Chapter 17
Simone looked as pristine as ever when she answered Patrick’s video call, makeup subtle but expensive, hair blown out and glossy in her sun-drenched office, like the beautiful but severe host of a morning show.
“Thanks for making time,” said Patrick. “How’s your better half?”
“Ugh.” Simone rolled her eyes. “You know I hate that expression. You can just say ‘girlfriend.’?”
“I could,” Patrick said, “but in this case, she definitely is the better half.”
“You’ve got me there. I had to send her an edible arrangement to apologize for missing our first-month-of-living-together anniversary.”
“What did you go for?” Patrick asked. “Fruit? Chocolates? Those tiny muffins where you need to eat at least four to equal a normal-sized one?”
Simone looked at him like he was stupid. “Edibles,” she said.
It was hard for an outsider to tell, but ever since she’d met Harper on a yoga retreat three months ago, Patrick had never seen Simone so happy. She had claimed to be spending her weekend at Shangri-LA to re-center herself and achieve enlightenment, but in reality she had followed indie darling Bella Gray there in the hopes of poaching her from a rival agency. While Simone might have ended up leaving on Monday no closer to personal enlightenment or a new client, she did have a budding romance on her hands. She and Harper had struck up a conversation about the current state of lesbian representation in cinema (“Why are they always set so far in the past?” “I know, right? Let the poor girls have some electricity along with all that pining”) and had become almost immediately inseparable. It was the first and only time Patrick had ever known his agent to get distracted from her work. Having met Harper, he could see why and was glad of it. Simone never forgot a mission for long, though: She locked down Bella a week later, after cornering the poor girl in the ladies’ room at Soho Warehouse.
“So what can I do for my favorite client?” Simone asked.
Patrick’s attention snapped back to the task at hand. As delightful as Harper was, he had brought her up for a reason. He was hoping that appealing to Simone’s romantic side—such as it was—would make the following conversation easier.
“I’ve met someone,” he said.
“I thought you might have,” she replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for one, you haven’t been sending me quite as many emails complaining about the changes to the script. And I know the production is still very much a mess, so I assumed your attention was elsewhere. But anyway. I’m assuming that this ‘someone’ you’ve started seeing is…?”
“A man.” He decided to keep “and a drag queen” to himself for the time being.
“OK.” Simone said nothing for a moment, didn’t even move, and Patrick began to wonder if the call had frozen. Then: “How serious is it?”
“I don’t know.” Patrick shrugged. It was the truth. He was almost certainly jumping the gun entirely by telling Simone about Will. They’d kissed. Once. Well, technically a lot of times, but only the one time, and Patrick had been eager for more, but the encounter had been frustratingly abbreviated.
The credits had long rolled when Patrick and Will walked out of the theater, giddy and breathless. Patrick could not bring a single detail of the movie to mind. They smiled shyly at each other as they adjusted clothing that had grown tight and uncomfortable, bashful all of a sudden under the artificial foyer light. The darkness had freed something in them both, and Patrick’s cheeks flushed again at the memory of Will’s lips on his, the warmth of his tongue, the way he’d moaned softly into Patrick’s mouth as he pulled him closer.
Acting on instinct, Patrick reached for Will again and then hesitated as a couple of teenagers walked past them so that his knuckles knocked clumsily against Will’s wrist. He saw it in Will’s face, too: the harsh, unflattering glare of reality chasing away their wonderful shadows. An almost physical pain jabbed at Patrick, a stitch in muscles that had been allowed to atrophy. His arms hung at his sides, useless, and then he got a call from Audra with some crisis or other that required his presence back at the hotel. Rather than say no, provoking questions about his absence, Patrick had acquiesced. He had made his pathetic apologies to Will, who looked understandably hurt and confused, and left. And the entire time he had stood in Audra’s room—it turned out all she really wanted was for somebody to be present while she ranted about the terrible table she had been given at the Ivy across the square—he had checked and rechecked his phone, but of course Will hadn’t messaged him. He wouldn’t have messaged either, after that abrupt departure. The next move had to be his. And so here he was.
“It’s serious enough that I’m telling you,” he said to Simone now. “Serious enough that I’d like some time to see where it might go.”
“OK,” she said again. “Is he discreet?”
“You sound like a closeted guy on Grindr.”
“And I’ve told you never to go on Grindr because your phone can be traced. I’ll ask again: Can you trust him to be discreet?”
