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There were no signs, initially, that it was going to be that kind of day. There were no ominous thunderclaps, no crones creaking dire warnings, no ravens flapping heavily overhead. Instead, it was a bright, airy spring day, the kind with a pleasant little breeze that kicks up no dust and carries no stenches but brings a sense of refreshment, and the newsstand guy handed over the new edition of Sports Illustrated where Dan had a little gem of an article about the factors that influenced the rise and fall of a dissolute rugby star. He’d even learned enough about rugby to write the article. Jeremy had been terribly proud of him.
He strode into the bullpen whistling something cheery. Even the plan for the day was auspicious: Casey was interviewing Marcell Maltoni, one of the greatest hockey players to come out of the United States in the history of the sport. Maltoni was retiring at forty-eight after a brilliant career, and he was a fantastic get for the show. Plus the interview was at the Ritz Carlton and Casey would be headed by Dan’s favorite churro vendor on the way back. There was a good chance of getting a full paper sleeve of mini churros, especially if Casey didn’t go cheap and pretend they were going to equally split the bag and then eat three quarters of it in transit.
“Natalie! You’re looking especially radiant today.”
“Whatever it is, I won’t do it for you.”
He leaned on the edge of the desk where she was working. He was pretty sure it wasn’t actually her desk. “Joke’s on you. I don’t have a favor to ask. I’m just in a particularly ebullient mood today.”
“Is it because of Marcell Maltoni?”
“Marcell Maltoni! The name is such music to my ears. It’s even alliterative. Natalie, my shining wunderkind, the show practically writes itself.”
“The questions are already written.”
“Exactly. I have but a few remaining minutes—”
“Thirty-eight remaining minutes.”
“Thirty-eight remaining minutes to fill.”
“Doesn’t Casey help with that?”
“Well, nominally, I suppose he might. But he will undoubtedly be star-struck from meeting—”
Isaac sighed heavily from behind Dan. “Marcell Maltoni?”
“Marcell Maltoni, indeed!”
Natalie said to Isaac, “I can’t make him stop or go away.”
“Don’t you have a job to do?” Isaac grumbled at Dan. Dan chose to take this as the gesture of affection it surely was.
Dan hugged Isaac—Isaac sighed once more, in resignation—and sauntered off to his office, still whistling. Quietly. Dan knew he was not, perhaps, the best at carrying a tune, but he could certainly enjoy a good whistle now and then.
He was halfway through a very tasty croissant when Casey burst into the office, wild-eyed and haggard.
“Whoa!” Dan swung his legs down from the desk and spun to face Casey. “What happened? Why do you look like that?”
“Danny,” said Casey urgently.
Dan waited a long moment before venturing, “Yes?”
“Danny.”
Another long, silent moment. “Casey, you’re going to have to say more words than that for me to know how to react.”
“Marcell Maltoni.”
“Yes, the one and only, from an interview with whom you have just returned.” A horrible thought struck Dan. “He did show up, right? You did get the interview?”
Casey nodded, but then shook his head, which wasn’t as clear as Dan would have liked.
“Do we have footage of the interview?” asked Dan suspiciously.
Casey nodded again, which was more satisfactory.
“So what is it?”
“He, uh.” Casey stopped and cleared his throat, and then did that three or four more times. “Did you know Marcell Maltoni is gay?”
“What?” asked Dan blankly.
“Gay. He’s homosexual. He plays for the other team, in his personal life, though not of course his professional life.”
“Can’t say that I did know that, no.”
“Nor did I.”
“I’m going to ask something,” said Dan.
“I thought you might.”
“It has the potential to be a bit of a delicate question.”
Casey winced, but nodded again.
“How, exactly, did this come up? ”
“That’s the crux of the matter right there, Danny. You’ve hit the nail on the head. With the unerring instinct of a news-man, you’ve sliced through the Gordian knot right to the heart of the issue.”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
“He—that is, Marcell Maltoni—”
“I know who you’re talking about at this point, Casey. I can safely assume.”
“He suggested I might, ah. Well. Consider an arrangement in which he would, ehm, I believe the saying is ‘keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed.’”
“He wants to be your sugar daddy? ” Dan bellowed, at a volume just slightly below the average jet engine.
Naturally, that happened to be the exact second before Natalie pushed the door open, and it would have been far too much to hope that she hadn’t heard the last words.
“Who wants to be Casey’s sugar daddy?” she asked with what struck Dan as far too casual a tone. Her arms were full of papers and a couple of tapes.
“Marcell Maltoni!” Dan felt the heat rising up past his collar again. He wanted to kill something. He was full of outrage. He turned to Casey. “That must have been an awkward conversation, when you turned him down.”
“Ehm. Well. Actually. I, uh.”
Natalie started cackling maniacally. “Oh, do not tell me you’re considering it!”
“Considering what?” asked Kim, who had somehow also picked this terrible time to come to their office with work in hand and was now stuck behind Natalie, half in and half out of the door.
“Becoming Marcell Maltoni’s kept man!”
