Chapter 23
The meeting lasted three hours. By the end of it, we had a counter-strategy for Merrick’s new ads, a revised media calendar, and a press release ready for Kendra’s approval.
“Got a minute?” I said to David after everyone else had left the room.
He looked up from where he was packing away his laptop, his expression carefully blank. “Sure.”
I tilted my head toward the door. “My office?”
He followed me out silently.
Our offices occupied the second floor of a converted brick building, and my office—if you could even call it that—was a narrow room with a small window overlooking a back alley. I was pretty sure at one point it had been a supply closet.
I closed the door behind us, and David settled into the tiny sofa that lined the far wall. I leaned against the edge of my desk, my palms braced on either side of my hips.
Before I could speak, he said, “Look, your sexuality is none of my business. Your secret’s safe with me.”
His directness threw me for a loop.
I was used to people beating around the bush, speaking in coded language open to interpretation in case they had to deny the conversation or dispute the facts later. It’d been a long time since someone I knew in a professional capacity had come right out and said the quiet part out loud.
It took me a moment to recalibrate.
I’d rehearsed a dozen variations of this conversation in the shower and then again during the three hours I’d spent pretending to focus on work while David sat six feet away from me. I’d prepared deflections, cover stories, and plausible explanations.
None of them accounted for him coming right out and addressing the elephant in the room.
“I—thank you.”
David leaned back, one ankle crossed over his knee. “Though I will say, as a friend—and I hope it’s okay to call myself that—you might want to know that your secret isn’t as airtight as you think.”
The floor tilted beneath me. “What do you mean?”
“Queer people recognize our own.” He shifted, draping an arm along the back of the sofa. “You’ve spent a lot of years being incredibly close with Senator Hastings. There’s speculation about that closeness in certain circles.”
My mouth went dry. “Certain circles?”
“Queer circles,” he said pointedly.
Obviously, I was familiar with the informal network of queer staffers, consultants, and operatives in the Capital who looked out for each other.
I’d kept my distance from them deliberately.
If I didn’t show up at their fundraisers, didn’t linger at their tables at events, didn’t engage when the conversation drifted toward anything personal, then maybe nobody would have cause to wonder why a straight man was so interested in what the queer community was up to.
“I’m not asking you to confirm or deny anything,” he continued, holding up a hand. “I’m just telling you that there’s been speculation. Most people don’t care, but his engagement did generate a certain amount of gossip.”
I turned toward the window. Below, a few pedestrians hunched into their coats against what I’d been told was an atypically chilly October afternoon.
“How long?” I asked through gritted teeth. “How long have people been talking?”
I turned back to him, bracing myself for the worst.
“Years, though ‘talking’ is probably too generous a word. It’s more like … an open secret that nobody discusses directly because nobody wants to be the one it’s traced back to.”
I pressed my thumb and forefinger into the bridge of my nose and breathed deeply. I fucking knew it. I’d been warning Wyatt that this was going to happen if he didn't stop behaving so recklessly.
“For what it’s worth,” David continued, his voice softer than before. “I’ve been where you are. Not the same situation, obviously, but the same feeling.”
I dropped my hands away from my face. “Yeah?”
“When I was starting out, I was on the Hill. Twenty-four, closeted, working for a congressman who would have had me escorted out of the building if he’d known.
” David’s gaze drifted past me, his attention here but not.
“I told myself it shouldn't matter who I slept with; I wasn’t an elected official. I didn’t represent anyone back home.
I was just a guy who could write a damn good press release. ”
I’d been that naive once, too, convinced that my personal life and my professional one could exist. That delusion lasted right up until a legislative aide I knew was quietly let go from her job after someone dug up photos of her dancing topless at a strip club her sophomore year of college.
Her work was flawless, but that hadn’t mattered.
She was a liability, and liabilities got cut.
I’d watched it happen from three desks away, and the lesson had embedded itself into my bones: in politics, you were never just yourself. You were an extension of everyone you worked for, and they would toss you out like garbage the second your past became their problem.
