Chapter Seventeen
When Simon signs his contract for half a season, he isn’t ready for the rush of relief. Partly he’s just glad to have made
a decision. But mostly he wants to see what happens to his character; after a week on the couch watching Out There, he’s embarrassingly invested.
“Did you tell people?” Jamie asks. They’re on FaceTime so Simon can watch Edie take a nap on Jamie’s lap.
“It’s weird because I didn’t officially tell them I was leaving. So how do I announce that I’m not leaving?”
“Group chat. Just say hey, I’m not leaving after all, looking forward to shooting the new season, exclamation point.” He reaches
for his laptop, types something, and a minute later an email pops up in Simon’s inbox. It’s word-for-word what Jamie just
said. “Copy and paste,” Jamie says.
“You don’t need to be my assistant.”
Jamie frowns. “Noooo. I don’t think of myself as your assistant.”
“I know!” Simon’s face is hot. “I know you aren’t.
” Then again, Jamie’s spent the past few weeks dog sitting for Simon.
He goes with Simon to every event that involves a plus one and acts as a social buffer.
He’s run Simon’s errands and filled his refrigerator a non-zero number of times.
He does all Simon’s social media. This isn’t the first time he’s drafted texts or emails for Simon. “Am I treating you like my assistant?”
“If you were crossing a line I’d have told you. I like helping. You help me too, you know. Knowing that I have a place to
stay is huge.”
“I can pay you.”
Jamie throws up his hands. Edie startles in her sleep. “And I can pay rent.”
“Are we bartering? Is this, like, a trade? You help me in exchange for housing?” There’s nothing wrong with that kind of arrangement,
probably, but he doesn’t want to be Jamie’s landlord, however informally.
“No!” Jamie is visibly pissed. Simon can see him bite back a comment and take a cleansing breath. “You have room in your house,
and I need a place to stay. I have time in my day to do things you don’t have the mental bandwidth for. But those two things
aren’t related. We’re helping one another because we can help one another.”
“Okay. Good.”
“I’m not broke.”
“I’m glad.”
“I can show you my bank statements. I can afford an apartment. I’m not here because I’m homeless.”
“Jamie.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m being weird about this.”
“Actually, no, you really aren’t. I think this is all on me. I feel wrong not paying rent. Not morally wrong, just unsettled.
I have basically no expenses right now? It’s insane. So, uh, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you.” Simon manages not to offer to put Jamie’s name on the deed to the house, because that’s probably weird and also not going to help.
“A real assistant might be a good idea, though. Someone who does that as their job will think of things that wouldn’t occur
to me.”
Simon is a little taken aback. “I’m not busy enough to need an assistant.”
“It’s not about how busy you are. You have a—” He breaks off. “I’m not sure if disability is the right word.”
It’s not a word that’s come up before. Not with Jamie and not with his therapist. Debilitating, yes. But “debilitating anxiety”
sounds like something you should figure out how to cope with, not something you should get an assistant for. Disability feels more accurate when he’s thinking about his migraines, even though they’re reasonably well controlled right now. Maybe
it’s the combination of the two things that pushes the entire situation over the edge into unmanageability? Or maybe Simon’s
definition of disability needs work.
“For the past few weeks,” Jamie says, very gently, “would you have been able to go to work if you had a regular job?”
The answer is yes, obviously, Simon could have gone to work. It just would have been agony.
When they end the call, Simon opens the main cast group chat and pastes the message Jamie drafted. The responses start coming
in almost immediately.
Alex: !!!
Petra: ???
Amadi: wait were you NOT going to sign? I thought only alex was leaving, wtf
Alex: we’ve been through this babe
Amadi: I figured if he didn’t leave after the space lobster season he was here for life
Roshni: Yay!!!! So glad, Simon!
An hour passes, and there’s no response from Charlie, even though Simon can see when he scrolls up that Charlie’s in this
group chat all the time.
When two hours pass, Simon wonders if Charlie’s offended that Simon didn’t tell him first. But that seems pretty out of character
for Charlie. If he’s pissed off at Simon, he’d probably just say so. Maybe he’s annoyed that he didn’t get offered the same
deal Simon did? Maybe he has a deep-seated desire for a mostly meaningless producer credit?
Around this time of day, they’re usually watching Out There. At least they have been every day for over a week. They’re on season four now. So he texts Charlie, just “wasn’t sure if
you’d seen the group chat” followed up with the same message of Jamie’s that he’d copied and pasted.
