Amadi:I figured if he didn’t leave after the space lobster season he was here for life
Roshni: Yay!!!! So glad, Simon!
An hour passes, and there’s no response from Charlie, even though Simon can see when he scrolls up that Charlie’s in this group chat all the time.
When two hours pass, Simon wonders if Charlie’s offended that Simon didn’t tell him first. But that seems pretty out of character for Charlie. If he’s pissed off at Simon, he’d probably just say so. Maybe he’s annoyed that he didn’t get offered the same deal Simon did? Maybe he has a deep-seated desire for a mostly meaningless producer credit?
Around this time of day, they’re usually watchingOut There. At least they have been every day for over a week. They’re on season four now. So he texts Charlie, just “wasn’t sure if you’d seen the group chat” followed up with the same message of Jamie’s that he’d copied and pasted.
The text is marked as delivered, but Charlie doesn’t answer. The little dots don’t even appear.
He scrolls up. That morning, Charlie had been painstakingly explaining to him the difference between a chin-up and a pull-upand the different muscle groups involved—not a topic Simon cares about, but there had been visual aids in the form of sweaty gym selfies with arrows pointing to different muscle groups. It had been light and—okay—flirty, for the very limited definition of flirtation that Simon’s capable of.
No matter how critically Simon reads those texts, he can’t find anything he did that would make Charlie want to stop talking to him.
Maybe Charlie just doesn’t want to work with him. Maybe the entire almost-friends thing they have going on depends on never having to see one another again. That’s not unreasonable of Charlie. It’s not like they enjoyed working together.
It still stings.
If anyone told Simon a month earlier that he’d be severely stressed by going less than a day without a text from Charlie, he wouldn’t have believed it.
When he wakes up and still doesn’t see a message from Charlie, he feels like—not like he’s been broken up with. They weren’t together, or anything like together. And even if they had been, twenty-two hours without a text doesn’t mean anything.
Texting pretty frequently for a couple weeks doesn’t mean anything. The fact that they had sex twice also doesn’t mean anything. Simon’s had sex with plenty of people he didn’t get emotionally invested in—people he didn’t want to be emotionally invested in and would have cringed to think they felt anything at all about him.
But just the other day, Charlie said he was worried about Simon. And now Charlie stopped talking to him and Simon’s feelings are hurt. This is not an emotion-free situation.
The problem is that Simon doesn’t just like people. He’s either indifferent with extreme prejudice or greedily overinvested. Clingy. Needy. When he cares about someone—when he lets himself admit that a person matters to him—he needs constant reassurance that he matters to them. He works so hard to keep that under wraps, to keep his mouth shut and his attitude icy. That’s what he needs to do now.
But he thinks about Dave, alone with his dusty paperbacks and the collar of a dog who isn’t around anymore. Dave, who didn’t think anyone in the world would care if he disappeared. Simon wants better for himself, and he wants better for the handful of people he cares about, and so he waits until it’s ninea.m.California time and sends Charlie a picture he took yesterday of a dog in a raincoat.
Then he sticks his phone into the bottom of his bag and makes himself go out for a walk. The looming specter of Nora’s graduation party is only made bearable by how it’s an excuse to buy her something nice, but he still hasn’t found the right present. He also needs a gift for Jamie to thank him for being Edie’s parent this month. Maybe he’ll get something for himself that isn’t the same two pairs of pants, two sweaters, and four shirts he’s been wearing for nearly three weeks. It turns out he just doesn’t have what it takes to survive indefinitely with a capsule wardrobe.
He’s on Prince Street, in the kind of store that makes him feel old and déclassé, but like maybe spending five hundred dollars here would solve those problems, when he hears his phone buzz. He finishes picking out peach silk pajamas for Jamie—very old Hollywood, he’ll love them—then makes himself wait until he’s on the sidewalk before checking his phone.
It isn’t Charlie. It’s Nora with a picture of today’s outfit. He responds, asking about brands in a way that probably makes it obvious he’s trying to figure out what to get her.
The weather’s decent and he needs the distraction, so he walks the half hour back to his apartment, stopping to get himself a salad that’s slightly—but not stressfully—different from all the other salads he’s been eating. He passes a woman walking two dachshunds that are obviously inferior to Edie and he’s hit with a pang of homesickness.
He’d thought being in New York would feel comfortable, like coming home. He spent four years here for college, but either the city changed or he did, and his memories aren’t mapping onto the landscape. The city he’s walking through feels like a LEGO model of a city he used to know. He wants to go home.
He’s... fine. Not any worse than yesterday, except he’s sad about Charlie and a little homesick. But it’s almost a relief, this reminder that he can have a normal human emotion without spiraling about it. It’s okay to miss your home. It’s okay to not enjoy being rejected. It’s okay—maybe—to have the sort of feelings that you want to be returned, even if you don’t want to put a name to any of those feelings.
Back at the apartment, he opens his laptop and puts on the next episode ofOut There, even though Charlie isn’t watching it with him.
It’s midnight when Charlie finally texts. It reads, ominously, “This a good time to talk?” Simon can’t imagine a universe where this leads to a conversation anybody wants to have.
Something hot and nervous and terrible fills his chest, but hetypes back, “sure.” When his phone rings, he answers it with a normalish voice.
“Okay,” Charlie says. It sounds like normalish is the best he can do too. “Sorry.”
Simon wasn’t expecting a sorry, isn’t quite sure he wants a sorry. “Okay,” he says.
“I didn’t think you were doing another season.”
“Yeah. I got that.” So, it’s like Simon suspected: Charlie can be friendly with him, but not if they’re forced to see one another every day. That’s fine. Simon knows he’s a lot. He knows he isn’t fun or easy to be around.
“Two weeks ago, you said you weren’t.”
