Chapter Twenty-One
“How do the mugs go?” Charlie asks after breakfast. “You said the handles have to go a certain way.”
Simon pauses in washing the pan that he used to cook scrambled eggs. “I’m not supposed to make this other people’s problem.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Simon dries his hands on his pajama pants and shows Charlie how the mugs in the cabinet are arranged, all the handles pointing
in the same direction, each mug equidistant from the mug next to it.
“Got it,” Charlie says.
“The real issue is stuff on the counter and in the sink. It’s not such a big deal here, but at home I start to feel like . . .”
“Like what?”
“Like there’s contamination. Germs? Not actual scientific germs, but like. Germ energy.”
“Anything else?”
The rest of Simon’s rules are self-contained inside his own mind—the right number of times to do certain things, items that
need to be counted, some rituals. But that’s probably not what Charlie’s asking.
A few years ago, Simon paid for an evaluation, a couple thousand dollars out of pocket.
He was sure there was something critically wrong with him, possibly something brand-new and mysterious that the psychiatrist would want to write papers about.
In the end, she’d told him that it was anxiety and mild OCD.
Simon had been dubious. “You’re telling me I’m fine?
” he’d asked. The doctor had blinked at him, tilted her head, and said, very slowly, “No, you have an anxiety disorder and OCD.”
“It’s mild OCD,” he says now, because Charlie already knows about the anxiety. “It’s worst when I’m already anxious or stressed.”
When things are going well, the compulsions fade to a background hum, and Simon spends a delusional few weeks thinking he’s
been cured.
“It costs me literally nothing to make sure the sink is empty or whatever the fuck,” Charlie says. “Just, like, FYI.”
The only person he’s talked to about this, other than his therapist, is Nora, and that’s because she has it too. Jamie knows,
probably, just because he spends a lot of time with Simon and has eyes in his head, but he doesn’t know the details, or he’d
never leave stuff all over the kitchen—which is partly why Simon’s never told him.
“I’m going to the hotel,” Charlie says.
“Oh.” Simon should probably have figured that a guided tour through his brain’s more ludicrous features would make anyone
need a little space. Hell, Simon wouldn’t mind a little space from his own bullshit.
“For the gym,” Charlie says. “The gym in this building is even worse than the hotel gym. Want me to pick anything up while
I’m out?”
“Take my key. I’ll probably be asleep when you get back.”
Charlie goggles at him, likely because he knows Simon slept for ten hours last night.
“Oh, whatever. If I want to sleep twelve hours a day, who does that hurt?”
Charlie laughs and kisses him and gets ready to leave.
Simon goes through what’s become his usual morning routine. A walk—this time with Edie—followed by lunch, then burrowing under
about fifteen blankets and reading until he passes out. Sometimes he doesn’t fall asleep, but he figures that if his body
needs this much rest, that’s what he’s going to give it. He gets more migraines when he isn’t well-rested, so maybe the inverse
is also true.
He wakes up to Charlie sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Someone took a picture of us the other night at that restaurant,” Charlie says, and it’s the edge to his voice more than
the words he’s saying that wakes Simon all the way up. “They put it on their Instagram and now it’s every-fucking-where.”
“Show me.”
In the picture, they’re sitting outside at the restaurant the night Charlie arrived. The photo quality is better than Simon
would have thought, given that the only lighting is string lights and candles.
Simon can tell right away when the picture was taken. They’re leaning toward one another, both grinning. Simon has recently
declared that he’s lazy in bed and Charlie just finished laughing at him. The way the picture is angled, Charlie’s arm, resting
on the rail, looks like it’s touching Simon’s shoulder.
It looks like a picture of a date. It looks like a picture of a very good date.
It wasn’t not a date. It was date adjacent. One might even call what they’re doing dating. Maybe.
In terms of, like, the sheer homosexuality of things, it’s not much more than the taqueria video. But Charlie hadn’t cared about that video. He’d even been kind of annoyed with Simon for suggesting that he might be bothered by it. Right now, the irritation—maybe even anger—is rolling off him.
The main difference, as far as Simon can tell, is that in this picture they look like they’re together. In the video, they
just looked flirty.
Simon sits all the way up. “I can see why this would bother you.”
“Are you not bothered?”
“It doesn’t matter as much for me.” Simon thought they’d covered this ground already. Photos can surface of Simon on ten thousand
gay dates and it won’t change his life in any meaningful way.
