Chapter Two
Simon’s in his trailer, very much minding his own business, when Alex Gutierrez, who plays the captain of their spaceship,
flings herself through the door and whispers, “Is it true? Tell me you aren’t leaving.”
Somehow, Alex is immune to all the please-go-away vibes that constitute Simon’s only coping mechanism. She texts him for no
reason Simon can discern, sails uninvited into his trailer, and beams at him without any provocation. At first, he worried
she had somehow failed to notice exactly how gay he is and was attempting to flirt.
Simon isn’t used to his general repellence not working. He’s had decades to refine his strategy. He doesn’t say much, but
his face is naturally pretty bitchy—it’s the cheekbones—so his silence gets interpreted as arrogance. He does nothing to contradict
this assumption. And so instead of seeming awkward and anxious, he comes off as aloof. Bored. Kind of an asshole. People leave
him alone. It’s wonderful.
He’s reasonably cordial with everyone at work.
Almost everyone. He’s polite. Well, he tries to be polite and maybe gets halfway there most of the time.
Fact is, television sets are loud and the lights are too bright; the costumes are unbearable and there’s always someone touching you.
You’d think he’d be used to it, but maybe he’s sliding toward a cranky middle age.
Crankier. In any event, the fact that Alex is here at all boggles the mind.
“I’m not discussing this,” Simon says, a little tartly and, case in point: not particularly nice.
Alex is in full makeup, green lines branching across her cheek because Captain Alvarez has been infected with some kind of
space pathogen. Alex is spending the last two episodes of the season lying very still in med bay. “That’s a yes. You’re leaving.”
“Nothing’s decided.” He isn’t lying, exactly. So far, nothing’s official. His agent keeps telling him to give it time, to think about it, and Simon can’t seem
to get across to him that he’s done all the thinking he needs.
He’s well aware that any other actor who hadn’t signed a new contract by this point would have their character killed off
before the season ended. He’s seen it before: they’ve been mauled by giant space beetles, executed by space fascists, and
devoured by space parasites. The next season, they’re replaced by new characters on this ragtag band of conventionally attractive
space explorers. It’s the circle of life.
But Simon’s getting special treatment, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t flattered.
“That’s not a no,” Alex says.
“It was supposed to be a secret. Who told you?”
“Why keep it a secret? I mean, if you leave, it’s not going to be a secret for long.” She’s looking at him intently, like
she really wants to know his answer. Like she has opinions she wants to share. Simon wonders exactly how unprofessional it
would be to shoulder her out of the way and flee his own trailer.
“Not while we’re still shooting. I don’t want people to .
. .” Simon isn’t sure how to finish that sentence.
He doesn’t want to have to say goodbye a hundred times?
Accurate, but impossible to explain to people whose brains are wired normally.
He doesn’t want to notice that people are glad to see him go?
Also accurate, but nothing could make him say that out loud.
“Yep,” she says, like Simon just confirmed her suspicions, but she doesn’t look mad about it. Simon is confused by almost
every aspect of this interaction.
“Charlie’s going to lose his shit,” she adds.
The idea of how happy Charlie will be when he finds out he’s rid of Simon makes him feel like he’s lost a game he shouldn’t
even admit he’s been playing.
“Well, you can see why I don’t want to be around for that,” he says.
“Hmm,” is all Alex says, but then she takes out her phone and shows him a video of her dog, and he shows her a video of his
dog. This is the level of interaction Simon can cope with, even when in the background of one of Alex’s videos he can hear
Charlie laughing.
“What on earth,” Jamie says the following night. He’s on the sofa next to Simon, looking at his phone.
For the past twenty minutes, a bowl of milk with seven floating cornflakes has been sitting on the coffee table, a constant
irritation at the back of Simon’s mind. He’s counted the cornflakes a few dozen times because his brain has decided something
dire will happen if he doesn’t keep a weather eye on the cornflake situation.
“Hmm?”
There’s an expression of unholy glee on Jamie’s face. “Charlie Blake liked all your Instagram posts going all the way back to November.”
Jamie’s been running all Simon’s social media for years. Jamie won’t let Simon pay him, and at this point Simon’s given up
trying. Money is always lurking in the dark corners of their friendship. It’s not that Jamie’s broke—he makes a living off
his YouTube channel somehow, in addition to residuals from old acting jobs. But Simon feels . . . not guilty, exactly, but
something like that. Survivors’ guilt, maybe.
