* * *
My green media credential, it turned out, was a skeleton key for a building run by people who profoundly did not expect to be questioned.I walked through doors that should have stopped me.I haunted the VIP press lounge with its sad little fruit trays, the carpeted mezzanine, the roped-off corridors where the real business of the convention got done in handshakes the cameras never saw.I moved like I belonged, because the single greatest disguise in America is a lanyard and a confident walk.
Once, near the private elevators, I saw him.The dark hair, the broad shoulders, moving through the middle of a blonde huddle of women who all looked oddly the same, and my heart did something stupid and lurched.I moved toward him, already arranging my face into something hard—
—and then he turned, and it was a bodyguard.Black-haired, broad, a curled wire behind his ear, scanning the room with the flat eyes of a man paid to find threats.Not Harrison.A stand-in.A decoy the right height and the right color, and Harrison himself was probably sealed away in some suite or a town car, gone behind a wall of muscle where a man like me could never reach him.
I stood there in the lobby with my hard face on and nobody to point it at, and felt like exactly what I was: a guy who'd been used, chasing the ghost of the man who discarded him.
* * *
The Cornhusker Room looked different at dusk.Same leather, same mahogany, but the manic energy from earlier had cooked down into something lower and sadder—ties loosened, delegates slumped, the long exhale of men who'd spent all day worshipping and politicking and had a couple of hours before they had to do it all again.
I sat down at the bar where I'd sat the day before, in the exact spot where a stranger had turned my whole nervous system inside out through a phone screen.When the bartender came I did not order soda water.
“Bulleit,” I said.“Neat.Double.”
He poured it without comment, and I looked at the drink for a second, this amber thing.Because here was the actual load-bearing rule of my entire working life: you don't drink until the story's filed.Not one sip.A drink is a loosened screw, and an investigative reporter with a loosened screw is just a drunk with opinions.I'd watched better men than me drink their credibility down a hotel drain.
I drank it anyway.
It went down like a struck match and I let it, because the truth—the actual truth, the one underneath the anger I'd been carrying around like a shield all afternoon—was that I was scared.The story of my career was somewhere in this hotel sealed behind a wall of bodyguards and I couldn't reach him.
Did I even have to lose the story, though?I mean, why was I even caring that he’d used me?
That was the second whiskey talking, and it talked smooth.Because I had the man dead to rights, the kind of scoop that doesn't just make a career, it defines one.
SHEPHERD, STATESMAN, SERVANT, and a pic of Cole’s torso on a hookup app.Hallie would weep.The network would clear the schedule.I could file the story tonight and be on a national feed by the weekend and never want for work again.
So why was my stomach turning over?
Because—and the whiskey laid it out for me gently, like a friend—because I'd seen his face up close.Not the polished face.The thing underneath it, the half-second of pure hollow despair when he thought he could let down his guard and be himself.
Perhaps it wasn’t hypocrisy?What if it was a cage?What if Harrison Cole didn't want one single inch of the life he was standing up there defending—the wife he didn't have, the God he couldn't please—and what if I was the only person on earth who'd ever seen him unfiltered?
What if I could get him out?Save him.
I set the glass down hard enough that the bartender glanced over.
“Oh, no,” I muttered.“No, no, no.”
Because I knew that thought.I knew it intimately.That was the codependent fantasy of every fool who ever looked at a beautiful disaster and decided love was a renovation project.I was not that guy.Alec Friedman didn't rescue people, or even harbor the delusion that he could.I kept one foot out the door of everything, always, on principle.Hell, that’s why I met guys on Grindr.Just get off and move on.
And here I was, now three whiskeys deep, seriously entertaining the single most one-foot-in thought a human being can have: I think I could save him.
“You absolute clown,” I told myself, for the second time in one day.
And then, because I am weak and the whiskey had kicked the door of my judgment clean off its hinges, I pulled out my phone and opened Grindr.Told myself I was just checking the wreckage.The grid loaded its sad familiar census of the closeted and the terrified, the gray squares and the headless torsos, the family-values delegates refreshing their screens in their separate locked rooms, and my inbox was a horror show, dozens of new messages, the same hungry anonymous tide as yesterday.
But at the bottom of all of it, in the dead thread where it had all started, there was one new message.With a trembling finger I opened the message.
Can we talk?
I stared at it.The bar noise went away.Harrison Cole was reaching back through the same dark channel, asking to see me again.
Every brain cell screamed at me to put the phone down.File the story.Get on a plane back to Richmond.But instead I typed three words and hit send.
12th floor.Now.
