He doesn’t explain that he never enjoyed those dates either, that he hated the pressure to be perfect, to conform to the assumptions people made about him based on how he looks. He doesn’t explain how the dates were something he did out of obligation, because dating was something he was supposed to do. He doesn’t explain how they always felt wrong, like Charlie was putting on a costume that didn’t fit quite right.

”How can I help when it gets like this?”
Dev folds himself tighter against Charlie, all those lovely sharp points digging in. “You can just stay,” he says, at last. “No one ever stays.” As Dev falls asleep on his chest, Charlie understands so clearly that Dev has spent four weeks trying to convince Charlie he deserves something Dev doesn’t believe he himself deserves. That whatever these little funks are – these evenings of the brain – they’ve convinced Dev he doesn’t deserve someone who stays. Charlie wishes he could find the words, find a way, to show Dev what he’s worth, even if this thing between them is already over. Even if it was only ever practice. But Charlie doesn’t know how you show someone they’re worthy of being loved. So he just stays.

It was his seventh therapist – or maybe his eighth? – who asked him to describe it once, the way it feels when the depression is at its worst. Dev told her it was like drowning from the inside. Like his brain was filling with water. Like sitting on the bottom of the deep end of the west Raleigh public pool the way he would as a kid, letting the silence and the pressure crush him until he couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What if I’m like our naïve contestants? What if… what if the love I’ve wanted my whole life isn’t real? What if there are no happily ever afters?” Jules takes their knotted hands and drops them into her lap, but still, she refuses to let go of him. “I don’t think happily ever after is something that happens to you, Dev. I think it’s something you choose to do for yourself.”