Chapter Twenty-Three
“What is this?” Simon asks after five consecutive days of Charlie dressing like a civilized member of society and not an extra
in a dystopian drama. “That has a collar.”
Charlie looks down at his shirt, like he needs to refresh his memory even though he put it on four seconds ago. “You don’t
like it?”
“I like it a lot. But I’m used to seeing you in—” Simon decides rags might be a tad judgmental. “Other things,” he decides on.
“You always look,” Charlie says, and now it’s Simon’s turn to glance stupidly down at his own clothes. He’s wearing black
jeans, a black T-shirt, and a fuzzy gray cardigan. It’s not his best effort. “Nice.”
“I look nice,” Simon repeats.
“I didn’t want to look . . . not nice.”
“You mean, if another creep takes our picture.”
“No, I just. Like. Maybe wanted to make sure you knew . . .” He trails off and goes silent long enough that Simon gives up
all hope of that sentence ever developing another clause.
Simon is getting familiar with Charlie’s weird lapses into silent nervousness. He moves so he’s standing in Charlie’s space.
“What did you want me to know?”
“That I’m, you know.” Charlie looks at the ceiling and sighs. “A whole entire adult.
Simon wrestles himself away from demanding exactly how old Charlie thinks Simon is. “I know you’re an adult. An adult with terrible taste, but a functional, responsible adult with a mortgage—”
“I paid off my house.”
“And a steady job.” The correct, therapist-approved next sentence probably goes something like and even if you didn’t have those things, it wouldn’t matter, and that’s true, sure. But it’s going to sound like bullshit. “You’ve worked hard to become that person. Your clothes are
usually”—Simon heroically refrains from saying literal garbage—“not what I personally would choose, but you look good in them and you know it. You know exactly what your”—he starts to
gesture at Charlie’s chest and arms but then thinks better of it and feels him up, because anything else would be disrespectful—“threadbare
T-shirts look like on you.”
Charlie blushes, which is what Simon was going for. “It’s sometimes weird for me to spend money on things.”
Charlie has two reasonably fancy cars and a house that’s nicer than Simon’s. He goes on vacations whenever they aren’t shooting,
and from the intensive study of Charlie’s social media that Simon’s conducted over the past few weeks, they don’t look cheap.
He tips heavily—even more than Simon, who considers tips combat pay for service workers who have to deal with him.
But that’s just Charlie spending money on things that matter to him. Clothes don’t matter to him, but they do matter to Simon,
and so Charlie spent the money.
Simon knows—mainly from Jamie, but also from, like, being alive—that people who grew up never having enough are going to have a different relationship with money than Simon does.
Obviously. Charlie spending that money anyway makes Simon feel—something.
Pleased, but also a little ashamed, because Charlie should already know that Simon likes him despite his shitty clothes, and if he doesn’t know it, that’s . . . not great.
“You were wearing your usual, um, ensembles, when we were in Arizona and that didn’t stop me from . . .” Simon makes a gesture
that he hopes signals something like developing feelings or whatever.
“Didn’t stop you from what?”
Simon takes a moment to arrange the collar of Charlie’s shirt so it looks less like he’s on his way to his job fixing computers
at an investment bank. “Obviously I’m attracted to you no matter what you’re wearing. And that’s some self-knowledge I didn’t
want, so thanks for that. But also—you know it’s not just that. Right?”
They’ve been circling around the state of their relationship like it’s an undetonated grenade that might explode if the conversation
gets too close. They’ve agreed that they’re “dating” and “together,” but you can date and be together in a casual, short-term
kind of way. Simon’s pretty sure you can date without feelings being involved, but then again, he’s overthought this so thoroughly
that “date” and “together” have stopped meaning anything at all.
It should be obvious, surely, that nobody acts how Simon’s been acting unless they’re invested on, like, a feelings level.
Charlie relaxes enough that Simon can only conclude it was not, in fact, obvious. Or maybe it was obvious, and Charlie needed
to hear it anyway. Maybe, when you have the kind of history they do, you have to constantly remind one another that things
are different now.
Simon tips forward, resting his forehead against Charlie’s shoulder. The horrible truth is that they’re going to have to keep doing this. Emotional honesty isn’t one and done, which is terrible news for everyone in this relationship.
“I know,” Charlie mumbles into Simon’s hair. “I just—sorry about being needy.”
Simon nearly tells him he isn’t being needy, but they’d both know it was a lie. “That doesn’t bother me,” Simon says instead,
which would come as a surprise to everyone he ghosted as soon as they looked like they were feeling things about him, as soon
as Simon worried he was feeling things himself. “It’s okay to need things. It’s okay to need more than other people do.” And
that would come as a surprise to his therapist, who’s been trying to get Simon to accept that about himself for years.
He doesn’t say that he wants to give Charlie whatever he needs. He doesn’t say that he’s at least ten times as needy as Charlie
could ever be. He doesn’t say a lot of things, because even though he knows what he feels, it’s staying in the privacy of
his own mind until he’s had some time to get used to it.
“And, you know—me too,” Charlie says. And Simon, who hadn’t known he had any doubts, feels himself sink against Charlie’s
body.
The one huge downside to that picture circulating on social media is now people know Simon’s in New York. His phone keeps
buzzing with variations on “hey we should get a drink while you’re in town.”
