Before I could speak, he said, “Look, your sexuality is none of my business. Your secret’s safe with me.”
His directness threw me for a loop.
I was used to people beating around the bush, speaking in coded language open to interpretation in case they had to denythe conversation or dispute the facts later. It’d been a long time since someone I knew in a professional capacity had come right out and said the quiet part out loud.
It took me a moment to recalibrate.
I’d rehearsed a dozen variations of this conversation in the shower and then again during the three hours I’d spent pretending to focus on work while David sat six feet away from me. I’d prepared deflections, cover stories, and plausible explanations.
None of them accounted for him coming right out and addressing the elephant in the room.
“I—thank you.”
David leaned back, one ankle crossed over his knee. “Though I will say, as a friend—and I hope it’s okay to call myself that—you might want to know that your secret isn’t as airtight as you think.”
The floor tilted beneath me. “What do you mean?”
“Queer people recognize our own.” He shifted, draping an arm along the back of the sofa. “You’ve spent a lot of years being incredibly close with Senator Hastings. There’s speculation about that closeness in certain circles.”
My mouth went dry. “Certain circles?”
“Queercircles,” he said pointedly.
Obviously, I was familiar with the informal network of queer staffers, consultants, and operatives in the Capital who looked out for each other. I’d kept my distance from them deliberately. If I didn’t show up at their fundraisers, didn’t linger at their tables at events, didn’t engage when the conversation drifted toward anything personal, then maybe nobody would have cause to wonder why a straight man was so interested in what the queer community was up to.
“I’m not asking you to confirm or deny anything,” he continued, holding up a hand. “I’m just telling you that there’sbeen speculation. Most people don’t care, but his engagement did generate a certain amount of gossip.”
I turned toward the window. Below, a few pedestrians hunched into their coats against what I’d been told was an atypically chilly October afternoon.
“How long?” I asked through gritted teeth. “How long have people been talking?”
I turned back to him, bracing myself for the worst.
“Years, though ‘talking’ is probably too generous a word. It’s more like … an open secret that nobody discusses directly because nobody wants to be the one it’s traced back to.”
I pressed my thumb and forefinger into the bridge of my nose and breathed deeply. I fucking knew it. I’d been warning Wyatt that this was going to happen if he didn't stop behaving so recklessly.
“For what it’s worth,” David continued, his voice softer than before. “I’ve been where you are. Not the same situation, obviously, but the same feeling.”
I dropped my hands away from my face. “Yeah?”
“When I was starting out, I was on the Hill. Twenty-four, closeted, working for a congressman who would have had me escorted out of the building if he’d known.” David’s gaze drifted past me, his attention here but not. “I told myself it shouldn't matter who I slept with; I wasn’t an elected official. I didn’t represent anyone back home. I was just a guy who could write a damn good press release.”
I’d been that naive once, too, convinced that my personal life and my professional one could exist. That delusion lasted right up until a legislative aide I knew was quietly let go from her job after someone dug up photos of her dancing topless at a strip club her sophomore year of college. Her work was flawless, but that hadn’t mattered. She was a liability, and liabilities got cut.
I’d watched it happen from three desks away, and the lesson had embedded itself into my bones: in politics, you were never just yourself. You were an extension of everyone you worked for, and they would toss you out like garbage the second your past became their problem.
“What changed for you?” I asked.
“Exhaustion, mostly. I’d spent years monitoring every handshake, every glance, every after-work drink, wondering if the guy I went home with on Tuesday night was going to show up in someone’s opposition file on Wednesday morning.
David leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“I’d managed to work my way up to Press Secretary, and I guess a part of me thought I was untouchable. That maybe I was essential or something. I honestly can’t say if it was me being lazy or cocky, but I got careless. Someone sent pictures of me leaving my boyfriend’s apartment.”
“That’s it?”
I’d seen politicians survive affairs, financial improprieties, even a DUI that made the national news, and bounce back within a cycle or two. A man leaving another man’s apartment could be explained away in a hundred different ways.
