Chapter One #2
“What does that have to do with anything?” Sometimes Simon worries that Charlie’s thought process is fundamentally broken.
“You look like that and you still manage to be the least cool person I’ve met in my life.”
Simon sighs pointedly. He’s reasonably tall and fairly thin, and his cheekbones and jawline do a lot of work that his personality
doesn’t. All that, plus good clothes and a decent haircut create the optical illusion of charisma. The only reason Charlie
doesn’t understand this is because he’s the kind of man who spends three hundred and sixty days a year wearing cargo shorts,
flip-flops, and T-shirts that got shot from cannons at sporting events.
“Nobody says cool anymore,” Simon says, which is something he learned from his niece and has been saving for the right moment to deploy against
Charlie.
But Charlie just starts laughing—his real, ear-splitting, honk of a laugh; not the smoldery, square-jawed ha he does on camera. “Have you been watching TikTok unsupervised?”
Simon tries to breathe in slowly and breathe out even slower, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do when you want to throttle your coworkers, and when that doesn’t work, he focuses on the fact that he only has to put up with Charlie Blake for another month.
One month, and he’ll be done with Out There, done with Charlie, done with storylines he’s already acted out a dozen times.
At the next red light, Charlie uncaps the tube and reaches under the collar of his T-shirt to rub some ointment on his shoulder.
“You can take it home and give it back to me tomorrow,” Simon says, magnanimous, like he can’t afford to just let Charlie
keep some Target-brand allergy cream.
Charlie throws the tube across the car into Simon’s lap.
Simon shuts his eyes against the glare of oncoming headlights. He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but the next thing he knows,
Charlie’s pointing the air conditioning vent directly in his face.
“What the fuck,” Simon mumbles. “What is wrong with you?”
“I was trying to aim it away from your face, you paranoid weirdo. Shut up.”
The next time Simon wakes up, they’re in his driveway.
“Come on,” Charlie says, flicking Simon’s shoulder. “Get out of my car.”
There’s a ten-year-old Prius chaotically parked in Simon’s driveway, a notification on his phone that his home alarm’s been
disarmed, and a single word text from Jamie: “sorry.”
Simon wants to pause outside his front door for a minute to get his thoughts together, but Charlie always waits to make sure
Simon gets inside, like he’s dropping Simon off after a playdate. So unless Simon wants to have a mini breakdown with Charlie’s
headlights turned on him like a prison searchlight, he has no choice but to open the door before coming to grips with what
he’s going to find on the other side.
Six cardboard boxes are piled in the foyer, each one of them battered and crumpled from all the other times they’ve been used to hastily pack Jamie’s things and bring them to Simon’s house. There isn’t a right angle to be found among them.
On the sofa, Edie sits with her ears impatiently in the air, staring at the door like a parent waiting for a teenager out
past curfew. She loves Jamie, so this is just drama, but Simon can respect the effort.
“Sorry,” Jamie says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the other sofa. There are purple circles under his eyes and his hair looks
like it’s been in the same ponytail for a few days, but he looks better than he did the last few times they went through this.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You can always come here.” Simon means it, but right now he’d very much like to pack a bag and stay at a hotel. He loves
Jamie, loves him as much as he’s capable of loving anyone who isn’t his dog, but right now, all he wants is to take his migraine
medication and collapse dramatically into bed without anyone asking whether he’s okay.
With Jamie around, there’s always someone to bear witness to exactly how far from okay Simon is. He’s spent decades patching
together something that looks like fine from a respectful distance, but once anyone gets too close they can see the seams.
Simon has let Jamie see more of the seams than anyone else—and a lot more now than when they were dating—but nobody needs
to see the full picture. Simon doesn’t want to see the full picture.
“It’ll only be for a week or two,” Jamie says.
It’s never only for a week or two. Simon doesn’t even want it to only be for a week or two.
He’s told Jamie—oh, maybe ten or twenty thousand times—that he can move into the spare bedroom permanently.
He likes having Jamie around—or, he does when he can keep his own shit together well enough that Jamie won’t suspect how close he is to unraveling.
“The spare bedroom belongs to you. I don’t know who else you think ever sleeps there.”
Jamie opens his mouth and Simon knows that he’s going to offer to pay rent, just like he does every time they have this conversation,
and the ball of pain behind Simon’s left eyeball might actually detonate if he has to go through it again. “I’m glad you broke
up with him,” he says quickly. “Now I don’t have to go to jail for murder, so that’s nice for me.”
“Technically, he broke up with me.”
Simon groans and covers his face with his hands. Jamie dates men who are objectively terrible—not violent or abusive, but
dirtbags who get upset when he doesn’t promote their YouTube channels or copyedit their screenplays.
Simon and Jamie were together for over a year. If Simon hadn’t already known he was a nightmare at relationships, Jamie not
only wanting him but staying with him would be all the proof he needed.
Simon sits next to Jamie and lets Edie climb into his lap. He matches his breathing to the rise and fall of her chest, focuses
on the weight of her on his thighs. Somehow, a ten-pound mini dachshund does better work than the heaviest weighted blanket
he’s ever bought.
“I was going to ask you to stay here this summer anyway,” Simon says. “I don’t want to drag Edie to New York just for her
to be alone all the time in a strange apartment.”
After they wrap up this season, Simon’s starting rehearsals for an off-Broadway production of The Tempest, directed by someone he went to college with.
The role fell into Simon’s lap when the actor who was their first choice broke his leg.
He still can’t believe he got it, and was convinced it was all down to stunt casting until he spent an hour looking up every production the theater had done and combing the casts for anyone who looked suspicious.
This would be the perfect time to mention that he isn’t doing another season of Out There, but he doesn’t know how to talk to Jamie about this. A few years ago, Jamie played a recurring character on the show. He
tried not to act crushed when his character got killed off, but Simon leaving the show on his own terms will probably not
be a great experience for Jamie.
