The Charm Offensive(3)

“I wish he had fallen off the horse,” Skylar seethes. “Maybe if he’d been trampled, we could’ve cast a Jonas Brother or a subpar Hemsworth.”

“I think all the Jonases and Hemsworths are married.”

“Oh, is that why we’re stuck with a constipated computer nerd?”

Dev knows better than to laugh at his boss. As a queer Black woman, Skylar Jones did not become the lead director of a reality television juggernaut by having chill. When she developed early female pattern baldness before forty from the stress of this job, she simply began shaving all her hair off.

“How can I help, Sky?”

“Tell me what you know about Charles Winshaw.”

“Uh… Charles Winshaw…” Dev closes his eyes, pictures the spreadsheets he compiled from network background checks and Google searches in preparation for this season, and rattles off facts rapid-fire. “Has the brains of Steve Wozniak and the body of a Marvel superhero. Graduated high school at sixteen when he won a coding contest and a full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Launched his tech startup, WinHan, with his dorm mate Josh Han before his twentieth birthday. Left his company at twenty-six and now runs the Winshaw Foundation as a twenty-seven-year-old millionaire. Has graced the cover of both Time and GQ but has been notoriously private until now, so little is known about his dating history. But—”

Dev shakes out his arms. This is what he does. “Based on what we know, I would guess Charles is looking for a woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, no taller than five foot six. Athletic, but not particularly outdoorsy. A woman who is grounded and ambitious, who has her life together and clear goals for the future. Intelligent, but not more intelligent than him, family-oriented and outgoing. He’ll say he’s looking for someone passionate with a great sense of humor, but what he really wants is someone easygoing and agreeable who will happily adapt to his life in San Francisco. Given this profile, I’ve already prepared folders on the women most likely to make top three.”

Skylar gestures to the rest of the tent. “And this, folks, is why Dev is the best.”

Dev does a little mock bow in the direction of a sound mixer. Skylar claps him on the back. “Here’s what you’re going to do, Dev. Hustle down to the west gate to meet Charles’s car and get him to his mark.”

As much as Dev loves a good hustle, especially on the first night of filming, he doesn’t move. “Shouldn’t Ry—I mean, shouldn’t Charles’s handler get him to his mark?”

“You’re Charles’s handler now. This is me reassigning you. And unless you want this show to go the way of Average Joe, I suggest you stop standing there with your mouth hanging open and really fucking hustle.”

Dev still doesn’t move. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I’m a contestant handler, and… Ryan is the prince’s handler.”

Ryan Parker is good at douche-bro camaraderie and Dev is good at coaching women. As the entire crew recently learned after their public breakup at Dev’s twenty-eighth birthday party, they were never good for each other.

“Except Ryan couldn’t get the shots at the prepackage shoot, so now he’s being moved to supervising producer, and you’re taking his prince. Listen.” Skylar cups Dev’s face in her hands in a flagrant disregard of recent network memos about workplace boundaries. “You’re the best handler we’ve got, and it’s gonna take the best with this guy.”

The only thing Dev loves more than this show is being flattered about his abilities as a producer on this show. “If we’re going to make this season work, I need Dev ‘Truly Believes in Fairy Tales’ Deshpande coaching our star. Can you do that for me?”

He doesn’t think about his own failed fairy tale. He simply says what his boss wants to hear. “Of course I can.”

“Excellent.” Skylar turns to Jules. “Go find Charles’s folder and bring it to Dev. You’ll work as his PA for the season. Help him with Charles. Go, both of you. It’s almost sundown.”

Dev can’t even enjoy the repulsed look on Jules’s face at being named his personal production assistant because all he can think about is seeing Ryan for the first time in three months now that he has stolen his job.

There is no time to dwell on that right now. He does what he was ordered to do. He fucking hustles down the flagstone path toward the west gate, where the town car is waiting with their star.

And maybe this is good. Maybe this is better. Dev can coach women in his sleep, but Charles Winshaw will be a challenge, the kind of thing he can throw his entire mind and body into, getting lost in the bright lights and the beautiful stories.

He barrels toward the town car, reaches for the back door handle without pausing, and perhaps, in his enthusiasm, wrenches open the door with more force than is strictly necessary, because their Prince Charming comes spilling out of the car in a mess of limbs and lands squarely at his feet.





Charlie


“Do we think the crown is a bit much?”

Maureen Scott doesn’t look up from her phone or in any way acknowledge he’s spoken.

Charlie shifts awkwardly in the town car backseat, the tux pulling across his chest in all the wrong ways. His body hasn’t felt like his own since they waxed it and tanned it and drenched it in very pungent cologne. The least they could do is let him remove the crown, so he doesn’t look like Stripper Prince William. He even had to double-check the tux wasn’t a tear-away.