Chapter 20
20
Devin and Alex might have awkwardly slunk off to their separate rooms after hooking up if they hadn’t had salad for dinner and worked up quite the appetite. Instead, at midnight, they found themselves in the kitchen, making pancakes.
“I don’t think I’ve spent this much time with anyone since I was married,” Devin said contemplatively when they were both sitting at the carved wooden table in the rental house’s kitchen, him back in his jeans and Alex in a set of flannel PJs from her suitcase.
“I’m not sure I understand that,” she said, pouring maple syrup across her stack. “I might be an outcast and self-proclaimed cunt, but people like you—why don’t you have more friends?”
It was a great question and one Devin had thought about a lot, especially lately. Nothing like turning into a supernatural creature to make you question your social circle.
“I think it’s a combination of things,” he admitted, keeping his eyes downcast on his plate as he cut his midnight snack into smaller and smaller squares. “My parents actively discouraged me from making friends when I was young. I don’t think they wanted me to care about anyone besides them.”
Other people were a distraction, obstacles to their ultimate goal of using Devin to make money.
“They told me I was different a lot, in a way that made me think I wouldn’t fit in even if I got the chance. On the rare occasions when I met another child actor or someone’s kid on set or whatever, I never really knew how to behave. I was used to talking to grown-ups or repeating lines that an adult had written for me. I knew how to act like a child but not how to actually be one.”
Devin chanced a look at Alex’s face, ready to see pity or disappointment at his revelation that he’d always been strange, alien, well before the Change.
Instead, he found her gripping her fork like a spear.
“I hate them,” she said.
When he looked pointedly at her fork, she lowered the utensil/weapon sheepishly.
“Sorry.” Alex shook her head. “I know that’s not helpful.”
Devin laughed.
“Actually, it kind of is. Makes me feel less messed up.” He never really talked about his family at length like this. Jade knew pieces of what had happened over the years, more of the recent stuff with the lawsuits. But Devin mostly kept the stories of his childhood to himself. They were embarrassing. Sad. Even Erica, his ex-wife, hadn’t liked hearing about it. The few times he’d tried to talk to her about his parents she started crying, and Devin ended up being the one comforting her.
Keeping this stuff from the press was an obvious choice. It would hurt his career. He couldn’t be the blank slate for a character if people were thinking about his own “tragic” backstory.
It was nice to finally have someone else say, in so many words, that it wasn’t his fault he’d spent so much of his life isolated, near people but not with them.
Alex took a long sip from her glass of water like she was trying to calm herself down.
The wolf liked her anger, her fierceness. He read it as an overture of protection. Alex couldn’t save him from his past, but every part of Devin liked that she wanted to.
“Weren’t there any adults that looked out for you?” Alex asked a little desperately.
He tried to think back. It had been a while. His adolescence was mostly a blur of cheap apartments and auditions, of long days on set and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him.
“There were a couple of people on the soap crew that were nice, doting, I guess. The ladies in the hair and makeup trailer wouldn’t let me drink too many cans of Coke. But it was such an awkward period of my life. I worked on Sands of Time from eight to eighteen, went from being a freckle-faced kid to a gawky teen to a”—he did air quotes—“?‘heartthrob’ in front of those people. As my storylines changed, got romantic, even people I’d known for years started treating me differently. They went from pinching my cheeks to, well, pinching my cheeks .” He grimaced.
“What the fuck? Devin, that’s…I don’t even have words for how messed up that is.”
Alex put both elbows up on the table and scrubbed her hands across her face, and then she did something that completely threw him: she reached across the tabletop and took his hand, the one not currently occupied with eating, and just…held it.
She smelled like sugar and affection. Devin thought he could happily sit there in the semi-dark with her forever, just like this, talking about things that still hurt but somehow less than they used to.
He didn’t know if it was the physical connection point or the trial they’d done earlier—the way his body felt loose and sated and safe—that encouraged him to keep talking. He hardly ever spoke this much when his words didn’t belong to someone else. Maybe it was just that Alex didn’t seem like she expected anything from him in that moment.
“ The Arcane Files was the first place I knew that I belonged. From that first read of Colby, I just felt it in my bones that I was where I was supposed to be.”
“Like fate?” Alex said, a mix of gentle and teasing. “Like you were chosen?”
And Devin had wondered. How could he become the only werewolf in a generation and not? But so far he didn’t feel any great calling to public service.
“Colby was chosen to save people.” Devin’s accomplishments, even the bad stuff that happened to him, always felt flimsy in comparison to his heroic character.
Alex held his gaze. “Who says you won’t?”
He wanted to say that he didn’t know how. That if he could have, he’d have saved himself a long time ago. But Devin also wanted Alex to understand that he’d tried to form bonds during TAF and couldn’t. It felt like unearthing something, showing her exactly where it hurt.
“I convinced myself it was just show business, all the relationship land mines on set. Gus and I got along okay at first, but there was always this unspoken competition. Our characters were partners, but I was the special one. And it didn’t help that Brian Dempsey treated me differently from the jump. He was always more interested in Colby—which I guess makes sense given what we know about his family ties. Nothing I did was ever quite good enough. The more I chased his approval, the more Gus resented me.”