“Oh no,” Charlie says when Simon complains about this. “People want to see you. It’s terrible.”
“They don’t really want to see me. It’s the kind of thing people have to say.” Simon doesn’t expect Charlie to understand—people
do want to see Charlie.
“What would they say if they did want to see you?”
“Oh, fuck off.” Simon sees where this is going.
“Because it would be the exact same message, right?” Charlie picks up Simon’s phone and holds it in front of Simon’s face
to unlock it, slow enough that Simon could grab the phone away if he wanted to. “How does a person even get four hundred unread
text messages?”
Simon drops his book and stands up only to climb into Charlie’s lap. “I don’t want to go out for dinner with friends from
college or people I worked with ten years ago. I want to have dinner with you.”
He doesn’t mean anything by it, not really—but he doesn’t mean nothing by it either. Charlie raises his eyebrows. “You can’t
help it; you’re obsessed with me.” He kisses Simon’s neck.
An hour later, Simon’s in the bathroom, still wearing a robe, trying to get ready.
“What’s that?” Charlie asks, coming up behind him and sticking his entire finger in the pot of moisturizer.
“What is wrong with you?”
“I just washed my hands. Why is this stuff blue?”
“There’s some kind of plant in there that’s supposed to reduce redness, and redness is a real problem in my life right now
because you’re a total freak who can’t stop leaving beard burn all over the place.” He pointedly dabs some cream onto his
neck.
Charlie, because he really is a freak, slips a hand under Simon’s robe and starts pawing at Simon’s chest, his stomach, his
inner thighs—all red from Charlie’s beard.
“You want me to stop?” Charlie murmurs into Simon’s neck.
“Stop groping me right now or stop mauling me with your beard?”
“Both. Either. I could shave.”
“No,” Simon says, far too quickly. “But how bad are your feelings going to get hurt if I need an hour alone?”
“Not at all.”
“You sure?”
“Gotta wait for you to come to me, like when someone’s trying to lure the raccoons to the bird feeder.”
Sometimes talking to Charlie is like entering another dimension where words have different meanings. “Someone? Why on earth
would ‘someone’ want raccoons at the bird feeder?”
“Why wouldn’t anyone want raccoons at the bird feeder?”
Simon’s going to have to figure out a casual way to bring up the existence of rabies. “You know you can’t cuddle a raccoon,
right, Charlie?”
“Not with that attitude you can’t.”
Simon decides not to be bothered that he’s the raccoon in this metaphor, and instead closes the bathroom door in Charlie’s
face. When he’s sufficiently moisturized, he finds Charlie sprawled on the sofa, on a video call, not pouting or sulking or
whatever Simon was worried about in the back of his mind.
“Gotta go in a sec,” Charlie tells whoever he’s talking to, already on his feet, already across the room. “This is so slutty,”
he says approvingly, one finger pressed against the exposed vee of skin at Simon’s collar.
“I really hope that’s Alex,” Simon says, because he didn’t see Charlie disconnect the call.
Into the phone, Charlie says, “He has three buttons undone on his prissy little linen shirt.”
Simon grabs the phone. “It’s the shirt’s fault,” he tells Alex, angling the screen so she can see. “Two buttons and I look like a golf dad.”
“Slutty’s a good look on you,” she says.
“You too,” he says absently, because Charlie’s mouth is on his collarbone.
“Oh gross,” Alex says, and ends the call.
“You’re really not mad?” Simon asks.
“That you’re going out to dinner with your whole chest out? No, I’m into it.”
Simon rolls his eyes. “That I kicked you out of the bathroom.”
“I know I’m clingy as fuck but come on, give me some credit.”
“You aren’t—that’s not what I mean.”
Charlie studies him. “Did somebody make you feel bad about wanting time alone?”
“No, no. It’s just. Not everybody likes being told to go away.” He says the words to the stretched-out collar of Charlie’s
T-shirt, but it feels like Charlie’s looking at him very carefully, not groping anymore, his hands on Simon’s hips. “I thought
maybe you also—I don’t know. Never mind.”
“I know the difference between someone asking for space and someone telling me to go away,” Charlie says, not offended, just—too
gentle.
It’s the gentleness, the idea that Charlie thinks he has to be gentle about this, the fact that he’s right, that makes Simon
snap. “Okay, well, congratulations.”
“Hey.” Charlie’s thumb traces Simon’s cheekbone.
Simon was trying to be nice. He started this entire cursed conversation because he wanted to make sure Charlie’s feelings weren’t hurt, and now he feels like his skin is see-through, everything important just sitting there, out in the open.
This is why it’s better to keep his mouth shut, a lesson he thought he learned half a lifetime ago.
“I’ll be careful,” Charlie says.
“We aren’t talking about me.”
“If I want space. I’ll be careful.”
“Still not talking about me.”
Simon doesn’t know if Charlie’s remembering Simon being the first to leave parties and dinners, doesn’t know if he’s thinking
about four hundred unread text messages, doesn’t know if Charlie can extrapolate exactly how much Simon prefers to be alone over being left alone.
Simon doesn’t want Charlie to become one of the unread texts on his phone. He twists the fabric of Charlie’s T-shirt around
his fingers like that will somehow stop himself from ruining this.