Chapter 8 #2
The heavy drapes had killed the stadium glow and most of the city with it; what light there was came thin and silver around the edges, enough to see by.
We lay tangled in the wrecked bed, his head on my chest, my hand moving slow through his hair, and I let my heartbeat come down and waited for the other thing to arrive.
It arrived.
I turned my head, and there it was on the dresser, six feet away in the dark: the black camera body, the long lens, the green lanyard pooled beside it like a snake that had shed its warning.
PRESS. The whole apparatus of my destruction, sitting on a hotel dresser, while the man who carried it breathed slow and warm against my sternum.
I made myself look at it for a long moment.
This was the part where the rule was supposed to fire into gear.
Where thirty-five years of survival stood up in me and said: get dressed.
Get out. Delete Grindr. Call your mother's lawyer. Protect the legacy, protect the empire, protect the careful lying life. I’d spent my whole existence learning to leave rooms without being felt to go.
The reflex was the deepest thing in me, deeper than faith and fear.
I waited for it.
It didn't come.
“I know about your wife,” Alec said quietly, into my chest.
My hand went still in his hair.
“I looked you up,” he said. “This afternoon. When I was angry. Kimberly. Ten years. The grief that built a ministry.” He said the headline with a gentleness that took the cruelty out of it, which was somehow worse.
“I'm sorry. That's an ugly thing to throw in a man's face, and I'm not throwing it.
I just—I didn't want to lie here knowing something about you that you didn't know I knew.
I'm done with the part where we don't say the true thing.”
And there it was. The opening. The one door I’d kept shut against every person who had ever loved me or used me or both.
I could give him the public Kimberly. The slideshow.
The hymn. The brave widower. I had given that version to the entire country; I could certainly give it to one man in the dark.
I gave him the other one instead.
“I never loved her,” I said. The words came out into the quiet and did not strike me dead.
“That's the thing nobody knows. My parents arranged it.
I was twenty-two and she was lovely and kind and as trapped as I was, though I was too young and frightened to see it then.
I was good to her. Faithful even, in the only way the world could see.
And I never once wanted her. Kimberly knew it—she had to have known it.
You can't share a bed with a man for three years and not feel the wall standing in the middle of it. But we never spoke of it.”
His arm tightened across me. Alec didn't say anything. He just listened, which I have learned is the rarest thing most people do.
“And when she died.” My voice went very low.
“I want to tell you I grieved her. I truly did.
The waste of it, a girl who never got her own life either.
But the first thing I felt, Alec, the very first thing, before the funeral and the cards and the casseroles—was relief.
So much relief I went out into my mother's garden at midnight and was sick into the roses. Because she was free, and God forgive me, so was I. And then—” the worst of it, the thing I had never said aloud in ten years, “then I watched my mother turn the dead girl into the most useful asset the ministry ever had.”
“What was that?” Alec murmured.
I took a deep breath and spat it out. “The grieving widower. Ten years a monument to a love that never existed. No one asks why I don't remarry. They don't have to. A dead wife is the perfect wife. She does the one job I could never do—she makes me look like the man I preach about.”
The silence after that was enormous.
I lay there with my own confession cooling in the air and understood that I had just handed this man, a journalist, this green-lanyard wearing stranger the rope to hang me with.
Not the affair. The affair was just sex; sex they could spin, sex they survive.
This was worse. This was the rot at the foundation of the whole sacred story.
The dead girl in the yellow dress, Kimberly.
If Alec wanted to end me, I’d just told him exactly where to press.
And I waited, naked in every way a man can be, for him to pick up the rope.
He lifted his head off my chest. In the thin silver light I couldn't read his face, only his eyes, and his eyes were not the journalist's eyes and not the furious eyes from the doorway. They were something I had no defense for at all.
“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me the truth.”
And he laid his head back down over my heart, which was galloping in my chest.
I looked up at the dark ceiling of a room I would have to leave by morning, with a man asleep on my chest who could destroy me with a single afternoon's work, and had instead just chosen, inexplicably, to stay.
Would I regret it?