Chapter Four
“I still wish you’d talked to me before you came out,” Walter said, sitting heavily behind his desk as Danny followed him into the office. “But I suppose what’s done is done. That interview was a good call. We gotta send this O’Connor kid… I dunno, flowers or something, for making you look like a hero.”
Danny blushed, both at the idea of being a hero and at the idea of sending Eliot flowers.
He already felt ridiculous over the text he’d sent to thank him, and that had been days ago.
Walter was right, though—Eliothadmade him look good, and had left out all the parts that wouldn’t have helped his image as promised. Danny hadn’t really expected him to do that. It probably would have been more in Eliot’s interests to expose him as less-than-perfect.
“Would he want tickets, d’you think?” Walter asked, breaking Danny’s train of thought.
“Uh. I doubt it. Maybe chocolate, or something? Everyone likes chocolate.”
“Done. We want him on-side. I guess he likes you.” Walter smiled wryly. “Good job picking out a gay reporter.”
“I didn’t pick the reporter,” Danny corrected. “Just the magazine.”
“Well, they sent you the right one.” Walter leaned back in his chair, putting his boots up on the desk. “But that’s only step one. If you’re retiring at the end of the season, we need to start thinking about advertising deals and the like. Your savings won’t last forever, but if you can top ‘em up and make some smart investments, you might never have to work another day in your life.”
It was true that Danny would have liked a year or two off, but he didn’t intend to lead a life ofcompleteleisure after that. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but permanent retirement sounded boring.
A family would have been nice. Someone he could come home to, maybe a dog. Or a cat, cats seemed to be less work. Kids, one day, maybe. He liked the idea of being a father.
All that was way in the future, but he had to start thinking about the future. This phase of his life was coming to an end.
“Okay, so… thoughts on that? I don’t wanna work with anyone who’s, like, poisoning the water supply or using slave labor or whatever, but otherwise I don’t really care.”
“See, that’s the thing. Being out closes off a lot of opportunities with companies who’d rather not be seen as political.”
Danny barely suppressed a growl at that. Everything was political. Some people just didn’t want to have to pick a side when it came to gay rights.
Which was insulting, because the two possible sides were live and let live, or arbitrarily hate a group of people because of who they were attracted to. To Danny, that was a pretty clear right and wrong.
He didn’t think of himself as a pillar of moral virtue or anything, but common decency seemed like a low bar to ask people to step over. The fact that some of them refused, andgot away withrefusing, was one of the most frustrating things in the world to him.
“But it’s gotta open up some where they’re actively looking to seem progressive, right?” Danny asked. He’d known that coming out would screw up some opportunities for him, but he was sure there’d be others.
The cost of being out was worth it. He couldn’t have lived the rest of his life in the closet, and he should never have had to be in there in the first place. If being out in public made any difference to that—and he hoped it would—then it was the right choice.
Walter shrugged. “Sure, but they’re usually not companies who necessarily carewhatyou’re famous for. If you want to capitalize on those opportunities, you’re gonna need a boyfriend. You’re not really gay to advertisers until you’re out there in the world holding hands with another man. Then, they care.”
“So your advice isfind a boyfriend?” Danny asked. Walter said it as though it was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world.
Meanwhile, Danny had been so desperate for affection that he’d been practically drooling over a reporter.
“Yes,” Walter said, deadly serious. “Clean cut, but with personality. Not a fan. Someone with a career of their own, but not one that overshadows yours. A little more classically gay than you would be nice, too.”
Danny opened his mouth to argue over the phraseclassically gay, but an image had popped into his head as Walter had been describing the ideal person.
Eliot fit all of that description, down to the last detail. He had everything on Walter’s shopping list.
The problem was that Eliot seemed unlikely to want to date him, especially if he knew it was for appearances.
Unless…
No. It was a terrible idea.
All the same, Danny wanted to run it past Walter first, just to make sure it was as terrible as he thought it was.
