Page 10 of Original Sins
His heartbeat slowed under my forearm, then his breathing went long and even.And I lay there in the dark feeling something I had no precedent for, no scripture for, no sermon that had ever prepared me to survive it: happiness.Real, unbearable, doomed happiness.And grief, exactly equal to it, riding alongside it.In a few hours the sun would come up over Nebraska and I’d become Pastor Cole again, and this man would become a stranger.The door would slam shut, and I’d carry the memory of one held hand to my grave like a stone in my shoe.
This sweet man was now asleep.I could tell by the weight of him.My own eyes were going heavy at last.As I slid down into the warm dark after him, with his heartbeat under my arm and his hair against my mouth, one last thought followed me down into slumber.
What would it cost me to feel like this for the rest of my life?And—the more dangerous question, the one I fell asleep still holding—was there any price on earth I wouldn't pay to keep feeling this?
ChapterFive
Alec
Iwoke up alone, and the disappointment that opened up in my chest was so immediate and so total that it actually frightened me.
The room was full of gray morning light.The sheets were a disaster—kicked to the foot of the bed, half on the floor, the particular wreckage of two grown men who had not been gentle with each other or with the furniture.The other pillow still held the dent of his head.I knew, because I lay there and looked at it for a long, stupid time, the way you'd look at a chalk outline.
He'd gone in the dark.Sometime in the small hours, while I was under, he had peeled himself out of my arms—and I was a light sleeper, and he'd done it without waking me.This meant the man had a lifetime of practice at slipping out of strange hotel rooms.Back to whatever he'd called it.The golden cage.Back to whoever was waiting for the version of him that everybody thought they knew.
I am genuinely good at this.I’d spent my adult life keeping every hookup clean—lust and mutual liking, a good night, a real connection for the length of that connection and not one minute past it.No splinters, or leftover residue from the encounter.I preferred my tricks grateful and gone, and I’d never laid in a wrecked bed and felt like something had been ripped out of me when the other guy left.
“What the hell is wrong with me?”I rubbed my palm over my eyes and yawned.
This didn't feel like simple lust.This felt like gravity—like I'd spent thirty-three years flying above my feelings through sheer stubbornness.Now a handsome stranger had walked into my hotel room and quietly informed my body which way the ground was.
I rolled over and put my face in his pillow before I could talk myself out of it, and there it was: his cologne.Something expensive, warm, and a little austere.Cedar and incense and money, already fading.I breathed it in like a teenager.
“You absolute clown,” I told the empty room.
Because here was the unbearable part, the part I couldn't lecture my way out of: I hadn't just liked the sex, though God knows the sex had been out of this world.
I'd genuinely liked him.
The way he'd gone still and reverent over a cheap gold chain with a cross.The crack in his voice when he said I don't get to stay, like a man reading his own prison sentence.I'd told him the truest thing I'd said out loud in years— how I messed up with Harry, and the relief-instead-of-grief thing—and he hadn't flinched.He'd just found my hand in the dark and held it like it was worth holding.
I had connected with a man I would never see again, more than I'd connected with any man I'd ever actually dated.And I didn't even know his fucking name.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, half to check the time and half hoping for something I had no right to hope for.I opened Grindr.Thumbed to the messages.
The message thread was still there.But the little dot beside his gray square had gone dark.Offline.And when I tapped the profile itself, the screen just blinked and gave me nothing—profile unavailable—the headless torso and the gold cross wiped clean out of existence, as though the man had reached back through the network in the night and erased any evidence of his existence.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress, stared at the water-stained ceiling, and felt the whole soft, dangerous morning threaten to swallow me.So I did the only thing I have ever reliably known how to do when my feelings get too loud.
I went to work.
I put my feet on the cold beige carpet.Somewhere twelve floors down, in a ballroom full of better liars than I would ever be, the most important seventy-two hours of my career were already underway without me—Hallie was in D.C.waiting for a story big enough to justify putting her neck on the line for me, and I was up here sniffing a pillow like a lovesick kid.
The stranger was gone, and I needed to get on with my life.
I showered with the water too hot.I put on the good shirt and the press lanyard and the face—the unimpressed one, my armor, the one that had never failed me—and I picked up the camera bag, and forced myself not to look at the bed again on my way out the door.
Whoever he was, he had his cage to get back to.
And I had a story to find.
* * *
The Crossroads National Summit did not believe in subtlety, and I respected that about it the way you respect a shark for being honest about its intentions.
The main hall was a converted arena, and they'd spent real money making it look like the future.A stage the size of a tennis court with three enormous LED screens, two stories tall, cycling through images of wheat fields, a rippling flag, a soft-focus nuclear family laughing at a picnic that had clearly never happened.Up-lighting in red, white, and a blue so saturated it hummed.A fog machine breathing a low haze across the stage so that every beam of light looked heaven sent, ready-made for the cameras.And the music—some swelling, wordless, stadium-rock hymn pumped at a volume engineered to bypass the brain and go straight for the spine.
Last night had been one dim lamp in the dark and a man's honest, broken voice six inches from my ear.This was the opposite of that in every measurable way.This was a feeling manufactured at scale, trucked in, focus-grouped, and sold by the seat.I'd spent one night inside something real, and now I stood at the back of a room where ten thousand people had paid good money to be told beautiful lies.
