* * *
The doors opened on the twelfth floor and down at the end, outside the door of room 1218 was Harrison Cole.
He'd shed the armor.No jacket.The charcoal suit pants and a white dress shirt open at the collar, sleeves shoved up his forearms, the tie gone entirely, and the immaculate hair was wrecked where he'd dragged his hands through it.He looked nothing like the man in the column of light.He looked like the man from the dark—the real one, the one whose hand I'd held—except now I knew that face threw a forty-foot shadow over ten thousand people, and the knowing sat between us in the hallway like a drawn blade.
He pushed off the wall when he saw me.Opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.I walked the length of the hallway with my keycard already out, and I didn’t look at his face because if I looked into his eyes I was afraid of what I'd do—hit him or kiss him, and I genuinely didn't know which.I swiped the card and the light blinked green.I shoved the door open, walked into the dark room, and left it open behind me, which was the only invitation he was going to get.
The door swung shut on its heavy hinge and clicked, and the sound of it was a starting gun.
I turned around.
He was right there—too close, always too close, the man could not stand in a room with me and leave a decent amount of air in it—and his face in the spill of light from the window was open and wrecked and bracing for whatever I was about to do, and that, somehow, was what tipped me over the edge.
“How could you,” I said, and my voice came out low and shaking and not at all the cool blade I'd wanted, “how could you use me like that?”
He flinched.I kept going.
“Tell me what I was.Go on.I want to hear you say it.”I took a step toward him and he didn't back away.“What am I to you, Harrison?Some cheap trick you can fuck and weep on and discard before the sun comes up?A nameless face on a phone you used to feel something for one night and then walked right past in front of God and ten thousand people like I was nothing—”
My voice cracked clean in half on the last word, and I hated it, hated that he got to see it, hated that after everything the thing underneath the anger wasn't rage at all.
“Answer me, damn it!”My fists clenched at my sides.“What am I to you?”
ChapterEight
Harrison
What am I to you?
The question hung in the dark room between us, and I did the thing I have always done when a question has teeth.I reached for the voice.
It came up out of me automatically, the way it had come up out of me at ten thousand altar calls and four hundred fundraising dinners and one terrible press gaggle the morning after my father died—the low, warm, infinitely reasonable register that has talked grieving widows down off ledges and hostile reporters into softball questions.The shepherd's voice.The voice that manages problems.
“Look” I spread my hands, palms out, the gesture that gentles a room.“I understand that you're upset.If you'll let me explain—I think if we both just take a breath—”
“No.”He said it quietly, and it stopped me cold.“No.Don't.”He took a step toward me, and his eyes were bright and furious.“Don't you dare use that voice on me.That preacher voice.I’ve heard that exact voice come out of you on a fifty-foot screen, and I am not—” his voice shook, “—I’m not one of your church people.Don't you stand in this room where you cried in my arms and try to handle me.”
And the voice died in my throat, because he was right, and because no one—no one in thirty-five years—had ever once refused it.Everyone took the voice.The voice was the whole machine.It was the thing that stood between me and every person alive, and this man had just reached out and switched it off like a lamp.Strip it away and there was only me, and I had not been myself, out loud, in front of another human being, since before I could remember.
“You don't even know my name,” he said, and the hurt in it was so naked it took the legs out from under me.“I gave you—I told you things in this room I've never told anyone, and I'm not even a person to you, I'm a—a torso, a trick, a face you walked past like furniture.Do you even want to know my name?”
“Alec,” I said.
He stopped.
“Your name is Alec.”My voice was not the shepherd's voice now.It was something rawer, something I didn't have as much practice with.“I read it off your press lanyard.Backstage.Right before I walked away from you behind a wall of my mother's friends.”
The color went out of his face.“You—”
“I've known since this morning,” I said.“And I knew what that green pass meant, and the camera.Alec, I knew exactly what a man like you could do to a man like me with one photograph—and I read your name off your chest and I came up to the twelfth floor anyway, because I’ve spent my whole life being careful.Alec, I have built an empire out of being careful, and I couldn’t make myself be careful about you.”
He was staring at me like I'd hit him.“Why,” he breathed.“Why would you walk toward the one person who could end you?”
And the thing came up out of me at last, past the voice, past the filters, past thirty-five years of the watchman at the door, and it came out ugly, unrehearsed, and true.
“Because you think you're some cheap thing I used and threw away.”I stepped into him.He didn't move.“I spent four hours at a country club today behind a wall of senators and diamonds, smiling, closing a donation, being the future of the movement—and the entire time I was praying, actually praying, for the floor to open up and take me.Why?Because every time I opened my mouth all I could taste was you.You’re not a thing that just happened.”My voice broke on it.“You're my ruin, Alec.And I walked up here knowing it, with my eyes open, because one more hour of being ruined by you is worth more to me than the whole rest of my safe and careful and lying life.”
For one second neither of us breathed.