“What changed for you?” I asked.
“Exhaustion, mostly. I’d spent years monitoring every handshake, every glance, every after-work drink, wondering if the guy I went home with on Tuesday night was going to show up in someone’s opposition file on Wednesday morning.
David leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“I’d managed to work my way up to Press Secretary, and I guess a part of me thought I was untouchable. That maybe I was essential or something. I honestly can’t say if it was me being lazy or cocky, but I got careless. Someone sent pictures of me leaving my boyfriend’s apartment.”
“That’s it?”
I’d seen politicians survive affairs, financial improprieties, even a DUI that made the national news, and bounce back within a cycle or two. A man leaving another man’s apartment could be explained away in a hundred different ways.
Lord knew that was what Wyatt and I had counted on all these years.
David’s lips tipped up in a wry smile. “The story also included pics of him leaving a certain closeted Republican’s hotel room at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Your boyfriend was cheating on you?”
“No.” He shook his head, his lips turning down slightly. “He was a well-known escort.”
Holy shit. David didn’t just have the temerity to be gay; he was also dating a man who could single-handedly take down every closeted politician in the city. No wonder they’d run him out of town.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Ah.” He scrubbed his hand over his face and blew out a breath.
“It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I represented everyone who’d ever hired me, everyone who had or would vouch for me, everyone whose name appeared on the letterhead my words were printed on.
And the second any of those people decided your personal life is a weakness?
” He drew a finger across his throat. “You’re done. ”
“So how’d you end up working for Kendra?”
I pushed off the desk and crossed the room to the window, needing to move, needing to do something other than stand there absorbing the weight of a story that felt uncomfortably like a preview of my own. I leaned against the sill, arms folded across my chest.
“I’d moved home--here to Portland--to lick my wounds and figure out what I was going to do next.
Not long after, Michael contacted me. Our paths had crossed many times, so he knew my work.
We became friends, and he introduced me to Kendra, who, in case you’re wondering, legitimately doesn’t care about my past. Though you should probably know, she did ask me about yours. ”
Kendra knew.
The realization made me re-evaluate every interaction I’d ever had with her. Every time she’d looked at me with that deep, penetrating gaze of hers, and I’d assumed she was evaluating my professional competence, had she been wondering about my relationship with Wyatt instead?
Fuck. Just how badly had we failed at all that subterfuge? How many people had looked at us and seen exactly what we were?
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat.
“What do you mean?”
I didn't know why I was still playing dumb, but it had been my default for so long, and some habits were hard to break.
“You already know she met with Hastings when she was vetting you. After, she said, and I quote, ‘That man was giving off very strong vibes.’”
“Fuck,” I muttered, moving behind my desk to collapse into my chair. I rubbed my sweating palms along my thighs, my pulse loud in my ears.
“I’m gay,” I blurted.
Two words. Five letters total.
I’d said them before—to Taylor, to Wyatt, of course, and to myself in the mirror more times than I could count.
But saying them to someone who existed in my professional world, someone who could carry that knowledge out of this room and into the ecosystem where I made my living, was entirely different.
David simply nodded, like it was a confession he didn’t find particularly remarkable. “Yeah. I sort of figured.”
I exhaled a shaky laugh. “I don’t know why that was so hard. You literally watched me climb out of a man’s car this morning wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I did notice the wrinkles.”
“Fuck off,” I said, but my tone lacked any real bite.
He smiled—a real, unguarded one—though it faded gradually into something more serious. “Can I ask you something?”
I nodded slowly. David had had no problem mentioning Wyatt by name, but he hadn’t done the same with Taylor. Was that because he wanted to respect his privacy, or had he not recognized him?
“I know who your family is. Hard not to, especially when they show up on every Republican donor list in the country.” He held my gaze steadily. “Is that part of it?”
I looked down at my hands. Normally, I would have found the question intrusive, but David had earned my honesty by offering his own history first.