Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He never intended complimenting him to become a thing.

Really, he didn’t. One day Jesse just walked into the chamber, looking like a vision in a new, tailored grey fresco suit with his curls wild and his eyes bright, and he found he couldn’t help himself. Jesse is an attractive man, and he’s never been above admiring that from time to time. So he’d straightened his glasses and strolled across the aisle to his seat just as the other man set down his papers, meeting his eyes with a grin. 

“Good morning,” he’d greeted softly, and Jesse lit up with a smile, too, genuine and effortlessly charismatic. 

It’s like ice thawing, that smile, he’d thought. Like springtime.

He was out of breath, clearly having hurried here to slip in at the last possible moment before Arib called them to order as he always does. Right on cue, they’d heard the bang of the gavel behind them and their colleagues begin to scuttle back to their seats, but Rob lingered a few moments longer, undaunted.

“Hey,” Jesse answered as he sank down into his chair.

He’d flipped open the manila folder in front of him like he was expecting that to be the end of it. Rob, however, folded his arms and stayed put beside his desk. 

“New suit?”

Jesse had seemed surprised he’d noticed and leaned back, adjusting the jacket. “Oh, yeah, actually. I just got it back from the tailor’s yesterday.”

“It looks great,” Rob remarked without hesitating, allowing his eyes to drop just low enough to admire the fit. He’d considered it for a second longer, then added, “The color suits you.”

Jesse had blinked. “You think so?”

“Yeah, you look incredible. Definitely my new favorite of yours.”

Jesse hadn’t seemed to know what to say, and in the near-decade he’s known Jesse Klaver, he can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen the man speechless. It may have been a trick of the light, but he thought he’d seen him redden slightly, too, shifting in his seat like a delighted little kid.

“Thank you,” is what he’d settled on saying at last. “Uh, you look nice, too.”

Arib had banged the gavel again, more pointedly that time. He’d finally migrated back to his seat, turning his attention to the front of the room and blaming the hammering of his pulse on his nerves.

Jesse wears the grey suit more often after that. Rob pretends not to notice.

-

He doesn’t intend complimenting him to become a thing. But somehow, it does.

It’s never conscious. Never to attain any particular end goal, never to flatter him. Now and then, Jesse simply turns up to the Kamer looking nice, and he tells him so. 

I like the haircut after he’d clearly just gone to the barber to tame his mop of curls, or That’s a great tie when he’d debuted a new red, paisley tie a bit more ornate than he usually opts for, or You smell terrific. New cologne?  when he’d arrived in the chamber smelling like warm spices and an old forest in a way that he could feel as far down as his knees.

That blazer and turtleneck look good together. You should wear that more often when he’d shown up to the weekly fraction leaders’ meeting in a lean, tan blazer and black turtleneck that fit him almost sinfully well. 

Lovely coat. It brings out your eyes when he’d run into him in the hallway wearing an overcoat that made his brown eyes as inviting as twin cups of hot chocolate.

He won’t deny he gets a thrill out of watching Jesse’s reactions. He’s always bashful. Sometimes he blushes. Other times he compliments him back. Every time, he breaks out into that irresistible, boyish smile of his. He seems touched that Rob pays attention enough to notice the little things, but he always has; he notices everything about Jesse.

He’s his friend in a way that no one else is in the unforgiving city of suits that is The Hague; the one friend that he doesn’t have to pretend to like for the sake of keeping the peace or getting something he wants. He spends half his life around people he despises with a smile plastered so firmly on his face he thinks it might one day get stuck that way. With Jesse, he doesn’t have to fake it. 

They have their routines. They grab lunch together whenever their schedules allow, or ice cream after interminable fraction leader debates, or at the very least, they eat their sack lunches together in one of their offices when they have a spare moment between meetings. Jesse introduces him to his favorite Indonesian spot in The Hague a few blocks away from the Binnenhof, and he’s hooked immediately. Often, their free time together is the highlight of Rob’s week. He catches himself looking forward to it days in advance.

He doesn’t intend complimenting him to become a thing. But then Jesse winks at him once as a joke, and that becomes a thing, too. Ice cream and Indonesian food become a thing. Conspiratorial glances across the aisle and long text chains lamenting everything from Wilder’s xenophobic nonsense to Thierry Baudet’s atrocious widow’s peak become a thing. 

Now and then, Jesse smiles at him, and his heart feels like it trips over itself and stumbles between his ribs. 

He doesn’t allow that to become a thing. At least to the extent that he’s able. 

