“They didn’t have anything on that entire menu you wanted to eat?” Charlie asks.
“I ordered—”
“If you have five substitutions, you’re ordering off menu. Come on. That’s asshole behavior. Even you know that.”
Simon does not need to defend his food choices to Charlie or anybody else, but all his substitutions were mentioned at other places in the menu, so it isn’t like he’s asking for anything special. He’s ordered the same thing a few times at this restaurant. The fact is he just doesn’t have the emotional space for new food today, and since that sounds legitimately unhinged even in his head, he won’t be sharing that fact with Charlie. “I’ll leave a big tip,” he says.
They descend into another long silence.
“So.” Simon drags the syllable out just for the sake of filling dead air.
“So,” Charlie agrees, and proceeds to say absolutely nothing else. And, seriously, this is all Charlie’s fault because nobody who’s ever met Simon would expect him to navigate his way through an awkward situation. Meanwhile, Simon has spent hundreds of hours watching Charlie smile and laugh and talklike it’seasy. So, if you want to be technical about it, and Simon one hundred percent does, Charlie ought to be saying something instead of sitting there toying with the frayed edge of his T-shirt sleeve in a way that’s very distracting but does nothing to improve the situation.
When Charlie’s phone buzzes, he grabs at it, probably relieved to have something to do other than marinate in awkwardness. But when Charlie looks at the screen, his face falls.
“Expecting something?” Simon asks, not because he cares, but because he feels like he owes it to this little project to say something vaguely in the shape of a conversation.
“I was hoping it was my stepfather. It’s been a few days, and he isn’t picking up the phone or answering my texts.”
Other than regularly scheduled phone calls with his mother, Simon doesn’t call his parents or stepparents, but if he did, and they failed to answer in under three rings, he’d assume they were unconscious on the bathroom floor. He would literally call the police. He has enough sense not to say this out loud. “I’m not sure I’ve ever called my stepfather. My mother is the intermediary.”
“He isn’t with my mom anymore,” Charlie says, which, yes, Simon could have guessed. Charlie would probably not be worried if he could simply have asked his mother whether her husband was alive and well. “And they were never married, so he isn’t really my stepfather, but I don’t know what else to call him.”
In an interview Charlie gave a few years ago, and which Simon read in an incognito window on his browser, Charlie said he was raised by a single mother, and they moved around a lot. That’s all he’s ever said publicly about his family.
“If you think of him as your stepfather, he’s your stepfather,”Simon says, as if Charlie needs Simon’s own personal blessing to call people whatever the hell he wants.
Charlie says nothing. Neither does Simon. Simon wonders if social anxiety can actually kill a person.
The waiter appears with their lunch and temporarily puts them out of their misery.
“This is good” and “Have you tried” get them through the next few minutes. When they wear out that line of conversation, Simon feels increasingly desperate. The problem, obviously, is that they’re trying to be polite. When they’re sniping at one another, conversation flows freely, but the entire point of this is to act like civilized adults in public.
“Want to see pictures of Edie?” Simon finally asks, opening an album on his phone.
Charlie drags his chair to Simon’s side of the table. There’s Edie in an array of sweaters, Edie pointedly ignoring every toy Simon ever bought her, Edie curled up on a pillow on Simon’s bed.
Simon loves his dog with all his heart, but pictures of her living her ordinary, if highly photogenic, life are not interesting to anybody but himself. Charlie says all the right things, though, and Simon realizes he’s seen Charlie do this before. Charlie bent over someone else’s phone, admiring babies or pets or intricately decorated baking projects is not an unusual sight on set.
“Do you have pictures of her as a puppy?” Charlie asks. Does Simon ever. He opens that folder, and Charlie says things like “Look at her” and “I can’t take it,” and either he’s a much better actor than Simon ever gave him credit for or he’s just wildly wholesome. It has never once occurred to Simon that Charlie might be either wholesome or especially good at acting, so this is a very confusing moment.
Adding to the confusion is Charlie’s forearm, resting on the table, and how he’s leaning in the way people only do when they have no boundaries. Not that they’re touching—whenever one of them moves, the other adjusts, preserving a firm inch of space between their shoulders, their arms, their hands.
“Your birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?” Charlie asks, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“It’s next week,” Simon says, startled into giving an answer instead of demanding how Charlie knows this. “I’ll be thirty-four.” Maybe if he keeps saying it out loud, it’ll start sounding like a reasonable age for a person to be.
“Are you doing anything?” They’re close enough that Charlie’s voice is low, just for Simon, and Simon’s trying not to have any thoughts about this whatsoever.
“I wasn’t planning to. But since Jamie’s there, we’ll have dinner, I guess.”
Charlie reaches across the table for one of the fries left on his plate. “You live together?”
The fact is, they practically do live together, except whenever Jamie moves out for a few months to live with some wretched boyfriend. “Sometimes,” he says.
“Are you sure you aren’t together? Or something like that? Because you said you weren’t, and he said you weren’t, but if you actually are then I’m going to feel like a dick for having hit on him.”
Simon is annoyed that now both Jamie and Charlie have made this Simon’s problem. What business is it of Simon’s who either of them mess around with?
