“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.”
