Chapter Three #2
even know what he did to bother Charlie this time. He likes a full inventory of Charlie’s sore spots.
Usually Simon makes an excuse and leaves right after dinner, but tonight he hesitates. Still, not wanting to leave isn’t the
same as wanting to stay, so he slips out to Lian’s backyard.
Someone else already had that idea, though—two people, actually.
And they’re kissing. He notices the cargo shorts first, and no surprises there—Charlie and Alex are back together.
All that cartoon-based fighting was probably their idea of foreplay.
They haven’t noticed him, so he takes a step back toward the house, but stops short when he realizes that the person Charlie’s kissing isn’t Alex.
It isn’t a woman at all. It’s one of the waiters from the catering company.
Back inside, Simon locks himself in the bathroom.
Simon’s general policy about everyone else’s sex life is that the less he knows, the happier he is. He hopes they repay the
favor, because while he’s made practically zero effort to hide that he’s gay, he doesn’t want to have to talk about it. He
isn’t famous enough for it to matter, except to a few dedicated weirdos who are niche enough that their speculation rarely
leaks outside their own world of carefully curated, intensely homoerotic Out There GIFs.
Anyway, Simon tries not to pay attention, but there’s some horrible, traitorous part of his brain that’s always tuned-in to
whatever Charlie Blake is doing. Simon notices if Charlie looks a little too long at a guest actor, or if he flirts back when
the set design guy flirts with him. Simon’s noticed, but he’s never let himself come to any conclusions. It’s none of his
business. And—maybe he doesn’t want to think about Charlie Blake being queer.
The problem Simon has right now is that Charlie isn’t out, at least not at work. And even if he’s out to some of the cast,
someone else from the catering company could see him, not to mention Lian’s teenage kids.
Simon doesn’t have a lot of humanitarian impulses but he isn’t letting people get outed, not even Charlie, not even when he’s kissing a cater waiter basically in public.
He leaves the bathroom and stations himself by the back door, with no clear idea of how exactly he’ll go about waylaying anyone
who tries to go outside. He takes out his phone and starts playing sudoku, which won’t raise any questions, since hiding in
empty hallways and playing on his phone is pretty on-brand for him.
The waiter comes inside first, not sparing a glance toward the corner where Simon’s lurking. Simon could go back to the living
room now, but he doesn’t, so he’s still there, skulking in the shadows in the creepiest possible way, when Charlie comes inside.
“What are you doing?” Charlie asks.
“Reading,” Simon lies.
“Did you start that dragon book?”
Bafflingly, Charlie sounds like he’s attempting a normal conversation. He’s talking to Simon like it’s a natural continuation
from yesterday’s ill-advised messages. Simon doesn’t like it. It makes him feel off-balance, much more so than the revelation
that Charlie is apparently into men.
“No.” Simon isn’t sure whether he’s rejecting dragon romance or civil conversation or something else, so he turns on his heel
and heads back to the living room, where everyone’s standing around in a way that means they’re about to leave. Alex is giving
Roshni a hug that’s only slightly less violent than a football tackle. Simon decides to leave before it’s his turn to get
mauled. He thanks Lian for dinner and books it for the door.
“Do you need a ride?” Charlie asks, following him out.
“I drove.”
“Good, then you can drive me home.”
“No, I really—”
“Alex, keys,” Charlie says, and before the words are even out of his mouth, he’s taken his key fob out of his pocket and tossed
it toward where Alex has just left the house. She catches it in one hand.
“Sweet,” she says.
“Wait,” Simon protests, trying to come up with an excuse not to drive Charlie home in front of a group of people who all know
perfectly well that Charlie has driven Simon home dozens of times. But before he can think of anything, Alex is pulling out
of Lian’s driveway in Charlie’s car.
“Door,” Charlie says, pulling on the handle of the driver’s side door on Simon’s car.
“What?”
“Unlock the door,” Charlie says, very slowly, like Simon’s the one here who isn’t making sense. “So I can get into your car.”
“I can drive, you know.” But even as he says it, he’s unlocking the door. It’s just because he hates driving, that’s all,
or maybe because he isn’t tacky enough to argue with Charlie in Lian’s driveway.
Charlie spends a full minute moving Simon’s seat back and adjusting the mirrors and in general making it so the next time
Simon has to drive, the car will feel like a rental.
“We’re the same height. Why are you moving everything?”