“I always knew I’d wind up dog sitting for celebrities,” Jamie says. He must notice how uncomfortable Simon looks, because
he quickly adds, “I will happily stay in your very nice house with its very nice kitchen and the world’s most perfect dog.”
“Well. Thanks,” Simon manages.
Jamie squints at him. “Do you need to take your migraine meds? Your eye is twitching.”
“No,” Simon says, even though there is no sane reason in the entire universe for him to lie about it. “I’m fine.”
During Simon’s more generous moments—nine hours sleep, no skipped meals, at least twenty-four consecutive hours away from
Charlie—he can admit that a lot of the bad blood between them is because they got off to a terrible start.
After college, Simon landed a minor role playing a slightly villainous elf in the adaptation of a fantasy series he’d been
obsessed with as a teenager. Working on Tree of the Gods had been a living nightmare, but he’d been nominated for a couple awards, even managed to win one, so he probably shouldn’t
complain.
When that show ended, he’d met with Lian Zhong, who’d been in the writers’ room and was preparing to shoot a pilot about people stranded on a hostile planet after a shuttle crash.
“Think Twin Peaks in space,” Lian had told him. “Leaning hard into the camp.” She wanted him to read for the part of Jonathan Hale, the ship’s
doctor with a mysterious past.
All the other scripts Simon had been sent were for gritty prestige dramas. Out There looked like the opposite, weirdly out of step with the rest of the market. It looked fun, and Simon needed a break. Badly. He figured it would last one season, maybe two, and then he’d go back to more serious work.
“I want it to be a good experience for everyone,” Lian had said, putting enough weight behind each syllable that Simon knew
she meant it wouldn’t be like Tree of the Gods. Simon trusted her to not be a fascist or a psychopath. He was right about that much, at least.
When they shot the pilot, he was mostly impressed with the rest of the cast. There’d been Alex Guttierrez, who’d just finished
a stint as a villain in a superhero television series. There was Samara Jackson, who’d been on a Disney show and then a teen
drama.
Then there was Charlie Blake, all of twenty years old, who’d done one season of a reality television show allegedly about
restoring old cars but actually about Charlie taking off his shirt. He wasn’t bad, but it was clearly a case of his personality
mapping pretty closely onto the role. Charlie was playing Luke West, a hot-tempered former juvenile delinquent sent on parole
to colonize a newly terraformed planet. And, well, Charlie—with his shaved head and his DIY-looking tattoos—looked like he
knew a little bit about being a juvenile delinquent.
But when the network saw the pilot, they wanted more Charlie. Presumably what they really wanted was more of Charlie’s shirt off, because that’s exactly what they got.
Simon had been livid. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have top billing or enough lines. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to share
the spotlight—or not only that, at least.
The real problem—and Simon knows this makes him a snob, this isn’t news to him—was that a former reality show star brought
down the tone of the show.
Halfway through the first season, when Charlie started missing call times, showing up drunk, and generally acting like he’d
read a book called How to Crash and Burn in Hollywood, Simon was annoyed. When Charlie punched the wall of his trailer and broke his hand, Simon was more than annoyed. When Charlie
dumped hot coffee on a guest director who’d—admittedly—been a complete misery to work with, Simon expected Charlie’s character
to be written off the show. But Lian—for reasons Simon doesn’t understand and officially does not care about—gave him a second
chance. Or, really, a fifth or sixth chance by that point.
Simon never expects people to change—at least not for the better. And he’s not sure Charlie did change, but his behavior did,
at least on set. During the second season, he was professional. He apologized in person to everyone—even Simon—and basically
went out of his way to be a total fucking delight and people fell for it.
If Simon were a better person, maybe he’d have let it go. Maybe he’d even have been impressed that Charlie managed to turn
things around for himself. But all Simon’s feelings were clouded by being stuck—with Charlie, with Out There, with a future that narrowed down and closed off before he even realized it was happening. Because the show turned out to be a hit, and Simon’s fun little break has lasted seven years.
Hell, if Simon were a better person, he’d be grateful. He has steady work on a show that’s never going to win awards but has
a loyal enough following that the annual cancellation rumors never feel too realistic. He has a house he loves, a dog who
tolerates being put in sweaters, and a friend he can list as his emergency contact.
But Simon is not a better person, and for the past few years, he’s become increasingly nervous that the longer he spends on
Out There, the harder it will be to find work on something different. Casting directors will look at him and think: midbudget science
fiction show. They won’t remember the award or the nominations; they won’t remember the Shakespeare festivals or the projects
he’s managed to squeeze in when he isn’t shooting Out There. He’s tired of eleven-hour days, nine months a year, playing a role he could do half asleep. He’s especially tired of Charlie
Blake, who obviously is loving every minute of it.
That sounds shitty, like Simon’s phoning it in on Out There, but he isn’t. He has too much pride to let footage exist anywhere in the world of Simon Devereaux being a bad actor. But
there are only so many times you can get rescued from space prisons, participate in love triangles with space diplomats, or
heroically save people’s lives from space viruses. He’s bored. It sounds so petty, but that’s what it comes down to.
And, honestly, that is kind of Charlie’s fault.
The show could have been something a little .
. . elevated, maybe? Something character driven, at least. But Lian and the rest of the writers have to work around Charlie, who’s very good at motivational speeches, heroic rescues, and a sort of constant smolder.
He knows how to take big blue eyes and a six-pack and somehow make you think you’re watching something special.
Simon doesn’t blame Lian for realizing she had something good on her hands and deciding to capitalize on it.
It’s just that even if the rest of Simon’s life is going to hell in a handbasket, at least he can fix his career, so that’s
what he’s going to do.