Where There's Smoke

by L. A. Witt

  “Will do,” I said with a two-fingered mock salute.

  “On it,” Jesse said, avoiding her eyes and mine.

  She glanced back and forth between us, chewing her lower lip, but once again let it go and reached for the door. “Anyway, I’ll see you guys in a little while.”

  “See ya,” we both said quietly.

  Ranya left, and Jesse closed the door behind her. Once we were alone, he faced me and leaned against the door. For a long, long moment, we just stared at each other, and fuck if I knew what to say or how to say it.

  Jesse took a breath. “This isn’t about the rally, is it?”

  I moistened my lips. “No.” I stood and took a few tentative steps toward him. He pressed himself against the door like a cornered animal. Like he needed to stay as far away from me as he could while staying in the same room. I stopped, hooking my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans in an attempt to look relaxed. Nonconfrontational, if nothing else.

  “Jesse,” I said softly, “we need to talk.”

  He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the door. I chewed my lip, trying to ignore the nicotine craving that rose exponentially with each passing second. This had to be handled indoors, away from prying eyes and ears, so the smoke would just have to wait.

  “Look, about the other night,” I said. “It was…”

  It was what? My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my breath stayed in my lungs. It was what, Anthony? Panic quickened my heartbeat. I’d needed—and dreaded—this opportunity since the morning we flew to San Francisco, but hadn’t thought this far ahead. What did I say? How did I address this? What the fuck kind of damage control did a situation like this warrant?

  “Was it a mistake?”

  Jesse’s voice startled me.

  “What?” I barely forced the word past my dry lips.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me across the canyon of hotel carpet. “Was that night, what happened, a mistake?”

  I swallowed hard, running a hand through my hair. “I’m your damned campaign manager. It’s—”

  “I’m not talking about the campaign.”

  “Then…?”

  Jesse shifted his weight, his shirt rustling against the door, and with what looked like a lot of effort, he held my gaze. “Not campaign manager to candidate. Just man to man.”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Jesse, we… I mean, we can’t pretend we’re not campaign manager and candidate.”

  “Can we at least drop that long enough to have this conversation?” His tone was even and collected but held a tense undercurrent I couldn’t quite identify.

  I swallowed, my chest tightening as I struggled to figure out what to say. Finally I managed a quiet, “Does it make a difference? If we drop it or not, I mean?”

  Just as quietly, he said, “It does to me.”

  I watched him, unsure how to respond to that.

  Jesse shifted his weight again. “Look, this may sound stupid, but you’re the only man who’s ever kissed me.”

  I blinked. “What?” Jesse had been closeted all this time, but it hadn’t even dawned on me that he’d never so much as touched another man. “You’ve never… You’re…”

  “I’ve been with men.” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Plenty of them. The thing is, every man on the planet who’s ever touched me like that thought I was someone who happened to look like Jesse Cameron.” He swept the tip of his tongue across his lips and stared at the floor between us. “You’re the first and only one who’s ever known who I was. And I…” He looked at me through his lashes. “Call it ridiculous, childish, whatever, but I need to know if that was a mistake.”

  “I…” …wasn’t sure how to answer that. Was it?

  Jesse exhaled sharply and pushed himself off the door. “That’s what I thought.” He started for the door handle.

  “Wait.”

  He stopped, his hand hovering above the handle.

  “Listen, I…I don’t know.” I avoided his eyes. “All I’ve been thinking about is how this will impact the campaign. I haven’t even stopped to think about how I felt about it. Feel about it. I’ve just been trying to do damage control, I guess.”

  “Damage control. God.” He laughed bitterly and shook his head. “You know, that was the one time in my life something like that happened and I didn’t feel like it was fake. And even that needs fucking damage control.”

  Before I could speak, he pulled open the door, and by the time any words made it to my tongue, I was alone, staring at a closed door as my heartbeat pounded out the phantom cadence of his footsteps fading down the hall.

