Chapter 23

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

KENAN

The following three weeks passed in a blur of meetings, media training, and even several unexpected, supposedly "well-meaning" warning conversations with people I'd thought were friends.

"Don't do this," a well-respected member of the president's senior staff had hissed at me after learning about my relationship with the president. "Are you fucking insane? This will ruin him."

I'd bitten my teeth together and felt my nose flare. "Would you say that if I was a woman?"

"Of course I would," he'd snapped back. "Sleeping with his bodyman? It's tawdry and sensational, not to mention the Me Too people are going to have a field day."

"President Ashley and I have known each other for a very long time," I'd reminded him. "Long before he was ever the president."

"If you truly cared about him, you'd stay the hell away from him."

I'd seen Garner's face peering at us from down the hall. He must have known from my body language what was happening, but thankfully, he stayed away.

"It's because I care about him that I'll endure anything to make sure he is loved openly by the person he wants most," I'd said as calmly as I could.

I hadn't come to this conclusion easily. Honestly, I'd spent a few hours in consultation with one of the Navy psychologists I'd befriended several years earlier. With her help, I'd come to terms—or started to anyway—with some of my remaining fears. I'd told her about my fear of causing a stain on his legacy, and she'd reminded me that standing proudly next to him as the first out gay president lived his truth in the public eye could be seen as contributing to his legacy.

"And think of the LGBTQ+ people around the world who are looking to him as their example," she'd continued. "Should they see him keep his love in the dark? Should they learn later, in the safety of his retirement, he or his partner had been too afraid to?—"

I'd stopped her right there with a grunt of acknowledgment.

It wasn't going to be easy or pretty.

But it would be worth it.

And it would be true.

As I entered the Oval Office at six o'clock in the evening on that Friday night in early August, I was shaking with nerves. Garner's team had strategized it to death, and now, here we were. Tonight, we would go public with our relationship via a televised interview, and Garner's sister had come to give us support.

Catherine looked up at me from where she sat on the sofa, scrolling on her phone. "There you are. He was getting worried." She nodded toward the closed door to Garner's private washroom. "Not that he wasn't worried enough already."

I strode over to the door and knocked once before turning the knob. "Baby?" I asked softly. "Can I come in?"

As soon as he made a sound of approval, I slipped through the door and closed it behind me. He was sitting on the back of the closed toilet seat, dressed sharply in a killer suit.

After three weeks of spending every possible night together naked and touching, I felt even closer to Garner. I could tell right away he was trying to get into the right headspace for our sit-down interview.

I could also tell he was having zero doubts about our chosen path.