Chapter Thirteen
Hearing Charlie talk about cars doesn’t get old, and today the car chatter is interspersed with finger guns and high fives
and back slaps, all reminders that yesterday Charlie was subdued. Today, not worried about Dave, he’s reverted to form. When
Simon stops to pet a dog or text Jamie, and Charlie bounds off, Simon can track him down by following his voice. He’s too
loud. His crackling energy almost takes up physical space.
It’s always driven Simon nuts, the way Charlie dials it up when he has an audience. He basks in attention. It’s so—needy,
maybe. People should see through it, should know it’s an act. They shouldn’t encourage him.
But, of course, Charlie likes attention. People don’t usually go into acting if they hate attention. Simon spent high school
and college with theater kids, and there’s nobody who loves an audience as much as a teenager who just realized they’re good, who just realized people want to watch them.
Simon started acting because pretending to be someone else—speaking someone else’s words, moving his body like it belongs
to someone else—made the more irritating parts of his brain shut off. But it hadn’t taken long before he started craving that
adrenaline rush of doing well, being seen, being enjoyed.
Charlie should have been a theater kid too. He should have spent his teenage years doing schlocky school productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Godspell, not living through whatever gritty reality he endured.
Instead of meeting for coffee like reasonable people while discussing their problems (or whatever, Simon doesn’t know, he’s
never claimed to be reasonable), Charlie and Dave stand side by side, looking at the same car, complimenting it, then moving
on to the next car. Simon rolls his eyes and leaves to buy two coffees. He doesn’t get one for Dave. Instead, Dave gets some
of Simon’s best glares and some side eye.
“Jesus Christ, calm down,” Charlie hisses.
“No,” Simon says, and he doesn’t.
When the crowds get thick, Charlie’s hand lands at the small of Simon’s back. Sometimes, when they’re bending close to talk,
he’ll touch Simon’s arm. Simon keeps leaning into it without meaning to. He has to check himself.
It’s not that he minds being touched. He doesn’t want to hug strangers and he doesn’t like handshakes, but when it’s someone
he likes—
And that’s a category Charlie falls into now.
Simon’s going to need some time quiet and alone to make sense of the past few days. Tomorrow they’re driving home and that’ll
be that. Charlie will go back to being the kind of person who doesn’t touch Simon, and they’ll only see one another when Simon
is walking Edie during one of Charlie’s runs.
But right now, none of that’s happened yet, and Charlie has a hand on Simon’s elbow, steering him toward a very eighties-looking
sports car.
Charlie touches everyone. It doesn’t mean anything. Simon’s spent the morning watching him give high fives and back slaps to total strangers, shake hands with everyone he meets, lean close to a million people in a million pictures.
Simon usually tries to resist the urge to psychoanalyze people, mostly because he feels acutely nauseous at the idea of anyone
trying to make sense of his own brain and pin it to the details of his life. But knowing what Charlie’s childhood was like
and seeing how he seems to crave physical contact now—well, Simon can’t help but draw some conclusions.
Maybe as an experiment, and maybe because he’s at some weird car festival in a town that’s an Americana-themed Pinterest board
and it feels like all rules are suspended, and maybe just because he wants to, he touches Charlie’s hand when they sit down
for lunch. When they’re posing for yet another picture, Simon lets his arm linger a bit around Charlie’s shoulders. Charlie
goes still, a pause in the absolutely feral energy he’s throwing around today. It’s . . . good.
When it’s time for Dave to leave, Charlie goes in for a hug. If Dave doesn’t hug him back, Simon will simply push him into
traffic. But Dave hugs Charlie and pats his back, and the hug passes muster. Dave gets to live another day.
Before Dave gets into his truck, Simon hands him an iPhone charger that he bought at a sickening markup at a shop catering
to tourists hungry for Route 66 Christmas ornaments.
“Oh my God,” Charlie mutters as Dave drives away. “Why are you like this?”
“Considerate? Generous?”
“I didn’t know you could give someone a phone cord and make it look like a death threat.”
“Thank you,” Simon says, pleased to have communicated his intentions so clearly.
“Why don’t you drive an old car?” Simon asks later that afternoon when Charlie’s giving a blue convertible the kind of praise
that makes Simon feel filthy.
“Airbags. Anti-lock brakes, crumple zone, fuel economy. They’re pretty—I mean look at her, Christ—but not to drive on the
freeway.”