The text is marked as delivered, but Charlie doesn’t answer. The little dots don’t even appear.
He scrolls up. That morning, Charlie had been painstakingly explaining to him the difference between a chin-up and a pull-up and the different muscle groups involved—not a topic Simon cares about, but there had been visual aids in the form of sweaty gym selfies with arrows pointing to different muscle groups.
It had been light and—okay—flirty, for the very limited definition of flirtation that Simon’s capable of.
No matter how critically Simon reads those texts, he can’t find anything he did that would make Charlie want to stop talking
to him.
Maybe Charlie just doesn’t want to work with him. Maybe the entire almost-friends thing they have going on depends on never
having to see one another again. That’s not unreasonable of Charlie. It’s not like they enjoyed working together.
It still stings.
If anyone told Simon a month earlier that he’d be severely stressed by going less than a day without a text from Charlie,
he wouldn’t have believed it.
When he wakes up and still doesn’t see a message from Charlie, he feels like—not like he’s been broken up with. They weren’t
together, or anything like together. And even if they had been, twenty-two hours without a text doesn’t mean anything.
Texting pretty frequently for a couple weeks doesn’t mean anything. The fact that they had sex twice also doesn’t mean anything.
Simon’s had sex with plenty of people he didn’t get emotionally invested in—people he didn’t want to be emotionally invested
in and would have cringed to think they felt anything at all about him.
But just the other day, Charlie said he was worried about Simon. And now Charlie stopped talking to him and Simon’s feelings
are hurt. This is not an emotion-free situation.
The problem is that Simon doesn’t just like people.
He’s either indifferent with extreme prejudice or greedily overinvested.
Clingy. Needy. When he cares about someone—when he lets himself admit that a person matters to him—he needs constant reassurance that he matters to them.
He works so hard to keep that under wraps, to keep his mouth shut and his attitude icy. That’s what he needs to do now.
But he thinks about Dave, alone with his dusty paperbacks and the collar of a dog who isn’t around anymore. Dave, who didn’t
think anyone in the world would care if he disappeared. Simon wants better for himself, and he wants better for the handful
of people he cares about, and so he waits until it’s nine a.m. California time and sends Charlie a picture he took yesterday of a dog in a raincoat.
Then he sticks his phone into the bottom of his bag and makes himself go out for a walk. The looming specter of Nora’s graduation
party is only made bearable by how it’s an excuse to buy her something nice, but he still hasn’t found the right present.
He also needs a gift for Jamie to thank him for being Edie’s parent this month. Maybe he’ll get something for himself that
isn’t the same two pairs of pants, two sweaters, and four shirts he’s been wearing for nearly three weeks. It turns out he
just doesn’t have what it takes to survive indefinitely with a capsule wardrobe.
He’s on Prince Street, in the kind of store that makes him feel old and déclassé, but like maybe spending five hundred dollars
here would solve those problems, when he hears his phone buzz. He finishes picking out peach silk pajamas for Jamie—very old
Hollywood, he’ll love them—then makes himself wait until he’s on the sidewalk before checking his phone.
It isn’t Charlie. It’s Nora with a picture of today’s outfit. He responds, asking about brands in a way that probably makes it obvious he’s trying to figure out what to get her.
The weather’s decent and he needs the distraction, so he walks the half hour back to his apartment, stopping to get himself
a salad that’s slightly—but not stressfully—different from all the other salads he’s been eating. He passes a woman walking
two dachshunds that are obviously inferior to Edie and he’s hit with a pang of homesickness.
He’d thought being in New York would feel comfortable, like coming home. He spent four years here for college, but either
the city changed or he did, and his memories aren’t mapping onto the landscape. The city he’s walking through feels like a
LEGO model of a city he used to know. He wants to go home.
He’s . . . fine. Not any worse than yesterday, except he’s sad about Charlie and a little homesick. But it’s almost a relief,
this reminder that he can have a normal human emotion without spiraling about it. It’s okay to miss your home. It’s okay to
not enjoy being rejected. It’s okay—maybe—to have the sort of feelings that you want to be returned, even if you don’t want
to put a name to any of those feelings.
Back at the apartment, he opens his laptop and puts on the next episode of Out There, even though Charlie isn’t watching it with him.