“Good to know.”
The scant rug of blond hair on his chest between his pectorals, his flat stomach that showed the outline of his muscles, arms perfect, water trickling down his front from his hair…
“Stop staring, Eli. Wouldn’t want me to sue you for sexual harassment, would you?”
Eli laughed and reminded him, “That’s usually brought from a person of lesser power in the workplace, Lee.”
Walking over to him, Lee’s smile faded, but in its place, a hard line of his lips moved into a sneer. “Power, huh? Are you telling me I have any kind of power over you?”
Eli’s mind swung one way and then the other, the list on the computer, the books in the desk, and Lee…Lee looking so…
“You have a lot, Lee. You’re not only an important man, my boss, the guy who’s holding my loans ransom, but you…you’re just plain powerful.”
Lee stepped close enough that he was surrounded by the masculine scent of his soap, and the minty undertone of that from his toothpaste. “We both know I have no real power.”
Eli was swimming in doubts and hopes at once. And Lee, his beauty and lack of confidence hidden in invented conceit, his mind, his heart, it was all crashing in on him. “You have a lot of power, if you want it, Lee.”
“Over you? Or with my job?”
Eli wanted to crawl away and lick his wounds, fall over and cry from the happiness he’d felt at seeing the list of what Lee had been working on, but also, just from him. His eyes, and how they grabbed Eli and held him, and his words spoken on sweet, cool breaths…
Eli moved in like he would kiss Lee, getting his mouth so close, he thought he could feel it, how good it would be, how powerful Lee could feel if he’d take it. “Both.”
As soon as he said it, he moved away, hoping Lee would take the word and see it for what it was. An invitation. He walked from the room, from the house and was back, staring at the river as it flowed so slowly, when it was obvious a once raucous river.
That was true power, the way a flowing body of water could carve the hardest stone. Like everything else in the modern world, true power was lost to trickling bits of it, all of it pretending to be real.
It hurt him to know that. Like the planet that was struggling to sustain any semblance of what it once was, so were people. Men were pretending to be the great warriors and hunters of old, playing with their guns, subconsciously wishing they could wield a sword and defeat their unseen enemies. Men like Lee with their pretend power and pretend care of things long ago, left to the past.
“Eli,” Mars called to him, and he turned, not ready to be around anyone else.
“What?”
“The senator has sent me to look for you. You’re heading back to Washington tonight. He didn’t want you to forget.”
“I doubt that’s why he wanted you to find me,” he said, leaving his sad sanctuary.
“What do you mean?”
Instead of answering him, he asked another question. “One thing about the legislators, Mars, is they do a lot of favor trading, right?”
“Well, sure. I suppose that’s true enough. Why?”
“I found a list in Lee’s room. People that owe him favors and how big the favors they owe. Then, on the bottom of that, a list about what he could do for others to earn their favors.”
“That is the quintessential deal in Washington, dear boy. Why does that have you in a tizzy?”
“It beats him crawling to people and begging for favors. It beats him doing nothing and flowing along with the sewage.”
“Very true, Eli. So…why do you think he’s collecting these favors?
“Maybe it’s not connected, Mars. I don’t know. Knowing him, he might just be messing with me somehow. He’s got the books I gave him, that stack of books they’re banning. He left notes in each of them, notes about what is good and bad about them. I don’t know, maybe he’s just leading me to think…whatever.”
As they continued on to the house, Mars avoiding the worst of the dirt, he said to Eli, “I don’t think he’s trying to lead you to a bad place. I think he wants your approval.”
“Why the hell would he want my approval.”
“Who knows? Maybe he needs approval and respect from someone whom he fears despises him.”
Eli opened his mouth to say that he did, indeed, despise the man, but his lips closed again before he could utter a word of that.
Instead, he said, “Yeah, maybe, Mars.”