Chapter 37
“What do you mean, missing?” Will asked.
“He isn’t answering his phone,” said Simone. “He always takes my calls. Always.”
“Even when he’s mad at you?” asked Hector pointedly. Simone cast a searing glare at him, and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Even when he is mad at me. Because this kind of sulking endangers the work, and the work is what matters. He and I have always been on the same page about that.”
“I think that might have changed, Geppetto,” said Corey. “Your Pinocchio is a real boy now.”
“Patrick is a dreamer,” said Simone. “Somebody has to be the grown-up.”
“Hard disagree,” said Audra. “This is LA!”
“Never mind that,” said Will. “Where is he?”
A carousel of increasingly grave scenarios began to spin through his mind: Patrick being pursued by paparazzi in such a frenzy that his car went off the road; Patrick being accosted by a deranged fan; Patrick falling from the top of the Hollywood sign. What on earth Patrick would have been doing atop the Hollywood sign in the first place was beside the point. If he had fallen, then he could have broken both his legs, might at this very moment be clinging on to life, and here they were at the Chateau bloody Marmont playing dress-up when they should be out forming search parties!
“I’m going to go look for him,” Will declared, marching toward the door as if he had any idea where Patrick might be, or where to even begin his search, or even any knowledge of this city at all.
He hurled the door open, and as if by magic, there Patrick was, standing in the hallway, hand outstretched, caught in the motion of entering. It had been just a few months, a handful of long weeks since they last saw each other, but he looked different somehow. Taller, maybe?
“Will…” Patrick’s eyes widened in shock, and Will said the first thing that came to mind, the only words he felt capable of getting out in the right order:
“What time do you call this?”
“LA traffic,” said Patrick. “I was at the beach, and getting back took forever, and…” He smiled lopsidedly, a single dimple creasing the left side of his face. “And gay men,” he announced, “are simply incapable of being on time.”
“That’s a stereotype,” Will replied with a smirk. “I thought you were above those.”
“There you are.” Simone’s voice behind them sounded infinitesimally gentler now that her client was present. “Where have you been?”
Patrick’s eyes drifted from Will’s.
“Venice,” he said. “Traffic. I’m sorry.”
“What were you doing out there?” asked Simone. “You know what, never mind, we don’t have time. Patrick, there’s a tux over there with your name on it. You have”—she checked her Cartier watch—“five minutes to get premiere-ready, and then we are all leaving.”
“Five minutes,” Patrick repeated. “Sure. Can do.”
He brushed past Simone toward the room where Audra had helped Will get ready, and once more Will questioned what on earth he was doing here. This was not his world, and certainly not the time to be distracting Patrick.
“Will?” Patrick called. “You coming?” His expression softened. “I think we need to talk.”
“Yes,” said Will, crossing the room to meet him. “Yes, we do.”
Patrick closed the door behind them, and Will braced himself. He remembered, with sudden horror, how things had ended the last time Patrick walked into a hotel to find him dressed in red.
What he did not expect was for Patrick to grip him in a crushing embrace, arms viselike around his back, face buried in his neck. Will curled his arms around Patrick’s shoulders, closing his eyes and gladly using one of the five minutes allotted to them by Simone to remind himself of Patrick’s smell, the way he felt, the sheer solidness of him.
This, he thought, was worth crossing an ocean for.
“You crushed it,” Patrick said into his neck.
“Excuse me?” asked Will, pulling away, and realizing with some amusement that Patrick appeared to be as scrambled as he was.
“Your song,” said Patrick. “I saw you, Will. I heard you sing. It was amazing.”
“What?” Will asked incredulously. “How?”
“Jordan sent it to me. He seemed to think I might find it relevant to my interests.”
Will’s heart swelled. He resolved to bring Jordan back a truly ostentatious souvenir from Los Angeles.
“He also said something about a guy called Maurice?” Patrick continued. “Do I need to get all jealous? Because I totally will.”
Will laughed and said, “That reminds me, you still owe me twenty quid.”
“I owe you so much more than that,” Patrick said somberly. “I’m sorry, Will. So sorry, you’ll probably never know.”
Oh, shit. They were really doing this.
“You hurt me,” said Will.
“I know.” Patrick nodded.
A harsh knock rapped three times against the door.