Kim raised her eyebrows. “If you don’t want the position—”
“I don’t think he’s flexible that way,” said Casey hurriedly.
“But you are, aren’t you? You’re thinking about it.” Natalie beamed at Casey like she was personally proud of him.
“Maybe! No! I don’t know. I have never been in a position like this in my life!”
“I didn’t think you were gay,” said Kim contemplatively.
“I’m not gay, ” said Casey, “I do like women!”
“Are you sure?” asked Natalie with interest. “I saw you try to woo Dana and a failure that spectacular—”
“This is different! It’s Marcell Maltoni! ”
Natalie was nodding like this made sense. “He’s your exception.”
“His what?” asked Dan faintly.
Natalie shifted her armload of files. “His exception. Everyone gets one.”
“Gets an exception?”
Kim nodded. “To your sexual orientation. You’re allowed to go gay—or straight, if that’s how it is—for someone if they’re, you know. Really hot. Or famous. Or really, really rich.”
“This is a rule?” Dan felt more and more like the 21 st century had found him standing on a rug and yanked said rug out from under him.
“Oh, yeah.” Natalie leaned back against the glass wall, smiling dreamily. “My exception is Halle Berry. If she ever makes a move on me, I’m leaving Jeremy. I’ve told him. He knows.”
“And does Jeremy have an exception identified?” asked Kim with more interest than Dan would have expected.
Natalie nodded solemnly. “I have sworn never to reveal his identity, though.”
“So next time we get margaritas?”
“Next time we get margaritas.”
“I’ve never had an exception!” Casey sounded panicky. “I didn’t know exceptions were allowed! Oh my God.”
“What did you tell him?” asked Kim.
“I said I’d have to think about it! I didn’t tell him I was straight! I said I had to think about it! What’s wrong with me?”
Natalie snorted derisively. “What’s wrong with you is that you even have to think about it! Say yes, for God’s sake. Make him buy you very shiny things. Nice watches. With diamonds in them.”
“But Natalie! He wants to have sex with me!” yelled Casey. Kim was still propping the door open. The conversations in the bullpen outside had all stopped completely.
“So? It wouldn’t be the end of the world! He’s handsome!”
“I don’t even know how to have sex with a man!”
“Oh, come on,” said Kim. “It’s not that complicated. We’re not talking about rocket science here.”
“You’re insane!” Casey flung his arms up in the air. “I can’t just turn gay!”
“Even for Marcell Maltoni?” Kim raised her eyebrows.
Casey threw himself down to sit on the couch dramatically, putting his head into his hands.
“Look,” said Natalie, “I’m not hearing any objections here that are insurmountable. Sure, you’re a sexual novice—”
“I have a child!”
“I have to assume Charlie was conceived in the missionary position,” said Natalie with gentle pity. “Or, if you two were feeling very feisty, with Lisa on top. Reverse cowgirl is the absolute limit I am willing to believe.”
Casey started to open his mouth and then closed it again, almost cross-eyed. Dan suspected, in his heart of hearts, that Casey had been about to ask what reverse cowgirl was.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn!” She leaned in, eyes beginning to shine with that iron-willed enthusiasm Dan had always dreaded and feared in her. “Listen, why don’t I get you some reference material?”
“You cannot bring porn into this office!” yelled Dan, louder than he’d meant to. “I forbid it!”
“It won’t be porn, Daniel,” she said scathingly. “It will be helpful instructional material for the man considering loving a man in a physical way. As if pornography would be helpful for that!”
“Yeah.” Kim nodded emphatically. “You don’t want to scare him, starting off with deep-throating twelve-inch—”
“OUT!” roared Dan, lunging to his feet and pointing to the door. “Out of our office! Begone, foul temptresses!”
“I’ll be back in a little bit with some reading material!” Natalie called over her shoulder as Dan crowded her out of the office.
The downside of removing the foul temptresses, however, was that once they were gone, Dan and Casey were alone in the office again.
“I can’t believe I didn’t tell him no.” Casey’s voice was quiet again, almost like he was talking to himself. “I mean, it’s insane.”
His tone of voice made it a question, something of a plea. Dan, staring at the Raging Bull poster on their wall, didn’t answer.
“I don’t—I’ve never—” Casey heaved a huge sigh. “But then, when he said it, when I realized what he meant… what if I do? What if I want to?”
“Casey.” Dan pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, like that would ward off the oncoming headache. “Even if you did want to, you absolutely should not! You have a career! You are a working news anchor. You have your dream job!”
“I’m sure he’d still let me work,” Casey mused aloud. “It’s like you don’t want me to enter into an illicit affair with a handsome and distinguished older man. Who also happens to be America’s answer to Wayne Gretzky.”
“He may be our Wayne–”
“Better looking, though.”
“Fine! Okay. I will grant you that Marcell Maltoni is more handsome than Wayne Gretzky.” Dan stabbed a finger in his direction. “That’s not a high bar, though.”
