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Sometime around 11:30 on the night of Monday, December 8th, Anderson Cooper gets a call from Rahm.
"Just so you know," Rahm says, before Anderson has even said hello, "I had nothing to do with this."
"Okay," Anderson says. "With what?"
"You'll see," Rahm says, and hangs up.
Anderson puts his phone back in his pocket. It's not even close to the weirdest phone call he's ever gotten from Rahm.
A little after 10:15 in the morning on Tuesday, December 9th, Rahm Emanuel gets a call from Anderson.
"Little busy here, feygelah," Rahm says. He sounds out of breath. Anderson can hear traffic in the background.
"I'm sure you are," Anderson says. "So, is this what you meant when you said you had nothing to do with this?"
"This, what? The guv? This, is that what you're bothering me about -- I called you last night so we wouldn't have to have this goddamn conversation now, I knew I would be fuckin' busy --"
"All right," Anderson says. "Thanks. Can I quote you?"
"You do, I kill you. Hey, asshole on a bike, yeah, you -- fuck you!"
"Bye, Rahm," Anderson says.
"Talk to you later, kid."
"Huh," Erica says. Anderson looks over at her. Her chin is propped on her hand and she's squinting at her laptop screen. "Did you see the thing in the Hot File?"
Anderson opens his laptop, then the Hot File -- rumors too vague to air, alerts about potential stories coming in from around the country, most of them -- if not all -- eventually turning out to be legitimate.
"RAHM WHISTLEBLOWER?" reads the title of the newest note, and he opens it, scans it quickly, and sees the big red "NOT FOR AIR" at the top of the page.
"You think it's true?" Erica looks over at him. He shrugs and pushes his laptop away.
"It'd be a good story," he says. "A really good story."
"It's already a good story," Erica says. "This would just make it better."
The stage manager calls out, "Thirty seconds back," and he fixes his cuffs and sits up a little straighter.
"It's not for air," he reminds her, and she sighs, cracks her knuckles, and closes her laptop.
The stage manager points at him, the red light on the camera starts to blink, and Anderson says, "Welcome back to AC 360."
On November 7th, which Anderson remembers because it was a Friday, the end of one of the longer weeks he'd spent at work in recent memory, his producer Josh knocked on his doorframe and said, "This guy who says he's Rahm Emanuel is on the top line for you."Anderson picked up the phone, his finger hovering over the button with the flashing light. "Is he actually Rahm Emanuel, or am I about to wind up on Opie & Anthony?"
"I'm gonna say it's actually him. He cussed me out when I asked for verification."
"Great. That's foolproof." He rolled his eyes at Josh, who threw up his hands and left the room. Anderson punched the button. "This is Anderson Cooper."
"Fucking finally, Jesus, getting your number is like piecing together the clues to the Holy Grail."
"Sorry," Anderson said. "My staff is protective. What can I do for you?"
"You can give me your direct line so that I never have to jump through forty fuckin' hoops again. This is my line, and my Blackberry." Rahm reeled off a string of numbers that had Anderson diving for a pen. "Nine seven," Rahm finished, and Anderson underlined the numbers and scrawled Rahm Emanuel WTF underneath them. "Now it's your turn."
"Congressman --"
"Call me Rahm, and listen, I'm fuckin' busy but I took the time to call you because I figured you wouldn't be calling me. And that's a shame, because if you'd called, I'd have picked up the phone and I do that for nobody. So here's the deal, and you don't get to say no to this -- I am now your White House go-to guy. If you have a source on something and you need a confirmation, you come to me. You are going to get your secondary source from me, every single goddamn time. You hear me?"
"I hear you," Anderson said. "What about Robert Gibbs? Does he know you're offering sources from outside the press office?"
"Get this -- you are simultaneously too fuckin' important and not important enough for Robert Gibbs. His staff has their hands full with the big three, okay, and I decided to be nice and keep you from getting lost in the shuffle. I'm doing you a favor, and when I say you I mean you, this is not a standing offer to all of CNN, this is a standing offer to you. So say thank you, give me your goddamn number, and I will talk to you when I talk to you."
