The Charm Offensive

A Novel

Alison Cochrun

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781668032817
• eBook ISBN: 9781982170721

A MOST ANTICIPATED ROM-COM SELECTED BY * BUZZFEED * LGBTQ READS * BUSTLE * THE NERD DAILY * ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT * FROLIC MEDIA * AND MORE!

A BEST BOOK PICK BY * HARPER’​S BAZAAR * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“The Charm Offensive will sweep you off your feet.” —PopSugar

​​​​In this witty and heartwarming romantic comedy—reminiscent of Red, White & Royal Blue and One to Watch—an awkward tech wunderkind on a reality dating show goes off-script when sparks fly with his producer.

Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to connect with the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

THE FIRST NIGHT OF FILMING

Pasadena, California—Saturday, June 5, 2021

20 Contestants and 64 Days Remaining

Dev

Dev Deshpande knows the exact moment he started believing in happily ever after.

He is ten years old, sitting cross-legged in his living room, staring up at the television in awe at Ever After. It’s like the stories he reads before bed, tented under Star Wars sheets long after his parents have told him to turn out the lights—stories about knights and towers and magic kisses. It’s like the movies he watches with his babysitter Marissa, stories about corsets and handsome men with dour faces and silent dances that say everything. Stories that make his heart feel too big for his small body.

Except Ever After is better than those stories because it’s real. It’s reality television.

On-screen, a beautiful blond man extends a jeweled tiara to a woman in a pink dress. “Are you interested in becoming my princess?”

The woman sheds a single tear as music swells in the background. “Yes. Yes!” She claps her hands over her mouth, and the man rests the crown on the woman’s head, gold against her golden hair. The golden couple embrace with a kiss.

He’s mesmerized by this world of horse-drawn carriages and ball gowns and big romantic gestures. The foreign travel destinations and the swoon-worthy kisses against brick walls while fireworks go off in the distance. This world where happily ever afters are guaranteed. He watches, and he imagines himself as one of the women, being waltzed around the ballroom by a handsome prince.

“Turn off that anachronistic, patriarchal bullshit,” his mother snaps as she comes into the house carrying two grocery bags, one under each arm.

But Dev didn’t turn off that anachronistic, patriarchal bullshit. In fact, he did the opposite. He joined it.

“A toast!” he declares as he sloshes the rest of the champagne into the glasses held in eager, outstretched hands all around him. “To beginning the quest to find love!”

He is twenty-eight years old, sitting in the back of a limo with five drunk women on the first night of filming a new season of Ever After. There’s a former beauty queen, a travel blogger, a medical student, a software engineer, and a Lauren. They’re all beautiful and brilliant and masking nerves with copious amounts of limo champagne, and when they finally arrive at the castle gates, the women raise their glasses excitedly. Dev takes an obligatory sip of champagne and wishes for something slightly stronger to dull the current aching of his too-big heart.

For the next nine weeks, these are the contestants he’ll coach for the cameras, guiding them through Group Quests and Crowning Ceremonies, helping to craft their perfect love stories. If he does his job right, in nine weeks one of these women will receive the Final Tiara, the proposal, the happily ever after.

And maybe then Dev will forget that in his own life, happily ever afters are never guaranteed.

He plasters on his best producer smile. “Okay, ladies! It’s almost time to meet your Prince Charming!” A chorus of shrieks fills the limo, and he waits for it to die down. “I’m going to go check in with our director. I’ll be right back.”

On cue, a production assistant opens the limo door for him. He steps out of the car. “Hey, babe,” Jules says condescendingly. “How are you doing?”

He slings his handler bag over his chest. “Don’t patronize me.”

She’s already pivoted and started her brisk march up the hill toward the castle. “If you don’t want to be patronized, I guess you don’t need these”—she pulls a bag of mint Oreos out from under her arm—“to stave off your crippling depression.”

“Crippling is a bit much. I like to think I’m sort of dabbling in depression.”

“And how many times have you cried while listening to the same Leland Barlow breakup song in the past twenty-four hours?”

“Fair point.”

Jules smacks the Oreos against his chest without breaking stride. Then she shoots him a sideways glance, almost like she’s searching for evidence of his epic cryfest in the shower three hours ago—and again in the Lyft on the way to the hotel ballroom to pick up his contestants. Her eyes fall to his outfit. He’s wearing his standard first-night uniform: cargo shorts with deep pockets, a T-shirt—black, to mask the pit stains—comfortable shoes to get him through a twelve-hour shoot. “You look like an Indian Kevin James in an ‘after’ weight-loss photo.”

He puts on his charming Fun Dev smile and plays along with this little game. She’s wearing corduroy overalls and a Paramore concert T-shirt with her giant Doc Martens, a fanny pack across the front of her chest like a sash, and her thick hair in its usual topknot. Jules Lu is every twenty-four-year-old LA transplant with mountains of student debt, settling for something less than her delusions of Greta Gerwig grandeur. “You look like the sad old person at a Billie Eilish concert.”

She flips him off with both hands while walking backward through the security gate. They both flash their badges to the guard before immediately having to dart to avoid a golf cart carrying two set runners. They skirt the jib, which captures establishing shots from twenty feet up, and run directly into the first assistant director, who accosts them with pink revised call sheets. Dev has always been a little bit in love with the chaos and the magic of the first night of filming.

