Secret Service

by Tal Bauer

He’s the first man who ever kissed me. The first who buried his face in the back of my neck and sighed my name like a prayer.

Years ago, I buried a black box on a beach inside myself, full to the brim of truths I couldn’t face. Reese’s voice is the tide, and his words are waves crashing against my hidden shores. The box is unearthing. Rising.

The desolate reality of my love life is inconsequential, and my wonderings about the occasional hitch in Reese’s breath, the slide of his eyes to mine when he thinks I don’t notice, are going nowhere.

His eyes dart down to my mouth, and lower, to my chest, then to my hand clutching my coffee in my lap. A moment later, his gaze slides back up and locks onto mine again.

Putain de bordel de merde, I

laconically,

“Je peux te voir demain soir?”

“You’re under my skin. You’re inside my mind. You’re down deep in my bones. You’re everywhere, and you’re everything. I can’t escape, but I also don’t want to escape. From you, or from this.” His eyes are huge, tumbled sapphires lit on fire. “You feel inevitable. Like I’ve been waiting for you.”

“That’s how you make me feel. I’ve kept this inside myself for years, and then I met you, and… You make me dream impossible dreams.”

“Tu me fais chier,”

Brennan clears his throat. The entire world is watching him. He’s up there, in front of everybody, with my come in his body. I didn’t even use a condom. I fucked him—the president—raw.

“It sucks falling in love with someone you can’t be with.” His voice is quiet, but it cuts me to my marrow.

But Sheridan is looking at me the way I look at Brennan. I’m watching a heart shatter in real time.

“I’m not ready,” I say. “I just broke someone’s heart, and I broke myself doing it. I’m not ready.”

Sazerac

Either go make Sheridan’s dreams come true and fuck him through the mattress—”

“I wouldn’t change a single thing about you. What I want is impossible: I wish you could be you, exactly as you are, and be my First Gentleman. I wish you could go from securing my state dinner to standing by my side in the receiving line. Securing the motorcade and then falling into step with me. No sacrifices. No compromises.”

He’s limp. He’s shaking. Tears are running down his face. Snot drips from his nose. His teeth are chattering, and when he looks up at me, there’s so much agony pouring from him that it nearly breaks my heart.

We fly back to Washington on a red-eye, and while everyone else is snoring, I blow him across three time zones, until he’s slumped on my office couch and I’m licking his come from my lips. “Is there a mile-high club for Air Force One?” I tease.

Tu me fais chier!

“You’ve given everything to me, and the Service, and look how you’ve been repaid.” My hand is on his cheek. My thumb brushes his stubble, the line of his jaw.

“I don’t know how this is going to go down. When it’s over, I need you to survive. Maybe Brennan and I won’t, but I need you to be okay.” “How can I be, if you do this?”

“And Sheridan? Did you think at all about what you were doing to him?” “He’s so fucking gone for you he can’t see anything, either.” Henry’s expression is ugly, hateful. “What is with you? Why did both of them go crazy over you?” Like the two best men I know thinking I’m worth making space for in their hearts isn’t the biggest honor of my life.

Cavitation

Some days, I think what Henry did to Sheridan is worse than what he did to me. He betrayed me and the long years of our friendship, threatened my career and my life and—most unforgivable of all—Brennan’s life. But he isolated Sheridan, made the world and everyone Sheridan loved turn against him. He turned me against Sheridan.