Chapter Thirteen #2
doesn’t think it will affect him. Some people will be assholes about it, but it isn’t anything Simon hasn’t heard before.
He doesn’t need to be convincingly straight to get the kind of roles he’d like to get in the future. He isn’t looking to be
a leading man in action movie blockbusters or superhero franchises. Mostly, Simon is annoyed that he has to think about this
at all. It’s like an emotional tax levied only on queer people.
Charlie, though. He may want the kind of roles casting directors equate with a certain kind of straight masculinity. If he’s
out, some doors will be closed—maybe not as many as would have been five or ten years ago, but it’s still a problem.
“Are you okay?” Simon asks. Charlie must have watched the video five times by now. “For what it’s worth, I think it mostly looks like I’m being gay at you, not like you’re . . . complicitly queer, or whatever.”
“Simon, can you just shut the fuck up?”
They’ve probably told one another to shut up a thousand times, and there’s no reason this time should feel any different.
Simon finishes his coffee and counts the number of cowboy hats in the crowd passing them by.
When he glances down, Charlie’s still watching the video. Simon hears his own laugh. It’s been a while since he’s seen himself
just being . . . himself.
“There isn’t anything in this,” Charlie says, tapping his phone, “that bothers me. It’s two people having fun. It’s cute.
Flirty, sure, definitely. I’m glad I saw it. Don’t treat it like a bad thing.” He runs a hand across his beard. “I told you
I’m not closeted. I’m not not out. I don’t care about that. I’m not—I really fucking refuse—to make a big deal over being seen flirting with a man. For
fuck’s sake. If we were—I mean, if I were dating a man, I wouldn’t keep it a secret, so.”
Simon thinks about Charlie kissing that waiter, about him flirting with Jamie. Those aren’t the actions of a man who’s spending
a lot of mental energy on staying closeted.
“Okay. Soft launching your queerness. Happy to help.”
“Are you okay?” Charlie asks.
“I mean, this,” Simon says, gesturing broadly at himself, “is not a secret and never has been. I don’t love the idea of my
personal life meaning something to total strangers, and that includes homophobes, obviously, but also people looking for queer
inspiration or whatever. Sorry if that makes me an asshole.”
“That isn’t what makes you an asshole,” Charlie says.
“Anyway, I guess we don’t need to worry about people thinking we hate one another. I mean, mission accomplished.”
“Yeah,” Charlie sighs.
Simon’s phone buzzes with another text from Nora. She’s written, “It took my dad fifteen whole minutes to mention that if
you publicly came out it would be convenient for his campaign.”
“My brother’s running for reelection,” Simon tells Charlie, showing him the message. “He’d be so happy to be able to talk
about his gay brother. Makes him sound like an actual person.”
“That’s . . . supportive,” Charlie says, not sounding too sure about it.
“They actually are supportive. Always have been. My niece is out to everyone. I’m well-adjusted about this one thing and only
this one thing.”
Charlie doesn’t say anything about his own situation. Simon knocks his knee against Charlie’s.
“It’s a good video,” Charlie says.
“Good camera work,” Simon agrees.
“She usually does eye makeup tutorials. Go figure.”
“Jamie loves those.” Simon realizes that Jamie probably saw this yesterday and didn’t tell him when they talked.
Simon: were you not going to tell me that I’m internet famous?
Jamie: you’re famous-famous you total dork
Simon: TikTok young people love me
Jamie: you have a fucking emmy
Simon: the youths, though
Jamie: Simon Devereaux are you GIDDY?
Simon’s smiling at his phone, and when he looks up, he finds Charlie watching him. “Jamie,” he explains.
They sit there for a while, and Simon knows he has to say something because this is one of those silences that has edges,
even though he doesn’t know exactly why.
“What I want to know,” Simon says, “is whether you bribed Laura from craft services to hide the blueberry muffins from me.”
He’s been thinking about this since yesterday when Charlie said he knows Simon likes them—which, honestly, is exactly the
kind of appalling thing Charlie Blake would think was appropriate dirty talk. His brain’s put together a photo montage of all the times Charlie smugly ate one of those
muffins right in front of Simon’s face.
Charlie lets out a boom of laughter. “In my defense, they taste so much better when I know you don’t have one.”
“You are so fucking petty.”
“Only to you.”
There’s no sane reason this should please Simon, but here he is, pleased. “I had no idea Laura could be bought.”
“It’s not her, I swear. The supplier started only sending a few every day, so I made sure to swing by early enough to snag
one.”
“One,” Simon repeats, skeptical.