Jules rudely slams him back into reality. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” she asks. By “it” she clearly means his breakup three months ago and the fact that he’s about to see his ex for the first time since they divided up their assets, Ryan taking the PS5 and the apartment and all the real furniture, Dev keeping the Disney collectible mugs and the DVD box sets. “It” being the fact that Dev has to work side by side with Ryan for the next nine weeks.

Talking about “it” is the last thing Dev wants, so he stuffs three Oreos into his mouth. Jules tilts her head and stares up at him. “I’m here for you, you know. If like…” But she doesn’t finish the sentence, can’t fully commit to her offer of emotional support. Instead, she reverts to their usual teasing. “You let me know when you’re ready for a rebound. I’ve got at least four dudes at my gym I could set you up with.”

“Oh, sweetheart, don’t pretend like you’ve ever stepped foot in a gym.”

She punches his arm. “I’m trying to be a good friend, asshole.”

Jules is a great friend, but you don’t just rebound from a six-year relationship, and the thought of dating again makes him want to crawl back into bed for another three months. He doesn’t want to go on awkward first dates with fit, well-groomed, West Hollywood queer men who won’t be able to look past his scrawny physique, his Costco-brand jeans, and his very uncool prescription glasses.

He thought he was done with first dates.

“I think I’m going to take a man-sabbatical,” he tells Jules with rehearsed indifference as they continue their march toward Command Central. “Just focus on scripting other people’s love stories.”

Jules detours them by the crafty table for cold-brew refills. “Yeah, well, you’re going to have your work cut out for you this season. Have you met Mr. Charming yet?”

“No, but he can’t possibly be as bad as he sounds in the group chat.”

“He’s worse.” She claps her hands together to dramatically punctuate each word. “He. Is. A. Disaster. Skylar says he’s season-ruining. Career-ruining.”

Dev would be more concerned if Skylar Jones weren’t always apocalyptic on the first night of filming. “Skylar thinks every season will be our last. I highly doubt Charles Winshaw is going to topple a twenty-year franchise. And Twitter is sufficiently twitterpated about the casting.”

“Well, apparently the prepackage shoot was awful. They took him to the beach, and he almost fell off his white horse.”

Dev could admit that didn’t sound great. “Charles is an outsider. He probably just needs some time to adjust to the cameras and the lights. It can be overwhelming.”

Jules rolls her eyes. “Bringing in an outsider isn’t going to convince anyone these Instagram influencers came on this show for love.”

“They’re not Instagram influencers,” he insists. Another Jules Lu eye roll. “Most of them are not Instagram influencers. And of course they’re here for love.”

“And never to promote their line of funky festival headbands on Etsy,” she snaps. “The only people who actually come on this show for love are so brainwashed by the wedding industrial complex, and so convinced their self-worth is tied to matrimony, they literally convince themselves they’re in love with a person they’ve spent all of ten total hours with.”

“It’s so sad to see such cynicism in one so young.”

“And it’s so sad to see such blind idealism in one so old.” He throws an Oreo at her, even if she sort of has a point. About Charles Winshaw, not about love and marriage.

In the six years Dev has worked for Ever After, the new star has always been chosen from the crop of fan-favorite rejects of the previous season. Except recently, this pattern has caused some vocal critics within the Fairy-Tale Family to cast doubt on the show’s romantic realism. Instead of coming on the show to find love, some people were coming on the show to become the next star. So their showrunner, Maureen Scott, decided to bring in an outsider for the new season to shake things up.

Charles Winshaw—the enigmatic, millionaire tech genius with an inexplicable eight-pack—is good for ratings, regardless of whether he can stay mounted on a horse.

Dev pulls out a copy of People magazine from his shoulder bag. It’s the issue with their new star on the cover, the words Silicon Valley’s Most Eligible Bachelor! splashed across the front. Blond curls and a broad jaw and a chin dimple. A perfect Prince Charming.

As they turn away from the crafty table, the sun is beginning to dip behind the castle’s twin turrets, dappling everything on set in soft, orange light. Strands of twinkle lights shine from the trees like stars, and the air is fragrant from the bouquets of flowers, and it’s exactly like the fairy tales Dev imagined as a kid.

“It’s a shitstorm, Dev! A fucking shitstorm!” Skylar Jones shouts as they enter the Command Central tent. She’s already halfway through a roll of Tums, which is never a good sign this early in the night.

“Why is it a shitstorm, exactly?”

“Because this season is completely and epically fucked!”

“I’m very sorry to hear we’re somehow fucked before we’ve started.” Dev slots in his earpiece as Jules hands him a walkie-talkie from the charging station. “Is this about him almost falling off the horse?”

“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 mixe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1. The First Night of Filming
• Chapter 2. Week One
• Chapter 3. Week Two
• Chapter 4. Week Three
• Chapter 5. Week Four
• Chapter 6. Week Five
• Chapter 7. Week Six
• Chapter 8. Week Seven
• Chapter 9. Week Eight
• Chapter 10. Three Months after Filming
• Chapter 11. The Live Finale
• Chapter 12. The Premiere
• Acknowledgments
• ‘Here We Go Again’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Copyright