The Charm Offensive

Dev is usually the one who takes care of people. No one ever takes care of him.

“How can I help when it gets like this?”

Dev folds himself tighter against Charlie, all those lovely sharp points digging in. “You can just stay,” he says, at last. “No one ever stays.”

Charlie thinks about all the times he’s pushed someone away because he didn’t want them to see his anxiety and his obsessiveness, and he thinks about what he really wanted all those times people took him at his word. He climbs back onto the bed and reaches out for Dev. Dev pulls away, fights him off, eventually curls down against his chest, and holds on tight. Dev sinks deep into Charlie, crying into the folds of his oxford shirt.

he grabs onto the back of Dev’s T-shirt
with both hands, presses his forehead into Dev’s throat, telling Dev what he needs in the only way he can communicate right now. He needs to be hugged. Held.

“You know you still deserve to have this love story. Right?”

Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help.

Dev tried to understand, which people almost never do.

Let me take care of you.

“I can’t just not stress about it!” Charlie’s fists slam onto the countertop. “My mind doesn’t work that way!”

even though he loved words—loved using words to build stories and escape hatches from the real world—he could never find the right ones to help his parents understand his heart and his mind.

In this moment, it feels like Charlie is wide open for him. A week of puzzle pieces, sci-fi shows, and the smallest hints of a hard childhood, but at two in the morning in the guesthouse kitchen, it almost feels like he’s glimpsing Charlie Winshaw in his entirety—anxious and obsessive and still so fucking beautiful—leaning into Dev like there’s some secret part of Charlie that wants to let other people in but doesn’t know how.