“He shared that video of Edie in the sweater vest,” Jamie says.
Simon slides closer to look at Jamie’s phone. On the screen is a video of Edie taking a nap, snoring loudly, wearing a cable-knit
sweater. Jamie posted it a few hours earlier, and Charlie apparently shared it along with a string of heart emojis. “Maybe
he did it by accident?”
“You think he tripped and fell and liked twenty pictures of Edie?”
“Maybe his phone got hacked? Maybe he’s having a neurological episode? Maybe it’s a cry for help?”
Jamie gives him an unimpressed look. “You’re better than this.”
Simon counts the cornflakes again. Still seven, what a surprise. Would it be too weird to reach over and eat one to achieve
a much more comfortable six cornflakes? He turns his entire body so the bowl is no longer in his field of vision.
“What I think,” Jamie says, “is that Charlie has his notifications set so he doesn’t see when people like his posts, and it
hasn’t occurred to him that you might not do the same thing.”
None of this explains what Charlie was doing liking all those posts in the first place, but Simon’s ready to file it away as one of life’s unsolvable mysteries, until the next day when Charlie walks into his trailer.
Simon’s expecting Jamie, who went off to talk to somebody.
It was probably unprofessional of Simon to bring Jamie, but he’s convinced that if Jamie has five unsupervised minutes, he’ll wind up eloping with the first dirtbag he meets.
When Simon realizes it’s Charlie standing in the doorway, he’s hit with the same reaction he has whenever Charlie takes him
by surprise: he wants to push him out the door but in a way that involves at least a little groping. In the instant before
Simon processes that this is Charlie Blake, what he sees is—
Well, Charlie looks the way he looks. It’s just that Simon notices sometimes, and he’d prefer not to. The fact that Simon
can catch a glimpse of Charlie Blake, a man who’s just this side of feral, and think hmm is proof there’s no sense in this world.
Then Charlie takes a huge, showy bite out of one of those blueberry muffins that keep disappearing from craft services. What
the hell? Simon doesn’t even like muffins, or blueberries, or foods that get crumbs all over the place, but these are surreal.
They’re basically brioche, and when Simon’s migraines are so out of control that he thinks he might as well try avoiding gluten
for the twentieth time, he decides that these muffins are gluten-free in, like, a spiritual sense. They would never hurt him.
And now it’s been a full month of watching Charlie eat them while Simon can’t find any. Nobody would blame him for reaching
out and snatching that muffin right out of Charlie’s hand.
Instead he asks, “Can I help you,” dickishness cranked all the way up.
“Just saying hi.”
“Saying hi,” Simon repeats, because they do not have a saying hi kind of relationship. And then, proof positive he’s been spending too much time around Jamie, his mind immediately supplies
the messiest thing he could possibly say. “Thanks for liking all those pictures of Edie. You were so thorough.”
Simon expects a comeback from Charlie, because this is the rhythm that’s defined the last seven years of Simon’s life. Instead,
Charlie stands there and slowly turns pink. It takes Simon a moment to understand that this isn’t a sunburn or yet another
allergic reaction, but Charlie blushing. Simon isn’t sure he’s ever seen Charlie blush, not once.
Charlie casts his gaze around the trailer, clearly looking for inspiration to change the topic. Simon watches in bewilderment
as Charlie studies the paperback Jamie left open and face down on the table, the bottle of nail polish (also Jamie’s), the
two half-eaten salads.
“Are all those yours?” Charlie finally says, gaze landing on the admittedly vast array of prescription bottles on the table
next to the salads.
“That’s what you’re going with?” Simon asks, and he’s blaming Jamie for that too.
“Are you okay?” Charlie’s still looking at the bottles. Usually they stay in Simon’s bag, but Jamie wanted aspirin and Simon’s
been turning his bag inside out trying to find it.
“Um, yes?”
“Because that’s a lot of medicine for a person who’s okay.”
“Seriously?” Simon points at each prescription bottle in turn. “Allergy, migraine, another migraine, antianxiety, another antianxiety, antinausea. That’s it. Do you want a doctor’s note? A treatment plan? Are you doing a drug sweep of all your colleagues’ belongings?”
“You should keep those locked up,” Charlie says. Simon searches his face for some sign he’s being made fun of and comes up
with nothing.
“They’re usually in my locked trailer.”
“Hmm,” Charlie says, because he is actually, honest-to-God, accusing Simon of unsafe drug practices. “You should leave them
at home.”