne says, her heels now clacking on the stones. Charles does not say hi back. Charles does not move. He stands by the fountain, his arms stiff and awkward and maybe not attached to his body, and he does not react to the beautiful woman approaching him. No smile. Not a flicker of lust.
Perhaps in response to his indifference, Daphne hesitates as she gets closer. Sputters, stops, and briefly looks like she’s contemplating a leap over the gate. She takes another step forward, and her silvery heels either catch the hem of her dress or an especially wet stone, and she slips, topples forward directly into the immovable, stoic wall that is Charles Winshaw. It’s almost a perfect—albeit unconventional for this show—meet-cute, except instead of putting out an arm to rescue Daphne, Charles flinches backward at her physical contact with his chest. She manages to right herself without his help.
“Stop!Stop!” Skylar screams. The director bursts out of the Command Central tent and into the shot, even though the cameras never stop rolling onEver After.“What the hell was that?How can two sexy people be so offensivelyunsexy together? Take it again!”
Daphne’s handler escorts her back to the carriage, and they take the scene from the opening of the door. This time, Daphne doesn’t trip, but Charles still looks disinterested, and they shake hands like this is a board meeting. So they film the scene again. And again. By the fifth take, Jules is turtling into her overalls from secondhand embarrassment, Charles looks like he might vomit again from the stress, and Skylar is screaming profanities into everyone’s earpieces.
Dev has to do something before the season actuallyisepically fucked. He waves his hands in front of the camera to get Skylar’s attention back at Command Central and requests a five-minute break. Then he darts across the courtyard toward the first limo, where the contestants wait for their carriage ride.
