Page 97 of The Charm Offensive
Daphne backs herself into a makeup mirror.
“You can’t send yourself home,” Maureen continues. “You signed a contract. We’ve built the entire season around you!”
“But we don’t… we don’t love each other,” Daphne mutters.
Maureen Scott throws her head back and laughs. “No one gives a shit if you’rein love. This show isn’t about love.”
Something sinks inside of Dev, and then he’s sinking, sitting on the bottom of the pool with the pressure of nine feet of water pushing down on him. He looks across the room and finds Charlie, and he tries to use his blond curls and gray eyes and chin dimple to anchor himself.
“Maureen, maybe we could discuss this calmly,” Skylar tries. She’s holding up both hands between Daphne and Maureen.
“There’s nothing to discuss. Our perfect princess is going to get engaged to our prince. That’s the story we’ve been telling, and that’s how it’s going to end.”
Dev stares at his boss and watches her silvery bob swish elegantly around her mean face.
“If Charlie proposes to me,” Daphne says, her voice surprisingly clear, “I will say no. You cannot force me to say yes.”
“And you can’t force me to propose to her,” Charlie adds. Dev feels a weird mixture of pride and dread at the sudden certainty in Charlie’s voice. “Daphne is right. I’m done pretending to be something I’m not.”
Maureen points an angry finger at Charlie’s face. “You’re not done pretending until your contract is over.”
“Maybe Charlie can propose to Angie instead,” Jules tries in a soft voice almost muffled by the screaming.
Maureen wheels around to face her and scoffs. “I’ve already told you we are not going to have a bisexual win this season.”
Dev watches the way this statement registers on Daphne’s face, watches the way her mouth slides open in horror. Charlie looks equally stricken. He meets Dev’s gaze, and his expression asks a simple question.Did you know?Did he know that his boss refused to let a bisexual woman become the next star or the winner of this season?
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Maureen snaps at the pair of them. “None of this is about me or what I believe. I’m a Democrat. I support gay rights. I hired all of you,” she says, gesturing to Dev, Skylar, Ryan, and Jules. Dev has never felt more like a prop, like a checked box. Maureen plows on. “But this show hinges on appealing to a wide viewership. I’m giving America what it wants, and it does not want a bisexual princess.”
For a minute, the dressing room is quiet, seven adult bodies packed together in horrified silence.
“What America wants?” Daphne echoes slowly.
“What ifIwas gay?” someone asks at the same time.
It’s Charlie’s voice that slices through the tension in the room like a felled tree in the forest. Everyone looks at him. No one breathes. Especially not Dev.
“What if I told you I was gay?” Charlie says again, his gray eyes steady as they fix on Maureen. “What if I told you I can’t get engaged to any of the women at the end of this season, because I’m gay? What if I told you I was in love with a man—”
Charlie has never said that word before.Love.Dev wants to bask in the sound of it sweeping past Charlie’s lips, but Skylar and Ryan both turn to look at him while Daphne’s tongue gets caught on a vague sound of disbelief. “You’re…what?”
“What if I told you I was in love with a man,” Charlie pushes forward, like the brave, beautiful,naïveman that he is, “and I wanted to choose him instead?”
Maureen puts her hands on her hips, stares down the man Dev loves, and says, “You do not want to play that game with me, Charles. You think we’ve never had a gay prince before? Of course we have! I don’t give a shit what you do or with whom when the cameras aren’t rolling, but when they are, you’re going to pretend to be head-over-heels in love withher.” She points angrily at Daphne.
Charlie looks around the room—at Dev, at Jules, at the people who know the truth and are saying nothing out of fear. “And what if I refuse?” Charlie asks, each word clipped.
Maureen is still for the length of one shallow breath. “Then I’ll give you a terrible edit and let the entire world see just how crazy you really are.”
All the air is pulled from the room by Maureen’s words, and Dev’s brain doesn’t have the oxygen it needs to understand. But it tries. The boyfriend on night one. The wool suit. Daphne throwing herself at him at the ball. Megan and Delilah. The massage Group Quest. The entire season, Maureen kept putting Charlie in situations to exploit him (because she knows about his mental illness, knows about WinHan,of course she does) and now she’s standing in a back room using that footage to blackmail him.
All Dev can think issix years.
He made so many excuses for Maureen—justified so many of her actions—for so long and somehow only now does he understand the truth. Maureen was never his ally, never his friend, and this show wasneverabout love. He threw away six years of his life.
Charlie looks around the room at the silent producers who still aren’t sticking up for him. At the producers he thought cared about him. He looks at Dev. “Well,” he says, and Dev can hear it in his voice. He’s trying so hard to be strong. Dev wishes he could help, but he doesn’t have any strength left in him to give to Charlie. He’s hollowed out, emptied of feeling, a husk on the bottom of a pool. “I guess we’ll have our happily ever after, then.”
Daphne is the only person who calls out for him as he shoves his way toward the door.
