Page 38 of We Could Be Heroes

It was hard for an outsider to tell, but ever since she’d met Harper on a yoga retreat three months ago, Patrick had never seen Simone so happy. She had claimed to be spending her weekend at Shangri-LA to re-center herself and achieve enlightenment, but in reality she had followed indie darling Bella Gray there in the hopes of poaching her from a rival agency. While Simone might have ended up leaving on Monday no closer to personal enlightenment or a new client, she did have a budding romance on her hands. She and Harper had struck up a conversation about the current state of lesbian representation in cinema (“Why are they always set so far in the past?” “I know, right? Let the poor girls have some electricity along with all that pining”) and had become almost immediately inseparable. It was the first and only time Patrick had ever known his agent to get distracted from her work. Having met Harper, he could see why and was glad of it. Simone never forgot a mission for long, though: She locked down Bella a week later, after cornering the poor girl in the ladies’ room at Soho Warehouse.

“So what can I do for my favorite client?” Simone asked.

Patrick’s attention snapped back to the task at hand. As delightful as Harper was, he had brought her up for a reason. He was hoping that appealing to Simone’s romantic side—such as it was—would make the following conversation easier.

“I’ve met someone,” he said.

“I thought you might have,” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one, you haven’t been sending me quite as many emails complaining about the changes to the script. And I know the production is still very much a mess, so I assumed your attention was elsewhere. But anyway. I’m assuming that this ‘someone’ you’ve started seeing is…?”

“A man.” He decided to keep “and a drag queen” to himself for the time being.

“OK.” Simone said nothing for a moment, didn’t even move, and Patrick began to wonder if the call had frozen. Then: “How serious is it?”

“I don’t know.” Patrick shrugged. It was the truth. He was almost certainly jumping the gun entirely by telling Simone about Will. They’d kissed. Once. Well, technically a lot of times, but only the one time, and Patrick had been eager for more, but the encounter had been frustratingly abbreviated.

The credits had long rolled when Patrick and Will walked out of the theater, giddy and breathless. Patrick could not bring a single detail of the movie to mind. They smiled shyly at each other as they adjusted clothing that had grown tight and uncomfortable, bashful all of a sudden under the artificial foyer light. The darkness had freed something in them both, and Patrick’s cheeks flushed again at the memory of Will’s lips on his, the warmth of his tongue, the way he’d moaned softly into Patrick’s mouth as he pulled him closer.

Acting on instinct, Patrick reached for Will again and then hesitated as a couple of teenagers walked past them so that his knuckles knocked clumsily against Will’s wrist. He saw it in Will’s face, too: the harsh, unflattering glare of reality chasing away their wonderful shadows. An almost physical pain jabbed at Patrick, a stitch in muscles that had been allowed to atrophy. His arms hung at his sides, useless, and then he got a call from Audra with some crisis or other that required his presence back at the hotel. Rather than say no, provoking questions about his absence, Patrick had acquiesced. He had made his pathetic apologies to Will, who looked understandably hurt and confused, and left. And the entire time he had stood in Audra’s room—it turned out all she really wanted was for somebody to be present while she ranted about the terrible table she had been given at the Ivy across the square—he had checked and rechecked his phone, but of course Will hadn’t messaged him. He wouldn’t have messaged either, after that abrupt departure. The next move had to be his. And so here he was.

“It’s serious enough that I’m telling you,” he said to Simone now. “Serious enough that I’d like some time to see where it might go.”

“OK,” she said again. “Is he discreet?”

“You sound like a closeted guy on Grindr.”

“And I’ve told you never to go on Grindr because your phone can be traced. I’ll ask again: Can you trust him to be discreet?”

“I think so. I mean, yes.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I am. I just…” He sighed. “I hate this part. It’s why I don’t date. Anytime I meet somebody, I don’t even get a chance to figure out if I really like them before we start talking about NDAs and lawsuits.”

“It’s the way of the world,” Simone told him.

“Should it be, though?” Patrick asked. “I wish I could just spend time with Will like a normal guy. Take him on a real date. Maybe even think about having a boyfriend.”

“If you wanted normal, you chose the wrong career,” Simone said, her tone light. “And I’m sorry to remind you, but you’re America’s boyfriend.”

“And if I don’t want to be?”

Simone laughed, as if he couldn’t possibly be serious.

“Do you remember the conversation we had when I first agreed to represent you?”

“You said if I had a thing for pills, I should head back to Buttfuck, Indiana, right then and there because you’re an agent, not a fixer or a babysitter. And I told you I was actually from New Jersey, and you said, ‘Same difference.’ ”

“Right,” Simone said unwaveringly. “Do you remember what else I said?”

Patrick sucked air through his teeth.

“That if I wanted to publicly date men, I might become a gay role model, but only for about five people, because I’d never get booked for anything bigger than network.”

“And what did you say to me?”

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