Page 14 of Original Sins
“Yes,” I said.“Of course.Let me—yes.”
Something flickered across her smooth face—surprise, quickly filed away as her due, as if I had finally come to my senses.“Well,” she said.“Good.”And she turned, certain I would follow, because I always, in the end, followed.
Lunch with mother and her court was a door out of this room.Lunch was a private dining room and the Walton's foundation, and had nothing to do with the man with the press lanyard and the camera in his hands.
Had he slept with me on purpose?Did that man come to Lincoln to weaponize my deepest, darkest secret?
I needed walls between me and him.
As we walked out I told myself I would not look at him.I am a disciplined man; discipline is the entire architecture of my survival.I would walk out with my eyes in front of me, my face composed, and I wouldn’t give him—or the long lens—one single photo worth printing.
I looked.
Five feet of stale backstage air between us and I turned my head.His eyes were already on me, had been on me the whole time, and they locked with mine.The roaring backstage went silent the way the arena went silent for me, except this silence I had not commanded and couldn’t control.
He didn't lift the camera.
That was the thing that undid me.He had the shot of a lifetime standing right in front of him—the kingmaker, hypocrite, the closeted shepherd, gift-wrapped—and he did not lift his camera.The man just looked at me, and his face had none of the triumph I'd braced for.There was something else.Something that looked, impossibly, like the same wreckage I was carrying.Like he'd been hit by the same truck, from the same blind corner, at the same instant I had.
For one half-second the doorway of room 1218 opened again between us in the middle of all those cables and bodyguards, and everything in me strained toward it—toward him, toward his warmth in the dark—and my arms actually ached, physically ached, with how badly they wanted to close around him one more time, consequences be damned.
I forced my feet to keep moving.
One in front of the other, down the line, after my mother.I broke our shared glance and it felt like breaking a bone.Walked away from the only man who had ever truly seen me, and I didn’t know whether I was walking away from the man who would destroy my life, or the only one who could save it.
ChapterSeven
Alec
Back in my room, I opened my laptop and I typed his name into the search bar like a man pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurt.
PASTOR HARRISON COLE.Forty thousand results in half a second.
There he was, in high resolution, from every angle.Pastor Cole on the cover of a Christian leadership magazine, arms crossed, jaw set, lit like a cologne ad.Harrison Cole behind a plexiglass pulpit the size of a small car, ten thousand hands raised toward him.Cole in a gray suit on the steps of the Capitol, shaking hands with men whose names showed up in my own reporting under headings like dark money and under investigation.
The Citadel of Faith, Houston—a glass-and-limestone spaceship that seated thousands and had its own multi-level parking structure and, according to one breathless profile, a Starbucks.Annual revenue that made me set the whiskey-less glass down and read the number twice.
On the church’s website there was an entire page devoted to his dead wife.Kimberly Cole, in a soft-focus memorial slideshow set to a hymn, gone ten years, beautiful, blond, and forever mourned.The grief that built a ministry, one headline called it.The widower pastor who never remarried, who'd turned his loss into a foundation, a sermon series, a bestselling little book about suffering and surrender.Of course, the internet loved him for it.But the internet had no idea his dead wife was the most useful prop in the church.
I clicked through it the way you pick at a scab, telling myself it was research, knowing it wasn't.Research has a stopping point.This didn't.I watched a twenty-minute sermon clip with the sound off just to study his hands.I read his Wikipedia page, his ministry bio, a hagiographic Texas Monthly feature, the comments under a YouTube video where four thousand strangers called him a man of God.
I knew what I was doing.I'd done it to subjects a hundred times—build the file, know the target, find the seams.But this didn't feel like building a file.This felt like the thing the closeted men downstairs in the hotel lobby were doing to their blank screens.Refreshing Grindr over and over again, hungry for an actual face.
I was stalking Pastor Harrison Cole.But I’d been trained to call it journalism.
“Did he fucking use me?”I slapped the laptop shut.
Swear to God I'd been used.Taken to bed and discarded by morning, the cheapest transaction there is, and I hadn't even charged him for it.I'd thrown it in for free, with feeling.
Except…
Except I kept seeing Harrison’s eyes.Not the stage eyes—the other ones, the bedroom ones, the way they'd gone wide and wet and disbelieving when I kissed him.You can fake a lot of things, but you can't fake relief.Relief is involuntary.It’s the body telling the truth.
“No,” I said out loud.That way was a trap, and I knew exactly what kind.That was the way that ended with me deciding he was secretly good, secretly suffering, even savable—and I am not, have never been, will never be, the kind of idiot who looks at a man holding a knife and decides what he really needs is a hug.
So instead of sympathy, I picked the anger.Grabbing my press pass and camera from the bed next to me, I went to the door and turned the knob.
“Time to go hunting.”
