Chapter Seventeen #2
It’s midnight when Charlie finally texts. It reads, ominously, “This a good time to talk?” Simon can’t imagine a universe
where this leads to a conversation anybody wants to have.
Something hot and nervous and terrible fills his chest, but he types back, “sure.” When his phone rings, he answers it with a normalish voice.
“Okay,” Charlie says. It sounds like normalish is the best he can do too. “Sorry.”
Simon wasn’t expecting a sorry, isn’t quite sure he wants a sorry. “Okay,” he says.
“I didn’t think you were doing another season.”
“Yeah. I got that.” So, it’s like Simon suspected: Charlie can be friendly with him, but not if they’re forced to see one
another every day. That’s fine. Simon knows he’s a lot. He knows he isn’t fun or easy to be around.
“Two weeks ago, you said you weren’t.”
Simon had come back from Dave’s and let it slip that he told Jamie he was leaving the show. “Lian offered me a shorter season
and, well. I want to end this right.”
“Oh. So you changed your mind.”
“Yeah—wait, did you think I lied?”
“No! I just didn’t know.”
They’ve hardly said anything to one another. At least half the duration of this phone call has consisted of awkward pauses.
But there’s a heavy subtext that’s making Simon feel like he’s in over his head. The fact of this conversation at all is an
admission that whatever is going on between them is important enough that they need to be clutching their phones, sweaty and
nervous, making things right.
“I think,” Simon says slowly, “that I was supposed to tell you right away, as soon as I realized I was considering staying.
I think that since we were talking, I should have mentioned it.” Talking is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, standing in for everything that happened in Arizona, everything that’s
happened since.
“You didn’t owe me—” Charlie starts, but Simon has to cut him off.
“I did. Or—maybe I didn’t, but I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks like that.” He’s squeezing his eyes shut,
like maybe that’ll stop Charlie from seeing what’s happening here, like maybe it’ll stop himself from seeing.
Charlie’s quiet for long enough that Simon wonders if he’s gotten things completely wrong.
“Okay,” Charlie says.
“Okay?”
“I wasn’t upset about that.” There’s the tiniest emphasis on that.
“Did I do something else?” It wouldn’t be hard for Simon to believe. At any moment he’s prepared to accept that he’s done
something unforgivable. That’s the easiest proposition in the world for Simon to accept.
“No, Simon,” Charlie says, sounding awfully gentle in a way that Simon doesn’t know what to do with. “I just don’t want to
fuck things up on set.”
Oh. “But we’re getting along.” Simon feels very small. “I know I’m easier to take in small doses, but I think we can still
be—” He wants to say civil, or maybe friendly, but those are wrong and he can’t make himself say them.
“I’m not saying this right,” Charlie says. Simon can hear him rub his palm over his beard. “When Alex ended things with me,
it was so much work at first to stay friendly.”
Simon tries to remember when Charlie and Alex broke up. It must have been during the writers’ strike, so he wasn’t seeing
them every day. They showed up at an event with different dates, but he’d have noticed if there was any tension. He remembers
them arriving together at the picket line.
“I didn’t realize,” Simon says.
“That’s because I worked my ass off to make sure she and I stayed friends. It was hard.”
Simon has never thought of Alex and Charlie’s friendship as anything but effortless and easy. They always look like they’re
having fun. But—how had Charlie put it—when Alex ended things. In Arizona, when he’d said something about Alex needing things to be light and fun, he’d sounded . . . hurt, maybe. Simon
can put that together and draw some conclusions.
“And you thought,” Simon starts, but can’t finish the sentence because he’s afraid to say it out loud. Charlie was worried
that things would get ugly after he and Simon were done with—whatever this is. Charlie had been thinking of a future—something
like a breakup, which implies that whatever they’re doing is real. It’s enough to make Simon need to hide in the bathroom,
still holding the phone.
“Yeah,” Charlie says, answering the question Simon didn’t ask.
“Oh.”
The silence stretches out dangerously. Simon sits in the corner of the bathroom, the tile cold beneath him.
“When Jamie and I broke up,” Simon says, “the first month was excruciating. Awkward check-in texts. Hideous attempts to get
coffee. He insisted on giving constructive criticism on my Grindr profile.”
Charlie lets out a bark of a laugh. “Please send me a screenshot immediately.”
Simon ignores this. “I can do that. I mean. If we—I can be friendly.” He’s writing checks he can’t cash.
But he made it work with Jamie, and with nobody else he’s ever been involved with—actually, with nobody else ever, period—because the idea of Jamie not being in his life made his heart ache in a way that breaking up with him never did.
Simon remembers how he’d felt at the idea of Charlie not being in his life, of how impossible it had been to imagine.
Simon presses a palm against the smooth tile floor.
“Are you saying,” Charlie asks, “that when—if—Jesus Christ, Simon,” he breaks off, exasperated, like this is Simon’s fault,
like Simon even knows what he’s talking about. “Are you saying that if—whatever—things end, you’ll be nice?”
It only occurs to Simon now that a normal person would have insisted that nothing needed to change between them just because
they had sex, and that it isn’t a problem because they won’t do that again. For fuck’s sake, Simon. That’s what people say in these situations. There’s practically a script for it. They don’t promise to have a nice breakup.
Simon’s making it so obvious, so embarrassingly obvious, that he wants this. It didn’t even occur to him to pretend that he
doesn’t want it.
He wants to throw his phone out the window. He wants to hide at the bottom of the sea.
“Yep.” Simon figures that owning his dumb offer is his only move.
“That,” Charlie says, his voice gone all warm, “is really sweet.”
“Oh, shut up.” Simon presses his hot face against the cool glass of the shower door.
“You’ve been returning my texts in like thirty seconds.”
It should be a non sequitur, but it isn’t, and Simon’s face gets even hotter.
At first, Simon started doing it because he felt guilty about not having texted Charlie when he landed in New York, and wanted Charlie to know—he wanted Charlie to know that he mattered, which is bad enough.
But now he just answers quickly so Charlie will get back to him sooner.
“Maybe I do that with everyone,” Simon says. “Maybe I’m great at texting people back.”
Charlie laughs, probably because he’s close friends with half a dozen people who can confirm exactly how bad Simon is at returning
texts.
“Closer to fifteen seconds, really,” Charlie says.
“Do you have a stopwatch?” Simon means it to sound testy but it comes out breathless, probably because he’s almost hyperventilating.
In his bathroom, at midnight, because someone noticed something they were fully intended to notice and interpreted it correctly.
Charlie’s quiet for a minute, and Simon has the horrible conviction that he’s about to start asking some pertinent questions,
like what are they doing here, and what does it mean? It’s what anyone would ask. Simon might die.
But when Charlie speaks, what he says is, “I’ve been returning your texts in about ten seconds.”
“Embarrassing for you,” Simon says immediately, awash in gratitude that of all the things he could have said, that’s what
Charlie went with.
“I think I’ll keep doing that.”
Simon feels like he might throw up, but he knows he’s smiling, and those two things don’t belong together. “Me too.”
Only later, when Simon’s trying to fall asleep, does he remember what Charlie said in the motel room after learning that Simon was planning to leave the show.
He’d said that he was kissing Simon because he ran out of reasons not to kiss him.
As if—maybe—it was something he’d wanted to do for a while, but waited until Simon wasn’t on the show.
He stows it away, puts it in the emotional piggy bank: a good thought, something to come back to.