“I know about your wife,” Alec said quietly, into my chest.
My hand went still in his hair.
“I looked you up,” he said.“This afternoon.When I was angry.Kimberly.Ten years.The grief that built a ministry.”He said the headline with a gentleness that took the cruelty out of it, which was somehow worse.“I'm sorry.That's an ugly thing to throw in a man's face, and I'm not throwing it.I just—I didn't want to lie here knowing something about you that you didn't know I knew.I'm done with the part where we don't say the true thing.”
And there it was.The opening.The one door I’d kept shut against every person who had ever loved me or used me or both.I could give him the public Kimberly.The slideshow.The hymn.The brave widower.I had given that version to the entire country; I could certainly give it to one man in the dark.
I gave him the other one instead.
“I never loved her,” I said.The words came out into the quiet and did not strike me dead.“That's the thing nobody knows.My parents arranged it.I was twenty-two and she was lovely and kind and as trapped as I was, though I was too young and frightened to see it then.I was good to her.Faithful even, in the only way the world could see.And I never once wanted her.Kimberly knew it—she had to have known it. You can't share a bed with a man for three years and not feel the wall standing in the middle of it.But we never spoke of it.”
His arm tightened across me.Alec didn't say anything.He just listened, which I have learned is the rarest thing most people do.
“And when she died.”My voice went very low.“I want to tell you I grieved her.I truly did.The waste of it, a girl who never got her own life either.But the first thing I felt, Alec, the very first thing, before the funeral and the cards and the casseroles—was relief.So much relief I went out into my mother's garden at midnight and was sick into the roses.Because she was free, and God forgive me, so was I.And then—” the worst of it, the thing I had never said aloud in ten years, “then I watched my mother turn the dead girl into the most useful asset the ministry ever had.”
“What was that?”Alec murmured.
I took a deep breath and spat it out.“The grieving widower.Ten years a monument to a love that never existed.No one asks why I don't remarry.They don't have to.A dead wife is the perfect wife.She does the one job I could never do—she makes me look like the man I preach about.”
The silence after that was enormous.
I lay there with my own confession cooling in the air and understood that I had just handed this man, a journalist, this green-lanyard wearing stranger the rope to hang me with.Not the affair.The affair was just sex; sex they could spin, sex they survive.This was worse.This was the rot at the foundation of the whole sacred story.The dead girl in the yellow dress, Kimberly.If Alec wanted to end me, I’d just told him exactly where to press.
And I waited, naked in every way a man can be, for him to pick up the rope.
He lifted his head off my chest.In the thin silver light I couldn't read his face, only his eyes, and his eyes were not the journalist's eyes and not the furious eyes from the doorway.They were something I had no defense for at all.
“Thank you,” he said.“For telling me the truth.”
And he laid his head back down over my heart, which was galloping in my chest.
I looked up at the dark ceiling of a room I would have to leave by morning, with a man asleep on my chest who could destroy me with a single afternoon's work, and had instead just chosen, inexplicably, to stay.
Would I regret it?
ChapterNine
Harrison
Iwoke 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.