That’s about the most boring answer that Charlie could have given, and Simon says so. Charlie rolls his eyes. “I mean it as
a compliment,” Simon says. It’s true.
“Oh my God.” Simon comes to a halt in front of a lime green car that looks like it was drawn by someone who’d only heard about
cars second or third hand. It looks like a Honda Civic hatchback dressed up as a race car for Halloween. It’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, but for economy cars. “What,” he says, “is wrong with that thing?”
“There isn’t one thing wrong with that car,” Charlie says firmly. “Except the paint, which honestly should be brighter.” If
it were any brighter, Simon’s retinas would disintegrate. “It’s a Gremlin.”
“It sure is,” Simon agrees. There’s something so fundamentally misbegotten about this car’s design that Simon can almost respect
it. It’s a statement, if nothing else.
“An AMC Gremlin. From ’73 or ’74, I think. It isn’t a muscle car, but some people will tell you it is.” It’s heavily implied
that anyone who would say this is living in the darkest ignorance. This might be the most judgmental Charlie’s been when talking
about anyone other than Simon.
“Tell me more,” Simon says, and is treated to a lecture about engine size, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1970 passage of the Clean Air Act. Charlie doesn’t have to look up any of those dates. He apparently just has that information sitting in his head.
“This is kind of hot,” Simon observes.
“V-8 engines are hot, yes. That’s the point of muscle cars.”
“No, I mean you infodumping. You being. Smart,” Simon concludes, because that’s the word.
Charlie looks like his operating system is about to crash. “You—what. Shut up.”
An off-leash corgi wanders over, so Simon pays it some attention instead of dwelling on whatever weirdness Charlie is committing.
They look at ten million more cars. Simon’s in the kind of good mood that makes him feel like all those brain chemicals that
are usually in too short supply, all the dopamine and serotonin and endorphins, are fizzing in his blood like bubbles in champagne.
He knows it won’t last. He isn’t new here. The bad stuff comes back but then it goes away and he gets days like this.
He tries to take a mental snapshot—the buzz of conversation and the distant sound of a honking horn, the blue of the sky,
the smell of corn dogs and cigarettes. Charlie, laughing, always in frame. He settles for an actual snapshot, even though
it can’t capture the lightness inside him.
It’s closure, probably, that’s prompted today’s happiness. He’s leaving Out There, leaving a chapter of his life that hasn’t been all bad. Ending things on good terms with Charlie feels right. When, later
on, he thinks back on the seven years of his life that he spent on Out There, maybe he can be glad about it.
When Simon’s phone starts buzzing, he takes it out of his pocket, ready to show Charlie whatever picture of Edie that Jamie’s just sent. But it’s Nora.
Nora: so I showed the video to my dad and he says he’s never seen you laugh like that, not even when you were a baby
Simon: video?
Nora: the tiktok from the taqueria???
Nora: have Charlie check his tiktok. that girl tagged him
Simon sits on a bench, tugging Charlie down by the sleeve so he follows. He shows Charlie his phone screen, and Charlie immediately
checks his notifications.
“Oh, wow,” Charlie says after a minute. “That’s a lot of views.”
He holds his phone up for Simon to watch the video of them trying to reenact that GIF two days ago. Simon thought the waitress
would post a couple pictures to the taco restaurant’s social media, maybe that three second clip where they finally manage
to get it right, but now he’s watching a video that’s got to be a minute long, at least, of him and Charlie grabbing one another
and cracking up.
“I told her she could post whatever she wanted,” Charlie says, scrubbing his hand across his jaw. “I didn’t think she’d post
the whole thing. I didn’t know she has like eighty thousand TikTok followers, or that it—” He clears his throat. “That it
looked like this.”
The video ends and loops back to the beginning.
There’s a lot of touching, much more than Simon remembers.
There’s also more eye contact. Simon remembers that moment when Charlie caught his eye, and Simon recognized a flicker of want there, but he doesn’t think you can pick that up on camera, just a general sort of intensity. At least on Charlie’s end.
Simon, though, looks—he looks fucking smitten. He looks like he’s never seen anything as wonderful as Charlie Blake.
Something hot and panicky starts swirling around in his stomach and he forces himself to think about this rationally. Does
this video change anything? Charlie was there, Charlie knows they were a little flirty. After yesterday, that’s all out in
the open, anyway. Nothing on this video is news to either of them, however embarrassed Simon might be at the moment.
The rest of the world may see this video and realize they’re witnessing a not particularly heterosexual moment, but Simon