Anderson rubbed his thumb over his eyebrow. "This has nothing to do with the fact that maybe with me, you think you can control the message a little? I mean, you're not calling Olbermann or Maddow with this --"
"How do you know I'm not? Olbermann would be so fucking glad to get official attention that he'd shove his tongue through the phone just to kiss my ass."
"If this isn't exclusive --"
There was a rush of air, like a sudden wind, on the other end of the line. Anderson held the phone away from his ear, then realized the noise was just Rahm sighing. "Goddamn, Cooper, just say yes and give me your fucking number."
Anderson grinned and rattled off his office line, then the number to his Blackberry. "I just didn't want you to think I'd be easier than anybody else," he said.
Rahm snorted out a laugh. "Easy, fuck no. Interesting? That's all I want. Be that, kid, you're mine forever."
He hung up before Anderson could ask whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
At the next commercial break, he takes out his earpiece, picks up his Blackberry, and calls Rahm.
"Busy!" Rahm howls into the phone as soon as he picks up. "This better be worth my goddamn time, Cooper!"
"We have a hot note about a Chicago Fox station reporting that you gave info to the feds --"
"Fuck me, that's it? Of course I talked to the fucking feds, I wanted this guy killed before he did something to really ruin my life. That's why I knew they were moving on him today, that's why I called you, whatever fucking good that did me."
Anderson holds the phone away from his ear. Erica's eyebrows are up high -- Rahm is shouting so loudly that every word is audible through the earpiece. "Okay," Anderson says. "So you're my second source --"
"If you report this, I will kill you, I will actually kill you --"
Anderson glances at the clock over his camera. The big digital numbers keep ticking -- less than a minute until they're back from the break. "Listen, I'm saying something no matter what, the note says that MS and Fox both ran it, so either you get to confirm it or I'm just gonna repeat the spurious claim of some Chicago reporter --"
"I didn't confirm shit, Cooper. Say whatever you want."
The line goes dead again. Anderson sighs and tosses his Blackberry onto the desk, then jams his earpiece back in.
"No second source," he tells Erica, who shakes her head. "But we're running with it."
"What did Rahm say?" asks Josh over the radio, his voice thin and reedy through the earpiece. Anderson shrugs at the camera, knowing Josh will see it.
"Nothing we can use. But the other networks have already scooped us -- we need to go to air with this note."
"That'll piss him off," Erica says.
"Please." Anderson straightens his tie and looks toward the camera. "What doesn't?"
The Monday after Rahm called him for the first time, Anderson wound up in a Hell's Kitchen bar eight blocks south of the Time Warner Center, two avenues east of the Colbert Report and Daily Show studios, and three avenues west of Rockefeller Center.
"I don't think this is the closest to the middle we can come up with," Rachel said, shaking rain off her baseball cap and shoving it back onto her head. "It's a fuck of a hike from Sixth." She dropped into the booth next to Anderson and gave him a friendly shove in the ribs.
"Whine, whine, whine," said Stephen. "You're late, you didn't reply to any one of my sixteen e-mails, so you don't get to complain about the location."
"I pick next time," she said, and Stephen scowled and mimed screwing a monocle onto his eye. Jon laughed into his hands as Rachel crossed her arms. "What? I'm an old man? Yes. Yes, I am."
"Children," Jon said loudly, and Anderson smiled into his vodka tonic and checked his Blackberry. Nothing new. He set it down on the table. "This is why we only wind up meeting once every two months. If I wanted to listen to toddlers bickering, I'd go home."
"Fine," Stephen said, but he wasn't looking at Jon. Anderson glanced over, and realized too late where he was looking. His arm shot out and he snatched Anderson's Blackberry off the table. "This is much more entertaining."
"It's password locked," Anderson said, and Stephen shrugged, thumbs poking away at the keyboard.
"You are the type -- let's see, oh six oh three six seven -- yes. Ha." He brandished the device at Anderson, who covered his mouth to hide his smile. "Your own birthday. I knew it."
"I'm a little more disturbed at the fact that you know Anderson's birthday down to the year," Rachel said.
"I know everybody's, it's a gift." Stephen squinted at the screen. "Jesus, good to know you don't spellcheck your e-mails to anybody, not just me. Who is --" He dropped the phone then, suddenly, like it had burned him. "You have Rahm Emanuel in your contacts!"
