Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Alec
I woke up alone, and the disappointment that opened up in my chest was so immediate and so total that it actually frightened me.
The room was full of gray morning light.
The sheets were a disaster—kicked to the foot of the bed, half on the floor, the particular wreckage of two grown men who had not been gentle with each other or with the furniture.
The other pillow still held the dent of his head.
I knew, because I lay there and looked at it for a long, stupid time, the way you'd look at a chalk outline.
He'd gone in the dark. Sometime in the small hours, while I was under, he had peeled himself out of my arms—and I was a light sleeper, and he'd done it without waking me.
This meant the man had a lifetime of practice at slipping out of strange hotel rooms. Back to whatever he'd called it.
The golden cage. Back to whoever was waiting for the version of him that everybody thought they knew.
I am genuinely good at this. I’d spent my adult life keeping every hookup clean—lust and mutual liking, a good night, a real connection for the length of that connection and not one minute past it.
No splinters, or leftover residue from the encounter.
I preferred my tricks grateful and gone, and I’d never laid in a wrecked bed and felt like something had been ripped out of me when the other guy left.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” I rubbed my palm over my eyes and yawned.
This didn't feel like simple lust. This felt like gravity—like I'd spent thirty-three years flying above my feelings through sheer stubbornness. Now a handsome stranger had walked into my hotel room and quietly informed my body which way the ground was.
I rolled over and put my face in his pillow before I could talk myself out of it, and there it was: his cologne. Something expensive, warm, and a little austere. Cedar and incense and money, already fading. I breathed it in like a teenager.
“You absolute clown,” I told the empty room.
Because here was the unbearable part, the part I couldn't lecture my way out of: I hadn't just liked the sex, though God knows the sex had been out of this world.
I'd genuinely liked him.
The way he'd gone still and reverent over a cheap gold chain with a cross.
The crack in his voice when he said I don't get to stay, like a man reading his own prison sentence.
I'd told him the truest thing I'd said out loud in years— how I messed up with Harry, and the relief-instead-of-grief thing—and he hadn't flinched.
He'd just found my hand in the dark and held it like it was worth holding.
I had connected with a man I would never see again, more than I'd connected with any man I'd ever actually dated. And I didn't even know his fucking name.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, half to check the time and half hoping for something I had no right to hope for. I opened Grindr. Thumbed to the messages.
The message thread was still there. But the little dot beside his gray square had gone dark.
Offline. And when I tapped the profile itself, the screen just blinked and gave me nothing—profile unavailable—the headless torso and the gold cross wiped clean out of existence, as though the man had reached back through the network in the night and erased any evidence of his existence.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress, stared at the water-stained ceiling, and felt the whole soft, dangerous morning threaten to swallow me. So I did the only thing I have ever reliably known how to do when my feelings get too loud.
I went to work.
I put my feet on the cold beige carpet. Somewhere twelve floors down, in a ballroom full of better liars than I would ever be, the most important seventy-two hours of my career were already underway without me—Hallie was in D.C.
waiting for a story big enough to justify putting her neck on the line for me, and I was up here sniffing a pillow like a lovesick kid.
The stranger was gone, and I needed to get on with my life.
I showered with the water too hot. I put on the good shirt and the press lanyard and the face—the unimpressed one, my armor, the one that had never failed me—and I picked up the camera bag, and forced myself not to look at the bed again on my way out the door.
Whoever he was, he had his cage to get back to.
And I had a story to find.
* * *
The Crossroads National Summit did not believe in subtlety, and I respected that about it the way you respect a shark for being honest about its intentions.
The main hall was a converted arena, and they'd spent real money making it look like the future.
A stage the size of a tennis court with three enormous LED screens, two stories tall, cycling through images of wheat fields, a rippling flag, a soft-focus nuclear family laughing at a picnic that had clearly never happened.
Up-lighting in red, white, and a blue so saturated it hummed.
A fog machine breathing a low haze across the stage so that every beam of light looked heaven sent, ready-made for the cameras.
And the music—some swelling, wordless, stadium-rock hymn pumped at a volume engineered to bypass the brain and go straight for the spine.
Last night had been one dim lamp in the dark and a man's honest, broken voice six inches from my ear.
This was the opposite of that in every measurable way.
This was a feeling manufactured at scale, trucked in, focus-grouped, and sold by the seat.
I'd spent one night inside something real, and now I stood at the back of a room where ten thousand people had paid good money to be told beautiful lies.
I set up in the press pen—a roped-off corral of folding tables along the house-left wall, half-empty, exactly as Hallie had predicted.
The national outlets hadn't bothered sending reporters to Nebraska. Hell, that’s probably why Crossroads chose this place.
I screwed the long lens onto the body of my camera, found a sightline through the bodies, and started scanning the crowd.
The crowd is always the real story, reflecting back the bullshit the guys on stage were feeding them.
And the faces were hungry. Ten thousand people leaning forward in the haze, lit up and yearning, wanting so badly to be told that they were the chosen and the righteous and the last good people in a country gone wrong—and someone up there was about to take that hunger and hand it back to them at a markup.
I snapped a photo of a woman with her eyes closed and her hands raised.
Then I caught a kid, maybe nineteen, in a blazer two sizes too big, mouthing along to a song that hadn't started.
The lanyards and the flag pins and the open, upturned, trusting faces, and I thought about the desk clerk from yesterday, on her feet since five in the morning so these people would have a cathedral to be fleeced in.
The music swelled, the lights dropped, and ten thousand people roared in the sudden dark.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.” A disembodied voice, the voice of God by way of a Vegas fight announcer. “PLEASE WELCOME—THE SENIOR SENATOR FROM THE GREAT STATE OF ALABAMA—SENATOR. RAY. FINCH.”
He came out of the haze into a single spotlight with both arms already raised, and the room came apart at the seams. Finch was built for this—silver hair, big shoulders going soft, a flag pin the size of a silver dollar, the practiced grin of a man who has never in his life paid for his own lunch.
He stood in the god-ray of light and let the applause wash over him, and only when it had crested did he lean into the mic.
“Are we ready,” he said, low, “to take this country BACK?”
The arena detonated. I had the lens on his face and I watched him drink in the adulation.
“Because I'll tell you what, folks. I have traveled this great land. I have been from Mobile to Bakersfield. And everywhere I go, the good, God-fearing, hardworking people of this nation come up to me, they grab my hand, look me in the eye, and they say the same thing. Senator. We are going to make this country GREAT. AGAIN.”
Again?
There it was, that word doing all the heavy lifting, and I felt the familiar sour taste in my mouth. Like, what did that even mean? When had we been so great that we needed to go back in time to recreate it?
“But before we begin,” Senator Finch’s voice dropped into a register of buttery reverence, “before we do one single thing—let's do the most important thing. Let's bow our heads and talk to the Man upstairs.”
Ten thousand heads went down. I kept mine up, and the camera up with it, because I'd be damned—a figure of speech; I'm a nice Jewish boy from a long line of people these rooms have historically not been crazy about—if I was going to close my eyes in this particular crowd.
“Heavenly Father,” Finch began, eyes squeezed shut, one hand pressed flat to his own chest. “Lord, we just come to You this morning with grateful hearts. And Lord, we know—we KNOW—that You did not make Your children to be poor. You did not make us to be small. You did not make us to be ashamed.”
“Amen,” the room breathed.
“You are a God of ABUNDANCE, Lord. You are a God of the open hands. And we know, Father, that when Your faithful sow into good ground—when they give, Lord, when they give generously to the work—You return it to them thirty, sixty, a HUNDREDfold. Because You reward the faithful, Lord. You bless the bold.”