  I sank onto the bed where he and Ranya had lounged earlier. Rubbing my temples, I closed my eyes and swore under my breath. As his campaign manager, I knew that night was a mistake. A huge one. But man to man? I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t allowed myself to. With all the other factors in place that couldn’t be changed, it didn’t matter.

  Did it?

  I drummed my fingers on my knee. I needed a cigarette. No thinking was going to happen in here until I had some nicotine in my system, so I grabbed my room key and hurried outside. Maybe some air—toxic and otherwise—would help me clear my head and figure this the fuck out.

  In the parking lot, squinting against the unforgiving blades of sunlight bouncing off steel and glass, I lit a cigarette. As soon as it was between my lips, I pulled in as much smoke as I could in one breath. I closed my eyes, letting the smoke out slowly. The twitchy, shaky craving slowly receded, and my nerves settled as much as I could ask the nicotine to settle them.

  The panic burning its way through my veins wasn’t the “oh shit, I’m losing control” panic that always came with seeing a campaign potentially unraveling at the seams. That simmered below the surface, of course; I was constitutionally incapable of turning off the campaign-manager brain most of the time, and the risk of all this fucking up Jesse’s campaign was not lost on me.

  But this was something much deeper. More unsettling. Something that burrowed into the center of my chest and left my heart pounding with the certainty I’d just fucked something up. And I wasn’t sure how badly or how to fix it, and even if I did, maybe there was no fixing it. Maybe there was no going back.

  With a shaking hand, I brought my cigarette to my lips. No going back or not, this ache in my chest promised not to let up until I did something. What, I didn’t know. But something other than sucking down nicotine alone in the lingering heat of a desert afternoon in a hotel parking lot. Whatever conclusion I came to about what the fuck was going on, it didn’t do me a damned bit of good out here.

  I dropped my cigarette and crushed it under my heel as I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. Typing out my text message took a few tries; my fingers were too infuriatingly unsteady to hit the tiny keys, but after some cursing and backspacing, the only four words I could think of were on the screen:

  It wasn’t a mistake.

  My thumb hovered over the Send button for a moment. Holding my breath, I pressed the button. Before the ‘message sent’ confirmation even flashed on the screen, I had another cigarette out of the pack and between my lips.

  Christ, Jesse. You’re going to drive me to chain-smoking.

  My heart beat faster, though I didn’t know how much of that was the double hit of nicotine and how much was from half-panicked nerves.

  Not sixty seconds after I sent the message, my phone chirped. Cigarette balanced between two fingers, I pulled up the new text.

  Sure about that?

  I exhaled. No. No, I wasn’t sure about that. It may have been a huge fucking mistake, but…no, it wasn’t. And this wasn’t getting any closer to ironed out via text messages.

  Pocketing my phone, I crushed my half-smoked cigarette under my heel beside the first one. Then I went back into the hotel. I took the stairs to kick away some of this nervous energy. That, and waiting for the slow-as-death elevator to get me to the third floor would just give me too much idle ti
me for second thoughts and backing out.

  On the third floor, I walked past my room. Ranya’s. Those occupied by other staffers who’d come up for tomorrow’s rally. All the people who didn’t need to know about this. On to the room of the one person who might have a better grasp on what the fuck was going on than I did.

  At his door, I hesitated. Then I took a deep breath and tapped just loud enough for him and no one else to hear. But of course, the sound fucking echoed all down the hall, and for a few seconds, I was sure every damned door was about to fly open.

  None of them did, though.

  Including this one.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and exhaled. Come on, Jesse.

  Maybe he didn’t hear me. That was it. Maybe…if I just…

  I knocked a little harder. A moment later I wished I hadn’t, because quiet footsteps on the other side told me he had heard me this time.

  The chain on the other side rattled and slid—which way?—and the deadbolt clicked. I gulped.

  Then the door opened.