-

Even though the compliments are a thing, they never talk about them afterward. They’re harmless fun. Ultimately meaningless.

But also not, as he discovers one afternoon.

He’s milling around the front of the chamber and chatting with Lilian Marijnissen when he notices Jesse’s unmistakable head of curls pop up at the back of the room. He can tell at once something is off; there’s no hop in his step like there usually is. His lips are pressed into a grim line, too, and he doesn’t greet anyone when he enters the room. He just heads directly for his seat, opening his notes and beginning to write.

He’s seen Jesse stressed. He’s seen him nervous. He knows what he’s like when he is either of those things, but this is different; his entire demeanor is off-kilter, something fundamentally out of line. He considers leaving him alone but finds himself wandering over before he can think better of it, hovering beside his desk with his arms folded. 

“Hey,” he greets.

It takes Jesse a moment to look up. When he does, he just barely manages a smile for him. “Hey, Rob.”

“Everything all right?”

Jesse hesitates, rakes a hand through his hair, and sighs. He pauses in his writing and drops his pen, chewing on his lip for a moment before glancing up briefly to meet his eyes. There’s sadness brewing in them, though he can tell he’s trying his best to mask it, and he looks tired. For someone who usually has a bottomless, Energizer Bunny-esque supply of energy, it’s a jarring difference.

“Yeah,” he exhales after a moment. “It’s - I’m fine. My wife and I had a fight, and I just-” He seems to begin to elaborate but stops himself, mustering up another smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Nevermind. I won’t regale you with the details.”

That piques his interest, although he doesn’t let it show. He’s never known Jesse and his wife to have anything less than an idyllic, picture-perfect marriage. The family man with a beautiful wife and beautiful kids, all wrapped up with a neat, tidy bow on top. For some politicians, that may be a farce. For Jesse, he’d never had the sense that it was anything less than genuine.

Rob’s shoulders sag slightly. He is silent for a moment, then tells him, “I’m sorry.”

Jesse shrugs it off and looks back at his notes. “It’s… It’s fine. Forget I said anything.”

There’s another, more awkward pause. Rob makes a move toward his seat, then stops at the last moment and turns back to face him. He’s in pain, he thinks, and he hates to see him in pain, and he can’t do anything to fix it, but maybe-

Maybe there is something.

“For what it’s worth,” he pipes up, “you look great today. You always do.”

It’s a thoughtless compliment, but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t require thought. Even now, Jesse’s hair falls just right. His suit fits him like he was born to wear it. His gaze is soft and disarming, and when the words meet his ears, he flushes with delight. Some of the tension in his shoulders unfurls. Everything about him seems to ease back like a fever breaking, and he can tell he’s struck a chord.

“Thank you,” Jesse replies, after a moment. He manages a smile for him - a real one, this time. “I needed that.”

Bam.

The bang of the gavel intrudes on their moment, as swift and unceremonious as ever. Rob catches his eye and winks as he returns to his seat across the aisle, and just like that, those meaningless compliments aren’t so meaningless at all. 

In the back of his mind, he wonders if he ever truly meant for them to be.

-

Then comes TikTok, and everything changes.

At first, it’s funny. He and Jesse both find the humor in it. They do interviews together. An award show. They play into it, laugh it off, and so do their significant others. It brings them closer together. It gets them both international attention. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a good thing, even though some nights when he’s alone in his flat in The Hague, he can’t help but wonder about that tenderness in Jesse’s eyes, the gentle look that launched a thousand TikToks. The look that only ever seemed to be for him.

Over time, though, things change for Jesse because it just doesn’t stop. 

He can pinpoint the exact moment it shifts. They’re together at the APB, the biggest debate of the year after the government’s budget has just been unveiled. He’s at his seat, and Jesse strolls over and leans forward on his desk to speak to him. He bites his lip, glancing up at him and thinking for a split second how incredibly, unfairly good he looks. For a moment, it feels like they’re alone - until all at once, they’re surrounded by the Kamer’s photographers, all eager to catch a shot of the two of them. 

It isn’t the first time something like this has happened - they’ve been stopped on the street together, too - but it’s as swift a reminder as a blow to the back of the head that everyone is watching them now. That them talking like this, even casually, will only spark more speculation, more videos. More everything.

Jesse moves back and tucks his hands into his pockets, his mouth twisting into a frown only he can see. A wall slams up between them. Jesse turns inward and walks away not long after, and he feels cold all over, like the sun has just gone out.

The next morning, he gets the text.