"Give me that --" Rachel grabbed the phone off the table and simultaneously pulled a pen out of her jacket pocket. "Three one two --" She hunched to the side as Anderson yanked on her shoulder, trying to get her to turn back around. "Ow, you little shit, no biting!"
"Give me my phone back," Anderson said, pinching the back of her arm through her jacket. "Now, Rachel."
"Fine, fine." She tossed it back onto the table, then turned around and proudly displayed the back of her hand -- on which she'd scrawled Rahm's phone number. "I knew I put up with you for a reason."
"Now I think Andy has to explain why he has Rahm's number," Jon said, drumming his fingers on the table. "Anderson?"
Anderson sighed and shoved his phone back into his pocket. "With friends like these," he muttered, and couldn't help but smile when Rachel laughed.
From December ninth to the twelfth, they just exchange e-mails. For the most part, neither of them says much of anything. Rahm mentions maybe jumping on a shuttle to New York over the weekend. Anderson tells him he'd like that, and he's welcome to stay at his apartment. No plans are made.
Which is good. Because on the twelfth, all hell breaks loose.
"You invited a reporter into your house?"
"The fucker was ready to unzip and piss on my lawn," Rahm says. Anderson hears the ding of a cash register in the background. Some days, he feels like he can plot the movements of Rahm's every day life, just by what goes on behind him during their phone calls. Tonight, he's at the grocery store. It's late. "You're picking a weird thing to yell at me about. Figured it'd be the fucking death threats."
Anderson can't let himself think about those -- something in his head gets dizzy for a second every time he thinks about someone threatening to kill Rahm . "I'm not yelling at you, I'm just confused. Are you seriously on those tapes?" Anderson heads into his kitchen and looks into the fridge. Carton of orange juice, bottle of seltzer. He takes those out, then checks the freezer. Vodka and ice cubes join them on the countertop.
"Yeah, of course I am."
Anderson stops, mid-screw of the vodka's top. "You are? What are you talking about?"
"With the fucktard? Nothing. I knew the guy was tapped. He kept calling, begging for something other than 'appreciation.' I told him he could fuck himself. As soon as he started to make threats, I told the feds what they needed to hear."
"Great," Anderson sighs, pouring several shots worth of vodka into a glass over the ice. "More bleeps."
Wednesday, two days after Rachel stole Rahm's number and eight days after the election, Anderson got a phone call.
"Busy?" Rahm asked.
Anderson blinked at the clock. "It's a quarter after one, so no," he said. "Unless you count 'being asleep' as busy."
"I don't," Rahm said. "Put some goddamn pants on. I'm in the city and I wanted to say hi."
Fifteen minutes later, Anderson was wearing pants and standing at the bar in The Half King, halfway through a hot toddy.
"Shit," someone said over his shoulder, "what are you drinking, piss-water?"
"Hey, Rahm," Anderson said, looking to his left. "How are you? Having a good night? I'm so glad you're here."
"Don't be like that, sarcasm ruins your pretty face," Rahm said, dropping his overcoat to the floor but leaving the scarf around his neck. He was wearing a suit, and had, from the looks of it, been wearing it for at least a week. "Jack on the rocks," he told the bartender, who jerked his head in a nod. He looked over at Anderson and bumped their shoulders together. "How are you?"
"Awake, when I'd rather not be," Anderson said. He pushed his empty glass across the bar and caught the bartender's eye. "Not that I'm not glad to see you in person, but you couldn't have called me tomorrow?"
"You'll be at work all day tomorrow," Rahm said. The bartender set two full collins glasses in front of them, and Rahm gave Anderson an inscrutable look. "If I thought I'd have been granted an audience with the Great and Powerful Anderson Fucking Cooper, I'd have come to your office. But I know you, you'd pull the 'I'm busy' shit and keep me kicking around all day until you deigned to meet me for a late dinner or what the fuck ever. So I said, fuck it, this is my game."
"You just wanted to prove you could make me do what you told me to," Anderson said, and Rahm started to laugh.
"Well, yeah." He took a sip of his whiskey, then looked over at Anderson. "Oh, don't make your priss-face at me, sweetheart. You're having fun."