“You’re on top of the steering wheel,” Charlie says, tilting the side mirror one fraction of one degree. “If the airbag goes
off, you’ll break your ribs and puncture a lung and die.”
“Are my mirrors going to kill me too?”
“I mean, yeah, if you need them to reflect anything other than the side of your own car.”
“My car has a backup camera.” So does Charlie’s car, obviously. This should not be a new concept for him.
Charlie looks at him like he’s never heard anything so dumb in his life, opens his mouth, shuts it with a click of his back
teeth, somehow managing to silently convey that Simon’s basically using tarot cards and vibes to maneuver his car.
Charlie drops an arm along the back of the passenger seat, looks over his shoulder, and backs out of Lian’s driveway in a
way that leaves Simon feeling faintly insulted.
Heroically, Simon doesn’t ask where all Charlie’s opinions on vehicular safety were when he rammed his old truck into the
car of a certain guest director six and a half years earlier.
“So,” Charlie says, when they’re heading east on Franklin. There’s some weight in that syllable, enough to clue Simon into
the fact that he’s been cornered. At least now he knows why Charlie insisted on driving him home: Charlie’s going to give
him an insulting lecture about how Simon had better not tell anyone what he saw in Lian’s garden. Simon thought Charlie hadn’t
seen him, but he must have been wrong.
“You’re leaving the show, aren’t you,” Charlie says.
It takes Simon a second to recalibrate his irritation. “You see, the problem is that nobody ever told you how secrets work.
Nobody was supposed to tell Alex, and Alex wasn’t supposed to tell you, which means you weren’t supposed to let me know that
she told you. Hope that clears things up!”
“You really are leaving, then?”
“Nothing’s set in stone,” Simon says, even though it nearly is.
“You were going to leave without giving anyone a chance to say goodbye. What, we’d come back in August and you just wouldn’t be there?”
“I guess there would have been a press release or something, like when Samara left.”
“That isn’t the point, Simon!” Charlie’s hands flex on the steering wheel. “You’ve worked with these people—dozens of people—for
years, and you weren’t going to give them a chance to say goodbye?”
The idea of saying goodbye to everyone involved with the show makes Simon want to check himself into a special hospital by
the sea. “Most people leave shows in between seasons. The cast and crew find out when they find out. This is very normal and
you’re the one making it weird.”
Charlie pulls into a car wash parking lot, hits the brakes, and turns to face him. “But you had a chance to be better! You
could care, just a little, about people’s feelings.”
And that hits too close to home because Simon does. He does care what people feel. He obsesses over it, getting so anxious that it’s all he can think about. When he’s super
anxious, he stops being able to think straight about how normal people react to things. Other people’s emotions become illegible.
And then he really does fuck up.
Tonight at dinner, Simon probably spoke twenty words. Twenty words. And he wasn’t even that anxious, at least on his own personal scale. It had practically been okay. But being in a group
of people—or sometimes being around anyone, and sometimes just sitting alone in his house and remembering people exist—makes
some fundamental part of himself shut down, and the best he can hope for is a quiet retreat into his mind, and that everyone
will read his silence as dickishness and not literal mental illness.
“Uh,” Charlie says, and Simon realizes he’s been sitting still, his face in his hands, for a while now.
Simon makes himself lower his hands. “You do not get to judge me. Not about that.”
“Do you—don’t fucking kill me, Simon, but I have to ask—do you need medicine right now?”
What Simon needs is a time machine to go back and hide those prescription bottles before Charlie could see them. “What I would
love is not to be in a poorly lit parking lot with a man who’s yelling at me.” Simon’s just being a dick—he isn’t afraid of
Charlie—but he needs this to end.
Charlie recoils as much as he can in the driver’s seat of a car. “Sorry,” he mutters, and puts the car in gear.
“Jamie doesn’t know I’m thinking about leaving,” Simon says when the car is moving. “So if you and Alex and whoever else you
told could just keep it together when you see him at the wrap party, that would be great.”
He’s expecting Charlie to pounce on that—Simon’s being a bad friend, not even caring about Jamie’s feelings—but he doesn’t
say anything, and the silence lasts until he’s parking in Simon’s driveway. It doesn’t occur to Simon until he’s letting himself
into his house that now Charlie has to walk home.
Simon can’t sleep, which is no surprise. Historically, it takes him five to seven business days to process one single unanticipated
emotion, and tonight he’s been handed a slew of them.