“Although I do worry that Charlie would like him better than me, if things got serious. Charlie already likes him. Charlie has a poster of him!”
Dan’s mouth twisted into a deep frown. “I think you’ve already thought about this too much.”
“Listen, if I’m going to be a legendary athlete’s paramour–”
“Paramour?”
“I’m certainly not going to refer to myself as his ‘sugar baby.’” Casey loaded the words, and the air quotes, with pure disgust. “Anyway, if I were going to do this, which I’m not, maybe, I don’t think, it’s not like we’d be making a big deal about it. Publicly.”
“Which is probably a good thing. That’s a lot of pressure to put on an early relationship.”
Casey made a little face. “Oh, my God, it would be a relationship.”
“It would. And you’d have to talk to Natalie about it.”
Casey visibly recoiled from the thought.
“With details, ” Dan added. “Sexual details. I guarantee it. You’ve met her.”
“No!”
“Besides,” said Dan, reluctantly dredging up the worst in himself, “he’s too old for you.”
“Too old? Danny! He’s not even fifty! That’s young in these situations.”
“These situations? Oh, now you’re an expert? On trading money for sex?”
“You make it sound so crass.”
“It’s prostitution, Casey, I think I’m allowed to make it sound a little crass.”
“You know, I thought I was supposed to be the narrow-minded one here. You always tell me you’re so much more morally advanced and enlightened—”
“I can recognize that prostitution is an important part of human society while also thinking you shouldn’t do it, you jackass.”
“You mean to tell me you’d have the same objections if it were Gloria Vanderbilt coming on to me?”
“Yes! She’s almost eighty!”
“You know,” Casey added speculatively, “her mother was accused of a lesbian affair with a British royal.”
“I neither know nor care.”
“Well, now you know, so that’s not strictly accurate.”
“I hope you burst into flames,” Dan said with total sincerity. “I hope you get hit by a meteorite on the way home from work tonight and it lobotomizes you. I hope Gloria Vanderbilt turns out to have a rabid Shih Tzu that takes a chunk out of your shin in Central Park.”
“I don’t go to parks.” Casey, inexplicably, was folding a paper airplane, and was staring down at it with rapt attention. “I think I’m safe from the mad dogs of heiresses.”
“Don’t do it.” Dan found himself exhaling heavily, tremulously. He hated it. “Please.”
Casey looked up from the paper airplane. “I mean, it would be insane.”
“That doesn’t immediately reassure me that you won’t.”
“I’m not in the habit of doing insane things.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Name one!”
“Every romantic decision you have ever made. In your entire life.”
Casey raised his eyebrows and nodded a little, mouth quirked in a moue of silent assent.
“I have to write the show.” Dan slapped both hands down on the desk, though not forcefully. “You have to help me write the show.”
“I think it’s the other way around, champ.”
“Regardless of your new career opportunities in sexual services, you do still at least nominally work here.”
Casey rolled his eyes, but he did, in a move that surprised Dan, open his laptop and begin to make comments about things other than his future life of luxury. Some of the comments were even germane to sports.
Slowly, the evening’s show began to come together.
Of course that was too good to last.
At the 6 o’clock rundown, Dana said, “Okay. We have the jewel in the crown with Casey’s interview with Marcell Maltoni, but we need to make sure the rest of our show lives up to that. What?”
Jeremy, who had politely raised a hand, said, “I heard Marcell Maltoni is gay.”
“It’s not part of the interview. Casey? Is it?”
“No,” said Casey. “It’s not part of the interview.”
“Which means we don’t need to address it on air. So when it comes to the Royals—”
Elliot said, “I heard he’s gay for Casey.”
“That better not be part of the interview,” said Dana crisply. “If one more person mentions Marcell Maltoni’s little crush on Casey—”
“Marcell Maltoni has a crush? On Casey? ” asked Chris with an unflattering degree of disbelief.
Natalie leaned around Jeremy to tell Chris, “Marcell Maltoni made an indecent proposition to Casey.”
“It wasn’t that indecent,” protested Casey.
“He wants Casey to be his plaything.” Natalie smiled sweetly at Chris. “Sexually.”
Dave added, “You know. He gets Casey nice things, and Casey is his boyfriend. That kind of deal.”
“Holy cannoli!” Chris pounded his fist on the table. “This will not stand. No one attempts to corrupt our anchors into sexual servitude!”
“So we’re not going to get any work done, are we?” asked Dana, who was rubbing her forehead.
“Definitely not.” Kim smirked and leaned forward, folding her arms on the table. “Casey, have you decided to let Marcell Maltoni buy you an Armani suit yet? You could use something nice.”
“You know, I do have my own money,” said Casey waspishly.
“Not as much money as Marcell Maltoni has.” Jeremy pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I looked up his net worth. Forbes did a piece of him a couple of years ago, and unless he suffered a lot more than the rest of us with the dot-com bust, he could afford to buy several Caseys.”
“There’s only one of me!”
“I’m just saying, he could pay your current salary and buy you a race horse. Monthly.”
“Why would I want a race horse?”
