Gavin loosened his tie. “Don’t get surly with me. I’d much rather be finishing my book in front of the fire.” He paused. “But like it or not, I’m here with my muck boots on, to help clean up the mess.”
Kyle was almost thirty. He’d flown missions into the most hellish of places, killed for his country, and witnessed his own die in her name, and still his parents could manage to make him feel fucking twelve years old.
Olivia began in the business-like tone Kyle recognized as her war-room voice. “Thomas just got finished with the party chairman. The library exhibit should be good PR, but he’s going to cancel the town hall I had planned for the day after in Rochester. I can’t risk a rogue question about this debacle. Kyle, that fundraiser with the New York Law Association should be postponed for a few weeks, too.”
“No.”
“Sorry honey, but I’ve got to bench you.”
“I mean no, we are not doing the sweep-it-under-the-rug thing. I’m not doing it with you.”
Olivia shot him a confounded look.
“Mom, I didn’t want my love life plastered over the airways any more than you did. But contrary to what anyone else thinks, it isn’t some kind of depraved indulgence. Not that I feel like I need to explain myself.” He stood up, placed his drink on the bookcase and raked his sleeve up to his elbow. “Do you see this?” Kyle thrust his arm out in front of him, brandishing the letters USMC stacked one atop the other from just below his elbow to the inside of his wrist. Beneath his wrist, his fingers curled into a fist. “It means I would have died for him. What we’ve been through together…what we made it through…” He shook his head. “No, I won’t lie about my feelings for Manny.”
“What feelings? You’re friends, nothing more.”
“We are
much
more.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I love him, and I won’t lie about it.”
Thomas approached him from the side. “You wouldn’t have to lie. We just need to keep you out of the public eye for a while—keep the questions at bay. The woman, Rebecca, maybe she can help us change the subject from you and Manny. We say that the picture was a playful taunt, that she recruited your friend Manny to make you jealous with that picture of them kissing. New York’s most eligible bachelor is hard to pin down, right?”
Kyle only scowled at him. The words coming out of Thomas’s mouth were so far from right.
Olivia stamped out her cigarette on the makeshift ashtray she’d fashioned from a saucer. “That is good, Thomas. Yes, Rebecca wanted to make him jealous and it worked. Kyle went over to that apartment to tell her how he felt about her. We can spin this into something nearly palatable and put this fire out before it does any more damage.”
Thomas nodded. “It will be easy, Kyle. You just need to look like you’re madly in love with Rebecca until the election. We can even tie in the library exhibit to your story. I know we said that she needed to leave the project, but the star-crossed-lovers angle is an excellent fit.”
Kyle scratched the back of his head, where a mother of a migraine had staked its claim. “And after the election? Then what?”
Olivia shrugged. “Then you can do what you want.”
“What if I want to be with Manny?”
Thomas answered. “We don’t want to risk a probe into the
coincidental
pairing of two childhood friends in the United States Marine Corps. I mean it screams favoritism. After a few weeks, people are going to care a lot less about any of this. Besides, you’ll have all the time in the world to explain how you
discovered
you were gay
after
the election.”
Kyle scoffed at the insinuation, turning to his mother. The sour taste in his mouth curled around his words. “I thought you liked the idea of a gay son, Mom. Pretty sure you thought it would get you a whole new breed of rainbow supporters.”
Olivia cocked her head to the side. “You cannot be serious. Gay is one thing. Carrying on with your best friend
and
another woman is something else entirely. Last I checked, there wasn’t much of an orgy constituency of likely voters.”
Gavin stepped in front of Olivia, tamping her down with his left hand as he extended his right one toward Kyle, ever the peacemaker, even if he accepted the role with reticence. “Son, the election is less than two months away. We’ve all made sacrifices. This is the final push. I don’t know exactly what the hell is going on with you and Manny—”
“And Rebecca,” Sam added promptly, being oh-so-helpful from her front-row seat in the leather club chair. Kyle shot her daggers with his eyes, but she just grinned, no less entertained.
Gavin continued. “You can work with us on this, can’t you?”