“I think so. I mean, yes.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“I am. I just…” He sighed. “I hate this part. It’s why I don’t date. Anytime I meet somebody, I don’t even get a chance to figure out if I really like them before we start talking about NDAs and lawsuits.”
“It’s the way of the world,” Simone told him.
“Should it be, though?” Patrick asked. “I wish I could just spend time with Will like a normal guy. Take him on a real date. Maybe even think about having a boyfriend.”
“If you wanted normal, you chose the wrong career,” Simone said, her tone light. “And I’m sorry to remind you, but you’re America’s boyfriend.”
“And if I don’t want to be?”
Simone laughed, as if he couldn’t possibly be serious.
“Do you remember the conversation we had when I first agreed to represent you?”
“You said if I had a thing for pills, I should head back to Buttfuck, Indiana, right then and there because you’re an agent, not a fixer or a babysitter. And I told you I was actually from New Jersey, and you said, ‘Same difference.’?”
“Right,” Simone said unwaveringly. “Do you remember what else I said?”
Patrick sucked air through his teeth.
“That if I wanted to publicly date men, I might become a gay role model, but only for about five people, because I’d never get booked for anything bigger than network.”
“And what did you say to me?”
Patrick sighed, frustrated by this exercise, but Simone’s stare remained casual, as if she were between thoughts at a nail appointment. He was the one to look away first.
“I said…” He folded his arms. “I came here to be a leading man.”
“Not quite.” Simone leaned forward in her chair. “You said you wanted to be the leading man. And I believed you. I saw that for you, and I still do.” Her gaze softened into something that might pass for affection, before cooling as she reclined again. “The question is, do you still want that for yourself?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then what’s changed?”
“I think I like him, Simone. And…he might like me.” It felt like a betrayal to be saying this to Simone before he and Will had even had a proper conversation. Things were so fragile and new. He stopped himself from saying, We haven’t even slept together. He didn’t need to tell Simone that. She already knew. And before he and Will took that step, Patrick needed assurances. Simone had coached him well.
“If that’s the case,” she said, “then…” She raised an eyebrow.
“Will.”
“Then Will is going to have to get on board. If he really cares about you, and not just sleeping with a celebrity, then he’ll understand.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” Patrick knew how petulant he sounded, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Sweetie, I’m just as queer as you are. But I’m also a realist. I know what kind of industry we’re in, and let me tell you, it’s not one that’s particularly fond of change. We work with what we have. You want to tell the world their favorite superhero knows what dick tastes like? I’ll support you, and I’ll do my best to get you work on Ryan Murphy’s next project. But if you want longevity in the Richard Ranger movies, a five-year contract, freedom to choose any project you like after that, a legacy? All the things we said we were going to make happen? Then this is simply the cost of doing business.”
There were monsters in the Captain Kismet comics called the Ravagions, a race of semi-giants with long, clawlike fingers they used to wrap around entire torsos and squeeze the life out of people. Patrick felt like he was in the grip of those talons right now. The tightness in his chest, the quivering uncertainty in his stomach.
He had no idea how to broach this with Will, how to possibly ask so much of somebody he had just met. But if he didn’t…
He thought of every phone number he’d been given by a man and then thrown away, every smile in a bar he hadn’t returned for fear of what it might lead to, the risk it might bring. All of it in pursuit of a single goal, an opportunity like the career he was building. Putting work before a personal life for so many years, choosing to be alone even when it felt like it might kill him? It had to be worth something.
If word got out about Patrick before filming on Kismet 2wrapped, if the studio decided to recast him while they still had time, or to bury it in streaming, then what was all of that for? All that sacrifice, all that loneliness?
It was another compromise, he knew. But something had changed these last few weeks. A part of Patrick that had lain dormant and undernourished for so long was now wide awake and ravenous. He thought back to the almost painful gentleness of Will’s touch as he’d dressed Patrick, those soft moans of desire he had made in the cinema. The sweetness and the salt of him. Patrick wanted more. He wanted to see how far the hair on those arms and legs went, to feel Will quiver under his touch, to take those whimpers and coax them into screams.
If he had to sign a piece of paper to ensure all of those things remained a secret, that was an easy compromise. He only hoped that Will would see it the same way.
“Fine,” he said.
Simone nodded. “Send me his full name. I’ll draw up the paperwork.” She ended the call without another word.