“Everybody shut up!” bellowed Dana. They all turned to look at her; most of the surprise on their faces was feigned, Dan knew, as Dana having an outburst at a rundown was about as rare an event as a bum screaming at them on the sidewalk. “For one thing, stop saying his full name every time. It is getting on my nerves! For another thing, we have a show to do and I will be damned if I let Marcell motherfucking Maltoni ruin it for me!”
There was a long moment’s pause.
“Everyone heard about this except Chris?” Casey asked the table at large. Everyone nodded.
“And Graphics,” added Kim. “No one likes Graphics so we didn’t tell them.”
“Loose lips sink ships,” said Elliot ominously.
“Dana said ‘motherfucking’ and no one is going to comment on that?” asked Jeremy.
Dave shushed him with a gesture. “So what does everyone think Casey should do?”
“Date him,” said Kim immediately.
“See how much stuff he’ll give you even if you don’t put out,” said Elliot.
“Discover your true potential for love,” said Natalie. “Clearly it hasn’t worked out all that well with women so far. Maybe Marcell will unlock the key to your heart.”
Jeremy said to her in what was almost but not quite sotto voce, “Marcell can’t unlock a key. He could unlock Casey’s heart with a key.”
“Eat shit.” Natalie took the sting out of it by taking his hand and giving it a little squeeze.
“This is going to take forever.” Dave shook his head. “Let’s vote. All in favor of Casey selling his virtue for cold hard cash?”
Kim, of course, raised her hand. Natalie raised her hand. Dana was steadily turning an ever-more-alarming shade of red. Elliot raised his hand.
Dave briefly raised his own hand, too. “And who thinks he should disappoint his gallant suitor?”
Dan glowered at Casey and raised his hand. Dana said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, we’re actually voting on this?” and raised her hand. Chris raised his hand, face full of judgmental disappointment.
“Jeremy?”
“I’m abstaining.”
Casey muttered, “Thanks, I think.”
“Hm,” said Dave. “Hardly a slam dunk.”
“I will give everyone in this room twenty dollars if we can actually talk about the show,” said Dana.
“Cash?” asked Kim.
“I will go to the ATM this very night.”
“I just don’t know what Marcell Maltoni sees in you,” said Chris to Casey. “No offense.”
“None taken?”
Jeremy said, “I can see it. Casey’s got a face that got him on television and he works out.”
“I do climb at the gym,” said Casey smugly.
“You cost me twenty bucks.” Kim kicked Chris under the table. “You owe me.”
“Oh, like you were going to stop talking about it?”
“I might have. We’ll never know.”
Dan turned to Dana. “The Royals haven’t won anything since 1985. I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in Hell.”
“Danny, I could kiss you right now,” she said.
“Please don’t. That’s the last thing this powder keg of simmering sexual undercurrents needs.”
“Hey!” protested Casey.
“Casey.” Dan slammed his hands down on the table. “In the last ten minutes, every single person in this room has commented on your attractiveness, your sexual orientation, the sexual orientation of the single best hockey player the United States has ever fielded, and how much you could charge if you were to charge for your favors. If I have to listen to any more of this, I will throw Jeremy’s computer through one of these big beautiful floor to ceiling windows and then I will follow it with my body.”
“Why my computer?” asked Jeremy.
“Because somehow, deep down, I know it was you.”
“Me who what?”
“Told everyone everything.”
Natalie raised her eyebrows at Jeremy. Jeremy shrugged. “He’s not wrong.”
“We helped,” said Kim. “This is the best gossip we’ve had since Casey and Dana split up.”
“Yeah, and that wasn’t even good gossip,” said Chris. “Honestly, that was just kind of sad.”
“We were rooting for you.” Elliot shook his head. “It would have been nice if you’d both actually been happy for once.”
“Okay! This meeting is over. Let’s hope the next one goes slightly better and someone, anyone, decides to do their jobs.” Dana stood up, pushing back her chair with a vengeance, and exited the room with as much hauteur as the soft-close doors would allow.
The rest of them sat in silence.
“Did he happen to mention why he was propositioning you and not me?” asked Dan.
Casey flung his arms into the air and followed Dana’s lead, marching out of the room and back towards their office.
“I’m just curious!” Dan shouted after Casey. “I’m younger! I’m cute!”
“You’re hot, sweetie,” said Natalie with deep sympathy.
“Yeah, it’s probably because Casey was there. If you’d gotten assigned to him, I bet he would have propositioned you.” Dave, abandoning his paper clips, patted Dan’s shoulder as he ambled by.
“No,” said Dan glumly. “He requested Casey. Dana told me so I’d stop complaining about the assignment.”
“Oh.” Dave winced and then left.
“Kim,” said Dan, “if you had to pick a sugar baby between me and Casey, who would you pick?”
Kim smiled sweetly at him. “Honey, I am the sugar baby.” She put her shoulders back, just to really show off the reasons why she was presumably successful in her sugar-seeking endeavors.