“Two-minute warning,” Simone called.
“Roger!” Patrick yelled. He pulled off his T-shirt and began to unbutton his jeans, and at the sight of that body, Will once again felt his brain hit shuffle.
“Tell me,” he said, taking a seat on the end of the sofa. “Please. Tell me what happened. What was going on with you?” Under slightly different circumstances he might have felt guilty about asking such a loaded question while he was fully dressed and Patrick stood before him in his underwear, but hey, time was of the essence.
“That night,” Patrick began. “In my hotel room…”
“Did I push you?” Will asked. “Make you do something you didn’t want to?”
“The opposite.” Patrick shook out the neatly pressed pair of suit pants and stepped into them. “I have never, in my life, trusted somebody the way I trust you. Never felt so seen or understood.”
“Then I really don’t get it.”
Patrick threw on a white shirt.
“I was afraid,” he said, focusing first on the buttons and then the cuffs. Finally, when he felt ready, he looked at Will. “I was afraid that being so deeply known would make it harder to hide who I am from the rest of the world. That I wouldn’t even want to anymore. Because being with you is the first time in years that I’ve felt really myself. And actually liked myself. How could I go back to the way things were after that? Shut myself away after finally breathing clean air?”
Patrick donned his black jacket, and then began to fiddle with the black bow tie in his hands.
“Let me,” said Will, standing and taking it from him. He looped the fabric around Patrick’s neck. “I’m sorry, too,” he added.
“For what?” Patrick asked, his eyes fixed somewhere over Will’s shoulder.
“That day on set. I knew you weren’t ready to come out, that it would mean all kinds of trouble for your career, but I got so insecure that I put pressure on you anyway. It was very unchic of me. I should have known better.”
Will stepped back, inspecting the job he had done on Patrick’s bow tie.
“Not bad,” he decided.
The door clicked open.
“We are leaving,” said Simone. “Now.” She vanished from the doorway, clearly confident that Patrick would follow.
“Looks like we’re out of minutes,” said Will.
Patrick smiled sadly. “Wasn’t that always our problem?”
“Hey, guys…” Audra edged into view in the hallway outside, one hand covering her eyes, the other splayed out in front of her as she inched forward blindly. “Simone says we need to get going…” She parted the fingers obscuring her view and sighed. “I thought you might be fucking,” she said, not bothering to hide her disappointment. “Come on!”
They all exited the suite in a flurry of activity, and Will allowed himself to be swept along in the tide of people, Simone’s edict that he stay behind all but forgotten.
A limousine awaited them in the courtyard, and Will and Patrick piled into the back after Audra, Hector, Corey, and Simone.
“I feel like I’m on my way to prom!” Audra said. “Champagne, anyone?”
“Will, I have to tell you something,” said Patrick. “Actually…all of you.”
“You’re gay,” said Audra. “We know, sweetie. We already did this, remember?”
“It’s not about me,” said Patrick. “It’s about Captain Kismet.”
“What is it?” asked Will, thinking that if he never heard the name Captain buggerfucking Kismet ever again, it would be too soon.
“It’s the reason I was out in Venice,” Patrick said. “The Omega Issue. I found it, Will. And get this…” He took one of the glasses of champagne that Audra was passing around the back for the car, and held it out in front of him. “They were gay, too.”
“Who?” said Hector.
“Say more!” cooed Audra.
Patrick explained what he had learned from the woman out at Venice Beach, showing them all pictures on his phone that she had permitted him to take of the hidden proof of Captain Kismet’s real origins, and in watching him speak, Will felt his eyes threaten to fill. He looked like a man who had just come home.
“We’ve always been here,” said Patrick. “I know that shouldn’t surprise me. But it does. To know that in some small way, the reason I’m here, in this car, with all of you, is because of them. It feels like…”
“Lineage,” said Will.
Patrick smiled, and it was a shining, glorious thing. “Yes. Lineage.”
“This is incredible, Patrick. I’m so happy for you.”
“That’s not all,” Patrick said. He put his hand on Will’s knee and looked over at Simone. “I want to come out.”
For the first time since the elevator doors opened, Will saw Simone’s perfect facade crack, a flicker of panic crossing her eyes. Or was that genuine concern?
“We’ve talked about this,” she said.
