“It’s not the end of the world,” Jeffery said.
“What about your rule of never mixing business with pleasure?” Evan asked.
“Turns out Darin Bloomberg loves dick,” Jeffery said. “He begged me to fuck him. What can I say? It’s not like we’re having an affair or anything. He wasn’t planning to leave her for me. So I don’t know what the fuck fresh hells the bitch is talking about. If she were smart she’d grab that gun, put on a strap-on, and fuck him herself.”
“He’s married,” Evan said. “She thinks you broke up their home. Most people would think that way. I’m sure she didn’t know she was in an open marriage, because unless an open marriage is discussed, it’s called cheating.” It always amazed him to think he had to explain things like this to Jeffery.
“It’s not the first time I’ve slept with a married man. It’s just the first time I got caught sleeping with one. I can’t believe that crazy fucking bitch shot at us. I could be dead now. I don’t know what the fuck her problem is.”
Evan hadn’t overlooked this. He was relieved Jeffery hadn’t been shot. But he was too mad to comfort him. “Her problem is that you fucked her husband and that her husband is a lying goddamn cheater. What part of that don’t you get, Jeffery?” He knew he shouldn’t have asked that question. He knew Jeffery would never understand what he’d done wrong. For Jeffery, sex had nothing to do with emotion. It was a physical need to be satisfied. Plain and simple.
“I can’t talk long,” Jeffery said in a dismissive tone. He’d mastered the art of changing the subject years ago. “I’m waiting for a call from my attorney.”
“What am I supposed to tell Kenny?” Evan asked. He glanced into the living room and saw that his son was sitting on the sofa with a pillow over his face now.
“Tell him I’ll talk to him when I get home,” Jeffery said. “For now, tell him the truth and don’t lie about anything. You know me better than anyone in the universe, and we both agreed a long time ago never to lie to him.”
“But he’s still hoping we might get back together,” Evan said.
“Well, we are going to get back together again as soon as you come to your senses. I don’t see how this silly little thing changes anything.”
Though most husbands would have hung up and phoned their attorneys, Evan knew deep down that wasn’t how it would work with him. It would have been a completely different matter if Jeffery had been lying to him. But Jeffery had always told him the truth, which made it virtually impossible to hate him. So Evan ignored the remark about them getting back together and asked, “When are you coming home? I don’t want to deal with this alone.”
“I’m leaving as soon as I can,” Jeffery said. “Darin’s not going to press charges against his wife, but I’m not sure how that works. I’m not either. We want this thing to die fast. That’s why I’m waiting to talk to my attorney.”
“I guess the deal you’ve been working on with Darin is finished now,” Evan said. He felt a slight sense of comfort in this. Jeffery had worked hard, but a lot of his success had been acquired through what Evan considered dumb luck—being in the right place at the right time. He’d always believed that if his husband had known how to deal with a little failure it would have made him a better person. Evan had been around long enough to learn one thing: money didn’t buy happiness.
“The hell it is,” Jeffery said. “This doesn’t change anything. I didn’t fuck his fat for nothing. We’re still going public next week, I’m still investing millions of dollars in his company, and this is only going to give us the best free publicity we’ve ever had. Oh, there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned sex scandal to get attention.”
“You almost got killed while you were fucking a married man, and now your dick is all over the Internet. How is that good publicity?”
Jeffery laughed. He didn’t seem concerned. “Any free publicity is good publicity as long as they spell my name right. And you know I have nothing to worry about with my dick. If anything, when they get a look at me naked, the stock is going to soar.”
“Don’t be so smug,” Evan said. “Not now.”
“It’s true. I’m not being smug. I know how people think and I never sugarcoat it.”
Evan hadn’t looked at it that way, but that was because he’d never been good with anything that involved business or marketing. He needed advice from his literary agent about everything that involved the business end of publishing. He probably could have sold more books if he’d spent more time marketing and promoting himself like other authors he knew, but he was satisfied with his small readership and as long as his books sold a decent number of copies, that was all he cared about. Like most career writers, he only wanted to write. He didn’t want to give speeches or lectures, or spend most of his time at book signing events. Conferences made him cringe.
So Evan sighed and said, “You’d better promise me one thing. When you get home you talk to Kenny first. Nothing else happens before you do that.”
“Of course I will,” Jeffery said. “You know the only two important things to me in life are you and Kenny.”
This sounded good whenever Jeffery said it. But Evan always had trouble believing it. He also wondered if all this had been an accident, or if Jeffery had somehow planned to get caught in bed with Darin Bloomberg on purpose to get the free publicity. It seemed awfully strange that something like this would happen only days before Darin’s company went public. And from what Evan had read, this social media company was popular but based on nothing concrete. “I have to go into the living room and talk to him now. Call me before you leave California.” His voice had softened by then. He knew getting mad at Jeffery wouldn’t help the situation. It would be the same as getting mad at a dog for licking his own balls.
“One more thing,” Jeffery said. “Keep a low profile for a while. The press will be looking for you and Kenny. They’ll want to get your reaction to what happened. You know the drill.”
He’d been through things like this before with Jeffery. Nothing this serious, where Jeffery had been caught in a sex scandal and his penis had been broadcast all over the Internet, but Evan had learned how to deal with the media: play dumb, say nothing, move forward without looking sideways.