"I don't like the implication that you think you can manipulate me," Anderson said. He swirled the whiskey over the ice, then took a long sip and tried not to make a face. He should have gone with vodka. So much for making an impression.
"Who's implying anything? I know I can manipulate you." Rahm jammed a finger into Anderson's bicep. "You're putty, feygelah."
"Fey-- damn it," Anderson grumbled, and Rahm looked delighted. "That's the absolute last thing I need from you, a nickname."
"You know what it means?" Rahm beamed at him over the rim of his glass, his face showing fatigue and amusement in equal amounts. "Shit, I know how to pick 'em."
"I grew up in Manhattan, I probably know more Yiddish than you," Anderson said, and Rahm laughed at him.
"Yeah? Toches ahfen tish, then." Rahm looked at him for a moment, then snorted through his nose. "Goy."
"You want me to -- asses on the table, put up or shut up?" Buoyed by alcohol and exhaustion, Anderson downed the rest of his drink and slammed the glass on the bar. Rahm's eyebrows shot up. "All right. Where are you staying?"
A grin spread over Rahm's face, and Anderson's stomach did a weird little flip. Okay. Putty was about right.
It's Tuesday night again, and Anderson finds himself wondering how the Blagojevich scandal could have broken only a week ago when it feels like he's been covering the story for a month.
He's re-drafting the A block of the script -- trying to find some ground he hasn't trod eighteen times already -- when his Blackberry vibrates. He checks the caller ID, then turns on the speakerphone and sets his hands back on the keyboard. "Hey, Rachel."
"Cooper!" Rachel shouts, then pauses. "Am I on speakerphone?"
"I'm writing, I wanted my hands free," he tells the phone. "And don't shout. What do you want?"
"Michael Sneed's reporting that Emanuel's on at least twenty-one tapes," Rachel says breathlessly.
"We knew he was on tapes."
"Twenty-one tapes! Twenty! One! Talking about the Senate seat!" She's shouting again. Anderson turns off the speakerphone and holds the Blackberry up to his ear.
"Okay, okay," Anderson says. "What are you calling me for? Olbermann's on your air right now, Campbell's on mine -- won't they be breaking it?"
"I'm calling you because you have Rahm's number," Rachel says. "Can you confirm this with him?"
"You have Rahm's number too," he reminds her. "Or did you forget to copy it down before you washed your hands?"
There's a pause, and then Rachel mumbles something. "What?" Anderson says, and Rachel coughs once, loudly.
"I said, he hung up on me," she says. Anderson starts to laugh. "Oh, yeah, it's hilarious, asshole, I have to go on the air in fifteen minutes and talk about this with no script, no secondary source, just Keith's lead-in and what might as well be a blind item from a second-string gossip columnist."
Anderson whistles under his breath. "Can't imagine why he hung up on you," he says. "You could give him a run for his money in the rant department."
Rachel groans. "Thank you for nothing, jerkface," she says, and hangs up.
Anderson pushes the phone away and focuses on the script again. Breaking news tonight, he writes, and of course that's when the phone rings again.
He snatches it up and blurts, "What!"
"Why is Rachel Maddow calling my fucking direct line?"
He bangs the heel of his hand against his forehead and slumps down over his desk. "My friends are idiots," he says.
"Should I expect a phone call from Larry fucking King next? Maybe a little voicemail from Stephen Colbert? Did you pass my number on to all the jackasses on community cable access, too? I thought we had an arrangement, Cooper, and it did not involve you scrawling my number on the walls of public restrooms."
"I'm sorry," Anderson says. "It's a long story, and I'm sorry. She shouldn't have done that."
"Michael Sneed is a fifth-rate piece of shit," Rahm snaps. "The fact that you, or Maddow, or Olbermann, or anybody with two brain cells to rub together would give her credibility when the woman is so lacking for it that she thinks Page Six is a reliable source, just, you fucking disgust me."
"Rahm --"
The line's dead already. Anderson hangs up the phone and deletes the A block.
The answer to the question "Where are you staying?" turned out very quickly to be "With you, Anderson."
And, Rahm being Rahm, Anderson's forced hospitality didn't stop him from heading right for the liquor cabinet as soon as he'd thrown his coat on the couch. "Glass-fronted liquor cabinets are helpful," Rahm said in response to Anderson's raised eyebrow as he pulled out a bottle of wine. "Cabernet sauvingon? Good boy."
