Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Harrison
I woke before he did, and for the length of one breath I didn't know where I was, and then I did, and the knowing went through me like a sunrise.
Alec. The weight of him along my side. His arm thrown across my chest, heavy and unbothered, his face slack against my shoulder, his breath moving warm and even over my collarbone.
Gray morning at the edges of the drapes.
The wrecked bed. The whole quiet miracle of having woken up with another man still in it.
I’d never done this before. In all these years of stolen encounters I had never once been the man who was still there at dawn. I was the man already gone, getting dressed in the dark, the man who left rooms before the warmth could turn into something that asked anything of him.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I lay very still, afraid that moving would break the spell, and I let myself feel the thing I’d spent a lifetime refusing to feel: that I was happy.
Plainly, animally happy, in a way that had nothing to do with God or power or the approval of thousands of strangers.
Instead, it had everything to do with the simple warm fact of a man breathing on my chest.
And right behind the happiness, the way the undertow follows the wave, came the fear. It said the things it always said.
This is the most dangerous thing you have ever done. He has a camera. You have a keynote in your blood and a mother down the hall and an empire that will not survive the daylight if it sees you like this. Get up. Get dressed. Leave the room before the room costs you everything.
I listened to the fear. And then, lying in that gray light with his heartbeat under my arm, I told it no.
Not yet, I told the voice. You've had thirty-five years. You can have the rest of my life if you must. But you cannot have this hour. This hour is mine. I am going to lie here and be a man who woke up beside someone he…
I didn't finish the sentence, even in my own head. But it was there, warm and terrifying, taking up the whole room.
Alec stirred. His arm tightened, then his eyes came open and I watched him remember where he was, and watched him decide, with no apparent struggle at all, that he was glad of it. He smiled, rough and sleepy.
“Hi,” he murmured.
“Good morning.”
“Don't,” he warned, “kiss me. Morning breath. I'm a biohazard.”
I kissed him anyway. He made an affronted noise and then gave up and kissed me back, slow and warm and unhurried, both of us stale and rumpled and human, and it was, I think, the least holy and most sacred kiss of my entire life.
No fever in it. No desperation. Just two men in a bed who did not want to stop touching, which is a thing I had read about and never once believed was real.
“I wish,” I said against his mouth, and stopped, because the end of the sentence was so enormous and so impossible.
“You wish what?”
“I wish this could just—go on.” I pulled back enough to see him.
“That there was no clock. That I could stay in this bed and not have to, I don’t know.
Put the other man back on? Become Pastor Cole again.
But I have people I'm meant to meet. In—” I didn't even want to look at the time. “Soon. Too soon.”
And something happened in his face.
Alec went still—not the soft stillness of a moment before, but a held, braced stillness.
His jaw worked. His eyes dropped from mine to somewhere around my throat, and for a second he looked like a man about to say a hard thing, the muscles of it gathering—and then he didn't. He swallowed it.
Whatever it was went back down, and he gave me a half-smile.
I felt the bottom drop out of my new happiness.
Of course, I thought, and the old voice came in smooth and cruel and familiar.
You pushed too hard. You said go on as if a man like him would want to go on with a man like you—a closeted fraud, a scandal with a church attached.
He had his one night, two nights, and you've gone and made it heavy, made it need something, and now he's looking at the door.
You always do this. You know you don't deserve happiness.
I had no way of knowing—none—that the thing crossing his face was not the urge to flee me but something else entirely. I only knew the shape of rejection, because it was the only shape I'd ever been allowed, and I fit what I saw into it.
“Can I see you tonight?” I asked, and I hated how it came out—too quick, too bare, a man asking for a thing he's sure he'll be refused. “After. When the day's done. I know it's—I know what I'm asking. But can I?”
The shadow crossed him again, deeper this time, and I braced for the kind no, the gentle let's-not, the speech I had given other men a hundred times and never once received.
Then he cupped my jaw, and he kissed me—hard, sudden, almost fierce, like he was answering a different question than the one I'd asked—and against my mouth he said, “Yeah. Yes. Tonight. I'll be here.”
I chose to believe it. God help me, I chose to believe it. I held his face in both hands in the gray morning light and let myself, for one more minute, be a man with something to lose.
* * *
My suite was on the top floor, of course—the Presidential, two rooms, a wet bar, and a view of the prairie going on forever.
The kind of room the convention comped to men they wanted to keep happy.
I’d reluctantly showered the smell of Alec off me and put the other man back on piece by piece: the dark suit, the white shirt, the small gold cross.
I was standing at the mirror working my tie into a four-in-hand, when the knock came.