“Please honey, we’re so close to the end,” Olivia said. She got up and stood next to Gavin, holding her arms out to Kyle. “What do you say?”
Kyle grimaced. “After the election I can do what I want?”
“We’ll be in a much better position to help the country accept the truth,” Thomas answered.
Kyle set free a long, ragged sigh. “All right…just until the election, I’ll only see Rebecca. After that I’m free to do what I want.”
“As free as any of us are,” Gavin murmured.
Sam sidled up to Kyle as he went to gaze out of the window. “Soooo…the three of you, huh?”
“Save it, Sam. I’m not in the mood.”
“Gotta say, I saw it coming with you and Manny. I’ve seen less epic bro-mances on
Brokeback Mountain
.”
He rolled his eyes.
She grinned. “He’s a beautiful person. You know I love Manny.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She took hold of her pin-straight hair and twisted it at the back of her head like she’d planned to put it in a bun; only she let it go and it fell to her shoulders again. Kyle always wondered why she did that when she had something serious to talk about—well, serious for Sam. Finally she spoke again. “Rebecca just a plaything between you two?”
He frowned. “Hell no. I really like her. Manny might already be in love with her.”
Sam twisted her hair again. “Wow. You sure know how to keep things interesting around here.”
“Well you’ve been in Paris, acing your first two semesters in international law, so I guess it’s my turn.”
“Yeah, about that…”
“About what?”
“I dropped out.”
Kyle leaned in. “What? When?”
“Three months ago. I’m designing naughty lingerie, like I always wanted to.”
“Holy shit, Sam. Mom and Dad don’t know, do they?”
“No, and I think they have enough to deal with right now, don’t you?”
Kyle had to agree. Another shock might put Olivia over the edge.
“That was one of my corset bras Rebecca was wearing in that photo. I gave it to her up at the lake.” She let her hair spin loose again. “From the look on your face, I guess she kept my secret.”
Kyle let it sink in that Rebecca knew his sister’s secret before he did. “You could have told me.”
“Confide in Mister Perfect? No thank you.” Sam put her hand on his shoulder. “But now I think maybe I was wrong about that.”
“I’m proud of you, Sam. You know that, don’t you?”
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind when Mom and Dad disinherit me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Kyle spun the white cocktail napkin on the small, scuffed wooden table with his index finger. The bar was an old dingy dive at the ass end of the Bowery, a holdover from the neighborhood’s grittier days and a place he’d frequented on more occasions than he cared to remember. It was a place where lost people went to never be found. Nobody gave him a second look. Since the interview, he drew a crowd almost everywhere he went.
Manny strode in, leaving the bright daylight behind him with a snap of the closing metal door.
Kyle took another sip of vodka and watched Manny’s approach while his heart went to war with the well-laid plans he’d agreed to only days before.
Manny stopped at Kyle’s table and shoved his hands into his front pockets, his muscles bunching with the motion. “So, why did you want to meet here?”
“Sit, please.” Kyle could see his reluctance. He swept his hand over Manny’s thigh, encouraging him, and his hand nearly caught fire with the need to touch more.
Manny appeased him, though his expression was cautious. He tossed a copy of page six onto the table. Kyle recognized the headline:
Bachelor Hunter off the Market.
Manny sniffed. “Just get it over with.”
“I love you. You gotta know that.”
“But.”
“It’s not like it would be the end of us. Just a few more weeks and we’ll be free to be together the way we want to. But for now, I need to make sure no one suspects we have anything between us. To the press it will just be me and Rebecca who are involved.” He paused, trying to look Manny in the eye, though all he saw there was ice. “They’re threatening to investigate Olivia on her use of the office to get us assigned together. If they know we’re lovers it will make things a thousand times worse.”
“What does Rebecca think about this?” Manny jabbed at the article featuring a staff picture of Rebecca from the library.
“She won’t take my calls.”
“Hmm. Go figure.” Manny folded his arms over his broad chest. He examined Kyle with searching eyes. “How the fuck did we end up here again?” His nose twitched, an acidic sneer marring his lips. “Oh,
I
know…you’re a coward. I never thought I would say that about you, Kyle, but it’s the fucking truth.”
