Page 4 of The Senator

Blaire reached into the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Glenlivet, my drink of choice, pouring it over a large ball of ice, just as I preferred. I’d bought him the mold to make the larger cubes when we started spending more time together, and he’d become accustomed to using them as well. It was the same mold we had at the house in Great Falls.

“Oh, I don’t know? Maybe someone thought it would be funny to prolong the agony of discovery. I’ve been waiting for this exact moment for months. I think I have the start of a goddamn ulcer.” Blaire took a seat next to me at the counter.

I tentatively reached out a hand, placing it in the middle of his back as I kissed his temple. “I’m so sorry about this, Blaire. I never intended for you to get hurt.”

Blaire chuckled ironically. “I was starting to fall in love with you, you know. I knew you were married, which broke my rule of never fucking a straight guy, but I don’t think you’re exactly straight, are you?”

It was a crossroads: Accept and finally embrace who I was or pull the closet door tightly and nail that fucker shut from the inside. I glanced at my companion and saw the pain of his current predicament—one I’d put him in—and I couldn’t help but give him some truth. “No, I’m not straight.”

“Bisexual, maybe? That makes the most sense to me. Your wife is a stunning woman, and the two of you have been married for years, so there must be chemistry between you, but everyone gets bored. I guess I’m just a new plaything, which, at my age, isn’t a boost to my confidence as it might have been when I was younger.”

I sighed heavily. “Not Bi. I’m gay. I’ve been gay my whole life, and Vani knows. She’s known since we met in high school,” I admitted.

Vanessa Hawkins Brady was a small-town girl at heart. We’d been best friends since her family had moved down the road from us in Portsmouth. By her family, I meant her mother, Velma, grandfather, Roy, and grandmother, Patsy. Her father was never in the picture, and to add insult to injury, Vani was raped by one of her mother’s boyfriend’s when she was seventeen. Her mother, that harping shrew, didn’t believe her and blamed Vani that the guy took off on her.

At the time, I was in my first year of college at UVA, and when Vani found out she was pregnant by the man, she called me, her best friend. She didn’t know what to do, especially with her mother’s guilt trip being heaped on her every day. I, being a bumbling idiot with my head up my ass, decided I knew how to fix it.

I went back to Portsmouth, taking her away from that awful mess, and we got married, planning to tell everyone the baby was mine and we’d been undercover lovers since she was sixteen. Sadly, she lost the baby a week after the wedding, and with it, any ability to have children in the future. She’d had her sights set on being a mother, so we adopted Jay years later.

Vani and I never consummated our marriage, though that shouldn’t surprise anyone, really. She had PTSD from the violent rape she’d endured, and hell, I was gay. We loved each other more like siblings than anything else, and we made a life together. She looked the other way when I found a lover. There was one rule: not in our home. In turn, Vani worked hard to make herself into someone other than the sweet, shy girl I knew from Portsmouth.

She took night classes to get a liberal arts degree in design, followed by classes to become a Realtor in Virginia, DC, and Maryland. I was proud of her and encouraged her every step of the way. She was an unbelievable woman who had me in awe.

Blaire touched my arm, bringing me back to the shitstorm at hand. “Who do you suspect followed you to Antigua, Spencer? This isn’t just happenstance.”

I was caught off guard for a moment by his comment, but he was right. It wasn’t dumb luck that someone stumbled upon us at such an out-of-the-way, gated resort on a small, private island. For the first time since my blurry ass appeared on the front page of every paper across the country, I realized it was a targeted attack on me.

“You think someone followed me intentionally?” Blaire nodded, and I felt the rug being pulled out from under me.

CHAPTER 3

SPENCER

I took an Uber home after saying goodbye to Blaire, letting myself into my home in Great Falls at four o’clock in the morning. I could smell coffee, so I walked into the kitchen to see Vanessa at the table with her tablet. “Morning, Vani. Why are you up so early?”

I walked to the pot and poured myself a cup, taking a seat across from her to try and determine her mood, which seemed cold as ice. “I spoke with Jay. He’s upstairs in his room, but he’s leaving in a few hours. You need to sit him down and talk to him, Spencer. I won’t betray your secrets, but he needs to know I’m not the aggrieved wife taken by surprise because of her husband’s infidelity.” The snap in her voice told me she was pissed off.

“Tell me what’s wrong?” Out of everyone involved, Vanessa and Jay deserved to be hurt the least. We adopted Jay after he came to live with us as a foster child when he was seven.

Jay was in a group home around the block from a house in Springfield that Vani was trying to sell. On the day of the open house, a beautiful little boy strolled nonchalantly in through the front door.

Vani talked to him for a few minutes and decided he was curious, so she showed him around. She figured it was good practice since it was her first solo open house, and at the end of it, the little boy said, “I’m gonna have a house like this one day so I can have a family.”

When Vani found out where Jay lived, she insisted on walking him home. What she saw at the group home upset her, and the next week, we petitioned to be his foster parents.

A year later, we adopted him, and we became the family we never thought we’d be. Knowing my son was upset with me broke my heart. He was never meant to be touched by anything I did. Yet another thing I didn’t contemplate when I took off for a wild vacation in Antigua with a fuck buddy.

“I’ll talk to him when he wakes up. How are you doing?” I was worried about her.

“Mother called. She’s asked that you not come for Thanksgiving because she doesn’t want her church group to turn their back on her for welcoming the queer into her home. Her words, not mine. I told her to go fuck herself, and that I wouldn’t be there either.” Clearly, Vani’s anger wasn’t directed at me, which was a relief. Her mother was truly a piece of work.

I chuckled quietly because Vani sounded like the girl I knew back in Portsmouth. “I’m sorry, but Velma has always hated me. She’s always looked for a reason to remind you how much better you could have done.”

Vanessa’s grandparents had died several years ago, never knowing what had happened to their granddaughter when she was a beautiful young woman full of light. They never knew that Velma was indirectly responsible for that beautiful light being extinguished in Vani’s eyes.

I wanted to tell them what happened to their only granddaughter, but Vani begged me not to, so I kept my mouth shut with them. I did, however, remind Velma at every chance I got that it was her fault for leaving the man alone in the house with her precious daughter.

It galled me that she chose to pretend it never happened. That was my biggest beef with the woman. The years of therapy Vani endured at the hands of Velma’s inability to judge a person’s character never failed to anger me.

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