“I want him to get hurt even less than you do,” Simon assures her. “I’ve got that covered.”
Lian gives him a complicated look, and Simon has a horrible certainty that she’s going to say something kind or meaningful, so he blurts out, “Vintage J.Crew. Your cardigan.” He’s being very charitable in calling it vintage instead of just old. He remembers buying the same exact sweater for his sister-in-law his freshman year of college.
She looks down at what she’s wearing. “Did you rummage through my closet and memorize all the labels?”
“You left it on the back of your chair once and I checked the label,” he admits. This probably isn’t much more normal than snooping in her closet, but at least they aren’t talking about feelings anymore. “You know Alex’s agent, right?”
“Claire? Sure, why?”
Claire got in touch with Simon that morning and they’re meeting for lunch tomorrow. Simon feels a little sick about it.
“I’ve had a kind of shitty year.” It feels bizarre to say it out loud. It feels dangerous admitting that he’s full of flaws and weaknesses, that the face he tries to show the world is a flimsy screen. But Lian doesn’t look surprised. “It would have been less shitty if I had an agent I felt comfortable being honest with.”
“I think you’ll like her. Her wife was in my prenatal yoga class. They have a pair of those dogs that herd you when you walk into the house.” Lian pauses for a moment. “She has multiple sclerosis.”
“I know.”
“A tick in the plus column,” Lian says, and it isn’t a question.
“Yeah.” He thinks, maybe, that it’s a good idea for him to work with people who already understand that sometimes you need to play the hand you’ve been dealt.
“Good.”
“Would you tell me if you thought she’d be a bad fit for me?” Simon doesn’t know why he’s looking to Lian for reassurance, except that he’s known her for longer than anyone else he trusts, and she knows both him and the industry.
Lian raises her eyebrows. “Yes. Simon. I want things to work out for you.”
She says it so deliberately, he can’t help but hear the impliedof course I care about you, Simon, you idiotthat maybe she’d say out loud if she didn’t know it would send Simon running to hide in the bathroom. A year ago, he wouldn’t have heard her meaning, let alone believed it. The fact that he believes it now feels like something good and solid that he can hold in his hand.
“Me too,” he says, and hopes she understands.
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From anOut Therefan Discord
SimonDevereauxsCheekbones:Some reprobates have been sending Charlie and Simon links to explicit fanfic about them. Not about their characters, but about them. I’m embarrassed to be alive.
HowlsMovingSpaceship:I’m usually against incarceration but some people just need to be removed from society
SimonDevereauxsCheekbones:God is sorry he made us
GalactoseIntolerance:Charlie, at least, seems pretty unbothered
SupervillainApologist:Charlie Blake’s entire social media presence this summer has healed me. Fifty percent five-minute-long videos of Simon Devereaux’s dog, fifty percent responding to homophobic comments with “get well soon, I guess.” A blessing.
DeathStarJacuzzi:Personally I’m focusing on every picture that surfaces of Simon and Charlie together with Simon looking like he’s putting on his own personal production of The Talented Mr.Ripley while Charlie is wearing swim trunks, a t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and a backward baseball cap advertising a car wash.
SimonDevereauxsCheekbones:I know you all think I’m even more delusional than usual but I REALLY think we’re going to see a Luke/Jonathan relationship happen on-screen?
GalactoseIntolerance:You’re probably right, but I kind of hope you’re wrong. Luke and Jonathan will get together in forty-five nuance-free minutes and it’ll make me mad every time I think about it.
HowlsMovingSpaceship:There is nobody in that writers’ room I trust with this story more than I trust the strangers on the internet writing about it for free.
SpacePope:Seriously. I’ve read about these guys falling in love hundreds—thousands?—of times and I will keep doing exactly that. Sometimes Jonathan is a space vampire and sometimes Luke is a war hero and sometimes they’re both working in a coffee shop on Earth, and all those stories live in my heart and are just as true as whatever the literal corporation in charge of Out There decides to put on television.
DeathStarJacuzzi:gonna be honest, I’ve been pretending the show got canceled after the space lobster season. Everything after that just didn’t happen.
HowlsMovingSpaceship:Is now a good time to mention that @SpacePope and I got a cat?
