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“What do you think they do with him between election cycles? Cryogenic chamber?”
Patrick leans back in his desk chair, putting the TV in sight. “I hear he likes horse racing, maybe they just let him switch beats for a few months.”
“Watch his face when new votes come in. Tell me if you’ve ever seen a happier person.”
“Ew David, do you have a crush? I’m telling Patrick.”
“I’m literally on the phone with him right now!” The video on the other end cuts focus. Patrick laughs and watches the screen colors blur as David adjusts his angle and resurfaces, steady, well-framed, and now walking down the hall. “Ugh, sorry. Hey, maybe you should get a commentator job. Give Twitter someone new to fawn over.”
“I already have a job. Which—hey, Stevie?” Patrick waits for her to manifest in his door.
She takes her time, then greets him with a slow eyebrow raise. “You know I can’t actually hear you call me from all the way in my office.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“I was already in the neighborhood.”
“Your office is two doors down.”
“Thick walls.” She knocks on the plaster. “What do you want, Brewer?”
“Have you got the numbers for—“
“Can you see the television?” She points to the screen.
“But the—“
“Can you hear the television?”
“In case they—“
“David, can you come collect your boyfriend? He seems to have forgotten how to work the remote.”
“He can’t hear you—can you hear her?” And by the time Patrick looks back up to Stevie she’s already gone.
David laughs. “She just texted me she quits, and can I pass on that message.”
Patrick shouts out into the hall, “What’s that, fourth time today?”
“Short day, but a big country,” she shouts back.
He stands so he can see her through the door frame, retreating into her very nearby office. “Ninth time this week, that puts the monthly total at… seventeen?”
He’s not looking at the phone, left behind on his desk, but he can hear David’s eye roll. “God, it’s only the second week of November.“
“Eighteen.” The walls, sure. “Don’t forget about ‘philatelic.’”
“Hey, stamp collecting is fun.”
“Should we make it nineteen?”
“You know, this happens so frequently I’m starting to think you actually report to me.”
“In your dreams, you know I outrank you.”
“Is that Patrick?”
David groans. “He keeps asking for you.”
“Oh.” Patrick rounds on his desk. “Does he want to talk about the remarks for the Southern Dems reception tomorrow? I told him before he went up that they’re mostly done, just a polish tomorrow to plug in the—”
And now the President’s grabbed the phone, holding it up to his ear despite the very video nature of the call. “There’s nothing left to do tonight but have dinner and watch the returns, son. Come over to the residence. Moira’s cooking.”
“Sure, Mr. President.”
“You can call me Johnny, Patrick.”
“I really can’t, sir.”
“Ah, well. Worth a try.”
The President hands the phone back to David who wordlessly submits his mutual annoyance and affection for his father with one twist of the wrist.
Patrick smiles back at him, at this family that’s taken him in. “I don’t actually agree with him.”
“You know he’s just happy to have someone at the dinner table who lets him talk shop. He’ll drop it soon.” David hesitates. “Or, well, maybe not.”
“I don’t agree there’s nothing left to do.”
“It’s not your race tonight, honey.”
“We have a chance to flip the Minnesota 8th. We could pick up two seats in Arizona—”
“The polls in Minnesota closed forty five minutes ago, and in fifteen—”
“But what about—”
“Pennsylvania 10? Projecting blue with seventy percent reporting.”
Patrick hasn’t seen that. His eyes flick to the TV. “Since when do you care about politics?” It’s their shorthand—I’m sorry, moving on, there’s more to life than this job.
David sighs, light, and picks up his cue. “I don’t. I care about you.”
“Give me ten, okay? Sorry I couldn’t be there when you got in.”
David’s lips pull sideways. “I understand.”
“How’re your mom’s, uh—?”
“Enchiladas? Terrible. Also, not done? But one can safely assume. They have an actual chef and tonight is the night my mother decides to defend her domestic gifts. I should be stress eating a culinary magnum opus on an election day, not forcing down her cooking. If you can even call it that.” David looks around, past the camera, then whispers, “So I put in for a few orders of crab puffs. Or maybe a lot of orders of crab puffs. You’re going to have to help me finish all the crab puffs.”
“I accept.”
“Patrick can you please come up here, like, post hastily. David’s moping.”
“I have not been—“ David rolls his eyes, whips his head around, and hangs up.
“The returns, your excellence.” Stevie plops a hefty print out on top of his keyboard.