“What are you even talking about?” Charlie sounds mean and impatient and it’s an unpleasant reminder of the way they used
to be. It sets Simon’s teeth on edge. It makes him want to back off, to settle into their old pattern of nastiness. It would
be easy, like what they’re doing is so fragile that all Simon has to do is look away for a second and it’ll crash to the ground,
splintering into pieces.
Simon isn’t going to do that. He wants to fight everyone who’s ever hurt Charlie and he doesn’t have the energy to be mad
at himself. “I’m going to get a glass of water. You want anything?”
Charlie shakes his head but follows Simon into the kitchen. He takes the glass of water Simon hands him and eats the granola
bar Simon unwraps and slides across the counter.
They stay like that for a moment, in the silence of Simon’s sublet, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator and city noises
from twenty stories down.
“What’s the worst part of it?” Simon asks.
“Sleazeball motherfuckers,” Charlie says immediately, his mouth still full of granola bar. “How did they find us? Who the fuck was even looking for us?”
“Chances are, some random person saw us, realized who we are, and snapped a picture.” Simon’s not totally sure about that,
but doubts paparazzi were staking out a medium-nice Italian restaurant. “Okay, what’s the next worse thing?”
“It’s an invasion of my fucking privacy,” Charlie spits out, like he’s annoyed to have to explain it to Simon.
“Our privacy,” Simon says, knee-jerk, irritated.
“Okay, yes, sorry, whatever. This was private.” Charlie taps the screen of his phone.
Simon isn’t going to point out that they were in public. He doesn’t want to argue about the ethics of photographing celebrities—however
minor—in public. He doesn’t want to argue about anything. “It sucks.”
Charlie rolls his eyes, like duh.
Simon was wrong before, because it turns out he does have the energy to be mad at himself. He thinks Charlie is just upset,
not upset with Simon, but there’s a pool of anxiety gathering in Simon’s stomach and it’s telling him that this is all his
own fault.
The thing with anxiety is that every attack is a clone of the last one. It’s always the same—the conviction that he messed
up, the sense of impending doom, the overwhelming loneliness. His hands are sweaty, his lungs useless, his heartbeat too fast.
It isn’t a panic attack, but it’s definitely something he could take his meds for.
He looks at the clock on the oven. Two forty-five. At two fifty he’ll take his pills if he still needs them.
His poor dumb brain tries to activate the usual defenses—be quiet, act calm, because then at least nobody will know he’s a mess inside. He could lock himself in the bathroom, turn the faucet on for some white noise, achieve mental anesthesia via crossword puzzles.
He can do all that five minutes from now. First, there’s one possible solution to this problem and he needs to make sure Charlie’s
aware of it.
“I’m going to talk for thirty seconds,” Simon says, feeling like he’s balanced on the edge of a ravine. Everything in him
is telling him to turn back. “And you’re going to try not to get pissed at me until I’m done. If you want to go get photographed
kissing women or whatever people usually do in these situations, I get that.”
They haven’t had any kind of conversation about exclusivity—for all Simon knows they’re just having sex and hanging out while
confessing embarrassing feelings to one another—and Simon isn’t sure how to navigate any of this with a pissed off Charlie.
The safe thing would be to say nothing, to assume nothing, to act indifferent to the idea of Charlie being with other people.
But he’s never been indifferent to Charlie, and faking it now—letting Charlie think he cares less than he does—feels cruel.
He takes a deep breath and forces himself to look Charlie in the eye.
“I would consider that, like, work,” Simon says, and it isn’t a heartfelt declaration but he thinks he got his point across.
“Fuck no. Thirty seconds are up. That’s gross. And just . . . wrong.” Charlie makes a frustrated sound. “I know you think
I’m a complete fucking idiot, but I’ve thought this through. I know that homophobes exist, Simon, and I know I’ll have to
deal with some bullshit, but this”—he holds up his phone—“is not about me being outed or whatever’s going through your head right now.
It’s never been a secret. I knew it would happen if I lived my life and that’s a choice I made a while ago.
I just didn’t expect it to feel gross. The TikTok didn’t feel gross. ”
“I don’t think you’re an idiot. But you were keeping it a secret. You flipped out at Jamie when you thought he told me.”
“It was only a secret from you, Simon.” Charlie scrubs his hand across his beard and squeezes his eyes shut.
Simon winces. “Did you think I was going to be shitty about it?”
“Simon, for fuck’s sake, I thought that if you knew I was into men, you’d figure out right away that I had this massive embarrassing