“Jesus Christ, calm down,” Charlie hisses.
“No,” Simon says, and he doesn’t.
When the crowds get thick, Charlie’s hand lands at the small of Simon’s back. Sometimes, when they’re bending close to talk, he’ll touch Simon’s arm. Simon keeps leaning into it without meaning to. He has to check himself.
It’s not that he minds being touched. He doesn’t want to hug strangers and he doesn’t like handshakes, but when it’s someone he likes—
And that’s a category Charlie falls into now.
Simon’s going to need some time quiet and alone to make sense of the past few days. Tomorrow they’re driving home and that’ll be that. Charlie will go back to being the kind of person who doesn’t touch Simon, and they’ll only see one another when Simon is walking Edie during one of Charlie’s runs.
But right now, none of that’s happened yet, and Charlie has a hand on Simon’s elbow, steering him toward a very eighties-looking sports car.
Charlie touches everyone. It doesn’t mean anything. Simon’s spent the morning watching him give high fives and back slaps to total strangers, shake hands with everyone he meets, lean close to a million people in a million pictures.
Simon usually tries to resist the urge to psychoanalyze people, mostly because he feels acutely nauseous at the idea of anyone trying to make sense of his own brain and pin it to the details of his life. But knowing what Charlie’s childhood was like and seeing how he seems to crave physical contact now—well, Simon can’t help but draw some conclusions.
Maybe as an experiment, and maybe because he’s at some weird car festival in a town that’s an Americana-themed Pinterest board and it feels like all rules are suspended, and maybe just because he wants to, he touches Charlie’s hand when they sit down for lunch. When they’re posing for yet another picture, Simon lets his arm linger a bit around Charlie’s shoulders. Charlie goes still, a pause in the absolutely feral energy he’s throwing around today. It’s... good.
When it’s time for Dave to leave, Charlie goes in for a hug. If Dave doesn’t hug him back, Simon will simply push him into traffic. But Dave hugs Charlie and pats his back, and the hug passes muster. Dave gets to live another day.
Before Dave gets into his truck, Simon hands him an iPhone charger that he bought at a sickening markup at a shop catering to tourists hungry for Route 66 Christmas ornaments.
“Oh my God,” Charlie mutters as Dave drives away. “Why are you like this?”
“Considerate? Generous?”
“I didn’t know you could give someone a phone cord and make it look like a death threat.”
“Thank you,” Simon says, pleased to have communicated his intentions so clearly.
“Why don’t you drive an old car?” Simon asks later that afternoon when Charlie’s giving a blue convertible the kind of praise that makes Simon feel filthy.
“Airbags. Anti-lock brakes, crumple zone, fuel economy. They’re pretty—I mean look at her, Christ—but not to drive on the freeway.”
That’s about the most boring answer that Charlie could have given, and Simon says so. Charlie rolls his eyes. “I mean it as a compliment,” Simon says. It’s true.
“Oh my God.” Simon comes to a halt in front of a lime green car that looks like it was drawn by someone who’d only heard about cars second or third hand. It looks like a Honda Civic hatchback dressed up as a race car for Halloween. It’sThe Island of Doctor Moreau, but for economy cars. “What,” he says, “is wrong with that thing?”
“There isn’t one thing wrong with that car,” Charlie says firmly. “Except the paint, which honestly should be brighter.” If it were any brighter, Simon’s retinas would disintegrate. “It’s a Gremlin.”
“It sure is,” Simon agrees. There’s something so fundamentally misbegotten about this car’s design that Simon can almost respect it. It’s a statement, if nothing else.
“An AMC Gremlin. From ’73 or ’74, I think. It isn’t a muscle car, but some people will tell you it is.” It’s heavily implied that anyone who would say this is living in the darkest ignorance. This might be the most judgmental Charlie’s been when talking about anyone other than Simon.
“Tell me more,” Simon says, and is treated to a lecture about engine size, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1970 passage of the Clean Air Act. Charlie doesn’t have to look up any of those dates. He apparently just has that information sitting in his head.
“This is kind of hot,” Simon observes.
“V-8 engines are hot, yes. That’s the point of muscle cars.”
“No, I mean you infodumping. You being. Smart,” Simon concludes, because that’s the word.
Charlie looks like his operating system is about to crash. “You—what. Shut up.”
An off-leash corgi wanders over, so Simon pays it some attention instead of dwelling on whatever weirdness Charlie is committing.
They look at ten million more cars. Simon’s in the kind of good mood that makes him feel like all those brain chemicals that are usually in too short supply, all the dopamine and serotonin and endorphins, are fizzing in his blood like bubbles in champagne. He knows it won’t last. He isn’t new here. The bad stuff comes back but then it goes away and he gets days like this.