“Okay, four, but I gave three away. I didn’t eat them all myself.”
“And you waited to eat your muffin until you were in front of me?”
“Yup.”
“That is so twisted,” Simon says, and so what if it comes out fond.
Things happen fast once they get back to the motel room, and that’s probably Simon’s fault. He has Charlie stripped to the
waist as soon as the door’s shut. He doesn’t think he’s getting this wrong, because all day long Charlie’s been giving him
these looks like he wants to eat Simon alive.
“What do you want?” Charlie asks, mumbling the words into Simon’s neck as he works open the buttons on Simon’s jeans.
“Well,” Simon says. If this is the last chance Simon gets to have Charlie, he’s not wasting it. They’re driving back to Los
Angeles tomorrow and normal rules will be back in effect.
Charlie pauses, his hands still on Simon’s buttons. “Well?”
Look, Simon’s kind of picky about sex, just like he’s picky about every other thing in his life, and reciting the laundry
list of things he doesn’t like is a guaranteed way to kill the mood. “I don’t like—” he starts. Charlie’s looking at him.
Simon shuts his eyes. “No hurting. No name calling. Nothing mean.”
“You don’t want me to be mean to you,” Charlie says, and something in his voice makes Simon need to open his eyes.
“No judgment if you like that kind of thing. It’s just not for me.”
“I wasn’t going to call you names, Simon.”
“No, I mean—yes, please don’t call me names. But the main thing is that I don’t want to call you names.” Charlie looks like he’s trying not to look surprised, and it isn’t working. “I don’t want to be—”
Mean is the wrong word. Bossy is closer.
He thinks of himself as sullen and bitchy, but knows it comes off, somehow, as quiet and stern to people who are optimistic about that sort of thing.
He’s eighty percent sure—a hundred percent, a hundred and twenty percent—this mistaken impression is what drew Jamie to him at first.
Anyway, he can’t tell Charlie that he doesn’t want to be bossy in bed, because he knows exactly how it’ll sound. Whatever
impression Charlie gets will be half right, but he’ll probably conclude that Simon wants to be bossed around, which isn’t right either. The truth is that he just likes the idea that someone wants to make him feel good, that
he wants to make them feel good too. Obviously he can’t say any of this.
“I think the men I sleep with expect me to be,” Simon starts, “something I’m not? Aggressive? I have no interest in smacking
anyone around. Also no interest in tying anybody up and telling them they’re a good boy.”
Charlie blinks. “Duly noted.”
“I don’t like being edged. Sertraline edged me for like ten years. I don’t need that energy from amateurs.”
Charlie lets out a crack of laughter.
“Sertraline’s an SSRI,” Simon explains.
“I know what it is. You don’t take it anymore?”
Simon truly can’t imagine a less erotic topic than his psychiatric history, but this conversation has already taken a sharp
turn toward the unsexy, so why not just double down. “That class of drugs kept messing with my migraine meds. What sucks is
that they were pretty good for my anxiety, but the migraines were making my life hell, so here we are.”
Charlie’s quiet for a minute, and Simon hopes he isn’t casting his mind back, trying to identify the point when Simon went
from being someone passably normal-adjacent to the person he is now. But Charlie just says, “Sounds hard.”
Simon swallows. “Yeah.”
“So, no edging. No pain or insults. No, uh, tying me up and calling me a good boy.” He utterly fails to keep a straight face.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Charlie laughs again and pulls off Simon’s jeans. “No, it’s good. I am totally fine with those rules. But what do you want?” His voice goes so gravelly on that last word that Simon can almost feel it.
“I don’t know.” Simon knows exactly what he wants but can’t bring himself to say it, not with Charlie looking at him. “Just
normal sex please.”
“Oh, normal sex. That kind of sex.”
“Charlie.” Simon pulls Charlie onto the bed with him, because they need to be done talking.
“No, really, how do you like it?”
“I told you. Very vanilla.” Simon turns onto his side, away from Charlie, tipping his head into the pillow. He has a perfectly
clear vision of what he wants right now and he doesn’t know how he could possibly communicate that more clearly. Well, not
without actually saying what he means, which is not an option. “Just. Nice.”
“Nice. Why the fuck are you being shy all of a sudden. Just tell me where, in an ideal world, my dick is in all of this. I
feel like you’re telling me you want to get fucked but I literally do not know because you’re being such a weirdo.”
Simon is fundamentally incapable of answering any of this in a sane way. “I mean, I could fuck you. Like, if you really wanted me to. In an emergency situation.”
“You’d fuck me to save my life.”