“True, but imagine yourself in the future, an attractive, successful, wealthy professional woman. Which one of us would you pick?”
She also patted his shoulder. “I could never choose between you. It’s like asking me to pick my favorite boob.”
“But it’s me, right?” he called after her as she left. “It’s me.”
Natalie leaned forward. “Dan, you don’t have to be so insecure. You’re handsome and funny and very smart.” Chris left, too. It was down to just Natalie and Jeremy and Dan, and Dan had a horrible suspicion he was going to have to go deal with Casey soon.
“It’s not helping my overall insecurity that Marcell Maltoni wants Casey to be his boytoy and not me!”
“Well,” said Jeremy, “you know the gay community tends to have very exacting standards.”
“Are you saying I’m not physically fit? ”
“No! Just that you could be more, you know.” Jeremy waved at him vaguely. “Chiseled.”
“I’m going to kill your boyfriend,” Dan said to Natalie.
“Go right ahead, tiger.”
Jeremy took his glasses off and started nervously cleaning them on his shirt. “Dan…”
“What?”
“You can just say it, you know.”
“Say what?”
Jeremy opened his mouth and suddenly Dan knew, and he held up a hand to stop Jeremy.
“No! I take it back. Whatever you were about to say, button that lip, stuff that deep down inside, and we never talk about it, not now and not ever, because we are manly men. ”
“I’d pick you,” said Jeremy very earnestly. “Casey is tall, it’s true, but you’re cuter.”
Natalie smiled at Jeremy and patted his hand approvingly.
Dan was so glad to have been wrong about Jeremy’s topic choice that he could have passed out.
Dan got up and started to leave, but as he got to the door he turned around, hand on the frame. “Hey.”
“Hm?” asked Natalie, who’d been giving Jeremy a non-office-appropriate kiss.
“I’m tall, too. Just because Casey is tall er doesn’t mean I’m not tall. ”
“No, of course.” Jeremy nodded so firmly that Dan suspected he was being mocked, perhaps inside Jeremy’s head.
“Good,” Dan said. “I’m glad we agree on that.”
And he left, heading back to his own office, or, as he’d begun to think of it, Hell.
Dan meant to say, Did you see the clips that Natalie was talking about using in the 20s? but instead it somehow came out, “Did he kiss you?”
“What?”
“When he propositioned you. How did it all go down?”
“Dan…”
“Humor me.”
Casey cleared his throat and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him, for all the world like he was about to talk to Dan about life insurance policies. “It was after the interview. He asked if I wanted to grab a cup of coffee because he knew the best place. I said sure. He paid for my coffee and then he told me he was planning to be himself more now that he was retired. I said that sounded like a great plan. He said that included finding a little more romance in his life. I said lots of people look for romance when they have more free time. He said the kind of romance he was looking for came with some challenges, like finding someone who was looking for an older man to take care of them and treat them right.”
“Treat them right?”
“That is what he said.”
“Did you clue in?”
“No. Not at that point.” Casey coughed. “Then he said, ‘What about you, Casey?’”
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that he wasn’t speaking rhetorically.”
“‘Have you ever thought about what life would be like if you had an older man treating you right?’”
“That does seem pretty clear.”
“It took me a while to get it. Once I figured out what all of those words put together meant, I believe I said, ‘It hadn’t crossed my mind.’ That’s when he said, ‘Is it crossing now?’ and I said ‘Let me think on it.’”
“Wow. Sixteen different kinds of wow, at least.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever been propositioned like that before?”
“No, can’t say that I have. I suppose being married was a fairly effective deterrent during my peak boy toy years.”
“Come on, now. Your peak boy toy years could be yet to come.”
“Danny,” said Casey with an edge of desperate panic in his voice, “I know why I told him I’d think about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m thinking about it.”
“Hm.”
They sat, staring at the carpet, in mutual horrified silence.
“It could be worse,” said Dan finally, bravely. “At least it’s not Gloria Vanderbilt. Hell, at least it’s not Michael Jordan.”
“What?”
“If it were Gloria Vanderbilt I wouldn’t be impressed, and if it were Michael Jordan you couldn’t say no.”
“That is true. If Michael Jordan wanted me to live with him in a love-nest, I’d do it.”
“No questions asked.”
“No second thoughts.”
“Hey, Casey?”
“Yeah?”
“You have to do what’s going to work for you,” said Dan, slowly, like each word had stepped in chewing gum and had to be pried free. “You have to do what’s going to make you happy. Whatever that is.”
“Jeez.” Casey ran his hand over his mouth. “Danny—”
Kim stuck her head in. “Dan, have you seen those clips Natalie was talking about using in the 20s?”
“Yeah, you know—”
“Kim.” Casey clasped his hands again. “Who’s your exception?”
“Casey, are you trying to embarrass her?”
“Maybe.”
“I suspect you’ll regret that.”
“We shall see.”
Kim shrugged. “I don’t really need an exception.”
“Why not?” asked Dan.
“Because I’m bisexual. Everyone’s fair game.” For once she sounded deadly serious.