We probably shouldn’t be seen together in public anymore. It just adds fuel to the fire.

Rob has grown so adept at hiding his emotions since coming to The Hague that, for a moment, he can almost convince himself he isn’t bothered by the message. He can almost convince himself that Jesse is just being sensible, hoping this thing will die down with distance between them. They both have their own partners. Their own lives. It isn’t personal. It’s smart.

The message shouldn’t feel like it breaks something inside of him. It shouldn’t feel personal, but it does.

I understand is all he types back, and they leave it at that.

So the compliments stop. The winks stop. The collusive glances and idle chats in the chamber stop. So do the ice cream runs and lunches together. They text now and then, but it feels awkward. Forced. Christmas comes and goes, and when he returns to The Hague in the new year, he’s a cabinet minister with even less reason to see Jesse - in fact, he’s actively dissuaded from it, because government and opposition are as diametrically opposed as the sun and stars. Just like that, there is an ocean between them, and he doesn’t know how to bridge the divide.

His life becomes an unending cycle of meetings, working visits, and trips abroad to conferences and Energy Councils. He comes to the Kamer often, but he and Jesse don’t debate. He barely sees him at all, even in passing, and what they were to each other, whatever that was, feels like a distant dream. In the darkest depths of winter, The Hague feels colder to him now. 

He misses Jesse. He misses the only real friend he had, here.

Still, he doesn’t allow himself time to dwell on it because he doesn’t have time to dwell on it. He loses himself in work, and if he lets it drown out all else, then it’s like those compliments and ice cream runs and little moments together never existed and the pain is gone. By February, it’s as if none of it ever happened at all. The ache goes dull. 

Until the night Jesse shows up at his door.

Chapter Text

He remembers the night Sigrid had called to offer him the ministry post.

It was a few days before Christmas. He’d been nestled away in Brabant with family, decompressing after the formation that had nearly killed everyone involved - him especially. His phone had lit up with Sigrid’s name, and he’d excused himself from the kitchen where his family was huddled around the counter assembling worstenbroodjes and drinking wine. It’s always second nature to him, taking work calls at all hours of the day. He hadn’t batted an eye, even though his mother had shaken her head as she watched him go.

“Sigrid,” he’d greeted, stepping outside onto the patio into the December cold. His breath had turned to smoke, rising into the night. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. I know you’re with your family, but this won’t take long,” she’d replied in that low, even voice of hers. “I just got off the phone with Rutte. They’re offering us the ministry post we wanted. Minister for Climate and Energy, under the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Technically it’s a role without a portfolio, but it would oversee the transition fund. That’s a thirty-billion-dollar pot of money. It comes with an incredible amount of power.” She had paused, then cut to the chase in that very unflowery, Sigrid way of hers, “I want to offer it to you. What do you think?”

He had sunk down into one of the wrought-iron chairs numbly, heart pounding and the chill sinking into his bones.

“You’re… Oh my God. You’re sure?”

“I wouldn’t have called if I wasn’t sure. You have the profile. You have the experience, the relationships. You understand how this place works. You’ve been the face of climate issues in our party for years. It would be a massive win for us, having you take this on.” She pauses again, then confesses, “Look. I haven’t forgotten that you cleared the way for me to become leader. You’ve been loyal. You were invaluable during the formation. This is my way of thanking you. There’s no one who could do the job better. So take it.”

He remembers the rush of emotion he’d felt right then, having that much power hand-delivered to him on a silver platter and only having to say the word. In the back of his mind, there was that ever-present, niggling voice questioning if he really could do it, if he really were capable enough. 

It would be an enormous commitment, opening him up to even more scrutiny, but that had never daunted him. It would be hard work, but that didn’t scare him either; his workaholic nature runs in his veins like blood. He’d have to leave the Kamer and give up being an MP, but that was the natural order of things anyway for members of the ruling parties. 

He’d thought of Jesse. Jesse, off somewhere with his own family. Jesse, who didn’t speak to him anymore where people could see, or really at all, ever. Jesse, who he’d leave behind and who would become his enemy in all but name, one in opposition and the other in government.

Maybe, he’d thought… Maybe distance from Jesse could be good.

So he had accepted after some deliberation with family and his partner, a decision he’s heavily questioning now as he enters what might be his fourteenth or fifteenth hour of work, still clad in his shirtsleeves and hunched over his kitchen counter in his flat with hundreds of papers spread out before him. Memos, debate prep, letters, meeting requests. Updates on the situation in Ukraine. Projections for their gas reserves heading into next winter if Russia shuts off the tap to Europe. He feels like he’s drowning in it.