“I know,” said Patrick. “And I know I told you this was what I wanted, that I was OK with it. But the truth is, I’m not.”
Simone took a deep breath, as if she had been preparing for this conversation for a long time but was still not eager to have it.
“Things will change,” she said. “The roles that get offered to you. The opportunities. You might even lose the Kismet movies.”
“Money, money, money,” said Patrick. “You’re always talking about the money we’ll lose by being honest, the opportunities that will dry up, the people who’ll boycott, the markets who’ll drop me. But what about the people who don’t? The ones whose lives might even be improved, who might feel less alone?”
“You’re certainly putting a lot of stock in your own significance,” said Simone.
“That’s just the thing!” Patrick said, his voice rising. “It’s not about me! It never was! It’s about all of us. How can we ever expect to change anything when we keep playing by other people’s rules? Fuck them!”
“I don’t know what to say.” Simone’s impassive demeanor finally gave way to a crease at the eyes, a pursing of the lips. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
“Me neither,” Will echoed.
“I’m just full of indignant rage,” said Patrick. “And I also haven’t had sex in several months. Well.” He turned to Will. “There was an aborted encounter in a bathroom stall that I’ll tell you all about later, and it didn’t mean a thing, and we were broken up, and—”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t try to get over me by getting under someone else,” said Will. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I appreciate where you’re coming from,” said Simone, “but representation is just the start. It’s the bare minimum, Patrick. If you want to do this, I will be right there with you, but being an openly gay celebrity is a whole gig by itself. People are going to have questions. And the community will have expectations. The handsome white man is going to need to have a clear stance on all the issues. Book bans. Trans rights. ‘Don’t Say Gay’ legislation. Are you ready for that, Renaissance man? Actor, activist, role model?”
“I’m ready to do the work,” Patrick told her. “I have a lot to make up for.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” said Will, putting his hand over Patrick’s.
“It’s not just you,” said Patrick. “I feel like I owe them. Iris and Charles. They had to lie and hide to be happy. Their story had to be a secret. If after all this time, I’m doing exactly the same, I can’t ever expect anything to change, can I?” His strident tone dropped. “I couldn’t hide and be with you.”
Will looked around the car, at Audra and Hector and Corey and Simone’s expectant stares, and realized that he and Patrick were going to have to have the most intimate, awkward conversation of their relationship with an audience. Which felt perversely apt.
“We don’t have to talk about this now,” he said.
“Don’t we?” Patrick raised an eyebrow. “Then what did you fly all the way to Los Angeles for? The food?”
“I just don’t know how this would ever work,” said Will, flapping his hands around the back of the limousine. “Not to be dramatic, but we’re from different worlds. You make movies in Hollywood, I sing and dance in a dive bar wearing a dress.”
“And yet here you are,” said Patrick, “on your way to a premiere with me.”
“Yes, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in this moment. But what about all the other moments after this one? How do we make it work, day to day?”
Patrick said nothing.
“All I know,” Will continued, “is that before any of this, before the secrets, before you kissed me in the back of that cinema, you were my friend.”
“The back of a movie theater?” Audra remarked. “That is a throwback.”
“I think it’s romantic,” Hector said.
“You think everything is romantic,” Audra said, leaning into him. She tapped the end of his nose. “Don’t you dare kiss me right now, Mr. Ramirez. You’ll smudge my makeup.”
Will cleared his throat, and the two of them hushed apologetically.
“I just want you to know,” he said, turning back to Patrick, “that I am still your friend. I always will be. Whatever happens between us, whatever form it takes and on whatever terms, please just know that I’m here for you.”
He paused, realizing he’d never actually said it out loud. Had been so obsessed with not seeming too needy, of misreading what was there, of being the silly little gay boy who deluded himself into believing a real man might want him.
But what the hell? He’d flown around the globe to have a single conversation. If Patrick hadn’t deduced by now how Will felt about him, then he never would.
“I love you, Patrick,” he said. “I adore you, in fact.”
Will didn’t look away from Patrick, knowing that the next words out of his mouth could change everything.
Except he said nothing. The car stopped, and the door opened before Patrick could answer. The limousine’s interior was illuminated from the outside in a series of rapid flashes: fractured light from strange stars. The world premiere of Kismet 2 was about to begin.
“Showtime,” said Simone.