“That’s cool!” said Casey enthusiastically, surprising Dan greatly. “I didn’t know bisexuals existed until I was in college. One of my frat brothers told me about them.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let me guess. Porn?”
“No, his sister. She wore a lot of black. Wrote poetry. Very…” Casey gestured vaguely off into the air. “Ethereal.”
“Oh.” Kim seemed nonplussed. She straightened her skirt briskly, smoothing it out. “Well. Anyway, Dan, do you want to review some of the footage? I had some questions.”
“Sure.”
“Wore a lot of berets.” Casey was leaning back, staring at the ceiling, when Dan and Kim left.
“You doing all right about this Marcell Maltoni thing?” Kim asked Dan in the editing room after Dan had made some brilliant suggestions she’d elected to ignore.
“Me? Of course. I’m fine. I’m totally fine. No one in the history of the world has ever been finer.” He cocked a pair of finger guns. “And I do mean finer.”
“Dan?”
“Too much?”
“Too much.”
“I’m in something of a kerfuffle over it.”
“I can tell.”
“A little verklempt.”
“Dan.”
“Do you think Isaac heard about this?”
“I know he did. I told him.”
“It was too much to hope.”
“Are you okay?” asked Kim.
“It’s weird.”
“Yes, it is.”
“It’s very weird.” Dan made a face.
“One of the weirder things I’ve seen around here.”
“And we’ve had some pretty weird moments.”
“The turkey in the light grid comes to mind,” said Kim contemplatively.
“The bomb threat over Danny Denton. You don’t think they’d threaten to bomb us again if they figured out Casey was Marcell Maltoni’s mistress, do you?”
“Probably not. It didn’t go all that well the first time.”
“It’s not that I wish Marcell had asked me.”
“I know.”
He turned to look at her, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was drumming her fingers on the desk, staring at a frozen monitor.
He knew he should say something.
He couldn’t.
“Don’t not do anything you’d regret,” she said, serious and sad.
“I… thank you. Thanks, Kim.”
“Now get out of my hair.” She finally looked up. “We’ve got a show to do and for some reason our 6 o’clock rundown was a total failure.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“We’ll fix it all at the 10 o’clock.”
“We always do.”
The 10 o’clock rundown was, while a circus, at least slightly better than the 6 o’clock rundown, in that Isaac was there (Dan suspected Dana had begged him to be), and no one had the heart to speculate too wildly about Casey’s purported possible relationship with Isaac in the room like a benevolent father figure. Not the dirty-sexy kind of father figure. No Madonna riffs happening in that room.
That didn’t stop a whole lot of innuendo, though.
Casey kept drumming his fingers nervously on the edge of the table. Dan glared at his notepad the whole time.
“Dan,” said Elliot next to him, very quietly, “that notepad hasn’t done anything to your family, has it?”
“Stuff it,” Dan muttered back.
“Fine, Mr. Grumpypants.”
“You’d be grumpy too!”
“I imagine I would, but I am lucky enough that I’ll never have to know.” Elliot patted Dan on the shoulder gently. “It’s going to be all right. He won’t do it.”
“I’m right here, ” hissed Casey. “And we are still having a meeting. ”
“He lacks the sexual courage,” explained Elliot. Dan covered his face with both hands.
Isaac coughed loudly and said, “So about the 20s.” Everyone looked at him and stopped making sexual comments about Casey.
Dan didn’t uncover his face until the end of the meeting. No one mentioned it, which was proof that they were capable of mercy, even if they almost never chose to exercise it.
The show was a little uneven, but not bad; Dan did a flawless throw to the interview, and then stumbled over a teaser in the 30s. Casey was a heartbeat slow on a transition. But it was fine.
After the show, Dan headed back to their office. He stood there, staring blankly at the wall, for a long few seconds before he remembered what he needed and turned to the coat rack.
He turned right into Casey, who was standing in the doorway of their office, holding the glass door open.
“He asked me to come out tomorrow night,” said Casey. The next night was his night off. “I said yes.”
Dan nodded slowly.
“Are you okay with that?”
“Do I need to be?”
“Danny.”
“Yes. It’s okay. I meant it. You need to do what makes you happy,” said Dan, but he knew he couldn’t keep his face right while he said it, and he grabbed his coat off the rack blindly and shouldered past Casey like someone with somewhere to be.
“Danny!” called Casey after him, but Dan kept going.
The next day Dan showed up to work and he did his job. He was pleasant and professional and the substitute in the rotation was Kelly, who kept shooting suspicious looks at him because the last three times she’d been there he’d managed to be a complete lunatic and she had to be wondering where he’d gotten the personality transplant. He stubbornly refused to be insane again. He hadn’t been in therapy for approximately fifty thousand years for nothing.
“So,” she said, aiming for casual, after the show, as they were getting up from the desk, “I heard a rumor.”
“It’s definitely true.”
“About Marcell Maltoni.”
He paused, taking a surreptitious deep breath. Kelly unclipped her microphone and set it down on the desk carefully.