Kyle flinched at his pointed words. “This isn’t like last time.”
Manny raised his eyebrow. “No? Olivia just going to let you off the hook once she’s reelected? What about the fast track to the presidential race? That just suddenly going to go away?”
Kyle started to answer emphatically, but now he wasn’t so confident. “We could keep things on the down low, be more careful.” He slid his hand onto Manny’s knee under the table, but the words felt sour in his mouth.
“I’m done hiding. If you’re not, then we have a problem.” Manny stood up.
“Manny, please. Just give it a try.”
“When you won’t even give us a chance?” He shook his head. “I love you, Kyle. I will always love you, but I fucking deserve better than that.” Manny got up. “Don’t call me.”
Kyle didn’t answer. The things he should say seemed to be caught in his throat. He watched Manny walk past the string of rickety tables to the door. A flash of light split the shadows, and then he was gone.
* * *
Manny wished he was scheduled for work, wished he had more to do than laundry. But even that didn’t get done. Instead, Manny got on his bike and rode the trafficked streets from one end of Manhattan to the other. At least he’d stopped checking his phone every five minutes. He hadn’t done that in days. Rebecca had only answered one text anyway, telling him she’d gone home to her parents and that she’d be back in a few more days to get her things.
Emptiness plagued him, and the apartment only seemed to remind him of everything he’d lost in the last few months. He found himself in the real estate office at the end of his block just as the evening light started to settle upon the city bricks. He’d sublet the place. The helpful woman manning the desk told him it would be a cinch to get the apartment rented in such a prestigious building. She even had some suggestions for reasonable rents further downtown. But Manny wanted out of the city. He was a small-town soul and completely out of place in the hustle-bustle of Manhattan. An hour commute to work would suit him just fine.
He thanked the agent and passed over the spare key that Rebecca had mailed from her parents so they could show the place when he wasn’t there. Then he left, feeling no less miserable than when he’d walked in.
The wife of one of the other pilots had recently given birth, and Manny was happy to take on the extra shifts. Work, eat, sleep; it was all he wanted. If he’d had any chance of forgetting that the Hunter exhibit opened the first week of the month, the calendar reminder Rebecca had surreptitiously placed on his phone weeks ago took care of that. A Hunter-free lifestyle was going to be hard enough to achieve with Olivia’s campaign ads airing every five minutes. He had no intentions of purposely subjecting himself to a run-in with any of them.
He deleted the reminder and shoved his phone back in his pocket, thankful to be headed back to work for his afternoon shift.
* * *
Rebecca stared at the e-mail again, her expression a sheet of blankness reflected in the screen of her laptop. It had been almost two weeks. After a fountain of shed tears, even her face was tired. She hadn’t known how long she planned to stay in Aurora, with her little brothers fighting over the TV remote and the familiar banter of her parents. She felt safe and sheltered and suffocated all at once. As time went by her emotions began to dull and her time in Manhattan seemed like an odyssey she’d fooled herself into thinking was real.
Manny and Kyle had both tried to reach her, but she’d avoided their calls, first because she needed to think and later because she hadn’t figured out what to say. She only knew one thing: the weeks she had spent homeless, in a dead-end job, without most of her stuff had been the best time of her life.
A soft voice came from behind her. “If you’re going to make it there in time, you’d better leave now.” Maddie Sinclair rested her hand on her daughter’s chair.
Rebecca fingered the frayed edge of fabric on her mother’s dining chair. She’d spent many hours in that chair doing her homework; she’d spent every holiday in it that she could remember, with the people she loved. “I quit, remember.”
“Says here that you’re welcomed back if you change your mind. Craig wants you to host the opening like you planned to.”
Rebecca slumped against the chair and closed her laptop. “I really don’t think I can go back, Mom. I was made a laughingstock on TV. The whole city thinks I’m some kind of wanton slut.” After the first week, Rebecca had finally broken down and talked to her mother about the disastrous interview, dirty details and all. She had listened quietly, without judgment, and had simply given her a hug and a cup of tea. Then she had let her sulk away the last few days in peace.