  Preoccupied or not, I couldn’t not notice how he looked. Fuck. He already had on his tuxedo shirt and slacks, and his bow tie hung untied around his neck. A few more minutes and a black jacket, and he’d have eliminated any chance I had of forming a coherent thought.

  His expression was almost blank. Almost neutral. Only the slightest lift of his eyebrows and the suggestions of crevices between them hinted at something other than complete apathy. The man could put on an act, but the cracks were showing, and the more they showed—his Adam’s apple bobbing, his lips tightening—the more my own cool exterior threatened to crumble.

  I cleared my throat. “Can I come in?”

  He stepped aside. I walked past him, and he closed the door with a quiet click. Still trying to find the right words, I took a deep breath, but Jesse spoke first.

  “Look, obviously we shouldn’t have done it,” he said coldly. “Can we just let it go and move on?”

  I faced him. “You didn’t believe my message?”

  One eyebrow rose in unmistakable “fuck no, I didn’t believe you” fashion.

  I exhaled and ran a hand through my hair. “I mean it, Jesse. This is…this…it’s complicated. That doesn’t mean it was a mistake.”

  “How could it not be?” he snapped.

  “Look, I’m your campaign manager,” I said. “It’s up to me to keep this all together between now and the election. I owe it to you to put that responsibility first and foremost.”

  Jesse looked away, his lips thinning into a bleached line.

  “But that doesn’t mean the other night was a mistake,” I whispered.

  His gaze darted back toward me. “Then what was it?”

  “I…” I swallowed hard and shook my head slowly as I took a step toward him. He tensed, so I stopped. “I don’t know what it was, Jesse. All I know is…”

  Is…

  What, Anthony?

  The silence went on, and with every second, the panic knotted tighter in my chest with the certainty he was a moment away from throwing me out. I supposed I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.

  Jesse inclined his head. “All you know is, what?” His tone was laced with suspicion and skepticism.

  “Nothing.” I took another step toward him, reaching for his waist. “I know absolutely nothing.” And with that, I kissed him.

  He stiffened, and panic ripped through me. Certain he was about to shove me away, I almost beat him to the punch and drew back, but when he put his hands on my chest, he grabbed fistfuls of my shirt so I couldn’t pull away.

  I broke the kiss and met his eyes. “As your campaign manager, I owe you better than this. I know this is a bad idea, Jesse, and so do you, but I can’t help it.” With a trembling hand, I touched his face. “I want you.”

  Jesse swallowed. He parted his lips like he was about to speak, but after a few seconds of silence, he pulled me into another kiss. He wrapped his arms around me and pushed me back a step. I took another step, pulling him with me. When he pushed me a second time, my calf bumped the bed, so I grabbed the front of his shirt and dragged him down onto the mattress.

  “God, Anthony,” he moaned between kisses. “I want you so fucking bad.” Before I could speak, he pressed his hips against mine. Through his slacks and my jeans, our erections brushed, and as he kissed me again, his loose bow tie whispered across my neck like a soft, cool breath.

  Bow tie.

  Tuxedo shirt.

  Slacks.

  His tuxedo. Mine, which still hung in my room.

  I broke the kiss and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We don’t have time,” I whispered and lifted my head to kiss him again. “We have”—I picked up the end of his bow tie—“we have that dinner.”

  He exhaled. “I know. Damn it.”

  I combed my fingers through his hair. “We’ll finish this.”

  “When?” He bent and kissed me again, pausing to murmur, “God, I’m going to go crazy waiting even a few minutes…”

  I shivered. “You’re not the only one. And I don’t know when. Soon, I hope.” As he raised his head and met my eyes, I added, “As soon as we fucking can.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jesse

  A week after that trip to Redding, I had already decided on my first order of business as California governor. Somehow or another, whether or not it was in my power, I was finding a damned way to get the word soon added to the Geneva Convention as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, especially where it pertained to someone trying to campaign alongside the man he desperately needed to sleep with. Especially when that man shared those feelings, the two of them had to be all but inseparable every fucking day, and they couldn’t get five goddamned minutes of privacy for a desperately needed quickie or something.