“Is it true he specifically requested Casey for the interview?”
“Absolutely not. I was his first choice, but there were scheduling conflicts.”
“Oh.” She gave him a little smile. “Naturally.”
“Naturally,” he said, with the breezy nonchalance of a man who was not in any way having a series of panic attacks, or possibly one very prolonged panic attack, or what Abby called a depersonalization episode.
She gave him a little wave on her way out. He waved back. He refused to be weird.
He didn’t go home, at first. He went to a bar near their building and had exactly one drink, slowly, because he didn’t trust himself to make good choices in that mood, and he was probably right.
He stared at the glass of whiskey for a long time between sips. There was something hypnotic about the ice, slowly melting into the liquid, and in the reflections of the glass he could watch the moving points of blurry light that marked other people in the bar going places, doing things.
No one approached him. That was good, probably, he thought.
Keeping his shit together was exhausting.
He eventually went home, congratulating himself on managing not to text Casey at any point during what had surely been a whirlwind, romantic night out with an absolute legend. It was not worth twenty-five cents a text (his free texts for the month had long since been obliterated by his incessant need to communicate) to torment himself.
When he walked into his apartment, he was perhaps five percent less tightly wound, which he was prepared to consider a victory. He flipped the lights on in the kitchen, pulling out a beer; the odds of a truly bad decision were far lower inside his own home, so he figured he’d earned the beer with his good behavior all day.
His cellphone beeped softly at him. He almost didn’t open it to check, but in the end his curiosity undid him.
Casey had texted, Are you home?
He hesitated over it for a moment. Yes
Can I come over?
Yes
The door buzzer immediately went off. Dan rolled his eyes and went to the speaker. “You could have just buzzed to begin with,” he said.
“Yeah.” Casey’s voice was tinny over the intercom. “Let me in?”
“Yeah.”
A minute later Casey was carefully closing the door behind him. Dan had retreated to the couch, and had propped his feet up on the edge of his coffee table, knees bent. They stared at each other for a minute.
“Want a beer?” asked Dan.
“Yeah.”
“They’re in the fridge.”
Casey rolled his eyes but went to get one. A minute later he was back. Most of the lights in the apartment were still off, but Dan had the television on, flickering faintly with West Coast Update, and the light in the kitchen was casting a few ragged beams through the living room.
Casey didn’t sit down. He paced across the room, in front of the door. He raised the bottle and took a sip, and Dan couldn’t stand the silence anymore.
“How was your date?”
Casey shrugged, staring at the beer bottle, not meeting Dan’s eyes.
“Must have been fantastic.” Dan winced at how dry his voice was.
“Danny.” Casey’s voice was very quiet.
“You know what,” said Dan, standing up abruptly, “I’m not sure this was a good idea. Maybe—”
“He kissed me.”
Dan stopped, frozen between the coffee table and the couch, staring at Casey, whose eyes had come up from the beer bottle to meet Dan’s. They watched each other in silence for a minute. Dan’s heart was racing.
“Who’s your exception, Danny?” asked Casey. His voice was level, even, and perfectly calm.
Dan shook his head, briefly, abortively. But Casey let the silence sit, let it hurt Dan, until Dan finally swallowed and said, “I don’t need one.”
“Like Kim?”
“Like Kim.”
“Ask me,” said Casey.
“What?”
“Ask me how he kissed me.”
Dan looked down, had to set his beer down, because his palms were getting so sweaty that they were slipping on the glass. “I don’t—what?”
“You want to know. That’s obvious.”
“I don’t…” Dan trailed off. He took a deep breath. “How did he kiss you?”
“Come over here,” said Casey. His eyes were glittering in the light.
Dan took another deep breath, and he picked up one foot and put it in front of the other, and then did it again, a couple of times in a row, until he was standing in front of Casey. Casey set his beer down on the table next to the door where Dan kept his keys. It hit the glass with a clink.
Casey said, voice low, “Like this.” He reached out and grabbed Dan by the front of his sweater and stepped back, pulling Dan with him into the wall, and kissed Dan, and Dan opened his mouth on instinct, so that as Casey tilted his head they were falling into an inferno.
Dan kissed him hard, harder than he meant to, but the thought was driving him insane, the idea of Marcell Maltoni with his hands on Casey like this, and Casey gasped, letting his head fall back as he wound one leg around Dan’s, dragging him even closer.
Dan had his hands up under Casey’s shirt, digging his nails into Casey’s back. He kissed Casey’s exposed throat, his Adam’s apple, and Casey was holding Dan’s shoulders, grip painful through the thin fabric of the old sweater.
“Jesus Christ,” murmured Casey, whose hips were starting to move against Dan’s in tiny, rhythmic movements.
Dan made a noise deep in his throat, half-groan, half-humming, as he ground against Casey. “Like this?” he muttered, still angry, still inexplicably, blazingly angry.
“Not—like this.” Casey’s hands slid down Dan’s arms to his elbows, squeezing, releasing, squeezing again.
