Page 39 of Where There's Smoke

“Look, about that night in your foyer. 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 ran 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 kissedme.”

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.Wasit?

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.

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