  We stole the odd kiss now and then, including a dangerously long one in a hotel stairwell in Mendocino, but it wasn’t enough. It was a tease, not a release. Every day, every night, just more teasing. More torturing ourselves.

  Frustrated and exhausted, I closed my eyes and leaned against the headrest in the back of a limo that inched through San Diego traffic.

  Now that we both knew what we wanted, it was a matter of discreetly being in the same place at the right time with condoms at the ready and nothing on the agenda for a few minutes. Soon, we’d get each other alone and into bed. Soon, I’d find out what Anthony looked like naked and how he felt inside me and how he sounded when he came. Soon.

  Soon. Soon. Soon. Never fucking soon enough.

  And with the gubernatorial primary coming up fast, the campaign had accelerated to breakneck speed. Speeches, appearances, dinners, rallies, baby kissing, ass kissing, and sustaining life with coffee and Red Bull. Downtime? What downtime? Even when we found a few minutes of that mythical downtime, we were either around other people or too exhausted to move.

  By this point, I’d written off soon as something around the time of the discovery of cold fusion and the colonization of Mars.

  “Doing all right?” Anthony’s voice made me shiver.

  I opened my eyes. He sat across from me, his back to the privacy window separating us from the driver, with his cell phone in his hand and a notebook balanced on his knee.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s a campaign,” I said, forcing a laugh. “It’s supposed to be stressful.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But there’s being stressed, and there’s being stressed to the point you can’t handle it.”

  “I can handle it.” I glanced out the heavily tinted window, and my stomach flipped as the airport control tower came into view. Almost there. Oh fuck. Almost there.

  “Jesse—”

  “I’m fine.” I put up my hands. “I’m just—” I met his eyes and couldn’t pretend I was all right. Exhaling sharply, I let my shoulders drop. “I could use some downtime.”

  He gave a quiet laugh that might
have come across as obnoxious in the beginning, but I now recognized as a show of “I feel your pain” sympathy. “There will be plenty of that in November.”

  “I’m sure.” I looked out the window at the rapidly approaching airport. “Just tell me it won’t be November before we…” I glanced at him again but quickly shifted my gaze toward the airport again.

  Anthony unbuckled his seat belt and got up. He dropped onto the seat beside me, and holy fuck, I couldn’t make myself look at him. If I did, I’d pounce on him. And we’d have to pry ourselves off each other in a few short minutes. And that wouldn’t be nearly enough time, so I’d be even more frustrated, and the distance between now and soon would feel infinitely longer.

  “Hopefully it won’t be November before we can get some time alone,” Anthony whispered. “But if it is”—he put his hand on my face and made me look at him—“I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”

  “I have no doubt about that,” I said and couldn’t resist leaning in to kiss him.

  He didn’t object. His hand drifted into my hair, and his tongue parted my lips. The taste of the cigarette he’d smoked before we left made me shiver again, driving the point home that this was Anthony.

  God, this was so wrong. This was the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong everything. I needed him, I wanted him, but…

  To hell with it. I wrapped my arms around him. It wouldn’t solve anything, it wouldn’t make me any less frustrated in the long run, and I’d probably regret it in a few minutes when I couldn’t do a damned thing about this hard-on, but I wanted him. The whole fucking universe could just wait a minute while I indulged in Anthony’s deep, demanding kiss.

  He touched his forehead to mine, and we both held on, panting and shaking. My mind told me to pull away and put an end to this before we got caught or had to get out of this car, but my body wanted more. Way more than we could even dream of indulging here.

  “I’m hanging by a fucking thread,” I breathed. “I don’t know… I don’t…”

  “I know.” He stroked my hair with a shaking hand. “I am too, believe me. But I’ll take what I can get. And right now—” He cut himself off with another kiss.