Chapter Twenty-Three
Four years, three months later…
After getting the job, it had taken months for him to acclimate into it, being he wasn’t prepared for getting it in the first place. His alma mater, Georgetown, had hired him, with the contingency he finished getting his Master’s degree in another school. He had gotten it and went on to try for his doctorate.
When he went to the bank to cash his last check as the personal assistant of the man he’d fallen for, he wasn’t expecting the numbers he saw when he opened the envelope. Lee had given him a severance of three million dollars.
Just like Lee to try to patch both their broken hearts with money.
The friends he’d had before meeting Lee, Sandy, Rhianna, and Chester, they all moved in with him in the modest house he bought with a little of the money. He didn’t need their rent, so he didn’t charge them rent.
Sandy had questioned him, asked why he wanted to share a kitchen again and corrupt the room where Chester stayed, but he knew the truth. It wasn’t roommates he necessarily wanted. He just couldn’t bear to be alone.
Once he had his doctorate, and settled perfectly into his job, he could breathe a bit and look around at the rest of the world. He’d been avoiding the news, getting rid of most of his social media to keep it that way. Not to mention, he swore his roommates to never tell him a thing about politics and what was happening.
When he did see it, he was shocked to see that Lee was up to his old tricks. He was voting party line, giving impassioned speeches on the floor of the senate against any legislature that would help people.
That must have been why he couldn’t be with Eli any longer. He knew Eli wouldn’t approve and it would tear them apart.
Then, things shifted. Lee was not in the spotlight as much, and when he was, people were complaining that they’d reelected a weak man that couldn’t vote for the party’s platform.
Sandy had sat by him, laughing, elbowing him as he said, “You fixed him?”
“Why hadn’t he started this before? Sandy, he was being the same prick.”
“Before re-election.”
Eli looked over to his friend. “Do you think? I mean, Sandy, for his campaign ads, he was still holding guns and talking about changing the first amendment to allow prayer in school and all that stuff.”
“Yeah, so the people in his state would reelect him. I don’t know, Eli, maybe I’m wrong, but I know how you are. In that few months you were together, you had to have made a dent.”
He didn’t believe it, not outright. Besides, he didn’t want to think too hard on it. Leaving Lee had been the hardest thing he’d ever gone through. The ache in his entire body nearly killed him and he thought of him all the time.
He still did, to be fair, but he was able to pile things onto that pain. Work, friends, other men now and then. To not constantly think about what could have been, he’d buried himself with other things.
However, Sandy’s words kept going through him. That he’d made a dent in Lee.
Coincidences were beginning to happen a few months after Lee’s reelection. Not only was Lee voting less with his own party, but he was also writing legislature and the newer senators were jumping on board with him.
More and more of the old guard was retiring, and there were a couple that had been forced to, being they were being prosecuted with crimes like insider trading, blackmail, and a few with heavy sexual assault charges. Not only prosecuted, but convicted, and in their places, fresh blood not tainted by money, were winning their elections.
Lobbyists were placed on notice; they could no longer give under the table contributions to lawmakers. The feds were cracking down on it. Sure, they could talk to the people they wanted to ask for legislation, plead their cases, but no more would money change hands. It was the biggest legislation of the kind in decades.
Lee was hated by his party, at first. Then, as they saw the benefits of what he proposed, they began to warm to him. He hadn’t jumped across the aisle and redeclared his affiliation, but he was using his party’s words against them. To work for the working people of the country. To not take money for things that all of Congress should join together to do.
Each time Eli caught him on television, humbled and grateful, tears leaked from his eyes, and he felt the pain all over again, only…only it changed some. He was proud of Lee, loved Lee still, and if they had to be apart for the work he was doing, so be it.
It was on a Sunday, over four years since he’d been with Lee, that he saw on the news that Lee was being pushed to run for the presidency. He’d rallied the new senators and they’d passed a law placing term limits on themselves and the House of Representatives. Lee had given a wonderful speech for it too, telling them that the longer someone was there, the more jaded they became. The less effective they became for the people.
Eli’s heart broke a little at seeing it, the commentators on the show throwing out all the reasons he should run, how his camp was keeping it quiet.
Eli knew the country might not be ready for a gay president, that Lee may take it, but still follow his parents’ wishes to marry a woman until one day, he got a call from a number he didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Mr. Bloom, how are you?”
It was Mars. He hadn’t heard that voice in four years and he realized then that he’d missed Lee’s butler nearly as much as he missed Lee. “Mars! Oh, god, I’m…I’m okay. How are you?”
“Mr. Bloom, thank you, and I’m well. Senator Madison, though, he’s not.”