Simon is getting familiar with Charlie’s weird lapses into silent nervousness. He moves so he’s standing in Charlie’s space. “What did you want me to know?”
“That I’m, you know.” Charlie looks at the ceiling and sighs. “A whole entire adult.
Simon wrestles himself away from demanding exactly how old Charlie thinks Simon is. “I know you’re an adult. An adult with terrible taste, but a functional, responsible adult with a mortgage—”
“I paid off my house.”
“And a steady job.” The correct, therapist-approved next sentence probably goes something likeand even if you didn’t have those things, it wouldn’t matter, and that’s true, sure. But it’s going to sound like bullshit. “You’ve worked hard to become that person. Your clothes are usually”—Simon heroically refrains from sayingliteral garbage—“not what I personally would choose, but you look good in them and you know it. You know exactly what your”—he starts to gesture at Charlie’s chest and arms but then thinks better of it and feels him up, because anything else would be disrespectful—“threadbare T-shirts look like on you.”
Charlie blushes, which is what Simon was going for. “It’s sometimes weird for me to spend money on things.”
Charlie has two reasonably fancy cars and a house that’s nicer than Simon’s. He goes on vacations whenever they aren’t shooting, and from the intensive study of Charlie’s social media that Simon’s conducted over the past few weeks, they don’t look cheap. He tips heavily—even more than Simon, who considers tips combat pay for service workers who have to deal with him.
But that’s just Charlie spending money on things that matter to him. Clothes don’t matter to him, but they do matter to Simon, and so Charlie spent the money.
Simon knows—mainly from Jamie, but also from, like, being alive—that people who grew up never having enough are going to have a different relationship with money than Simon does. Obviously. Charlie spending that money anyway makes Simon feel—something. Pleased, but also a little ashamed, because Charlie should already know that Simon likes him despite his shitty clothes, and if he doesn’t know it, that’s... not great.
“You were wearing your usual, um, ensembles, when we were in Arizona and that didn’t stop me from...” Simon makes a gesture that he hopes signals something likedeveloping feelings or whatever.
“Didn’t stop you from what?”
Simon takes a moment to arrange the collar of Charlie’s shirt so it looks less like he’s on his way to his job fixing computers at an investment bank. “Obviously I’m attracted to you no matter what you’re wearing. And that’s some self-knowledge I didn’t want, so thanks for that. But also—you know it’s not just that. Right?”
They’ve been circling around the state of their relationship like it’s an undetonated grenade that might explode if the conversation gets too close. They’ve agreed that they’re “dating” and “together,” but you can date and be together in a casual, short-term kind of way. Simon’s pretty sure you can date without feelings being involved, but then again, he’s overthought this so thoroughly that “date” and “together” have stopped meaning anything at all.
It should be obvious, surely, that nobody acts how Simon’s been acting unless they’re invested on, like, a feelings level.
Charlie relaxes enough that Simon can only conclude it was not, in fact, obvious. Or maybe it was obvious, and Charlie needed to hear it anyway. Maybe, when you have the kind of history they do, you have to constantly remind one another that things are different now.
Simon tips forward, resting his forehead against Charlie’s shoulder. The horrible truth is that they’re going to have to keep doingthis. Emotional honesty isn’t one and done, which is terrible news for everyone in this relationship.
“I know,” Charlie mumbles into Simon’s hair. “I just—sorry about being needy.”
Simon nearly tells him he isn’t being needy, but they’d both know it was a lie. “That doesn’t bother me,” Simon says instead, which would come as a surprise to everyone he ghosted as soon as they looked like they were feeling things about him, as soon as Simon worried he was feeling things himself. “It’s okay to need things. It’s okay to need more than other people do.” And that would come as a surprise to his therapist, who’s been trying to get Simon to accept that about himself for years.
He doesn’t say that he wants to give Charlie whatever he needs. He doesn’t say that he’s at least ten times as needy as Charlie could ever be. He doesn’t say a lot of things, because even though he knows what he feels, it’s staying in the privacy of his own mind until he’s had some time to get used to it.
“And, you know—me too,” Charlie says. And Simon, who hadn’t known he had any doubts, feels himself sink against Charlie’s body.
The one huge downside to that picture circulating on social media is now people know Simon’s in New York. His phone keeps buzzing with variations on “hey we should get a drink while you’re in town.”
“Oh no,” Charlie says when Simon complains about this. “People want to see you. It’s terrible.”
“They don’t really want to see me. It’s the kind of thing people have to say.” Simon doesn’t expect Charlie to understand—peopledowant to see Charlie.
“What would they say if they did want to see you?”
“Oh, fuck off.” Simon sees where this is going.
“Because it would be the exact same message, right?” Charlie picks up Simon’s phone and holds it in front of Simon’s face to unlock it, slow enough that Simon could grab the phone away if he wanted to. “How does a person even get four hundred unread text messages?”
Simon drops his book and stands up only to climb into Charlie’s lap. “I don’t want to go out for dinner with friends from college or people I worked with ten years ago. I want to have dinner with you.”
He doesn’t mean anything by it, not really—but he doesn’t mean nothing by it either. Charlie raises his eyebrows. “You can’t help it; you’re obsessed with me.” He kisses Simon’s neck.
An hour later, Simon’s in the bathroom, still wearing a robe, trying to get ready.
“What’s that?” Charlie asks, coming up behind him and sticking his entire finger in the pot of moisturizer.
