Page 154 of Indiscretion

Chris sits back in his chair. “You need to pick one to be more loyal to than the other, and don’t give me any bullshit about you can’t do that. Youcan, andhaveto. Shae knew from the start that Kev was my priority, and she had to deal with that. At any time, had she pissed me off or refused to follow my directions, I would have taken Kev and walked, and she knew it. I negotiated from a position of power.”

He laces his hands together on top of his head. “My recommendation, based on my experience, is that you make Jordan your priority. Then, make it crystal clear to Elliot if he fucks up, the two of you will walk.Together. At that point he’s risking losing you as his lover, and losing Jordan as his right-hand man.”

“Then how do I guarantee Elliot doesn’t spook and tell me to get out?”

“Invest him as heavily in Jordan as he is in you. Or more.”

That clicks. “Oohhh.”

Chris nods, smiling. “Right? You can see it all, looking back, can’t you? I mean, how I finagled things.”

He means between Shae and Kev, and I know it. “Yeah.”

“I made sure Kev was invaluable to Shae, professionallyandpersonally. Way more than I was. That wasn’t an overnight thing, either. There’s one more reason you handle it like that, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Go on.”

“Because there is an incredible power imbalance to start with. Inequitable relationship by default. Elliot’s veep, for chrissake. Make him POTUS?Damn.Andhe’s Jordan’s boss? Even more important that Jordan feels secure withyou. Doesn’t mean you can’t mind-fuck Elliot on occasion to keep him on his toes. I recommend that, by the way, for both of them. But it means if Jordan gets scared, he still knows he can count onyou.

“Throughout everything we did, Kev could always rest assured I had his back. That if he felt he had to leave, he knew he could, because he knew I’d leave with him. I was his security blanket, emotionally and professionally.”

“Even now?”

His smile turns an unusual mix of melancholy and evil. “He’s not leaving. Because he loves me, and he loves Shae. Once the three of you’ve been together for a couple of years, and things are stable, that won’t be an issue.”

He taps his desk with a finger. “Butonlyif you build the power structure properly from the ground up, and you do thatnow. Elliot needs to be terrified to losebothof you. The trick is to make him more terrified of losing both of you than he is of staying in the fucking closet. Or, at the very least, he’s more afraid to lose you both than he is of de-assing his head.”

I sit back and think about it. “How do I make myself walk away, though? If forced to? I love the dumbass. I haven’t managed to make myself walk away yet, when anyone else would call me the dumbass for staying as long as I have with no firm commitment from him.”

Chris shrugs. “That I cannot answer for you. If you think that’ll be a problem, then you need to hold up right now and make some hard decisions before going any further with either of them. I didn’t want to walk away from Shae. Yet I knew if something happened and Kev decided to leave that I would go with him. Even though, technically, I’d had a far longer relationship with Shae at that point and I loved her very much.”

I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling for a moment. “They’re both bottoms. How do I play that?”

“Elliot has a toppy streak in him, I’m sure. He wouldn’t have gotten this far in politics otherwise, no matter what it might seem like from your side of things. If you are seriously thinking about making Jordan his body man, you’d damn well better hope that boy of yours has at least a little toppy streak in him. He’ll need it to keep Elliot corralled and on schedule. You and I both know that manneedsa fricking keeper on the campaign trail. Not just a keeper, but a hand-holder to keep him from letting his nerves eat him alive.”

“True story,” I mutter. Even when technically it wasn’t Elliot running for POTUS, there were plenty of nights on the campaign trail, when Elliot and Shae were making appearances together, that I slept in Elliot’s room with him and had to calm and center him.

Elliot looks great in public. He’s got the handsome, winning smile, the personality, and the gold-mine of a backstory.

Or so people think.

The truth is, he’s a nervous wreck when he has to make public appearances. I’m honestly not sure how he managed to get himself elected toanyoffice, much less the US House of Representatives, without giving himself twenty fricking ulcers in the process.

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of grokking the framework of lawmaking he’s amazing, brilliant, focused.

Put him out in front of people for a grip-and-grin, or a town hall?

Break out about a gallon of antacid.

He claims he wanted to be POTUS from a young age. I’m sure armchair psychologists who know as much of his backstory as I do would say it’s directly tied to him wanting to earn his family’s love and respect.

Especially his father’s respect.

But getting elected to local offices in Nebraska is a far different universe than making it to DC and seeing the bloody political machinations there first-hand. What Elliotthoughthe wanted, the ideals he’d held in his mind, were cleanly sheared off once he fully understood how dark and nasty the halls of our nation’s capital can be when it comes to trying to actually get shit done.

Yet his whole public persona, and especially his regional popularity, is why he was the perfect choice as VP for Shae. Elliot hadn’t planned on running for Senate for at least another couple of terms, much less being added to the presidential ticket the way he was.

One of the reasons they picked Elliot was because of my relationship with him. Meaning they knew I could keep Elliot in line. There’d be no backstabbing, or Elliot trying to one-up Shae once she was elected. No premature campaigning for his own election run before she’d even warmed her chair behind theResolutedesk. No stealing her limelight.