Anderson sighed, threw his own jacket on top of Rahm's, and pulled down two wide-mouthed glasses from the shelf. "Please, help yourself," he said dryly, and Rahm gave him a smirk when Anderson handed him the corkscrew.
"I plan to," he said, and yanked the cork out of the bottle with a wet pop. "Oh, that smells nice."
Anderson left him to pour the wine and walked down the hallway to the bathroom, where he shut the door, leaned on the counter, and looked at himself in the mirror for a long minute. "It's two thirty in the morning," he told his reflection. The bags under his eyes seemed to darken as he watched. "What does he want?"
Seeing as his life was not a Disney movie, his reflection failed to respond. He splashed cold water on his face, dried it on his t-shirt, and walked out.
Rahm had seated himself on the couch, one ankle propped on the opposite knee. The cuff of his suit pants had ridden up to show that he was wearing grey and black argyle socks, which Anderson found inexplicably endearing, almost humanizing -- political attack machines, after all, didn't know how to match patterns. His suit jacket and tie had joined his coat on the back of the couch, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up over his forearms.
He was fiddling with a Blackberry that, on second look, turned out to be Anderson's.
"Goddamn it," Anderson said, covering the distance between them in two strides and going to grab it out of his hands. "What is with people and my stuff --"
"Hey," Rahm leaned back into the arm of the couch and clutched the phone against his chest. "If you really didn't want me to read your e-mails, you'd have a better password."
"It's work stuff," Anderson said, planting his hands on his hips and glaring at Rahm. "Confidential, private, top secret work stuff."
"Yeah, your e-mail to the intern about getting you some edamame is very important," Rahm said, and lobbed the Blackberry onto the other side of the couch. Anderson grabbed it and stuffed it in his jeans pocket before throwing himself onto the cushions and picking up the glass of wine on the table.
"Now that you've violated my privacy," Anderson started, and Rahm snorted out a laugh. Anderson ignored him and continued, "and made it very clear that it was a mistake to let you come back here --"
"What?" Rahm sat up straight. His feet hit the ground, thudding dully on the thick carpet. "Let me come back here? You're so full of shit those baby blues are about to turn brown."
"I don't know what you're doing here," Anderson said, pointing dangerously with the hand that held the wine glass. Rahm smirked at him, which made Anderson suddenly much more angry. "You show up in my city, you call me at one in the morning, you drag me out of bed to a bar and then do nothing but make fun of me for twenty minutes. I can't get a straight answer out of you to save my life and what was supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship in terms of information has instead turned out to be five days' worth of an extraordinarily frustrating one-sided thing. So maybe instead of being such a damn tease, you answer some basic yes or no questions. Does that sound reasonable?"
"No," Rahm said.
Anderson blinked at him, feeling instantly deflated. His hand shook a little when he put down the wine glass. "Why not?"
Rahm shrugged, and shifted so that one knee was planted on the couch under him and he was turned toward Anderson. "Because," he said, leaning forward and hooking two fingers into the neck of Anderson's t-shirt, forcing him to bend closer to Rahm until their faces were parallel. Rahm's mouth was so close to his ear that Anderson felt his lips move when he said, "I'm really damn tired of talking."
Anderson doesn't hear from Rahm for what feels like a long time but in reality is only six days. Slow news cycles tend to make Anderson feel like time has just stopped passing. Rahm doesn't return his calls, or respond to his e-mails, and everything starts to feel a little more like it had in the beginning.
"If it's my fault, I'm sorry," Rachel tells him on Monday night -- two weeks since Rahm called and said, "I have nothing to do with this." Anderson thinks about that still, and finds himself wishing that he had more of a reason to believe him.
Rachel's baseball cap is pulled low over her eyes -- a fan recognized her earlier in the evening, and rather than leave their favorite bar, she's opted for a semi-effective disguise. "I shouldn't have called him," she says. "But I was desperate for some real information."
"I know, I am too," Anderson says, watching Jon and Stephen play Chinese football on the other side of the table. "It's probably not your fault."
