Page 61 of The Charm Offensive
He steps into the room alone. The air is stale and thick with the scent of unwashed things, and a kick of anxiety rockets through him at the filth. But then he sees Dev cocooned on thebed, the comforter sealed tight above his head, and he’s able to push aside those thoughts.
Charlie opens the window before he climbs onto the bed and tries to pull back the comforter. Dev stubbornly holds on tight, but Charlie’s stronger, and he yanks the blanket away from Dev’s face. The sight makes Charlie’s throat close up: unwashed hair, no glasses, curled up in a tight ball.
“Leave,” Dev grunts into his pillow.
“Tell me what you need.”
“I need you toleave.”
Part of him wants to. The more powerful part of him reaches out to push Dev’s hair off his forehead. “Please tell me what you need.”
Dev opens his eyes and looks up at Charlie. They’re the color of his perfect violin and filled with tears, and he’s the most beautiful person Charlie’s ever seen, even now. “I need you to leave. I… I don’t want you to see me like this.”
Charlie thinks about all the times he’s pushed someone away because he didn’t want them to see his anxiety and his obsessiveness, and he thinks about what he really wanted all those times people took him at his word. He climbs back onto the bed and reaches out for Dev. Dev pulls away, fights him off, eventually curls down against his chest, and holds on tight. Dev sinks deep into Charlie, crying into the folds of his oxford shirt. Charlie tries to hold Dev like Dev held him that night in the bathroom, carrying his weight.
Most of the time, Dev is like a human bonfire walking around generously warming everyone with his presence. But burning that bright and that fiercely must be exhausting; no one can sustain it forever. Charlie wishes he could tell Dev it’s okay toflicker out sometimes. It’s okay to tend to his own flame, to keep himself warm. He doesn’t have to be everything for everyone else all the time.
Charlie wishes he could cup his hands around the feeble Dev flame, blow on its embers to keep him going before he burns himself out completely.
“Do you get like this a lot?”
A few quiet sobs dislodge from Dev’s throat. “I get like this sometimes, yeah,” he whispers. “Little funks. But I bounce back. I’ll bounce right back.”
“How can I help when it gets like this?”
Dev folds himself tighter against Charlie, all those lovely sharp points digging in. “You can just stay,” he says, at last. “No one ever stays.”
As Dev falls asleep on his chest, Charlie understands so clearly that Dev has spent four weeks trying to convince Charlie he deserves something Dev doesn’t believe he himself deserves. That whatever these little funks are—these evenings of the brain—they’ve convinced Dev he doesn’t deserve someone who stays. Charlie wishes he could find the words, find a way, to show Dev what he’s worth, even if this thing between them is already over. Even if it was only ever practice.
But Charlie doesn’t know how you show someone they’re worthy of being loved. So he just stays.
Dev
It was his seventh therapist—or maybe his eighth?—who asked him to describe it once, the way it feels when the depression is at its worst. Dev told her it was like drowning from the inside. Likehis brain was filling with water. Like sitting on the bottom of the deep end of the west Raleigh public pool the way he would as a kid, letting the silence and the pressure crush him until he couldn’t stand it any longer.
That is how he feels when he opens his eyes Thursday morning, so it takes a while to figure out when he is and where he is and why Charlie Winshaw is sitting on the edge of his bed tying his shoes. Relief sweeps across Charlie’s face. “You’re awake.”
Dev clears his throat. “You stayed.”
A shy smile tugs at the corner of Charlie’s mouth. “How are you feeling?”
Like I almost drowned but didn’t.“That question is a little too much to handle pre-coffee.”
“You get in the shower, then, and I’ll go find some coffee.” One more smile, then Charlie climbs off the bed. Dev watches him move to the desk chair, watches him slip on his coat, watches him grab the hotel room key off the desk.
Charlie turns to look at him again, propped up against the headboard. He takes two uneasy steps toward the door. Hesitates. Pivots. Then he takes three determined steps toward the bed. Charlie grabs Dev’s face and kisses him firmly in the middle of the forehead. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
And then he’s gone.
When the door clicks shut behind Charlie, Dev takes a deep breath, gathers up what little energy he has, and gets out of bed. He takes an exceptionally long shower, trying to make up for the four days he didn’t shower, for the days he could barely get out of bed at all. He lathers the soap between his hands and imagines he can scrub off the days of fog, the days of never feeling fully awake, the days of climbing deeper and deeper into that placewhere he feeds the darkness with his self-loathing, his loneliness, his feelings of inadequacy. The depression has a special knack for listing all his shortcomings, and this time, it had his epic mistake of kissing Charlie to throw in his face.
Kissing Charlie—and coming to terms with the fact that he needs to stop kissing Charlie—shouldn’t have been enough to trigger his depression, but unfortunately, that’s not how his depression works. It’s not logical or reasonable. It doesn’t need some catastrophic tragedy to turn the chemicals of his brain against him. Tiny tragedies are more than enough.
“I couldn’t find black coffee, but I got you a large Americano,” Charlie says as soon as Dev gets out of the bathroom. “Jules texted, and call time is in an hour.”
“Thanks.” Dev reaches around for the paper cup and Charlie startles.
“You shaved,” Charlie announces. He lifts his hand, like he’s about to touch Dev’s cleanly shaven cheek, but then he clasps both hands around his tea instead. “I… I missed your face.”