He scans the data. “These are the numbers from Fulton County, November 3, 1992.”
“Are they? Oops.” She shrugs.
“How’d you get Gwen to do this so quickly?” He flips to the next page. “Nope, custom job. Dial 1-800-KOR-NAKI. Very cute. Think you missed a ‘C’ though.”
“As press secretary, you should know I have an excellent grasp on how to contact the media.”
“Do you have Anderson Cooper’s hotline? Got a bone to pick with him.”
“Oh don’t worry, dealt with that one years ago.”
“You coming for dinner? I’m about to head up.”
Stevie nods. “Don’t be gross when you see him, okay? Or at least wait till I’m out of the room. I have to overhear enough weird conversations as it is.”
“Maybe you should call facilities, ask about adding another layer to those impenetrable walls.”
She doesn’t dignify that with a reply. He should send her flowers. Or help get her fired.
David brought her onto the campaign trail. A crisis manager by trade, she was there for him, not the President. She ran circles around the acting press staff, despite her impressive commitment to doing as little as possible while still getting the job done. Turns out you can get a lot done by not doing much and being as smart as her. By the end of the run, there were no other candidates shortlisted for the job. She said no immediately. Technically, she still hasn’t said yes, even if she did sign the papers.
An early day on the road, Patrick commended David for his great taste in friends. David laughed like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard. But for all the drug addicts and derelicts, all the fame seekers and frenemies Patrick would come to hear stories about, he thinks finding one as good as Stevie proves his point. David is in New York without him, sure, but what’s worse for Patrick to remember is that David’s there without her too.
They were only a few weeks into their thing when Patrick formally accepted his position in the Rose administration. There wasn’t much to discuss when it came to making this long distance—they both had lives to live and David’s was two hundred miles north of Patrick’s dream job. It’s easier to stay away from something you weren’t expecting to have, right? But David had Stevie before the campaign, before so much of his life had been decided by his father’s ambition.
Even with the distance, David is everywhere he looks around his small office. In the ergonomic chair that showed up three months into the job after an off-hand comment about back pain. In the overly elaborate tea set resting on top of his filing cabinet he only breaks out for the important meetings. In the eerily similar expressions and copied mannerisms of his best friend.
Patrick knows the Acela time table by heart, but doesn’t get to use the knowledge as much as he’d like to. Once, David surprised him at the office and Patrick’s attention drew first to his iPhone on hearing his voice, just out of habit. As much as they were able to see each other in person, that was the default—a mobile David: sleepy early morning calls, lunch dates on Facetime, falling asleep with the line open at night. And now, rounding on their two year anniversary, David’s been a forty-five second walk across the west colonnade for six whole hours while Patrick’s, what? Sat around refreshing his email and pacing back and forth to the briefing room? He hasn’t seen David in person in a month.
He shuts his laptop, pushes his chair back with a squeak, and tries not to run for the door.
At the residence, he finds David in the kitchen, scowl now directed at a pot of bubbling sauce.
“Any idea what ‘fold in the cheese’ might mean?”
“Hmm?”
“She just left me in here with the instructions like I’d won some James Beard no one told me about.“
Patrick steps into the space directly behind David and runs a hand down his stirring arm. “It just means mix,” he whispers into David’s ear. “But,” Patrick holds onto David’s wrist and guides the spatula in long sweeping circles, “slower, longer—like this.”
“Why is this doing it for me?”
“Cause you haven’t seen me in a month?”
“It’s not my fault you went and got a job at the White House.”
“And it is my fault that DC is a ‘swamp full of finance bros in boat shoes?’”
David hums. “You could always introduce some legislation, if you really love me. Restrict off-season footwear. ”
“What do you think my job is?”
“Tax code, blah blah, dad joke, etcetera, situation room realness.”
“One out of three, not bad.” He kisses the back of David’s neck, pushing closeness and longing, and love, into the gesture.
David moans low, then it flips into a tortured whine. “Not here.” He leans back into Patrick like he’s said the opposite. “Too many ghosts. What if Mary Lincoln is watching?”
The kiss Patrick’s working on turns into a laugh and he rests his head on David’s shoulder. David keeps stirring and Patrick breathes, the stress of a day no longer in his control folding in and dispersing with the motions of the muscle he can feel against his cheek. He slips both arms around David’s waist. It’s getting too hard—to hang up the phone each night, to pick up the calls he knows have to end. To sit in his office and eat lunch and write and make tea and go home alone. He’s being selfish, greedy, but he wants more of David, more often. He wants their future to unfold of its own accord, not be held hostage to schedules and time zones and cell reception.