"Listen to them," Stephen says, and lines up his punt to Jon's goal-shaped fingers. "It's like they're real journalists or something."
"Imagine that," Rachel says. Anderson sees her tense up, then the instant Stephen flicks the paper triangle at Jon, she snatches it out of the air. Stephen lights up as Jon groans.
"That was impressive," he says to Rachel. "Cat-like."
She shoves the triangle into his glass of water and Stephen's face falls. "You're annoying me. Anderson and I are trying to have an actual conversation."
"One that, by definition, excludes us," Jon points out. "Andy, Rahm isn't calling you because seriously, there's no fucking news happening. We know Obama's gonna release all the contacts between his staff and Blago's, but they're gonna do it when nobody's paying attention. Hanukkah started last night, so all but the most secular Jews have already tuned out, and Christmas is, what, Thursday, three days away -- they could announce that they're appointing Blagojevich to be Head of the White House Ethics Committee, and everybody would just shrug and go back to wrapping presents and drinking too much. So it'll happen on Tuesday, MSNBC won't even come out of their re-runs of Lock-Up: Scranton to cover it, and everybody will have pretty much forgotten about this by January. Leave it alone."
Rachel puts down her empty glass. "We have a Lock-Up: Scranton? That's hardcore."
Jon holds up his hands and looks at the ceiling. "Why do I bother? Why?"
"I get it," Anderson tells Jon, as Stephen starts folding his napkin into another paper football. "It just pisses me off, because I'm paying attention, and I want to make sure my information is good. I do have to go on the air tomorrow and if it's bad news for Rahm, I don't care. I just want to be able to say it on the air without it coming back to bite me."
"Please," Stephen says, still intent on his folding. "You want to clear him of any wrong-doing, because if it turns out that he was talking to Blago about dealing for the Senate seat, then he's been playing you like an exceptionally easy fiddle for a pretty long time."
Rachel looks at Anderson from underneath her hat brim. He's pretty sure that the expression on his face betrays exactly what he's thinking. "Anderson knows better than to fall for that," she tells Stephen. "And if that turns out to be the case, then this thing is bigger than we thought."
"Either way, I have a story," Anderson says.
Stephen flicks his new paper football at him and says, "That's looking on the bright side, sport."
Anderson figured that, if someone had told him a month ago that he'd eventually find himself shirtless, tipsy, and straddling Rahm Emanuel, he'd have recommended that person check themselves into Bellevue post-haste.
But now that he was all of the above, nothing about the situation seemed particularly crazy.
Rahm kissed like he talked -- fast, brutal, and filthy. Anderson was more than happy to fight him for control, one hand tight on the back of his neck while the other popped open his shirt buttons one by one to get at the white t-shirt underneath.
Rahm sank his teeth into Anderson's lower lip, and Anderson groaned instantly, involuntarily. His hands felt detached from the rest of him as they closed around Rahm's shoulder and he dug his fingers into the back of Rahm's neck, holding him still as they kissed, bit, pulled and pushed at each other for control.
Anderson wanted to give up, give himself up, but his pride or his guilt or his dick wouldn't let him, and he made a noise in the back of his throat when Rahm tried to shove him to his back on the couch. He grabbed at Rahm's open shirt, clumsy from adrenaline and arousal, but got enough of it to pull Rahm on top of him when he eventually toppled onto his back.
"You fight dirty," Rahm said, trying to catch his breath as he pushed himself up, hands pressed into the cushion on either side of Anderson's head.
"I didn't know we were fighting." Anderson let his legs sprawl out as much as he could on the narrow couch, and silently cursed himself for thinking jeans were a good idea. He hitched his hips up, then inhaled sharply as his erection rubbed against Rahm's thigh.
Rahm smirked at him and pushed his thigh forward just enough so that the pressure made Anderson twist under him, hands still clenched in the fabric of Rahm's shirt. "Fighting, fucking, it's all the same in the end," Rahm said, and Anderson glared at him.
"It's not a lot of fun to be you, is it," he said, letting go of Rahm's shirt and pushing his fingers up under the hem of his t-shirt, skimming over his stomach and the curve of his ribs until he felt a nipple, and immediately tweaked it.
