“It’s not realistic, but it’s kind of soapy fun if you want to watch it with me.”
Jackson had nowhere else to be. The campaign staff all knew he was here. They’d ordered enough pizza to feed the lawyers, Dee, Dum, and Sam, who were all also still staying in the hotel. They’d wound up setting itup in one of the hotel conference rooms, so the hotel staff knew Jackson was still here as well, though he supposed he had some plausible deniability here; he could say they were strategizing, or Jackson was preparing Park for the apartment walkthrough the next day.
Or Jackson was overthinking this. Or stalling.
“I can watch for a little bit. I probably shouldn’t stay too late.”
“No,I know. It’s only an hour.”
“All right.”
Park went into the restroom and emerged a few moments later in a pair of knit pajama pants and a Columbia T-shirt. He futzed with the pillows until they made a nice pad against the headboard, and then he leaned back on them. Jackson stayed on the couch for as long as he could stand it, but around the opening credits of the show, he gave up and satwith Park on the bed.
Reluctantly, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about us.”
“All right. Have you decided anything?”
“Maybe. No. Yes.” Yes, he’d decided. But no, he didn’t want to confront that decision.
Park shot Jackson a sidelong look with a bit of a smile. “You can take the time to decide what you want.”
“I need something from you, too. The whole window thing.”
Park nodded. “I know.”
“And we agreed to table this, so I don’t even want to bring it up, but spending all day with you...it’s hard to spend time with you without, you know,beingwith you.”
Park took a deep breath and looked down, toward his knees.
“You keep speaking in hypotheticals,” Jackson said. “What would you do in an ideal world? Well, I have to deal with my practical world.And as much as I care about you, I can’t go back in the closet. I try to live my life authentically and honestly, you know? I work for causes I believe in. I do pro bono work for the LGBT center in the Village. I host a big party for the LGBT lawyers in New York every year. Even when I still worked as a prosecutor, they sent a lot of hate crime cases my way because they knew I’d be good with thevictims. Because I’m a big gay lawyer and have never represented myself as anything but that.” Jackson leaned back against the pillow wall. “I’m other things, too, of course. I’m a damnedgoodlawyer, for one thing.”
“That you are.”
Jackson let out a sigh. “I do care about you, Park, and even in these odd circumstances, it’s felt good to be with you again. But the stupid shit like havingto hide any evidence so the hotel staff wouldn’t know you’d had sex...that gets so tiring. And this is just a couple of days of sneaking around. I can’t spend the rest of my life acting this way.”
“I know. And I’m sorry.”
“What is it you want here?”
Park sighed heavily, but his gaze remained focused on the TV screen, which Jackson found unnerving. “I don’t know yet. I wonder if mylife would be easier if I came out. Maybe I’d lose the election, but maybe it would be worth it in the long run. Except I really want to be a senator. I want to win the election.”
Jackson nodded, because he believed Park would be great as a senator. He could imagine Park being the sort of senator they tried to get on TV for interviews, because he was charismatic and photogenic in a way a lotof sitting senators weren’t. Park would excel at discussing issues, at the day-to-day lawmaking work, at the politics.
Park said, “I suppose I could say, you know, when I first got into politics, same-sex marriage wasn’t even legal in New York State. Now we’re on a whole different playing field.”
“Your voting record is mostly LGBT-friendly.”
“I had to vote that way. I’m not that muchof an asshole.”
Jackson nodded. “But you’ve been cagey with press questions. Reed pointed some examples of that out to me. Why is that?”
“No good reason. The worst was that suit that ended up in the state supreme court about that florist upstate, and I worried discussing it too much would make people take a closer look at my personal life, which I don’t think would have happened in retrospect.Then SCOTUS ruled that same-sex marriage was legal and I kind of made myself scarce. But I’d been in the Assembly for all of six months, and my paranoia was intense enough to affect my decision-making abilities, I guess.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Jack. I thought of you a lot while we all waited for that decision. I kept thinking that if I’d been a braver man, I would have asked youto marry me when I still had the chance.”
Jackson’s heart kicked up to a faster pace. This wasn’t the first time he’d wondered how his life would be now if Park had done just that. And Park saying things like that made what Jackson would have to say that much harder to voice.
“I also hoped you’d be happy one day, that you’d find someone you loved enough to marry, even though watching thathappen probably would have killed me.” Park leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “I know I must sound indecisive, but you have to believe me when I tell you that I never regretted a minute of the eight years we spent together.”
“I do believe you. I don’t, either, for what it’s worth.”
