“It’s strike three,” Quinn said miserably.When Jem raised his eyebrows, he continued, “He’s tried this before.The first time, he was messaging this waiter at the resort we were staying at.President Fitzpatrick lit him up, but Tafton promised it was just a slip.The next time, it was porn.”
“He put it on the TV in our next meeting,” Beckett said.“Made us watch.”
“And sent it to Tafton’s in-laws?”Tean asked.
Quinn nodded.
“Hence,” Beckett said, “strike three.”
“So, you think he got caught,” Jem said, “and Gerald was going to tell Nora’s family again?”
Quinn and Beckett exchanged another look, but neither of them said anything.
“The problem with that,” Jem said, “is he was with Aiden, Dean, and Sawyer last night.So, he’s got an alibi.Nora, too, if that’s your next guess.She was with Mckell at the theater.”
Beckett pursed his mouth.Quinn rubbed the back of his neck.
“What is it?”Tean said.
To Jem’s surprise, it was Quinn who spoke—voice low, head down, words aimed at the floor.“Tafton wasn’t with Aiden and Dean.”
“Yes, he was,” Tean said.“They all said he was.”
But Jem said, “Where was he?”
“I saw him when I went to get ice,” Quinn said, his gaze coming up to meet Jem’s.“He was going somewhere with Stephen.”
17
Tean followed Jem out of the locker room.The sounds of splashing filtered into their silence as they moved past the pool again.The echo of their steps bounced off the tile.Once again, the smell of chlorine met them; a middle-aged couple was soaking in a hot tub, while another man was laying a towel on a chaise, fussing with it, lining it up exactly.A woman was trying to get sunscreen on her back even though: a) they were indoors, and b) it was snowing.
All of it registered only distantly for Tean.He was still playing back fragments of the conversation with Quinn and Beckett.The app on their phones.The interviews or one-on-ones, or whatever they wanted to call them, that they had with Gerald.The threat of being outed or shamed.Of having their secrets and their fantasies exposed to the people most capable of doing them harm.Of having what they wanted being turned against them like a knife.
The splashing.
The sound of water on tile.
The memory was so strong that, in the first fragment of a second, it blocked out everything else.The first time with Ammon.In the apartment they shared in Lima.They were both missionaries.They’d both been sent to Lima.In the strange cognitive dissonance that had still marked that time in Tean’s life, when he had simultaneously believed and not believed, it had seemed like a sign.Like God had meant for this to happen.The doors to the balcony open, and the sea breeze making the curtains move like smoke.The shower running, Tean stepping under the spray, and then the door opening, and Ammon moving into the room: blond, leanly muscled, perfect.He had tested the spray with one hand, like this was just another shower, and then he had moved into the water, and Tean had only been able to stare at him, at how the water ran over his shoulders like silver, following his chest, draining across his belly until he was looking at Ammon’s dick.It was bigger than Tean’s.Hardening.Tean tried to say something, but he didn’t know what, and Ammon kept coming, moving into the water, and then Tean hit the wall, and there was nowhere left to go.Literally.Figuratively.Theologically.Trapped, said a voice that sounded a little like Jem, between a dick and a hard place.Ammon had touched his arms.Settled his hands on Tean’s hips.Kissed his shoulder.Not his mouth, though.At the time, that had seemed…all right.Understandable.And Tean had been twenty, and his body had done what any twenty-year-old’s would have done.Dicks bumping against each other.And then Ammon’s arms around his waist.Tean painfully aware of the awkwardness of his own movement, of how he kept humping into the crease of Ammon’s thigh, and the agony ofknowinghe was supposed to be doing something else, something sexier, and, at the same time, feeling better than he’d ever felt in his life.
In the dark, that night, from the bed across the room, Ammon had said,We can tell people when we get home.
Tean had forgotten, until that moment, that he had cried himself to sleep.Quietly.So Ammon wouldn’t hear.For a moment, everything after that night opened up for him like a pit he was tipping into: the years of hiding, the years of loneliness, the years of wanting and hoping, and the years of being disappointed over and over again.Years of being a fool.Years of the hurt that grew and spread until it was nothing but numbness.
And then he was back in his body, tense, shoulders aching and teeth gritted and his head like he had a fever.They’d left the pool behind along with the sounds of water, and now they were following a carpeted hallway with more windows that looked out on—well, at that moment, the blizzard.
Tean opened his mouth to apologize for disappearing inside his own head, but Jem was staring straight ahead.His mouth was set in a tight line, and there was the faintest furrow between his eyebrows.His hair, Tean noticed for the first time, was a mess in a way it almost never was with Jem—which was to say, a little mussed, bangs spilling over his forehead, a few flyaways in back.For Tean, it probably would have been one of his top ten hair days.But, then, of course Jem’s hair wasn’t in its familiar state of perfect control: they’d been on the run, almost literally, since the moment they’d gotten up.And the hat, said that voice that sounded a little like Jem.Larsen made us wear those stupid hats.
“Are you okay?”Tean asked.
Jem didn’t say anything.
“Jem?”
“Hm?”
“Are you okay?”
“What?Oh.Yeah.”