Rahm's mouth twisted to one side like he was fighting a smile, and he pushed against Anderson's cock again. "I don't know," he said, and bent down to take Anderson's nipple into his mouth, biting and sucking at it until Anderson was nearly humping his thigh and yanking on his hair to tug him away, to make him stop teasing. Rahm laughed, low in the back of his throat, and looked Anderson in the eye. "I'm having a lot of fun being me."
Anderson threw one arm around Rahm's shoulders. "I thought you said you were tired of talking." He pushed his fingers up into Rahm's hair and tugged a little, and Rahm let out a shuddery breath against Anderson's skin. Anderson pulled again, smiled when he got the same reaction and then groaned as Rahm shifted and pushed his groin against Anderson's hips, because knowing Rahm was turned on was one thing, but feeling his hard-on rubbing against his own through their pants was something else entirely.
"I need you to take your pants off," Rahm said, and Anderson gritted his teeth and pushed at his shoulders, shoving him back. "What --"
Anderson forced himself to stand up, spreading his feet to steady his shaky legs, and undid the button on his jeans. Rahm's eyes never left his hands. "I think one of the rewards of adulthood is that you never have to have sex on someone's couch again," he told Rahm, and kicked his pants off from around his ankles. "My bedroom's down the hall."
He spun on his heel and strode toward his door, pushed his boxers to the floor, and had one knee on the bed by the time Rahm joined him, having shed the rest of his clothes between the bedroom and the living room.
"I should've given you more credit," Rahm said, elbowing the door closed behind him and plunging the room into darkness, the only light coming through the window from the buildings around them. "I expected you to be a lot more passive."
"Thanks for changing your mind, I guess," Anderson said.
Rahm knelt on the bed next to him, and dragged his fingers over Anderson's chest. "There's still time for you to convince me, either way," he said, and suddenly shoved him, hard. Anderson fell onto his back on the bed, the wind knocked out of him more out of surprise than from the shove, and he tried to drag in a breath but wound up gasping instead when Rahm kissed him, digging his teeth into his lip.
"Anderson," Rahm said, "I'd do pretty much anything right now if you'd suck my cock."
Anderson swallowed a moan, his cock jumping in arousal, and pushed Rahm onto his back. Rahm gave him a smug look and Anderson pinched his nipple, hard. "You're the only person I know who's satisfied with himself before having an orgasm." Rahm laughed and rubbed his hand over Anderson's hair, then pushed him down.
"Still not interested in having a conversation," Rahm said, and Anderson rolled his eyes and took the head of Rahm's cock into his mouth. "Oh, fuck--"
Anderson wrapped his hand around his own cock, bracing his other against Rahm's thigh, and let Rahm jerk his hips, hand still curled around the back of Anderson's neck. He'd forgotten how good this could feel, to actually hand the power over to the other person, and now he was so turned on that it felt like all of his nerves were buzzing and sparking.
"Fuck, Anderson, that's good," Rahm groaned, and Anderson hummed in the back of his throat, jerked his own cock hard, and felt his legs start to shake again as Rahm held his head down, thumb digging into the spot behind his jaw that made his muscles go weak. He swallowed around Rahm's cock, and forced himself to slow down his hand.
"C'mon," Rahm said, dragging his fingers over the back of Anderson's neck. "I want you to come, Anderson --"
Anderson let out a noise somewhere between a moan and a whimper, and dug his fingers into Rahm's thigh as he thrust into his hand, as Rahm fucked his mouth. He came suddenly, groaning around Rahm's cock, holding on to the bed with shaking hands. Rahm stroked his hair, the back of his neck, then suddenly pushed urgently at his shoulders, but Anderson was too far gone to move, to do anything other than let Rahm use his mouth. "Anderson -- I'm close --"
He just ran his tongue up the underside of Rahm's cock, and swallowed as he came.
Rahm's hands fell away from Anderson's head and he pushed himself away, let himself fall to the bed, face mashed into the sheets. Rahm pulled at his shoulders, making him move and put his head on a pillow. Dimly, as he fell headlong into sleep, he felt Rahm stroking his back, petting his hair, altogether too gentle and unnervingly kind.
He woke up alone the next morning, unsurprised.
At 6:00 on Tuesday morning -- two weeks since the scandal broke -- Rahm calls him and says, "Busy?"