“It’s getting harder.”
David shrieks and turns around in his arms. “What did I say about Mary!”
“The long distance.”
“Oh.”
“The long distance is getting harder.”
They dance around it enough, but the conversation keeps getting lost because they both know the real truth: Patrick’s job is the less flexible one. If they want to live together anytime short of two years from now, David’s going to be the one to move. Patrick thinks about it all the time, and gets the sense David does too. When when when, with no one doing the actual asking.
David sets down the spatula. “I see.”
“Anything to add?”
“I—. Yes.”
“Glad we had this talk.”
“Patrick—”
Might as well go for it. “I could make you so happy here. I promise I’d make you so happy here.”
David pauses and tips his head back, eyes shut. It could really go either way. They’ve sat on the edge of this conversation before, but this is the farthest Patrick’s jumped past mopey ‘I miss you’s and ‘when will I see you next’s. He doesn't know where he found the nerve. Maybe it’s the cumin.
“By here we do mean a DC townhouse of my choosing, right? I’m not living with my parents, even if it’s in the White House.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Or you could move to New York, quit your job. I already have a brownstone there. You know, maybe we should get a dog—”
“Alright, point made.” He knew it was too good to be true.
“Well, what’s the other option? One of us takes a huge professional sacrifice? One of us moves to a city they don’t want to be in? One of us slowly grows to resent the other person so much it takes the whole relationship down with it? Who’s gonna draw the short straw, Patrick? Why does it have to be me?”
“Hey. Hey, nobody’s drawing straws.” Patrick tries to backstep, something else is going on here. “Just say no, it won’t change anything.”
“I got a job offer.”
“Yeah?” Patrick tries for neutral, but lands in desperate territory.
“Last week.”
“Okay.”
“Ali Forney wants me.”
Patrick smiles. “That’s great—I mean, is that great?”
“It’s another two years in New York. Minimum. I guess, unless I fuck it up really quickly.”
“You’re not gonna fuck it up—”
“Forty percent of the unhoused youth population in New York City is LGBT. Eighty percent of those were kicked out by their family.”
“It’s important work. You’re not gonna fuck it up.”
“Of course I’m not,” David snaps, but he’s grinning.
“Knock knock.” Alexis taps on the circular see-through window of the swinging kitchen doors, but pushes in without waiting for an answer. “Are you done yet? Democracy is happening out here and I think you need to show it some respect, be present and stuff for it.”
“Just because you co-hosted your first state dinner last month doesn’t mean you’re suddenly Queen of the Federation.”
“There aren’t any queens in America, David. Duh.”
“Fall down the grand staircase, please.”
Patrick smiles and slips into his best civil servant voice. “We’ll be out in a second, Alexis. Thanks for checking.”
She flips her hair with a hmpf.
They watch the door swing and still shut.
They’re silent, in the hum of the fridge and the simmering pot. David tightens his hold and kisses Patrick, familiar and clear. The kiss slows and they separate, but stay close. They really should go back out soon. Patrick’s desperate for the first numbers out of Arizona.
“Sorry,” David whispers. “Not yet.”
Patrick squints and tilts his head. Don’t apologize. “I hear Stevie quit today, maybe she’ll move back to New York.”
“You know I can survive without the two of you, I do have other friends.”
“Here I thought you were tortured and lonely, sitting in the dark eating takeout at two a.m.”
David strokes a hand down Patrick’s cheek. “Only half true.”
“I’m proud of you. Maybe I’ll even book first class on the train to come up for your swearing in.”
“Okay, what do you think my job is going to be?”
“Board meetings, blah blah, imparting wisdom to America’s youth etcetera, slowly taking over the world.”
“Mmm, two out of three. It’s gonna be a fast take over.”
Even this close, pressed together, Patrick needs more contact. Storage for the winter. He takes David’s hands off his waist and winds their fingers together, right up to the webbing. “I won’t ask again. You tell me when you’re ready.”
“It’s nice to know you still want to. I don’t mind a desperate phone call every now and then.”
“Note taken.” Patrick starts to drag David towards the door. “You tell your parents yet?” David shakes no. “C'mon. Johnny’s gonna flip.”