“Whatever. What’s your situation with other people’s substances? Do you need me to keep my pills someplace safe?” Simon’s remembering what Charlie said in Simon’s trailer about locking up his meds. Simon’s emergency anxiety medication is infamously addictive.
Charlie closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and looks like he’s trying not to do something regrettable. “I’m not gonna steal your fucking pills, Simon.”
“I wasn’t implying that you were. But if you’d feel better if I flushed the benzos—”
“That’s bad for the water supply,” Charlie admonishes him. Simon wants to strangle him.
“Fuck the water supply and fuck you too. I’m trying to be supportive.”
At the taco restaurant, when Simon hadn’t been able to come up with the right thing to say, he’d touched Charlie. Well, he’d kicked him, but same difference. He figures it’s worth another try in the name of not seeming like a jerk about literal addiction, so he squeezes Charlie’s ridiculous arm. He does everything in his power to strip any bitchiness from his voice. “What you did—what you’re doing—is hard. I respect it. Can you, just for the space of this conversation, assume I’m not a complete asshole?”
He’s made his point, or at least he’s tried to, so this is probablywhere he ought to let go of Charlie’s arm. He thinks about it, even gets so far as to slide his hand maybe half an inch down toward Charlie’s elbow, then gets distracted. They’re about the same height, but Charlie’s slouching against the door frame, looking up at Simon, bright blue eyes glittering in the unfortunate overhead lighting.
Charlie’s gone very still, like maybe he’s holding his breath. Simon watches his fingers attempt to span Charlie’s upper arm, his own skin pale against the swirling black of Charlie’s tattoo.
“You’re impressed with me, are you?” Charlie says, voice quiet and smug and doing terrible things to Simon.
“You’re so embarrassing.” Simon still doesn’t drop his hand. Charlie’s so warm, and Simon wants to take a step closer. If he had to bet, he’d say that Charlie wants him to take a step closer too. He might be a basket case on a good day, but he can read a fucking room and he knows an invitation when he sees one. It’s the same as that moment at lunch, a silent acknowledgment that theycould.
It’s still shocking, a piece of information that doesn’t fit anywhere in Simon’s brain, and so it rattles around. They could, and the reason they could is that they bothwantto.
“You,” Charlie says, his voice a little rough. He reaches a hand out to Simon but pulls it back. “You have a gray hair.”
“Ugh!” Simon spins out of Charlie’s reach and throws his hands up. “Way to ruin a nice moment, Charlie!”
“Oh, were we having a nice moment?” Charlie asks. Simon wants to push him out a window. “No, shut up. I noticed it this winter. How could I not, dumbass? How many hours a day do I spend looking at you under studio lights? I’m not blind. Remember when I had that pimple?”
Does Simon ever. They’d had to re-block everything to keep that thing away from the camera. “It was the size of my car,” Simon says. “How could I forget?”
“Anyway! My point is that I probably saw your stupid gray hair before you did.”
Simon doesn’t know what on earth that’s supposed to mean, except now he feels almost nostalgic, like he’ll have lost something by not having Charlie’s eyes on him for hours a day.
Simon took the room with two double beds and left Charlie the room with one king bed, on the theory that Charlie is bigger and could use the acreage. They pick Simon’s room, with its two beds, to watch television.
Charlie flicks through the channels, changing before Simon even knows what he’s watching. It would be annoying if Simon were paying any attention. Instead he’s texting Jamie and trying not to think about Charlie, in bed, a few feet away.
“Oh, hey,” Charlie says. “Look.”
Simon knows what he’s going to see before he even looks up, because he can hear Alex’s voice as she shouts over the ship’s communication system. Based on the red streaks in Alex’s hair, it’s an episode from the second season.
“She looks like a baby.” Simon doesn’t love the reminder that five years is a lot when your face is on a giant television.
He barely remembers this episode, so when the picture cuts to him harassing some actor he’d swear he’s never seen before—“Get me the antidote, Callahan!”—he’s unprepared. Charlie’s on a stretcher.
It turns out that this is one of those rare episodes where he and Charlie aren’t in practically every scene together, and that’s only because Charlie’s supposed to be dying while Simon’s off finding space antidotes.
Unless Lian coerces him into attending a season finale watch party, Simon doesn’t watch finished episodes ofOut There. He’s never seen this one, and for a minute it’s like he’s seeing something brand-new.
He’s a little surprised to find that he likes it, that maybe it’s a show he’d want to watch. Which is a stupid thought—he’d signed on forOut Thereprecisely because it’s the kind of show he likes. It’s just that at some point he’d forgotten.
“My hair was so short,” Charlie says, a little ruefully. On the screen, it’s barely peach fuzz. Now, Charlie’s hair curls at his collar.
If Alex looks like a baby, Charlie looks like a fetus. He’s twenty-one or so in this episode. His shirt’s off, of course, and he’s missing half the tattoos that Simon’s gotten used to seeing.
When Simon thinks of Charlie a year before this episode, arriving drunk to set and ramming his truck into the director’s car, wrecking his trailer and punching people in bars, it feels like he’s hearing about a kid stealing someone’s blocks at preschool.
Twenty is more than old enough to be responsible for your actions. Still. That first season, Charlie wasn’t much older than Nora is now, and the biggest problem Nora has in her life is what to major in at Brown. Simon, at that age, rage-cried when his roommate deleted a season ofDrag Racefrom the DVR.