"Yes," Anderson says. He hangs up the phone and goes back to sleep.
At 7:30, the phone rings again. He lifts his head off the pillow, checks the caller ID, and sends the call to voicemail.
He's being petty. He's okay with that.
At 7:58, he's in the shower, and not even the phone ringing will make him run out to his bedroom with soapy hair.
At 8:13, he checks his voicemail. He has two new messages, both of which are hang-ups.
He misses another call at 8:32 while he's in the subway, and ignores his ringing phone at 8:54 as he steps into the elevator.
At 9:02, as he's hanging up his coat and flipping through the mail from the day before, his office phone rings. He picks it up, then drops the handset back into the cradle.
At this point, he's just having fun with the constant reminders that yes, Rahm does in fact need him for something.
The phone doesn't ring again until 11:48, when he gets back from the morning run-down meeting. He spares a moment to wonder if Rahm has a camera installed in his office, and then picks up the phone. "Hey, Rahm."
"What? 'Hey, Rahm'? 'Hey, Rahm'? That is the best you can fuckin' do after ignoring every one of my goddamn phone calls, you petty little manipulative shit --"
"Can I help you with something?" Anderson asks, sitting down in his chair and kicking his legs up on his desk. Out of curiosity, he flips the channel on the wide-screen TV on his wall to MSNBC. They're airing Lock-Up: Albany. He swallows a laugh.
"You can pick up the fucking phone when I call you, shithead."
"I was just taking my cues from you, Rahm," Anderson says, and Rahm sighs explosively.
"I was fuckin' busy, okay, nothing important was happening and you and all your stupid little friends were playing Harriet the Spy about the dumbest shit and I was sick of it, okay, so now I want to tell you what's up."
Anderson turns the TV back to CNN. "Okay, what's up?"
"The bossman's in Hawaii for the holidays, okay, so nothing's gonna happen until the new year."
"Seriously?" Anderson sits up, letting his feet fall to the floor. He opens his e-mail and tucks the phone between his ear and his shoulder, and starts to type out a note to his producers. "Can you give me a date?"
"Not before the third. Okay, probably the third," Rahm admits. "It's all good news, so the thinking is we want people to be paying attention."
Anderson starts to smile. "Yeah? All of it is good?"
"For us, anyway." Rahm laughs a little, and Anderson grins. "For that motherfucker, it's nothing but bad news."
"Good," Anderson says. "Great. So I can send my staff home, if there won't be news today."
"Well, shit, I can't tell you there won't be news today -- but if there is, we aren't the ones making it. So, whatever, send 'em home. And Cooper, seriously, if you don't pick up your phone on the first ring next time, I'm calling Maddow."
"Liar," Anderson says with a laugh.
"Yeah, I'm calling Maddow, and then I'm coming to your office and kicking your ass."
"You're gonna get on a plane just to kick my ass?"
"Shit, no planes required -- I'm in New York for the holidays."
Anderson stops typing. "Is that why you asked if I was busy, first thing? You're in the city?"
"Yeah." There's silence for a moment, and then Rahm clears his throat. "So? Are you busy?"
Anderson sends his 'go home, happy holidays' e-mail to the producers, then shuts down his computer. "Not in the slightest."
"Good," Rahm says, and Anderson is convinced that he can hear him smirking. "See you at your apartment in twenty."
"Make it thirty," Anderson says, but Rahm, of course, is already gone.
Twenty-six minutes later, Anderson unlocks his door and pushes Rahm ahead of him into the apartment. "Just so you know," he says, kicking the door shut and shrugging out of his coat, as Rahm toes off his shoes and drops his jacket to the floor, "if your news breaks -- if any news breaks, but mostly your news, then I will leave you here with the worst case of blue balls known to man."
"There won't be any news, Cooper," Rahm says, and yanks off his tie as he heads for the bedroom. "I heard it from a reliable source."
Anderson rolls his eyes and starts to walk after him. He pauses for a second, then digs his Blackberry out of his pocket and checks his e-mail. His inbox is empty. He looks at it for a moment, then turns off the phone, tosses it onto the pile of their coats, and follows Rahm into the bedroom, closing the door behind them.