“It probably didn’t help that the audience divided into team Colby and team Asher.” Alex bit her lip in a way that made Devin think she was considering the role of the fandom, maybe even her role as an archive moderator, in a new light. “And on that note, I can imagine it was awkward for you and Anthony that so many people shipped Colby/Nathaniel.”
“It never bothered me the way it seemed to bother Anthony. I got the impression he read more about it online or maybe people were weirder with him in person—asking him to bite them and stuff? But yeah, I remember this picture of us at a cast dinner got circulated in a way that felt really strange. People diagramming the inches between our thighs under the table or something.”
“Yeah, I know which one you mean,” she said, not without a note of self-loathing.
“Look, I’m not gonna pretend there weren’t fans who crossed the line, but the network was intentionally manipulative. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too when it came to Colby getting horizontal with dudes. They’d deny romance rumors at the upfronts every year until they were blue in the face, but even I picked up on subtext in some of the promos they had me and Anthony read. I’m pretty sure I said at one point that I could ‘feel Nathaniel—’?”
“—up your ass,” Alex finished. “Yeah, there’s a quote that will live forever in infamy.”
Devin traced his thumb across the tattoos on her knuckles as she laughed. He’d been wanting to do that for so long that it felt illicit.
“Real-life speculating about me and Anthony stopped a little bit when I married Erica. It wasn’t why I married her, obviously, but I remember the change. He got less jumpy about posing together at conventions and stuff.”
Alex pulled her legs up onto the seat of her chair, curling in like a pretzel. “Why did you marry her?”
Devin fought against an immediate, instinctual shuttering at the bald question, two decades of media training kicking in on autopilot. But Alex wasn’t a reporter. She wasn’t even the Mod anymore, not really. She was the woman he’d trusted enough to let her tie him up. The one who’d seen the basest parts of him and still found him hot.
The truth still felt intensely vulnerable. He had to take two bites of sticky-sweet pancake for courage. He’d liked plenty about Erica. She was pretty and ambitious and warm. But really, he knew why he’d bought the ring.
“She had this huge Southern family and tons of friends, and from the very beginning, she just kinda folded me in.”
Parties and BBQs, glasses of rosé on someone’s fancy terrace for no good reason except the weather was nice. She’d treated them like a unit, and sure, sometimes he’d been bored or exhausted and wished he could skip out on plans, but for the first time in his life he’d had people slapping his back and calling him “Big Man,” which he half hated, but that wasn’t the point.
“When we got divorced, she took everyone with her.”
The fall was swift and jarring. He went from having a packed social calendar to spending Thanksgiving alone on his couch with KFC.
“But through all of it, all those years, I never really noticed how lonely I was because there were always people around. My agent, my manager, my publicist, my trainer. It wasn’t until Jade—my agent—dumped me that I realized, my whole life the only people that stuck around were the ones that I paid.”
Devin got a bit of a head rush, finishing that sentence. It was the kind of quote that could have killed his career or what was left of it. Alex simply sat still, her empty plate in front of her, shadows from the window playing across her cheeks and chin, making it hard for him to read her.
“Do you think of me like that?” Her voice was barely loud enough to rise above the hum of the refrigerator. “As one more person you paid?”
“No.” He wanted to reach for her, to hold more than her hand, but didn’t dare.
The obvious question floated between them. Devin held his breath, waiting for her to ask.
She didn’t.
“You stopped being someone I paid a long time ago.”
Alex turned her head toward the window, hiding part of her reaction from him.
“We’ve only known each other a couple of weeks.”
“I think”—Devin swallowed, unused to making philosophical declarations even when the moment demanded it—“sometimes getting close to someone has less to do with time and more to do with them letting you.”
Even in his periphery, he could see the flash of fear in her eyes a few seconds before her scent changed.
“I’m not good at this kind of intimacy,” she said, her voice wavering but determined. “Even the people I love the most—my dad, Rowen—I don’t like for them to know when I’m struggling. I tell myself I’m protecting them. I’m supposed to be the strong one. The one with the answers.”
The girl who became the Mod at fifteen. The same year her mom left.
“What about your friends? The ones your dad mentioned from the fandom?”
“Cam and Eliza.”
All of a sudden, Alex pulled her hand from his.
“They’ve seen my messy parts. They know every mean thing anyone’s ever said about me. They were there when my dad got sick. The last time I spoke to my mom. But I think part of the reason our relationship works has always been that they’re far away. It’s easier, in some ways, to lay your heart on the line when most of your communication comes through a screen. You can hide when you need to.”
She got up and dropped her dish into the sink with a clang.
“They trust me, so they give me a lot of leeway, but there’s things that I’ve kept from them too.”
Devin came up behind her and gently turned on the faucet. The rushing water was loud after so much stillness.
Alex turned to look at him over her shoulder, something lost in her eyes.
“When you decide to give someone everything, whoever that person is, they’re gonna be really lucky,” he said, gently nudging her aside to put their plates in the dishwasher.
What he meant was, Let it be me .