“Good.” Dan kissed Casey’s mouth again, and Casey chased the kiss when Dan broke away. “You’re not for him.”
“I know,” said Casey, whose hand had dropped to Dan’s lower back and was pulling him in, “I know now.”
Casey was hard against Dan’s thigh. Dan dropped a hand to cover Casey’s cock, through the thin fabric of his slacks, and Casey groaned into Dan’s mouth. Dan undid the button and tugged down the zipper, and Casey’s cock was hot in his hand.
Casey gasped, jerking back, and for a split second Dan thought he’d gone too far, but—Casey was grabbing the base of his cock and muttering, “Wait, wait,” and Dan knew that move.
“Too much?”
“Too good, ” said Casey, with notes of anguish. “Jesus Christ. Give me a second.”
Dan did. Well, he sort of did. Ish. He made do by kissing Casey again, and after a minute or two Casey started to relax, and then Dan whispered, “Okay?” and Casey nodded, and Dan reached for his cock with a much gentler grip this time. Slow. Slow, slow, he could do slow, and Casey started to keen softly, a faint ululation in the back of his throat that built until Dan couldn’t stand it anymore and he had to let go to undo his own jeans. Casey protested wordlessly against the loss until he looked down and realized what was happening, and as Dan took them both in his hand and started to stroke, Casey looked back up and met Dan’s eyes. He looked wrecked, shattered, and then his eyes closed and he started to come—soundlessly, powerfully—and Dan was coming with him, gasping, shaking.
Casey kissed him again, and kept kissing him, so that for a few long moments Dan thought maybe the afterglow was just where he lived now.
“I didn’t know,” said Casey.
“Hm? What?”
“I didn’t know it was like this. I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“Yeah, um, it can, so—”
“I have wasted so much of my life not sleeping with you.”
“You and Raquel Welch.”
“Unlike Ms. Welch,” said Casey, a somewhat crazed gleam in his eye, “I have the opportunity to rectify my mistakes.”
“Okay, but, uh—”
“Think we can go again in the shower?”
“I mean, maybe?” said Dan, who was starting to feel out of his depth and a little lost. “It’s been—I’m not exactly out here having bacchanalias on the regular, you know.”
“That all changes today!” Casey grinned at him triumphantly, slapped him firmly on the shoulder, and straightened up. “To the shower!”
“I’ve created a monster,” Dan said to the empty room at large, but the effect was mitigated by the fact that he couldn’t stop smiling.
In the shower, while he was coming, Casey gasped out, “I love you,” and Dan froze for a second, but afterwards when Dan stood up Casey said, “I mean it, God, I hope you—” and Dan let out a shaky breath.
“Me, too. I mean. Yeah.”
Casey slept on the left; Dan slept on the right. They’d done that before in hotels when they were young and broke, and it was completely different now, with Casey wrapping his arms around Dan and holding on like an octopus in his sleep.
Dan would have thought it would have been more challenging to sleep like that, but he managed, somehow, and slept deeply and dreamlessly, warm and content.
“So, Casey,” said Isaac, “are we losing you to your new career opportunity?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Casey blatantly lied as he flipped open a notepad for the 12 o’clock rundown.
“I’m given to understand that you’re considering becoming a kept man.”
“Not happening.”
“Bad date?” asked Elliot sympathetically. “You can’t trust rich guys, they always think the money does the talking for them.”
Chris raised his eyebrows at Elliot. “This is something you have much experience with?”
“More than you. I was hot when I was young, I’ll have you know. I had my fair share of wealthy suitors.”
“I’ll believe it when I see the photographic evidence and not one second before.”
“Anyway,” said Jeremy, with the tight, pained face of a man whose girlfriend has just kicked him under the conference table while wearing high heels, “the important thing is that Casey is continuing to work with us, and we should probably have a show for him to do.”
“I guess.” Kim smirked. Dan suspected she’d been smirking more than usual, and possibly directly at him, but that could have just been his guilty conscience talking. He hoped, for the fiftieth time, that his turtleneck didn’t scream that he was trying to hide hickeys, but he had a feeling it probably did.
Nevertheless, Dana managed to restore what passed for order at a rundown by saying, “Did everybody see the news about Glowch?”, which turned out to involve a B-string rugby player (Danny recognized him from his piece for Sports Illustrated ), a tractor, a public gas station, and a very ill-advised string of decisions that Dan had not seen on the news for the simple reason that he had been extremely busy for the previous twelve hours or so.
Later, he found himself at the water cooler with Kim.
“Listen,” she said. His heart sank. “I’d pick you.”
“Wh—oh! I knew it!”
“Never tell Casey.”
“I won’t.”
“He’s tall,” she said thoughtfully, “but you just seem like somebody who would love going down. And that’s a great trait in a sugar baby.”
“Uh—thanks?”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled at him, put her shoulders back again, and sauntered off.
Dan had to burst into the most silent hysterical laughter he could manage, and resolved never to tell Casey, because sometimes—on certain occasions—Kim was right.