Two raps. Precise. I knew them the way you know your own pulse.
I opened the door and my mother swept in past me without waiting to be asked, trailing her cloud of Joy perfume and cold air, already dressed, lacquered, and armored for the day at an hour when most people were still asleep.
Floris Mae did not sleep so much as power down.
She crossed to the window, surveyed the prairie as though deciding whether to buy it, and turned to look at me with those ice-blue eyes that missed nothing and forgave less.
“You weren't at the donor breakfast,” she said.
“I sent Davies.” He was an associate pastor at the church. “The Hadleys adore Davies.”
“The Hadleys tolerate Davies. They came for you.” She drifted closer, and her gaze did the thing it always did, the proprietary sweep, the quality check—and I felt it snag on something.
On me. On whatever was different about my face this morning, the thing I hadn't been able to scrub off in the shower because it wasn't on my skin. “You look,” she said slowly, “rested.”
She made the word sound like an accusation. I turned back to the mirror and kept my hands moving on the tie.
“I slept well for once.”
“Did you.” She let it sit. Then, lightly, examining a ring on her own hand: “Joel mentioned you came up very early this morning. From the lower floors.”
My hands did not stop, but everything in me went to ice.
Joel. The head of the security detail, the man whose entire job was to know where I was at every hour—and who had apparently noted, and reported, that the pastor had ridden up from the twelfth floor in the small hours of the morning, alone, rumpled, and rested.
“I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep,” I muttered. “I walked. The building's enormous. I lost track of the floor.”
“Mm.” In the mirror I watched mother watch me, and her face was doing the terrible pleasant thing, the smooth concerned thing, the thing that was so much worse than anger. “Harrison. Look at me. Now.”
I turned.
“You are,” she said, “the most important asset this movement has. Do you understand that word? Asset. Not man. Not son—though you are that, of course, you'll always be that.” Her smile never wavered. “There are men in this organization who have spent careers and fortunes building what you stand on top of. And there are people—small, envious, godless people, the kind that crawl around these conventions with cameras—who would give anything, to find one crack in you. One soft spot, like a late night on the wrong floor.” She reached up and adjusted my tie a quarter inch, a gesture of such tenderness it made my skin crawl. “Your father had appetites. Did you know that? Of course you didn't; I made certain of it, the way I’ve made certain of everything. A man is permitted his weaknesses, Harrison. But he’s not permitted to let them be seen. The seeing is the only sin that matters in our line of work.”
“Mother—”
“I would hate,” she went on, twisting the knife, “to watch you throw away everything your father bled for. Everything I’ve given my entire life to protect.
Over some—” and here she paused, choosing the word, and set it down between us with surgical care, “—some appetite. Some sickness you indulged in. It would break my heart. And as always, I would fix it, because that is what I do. But Harrison, it would break my heart first.” She patted my chest, once, over the cross. “Am I understood?”
“There's nothing to understand,” I said, and my voice was almost steady. “I walked around the hotel. That's all.”
“Of course it is.” She was already turning, gathering herself to sweep out of the room. “The car's at nine. Don't make me send Joel to find you.”
And the use of the name a second time was not an accident, because nothing my mother did was ever an accident, and we both knew it. She let the door close softly behind her and left me standing in the Presidential suite with my hand pressed flat over the small gold cross.
Mother didn't know. I held onto that. She couldn't know—if she did, there would have been no velvet, only the knife.
She suspected. Floris Mae had smelled the change on me the way she'd once smelled it on my father, and she was laying down the warning shot.
A velvet-wrapped reminder that she was watching, that the security detail was watching, and that the cage had eyes and ears in every wall. It always had.
But suspicion was a lit fuse, and I had until—when?
Until Joel saw something he could prove.
Until I rode up from the wrong floor one time too many.
Until the small godless person with the camera, the one she'd described so precisely without knowing she was describing the man who slept on my chest last night, decided he would turn on me.
And here was the vise, the thing that closed around my throat as I stood there alone: I couldn’t have Alec without losing everything.
That much I'd always known. But it was worse than that now, infinitely worse, because if they found us—if Joel or my mother or the political machine ever caught the scent—they would not only take me down.
They would destroy Alec, too. They would find the journalist on the twelfth floor and they would salt the earth, annihilate anyone that threatened the empire.
“Damn it,” I muttered aloud. I’d spent one night feeling more alive than I’d ever been, and the price of keeping it might be the destruction of the very man who'd given himself to me.
I had finally found the one thing worth risking everything for.
So how in God's name was I supposed to risk anything at all—when the everything I'd be risking was Alec?