Chapter 3 #2
My Grindr profile had a face. My actual, recognizable, here's-the-investigative-journalist-face, the one I was so proud of, the truth is the brand, the I don't hide behind a torso—and I'd walked into a building full of terrified closeted gay men and lit up their grid like a flare.
Every one of those messages was somebody clocking that there was exactly one real face in this entire anonymous city, and that face was mine. And like an idiot I was broadcasting it from the middle of their hiding place.
I killed the photo. Three taps, gone, profile blanked to a gray square like everybody else's, and my heart was racing like I'd sprinted up the twelve flights instead of riding the elevator.
Stupid. Rookie. Mistake. The kind of mistake that outs an undercover reporter before he's filed a single word. And then—because I am, at the bottom of everything, a curious animal—I opened the messages.
The first one stopped me cold.
No face, naturally. A torso. But the torso was—
Okay. I'm a professional. I look at things clinically.
The torso was obscene. Broad through the shoulders, narrow at the hip, a chest with actual hair on it instead of the waxed plastic everybody posts, abs that you could've done your taxes on, the whole thing lit warm and a little shadowed like he knew exactly what he was doing with a phone camera.
And there, dead center, hanging on a thin gold chain in the valley between two flawless pecs: a tiny gold cross.
I laughed out loud. Of course. Here, of all the rooms in America.
The cross winked at me in the warm light, this absurd, perfect little contradiction, faith and flesh on the same chain, and something in me—the journalist, the cynic, the lonely animal, I genuinely could not have told you which—leaned in. I tapped on his message.
hey
My thumbs moved before my better judgment could file an objection.
What's up?
The reply came back fast. Faster than a careful man should answer.
better now
And we were off.
I'm not going to pretend I was working. Somewhere in the first ninety seconds the story slid off the table entirely and it was just the two of us, two gray squares in a building full of gray squares, except these two had found each other.
you here for the convention?
God no. Here for work. You?
something like that. you don't look like the praying type
I'm not. It doesn’t seem like you're here to pray either.
depends what you're praying for
I huffed a laugh into my warm soda water. Across the bar a politician of some sort was loudly explaining tax policy to nobody. Down in my hand, a stranger was turning the dial up a half-degree at a time, and I let him.
Careful. A man could get the wrong idea about you.
what idea is that
That under that very respectable torso there's somebody who knows exactly what he wants
There was a pause. Three dots, gone, back again. I'd hit something—I could feel it through the glass, the way you feel a fish test the line.
and if there is
Then I'd tell him he could say it to me. I'm very good at keeping a secret.
you have no idea how much I want to find out if that's true
My collar was too tight. I shifted on the bar stool. I decided to up the ante, see how far this thing could go.
So tell me. What would you do to me if nobody was ever going to know.
The dots churned for a long moment.
I’d get on my knees for you. Take your cock in my mouth and I’d take my time. Then I’d hold you open and use my tongue until you stopped caring who might hear us. Then I’d fuck you hard enough that you’d feel it for the rest of your life.
I read it twice. The second time my cock gave a hard, unmistakable throb against the zipper of my dress pants. My face was hot. I shifted on the stool and the movement made it worse.
I keep thinking about your face. It’s the only real one on here. I haven’t been able to stop looking at it since you walked in.
I read it three times. The bar noise went to a dull roar somewhere behind my own pulse. Something turned over in my chest, low, warm, and dangerous.
so. you want to get out of here
I looked up once. Scanned the room over the top of my phone—the suits, the rings, the backward lanyards, the brown liquor sweating in two hundred hands. Any one of them. He could've been six feet away or sixty, watching me read him the exact way I was watching all of them.
I looked back down.
Yeah sure. Room 1218.
The app froze.
Just—froze. The little send-wheel spun, and spun, and the whole interface locked up tight, and then a gray box: Connection lost. Try again later.
I glanced up, and it was the funniest and saddest thing I'd seen all day: all across the bar, in the same half-second, a dozen heads came up from a dozen phones, frowning, thumbs jabbing, that universal flicker of a man who's just lost his signal at the worst possible moment.
The servers had finally buckled under the weight of all that need.
The women scattered through the room didn't notice a thing—kept right on talking, oblivious, while around them their husbands and their pastors and their delegates all surfaced at once, blinking, bereft, cut off mid-reach from whatever they'd been reaching for.
I didn't wait to see if it came back.
I set the warm glass on the bar, slipped out through the crush of suits, and made for the elevators with my heart slamming and one thought running on a loop: he has the room number.
Whether the message had gone through before the crash or died in the spinning wheel, I had no idea.
That was the thing about throwing yourself off a cliff.
You don't get to find out if there's water at the bottom until you're already in the air.
The elevator was crowded. Four men, all of them—I couldn't help it, I did the math—objectively good-looking in that scrubbed, monied, ruinous way.
Nobody spoke. Everybody watched the numbers climb.
And I stood there in the cologne and the silence and looked at the back of every neck and thought: is it you?
Or you? Did I just give my room number to the man standing eight inches to my left, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his shoulder?
Two. Six. Nine.
The doors opened on twelve and I stepped out alone. Nobody followed. The hall stretched away beige and silent and humming with that same recycled air, and I nearly ran, key card already out, and let myself into 1218, shut the door, and leaned back against it.
Then I went into the bathroom, ran the cold tap, and bent down and splashed it over my face. I stared at myself dripping in the mirror—the wet hair, the five-o'clock shadow, the eyes that for once didn't look unimpressed at all.
“God,” I told my reflection. “I hope this is worth it.”
The knock came.
Not loud. Three soft raps.
I dried my hands. My pulse was going somewhere up in my throat. I crossed the beige room, put my hand on the cold metal handle, then took a deep breath that did nothing at all to settle me, and opened the door.
And every smart, cynical, well-defended thing I had ever believed about myself went straight out of my head.
He filled the frame. Tall enough that I looked up, which I almost never do.
Dark hair, near black, pushed back from a face that didn't seem like it should be legal to wear in public—a hard clean jaw shadowed faint with stubble, a mouth that was trying for composure and not quite managing it, and God, the eyes, a blue so pale and so direct that when they found mine the whole hallway tilted half a degree under my feet.
The suit was beautiful, charcoal, cut close, the tie already loosened and the top button open at a throat I suddenly wanted to taste.
The collar was open just enough that I could see it, resting against his skin, catching the dim hall light.
A thin gold chain. I wondered if that tiny gold cross was nestled between his perfect pecs.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said a word, and the silence was its own live thing, crackling in the six inches of air between us, and I felt the desire come off him in a wave so strong it nearly knocked the breath out of me—all that held-down, locked-away, starved need pointed directly at me, and underneath my skin something answered it, hot and instant and absolutely beyond my control.
I had come to Lincoln to expose a liar.
I just hadn't expected him to be the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.