Sometimes he thinks of all that it’s cost him. With the wound still fresh, he wonders if it was worth it.

“We haven’t spoken in weeks, Rob. Weeks. Not even a text.”

“For the record, you’re the one who took a job outside of the country. It’s not my-”

“You know that’s not the issue. We’ve always made that work. I just asked you to make time to talk to me, and you’re acting like I’m asking for the moon-”

“If I had time, I would; you know that!”

“This isn’t a relationship anymore. You’re a… you’re like a stranger. This job is your entire life. Where do I fit in? Or do I even fit in? You don’t make me feel like I do.”

“Can we talk about this later, please, I’m-”

“Oh, what? You’re busy? Precisely my fucking point.”

The vibration of his phone on the counter before him wrenches him free from the memory. He downs the last bit of cold coffee in his mug, runs a hand over his face to make himself sound at least marginally alive, and holds it up to his ear.

“Sigrid,” he greets.

“Good, you’re up. I was worried you’d be asleep.”

He glances down at his watch to check the time: nearly midnight. It isn’t unusual for him to work until this hour. He thinks he’s forgotten what a good night’s sleep feels like, but he long ago adapted to survive on minimal rest. It’s wasted time, in his view. He can sleep when he’s dead.

Which may be sooner rather than later, if Vladimir Putin has anything to say about it.

He can’t help but snort. “We both know I never sleep. Especially not when we’re on the brink of World War III.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you have the latest figures on our gas reserves? I’ve been getting questions about it from the media, and-”

He’s halfway done running through figures and scenarios with Sigrid when a knock on his door disturbs him. He can only assume it’s one of his neighbors; most likely the one downstairs, an elderly woman who couldn't care less who he is and regularly complains about his late-night pacing, which he hasn’t had much success curbing as tensions in Ukraine have mounted and brought his stress levels with them. He goes to pull open the door, bracing himself to have a cane waved in his face with no regard for his ministerial position whatsoever, when-

It’s brown eyes that meet his on the other side. Gentle eyes. Eyes that’ve watched him too many times to count, watching him yet again.

Jesse.

For a second, he wonders if he’s dreaming or maybe just hallucinating in his exhaustion. The other man is clad in a long navy overcoat and jeans with a duffel bag in one hand, lit from behind in the stairwell. His cheeks are flushed from the cold. The moment their eyes meet, Jesse seems to return to himself, as if he’s suddenly second-guessing this - whatever this is.

“Uh, Sigrid… let me call you back.”

He lowers the phone without waiting for her to respond, and for a moment, all either of them does is stare. They haven’t spoken a word to each other in months, save for Jesse’s perfunctory congratulations text when the ministerial line-up was announced. Somehow it feels like there’s a chasm separating them, even though it can’t be more than a few feet, but Rob still can’t deny how good it is to see him.

Before he can say another word, Jesse clears his throat, taking a step backward and shaking his head. He looks lost, suddenly, like a stray dog that’s been spooked. Jesse Klaver is rarely anything less than perfectly self-assured, but he’s different now. Something in him has been fractured, and if he looks close enough, he thinks he can see faint red rims around his eyes.

“I… you know what?” Jesse starts. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I should’ve-”

He begins to leave, but Rob reaches out at the last moment, touching him on the arm.

“Hey,” he undertones, any lingering ice thawing inside him. “Wait. What’re you doing here?”

Jesse shakes his head again. “It’s really not… It’s not your problem. I’ll just go-”

“Don’t,” is the word that booms past Rob’s lips before he can contain it, a bit more desperately than he intends. He furrows his brow, then nods back into the flat behind him. “Just… come in, all right? You’re already here.”

Jesse hesitates but obeys, stepping over the threshold with an unsteady gait. Rob closes the door behind him and watches as he comes to stand just before the kitchen, dropping his weekend bag on the floor before raising his eyes to take in his flat. He’s only ever been over once before, years ago when they worked together on the Climate Act, and not much about it has changed since then. He wishes he could say the same for the two of them.

Still, neither of them says a word, and so finally, Rob pries, “What’s going on, Jesse?”

“I just left my wife,” Jesse manages, at last. He swallows, voice hitching. “We ended things. For good, I think.”

At first, all he can do is stare. It’s a stream of information he can barely process. Jesse is here. Jesse left his wife. Jesse left his wife and came here. Jesse-

Jesse continues, silencing that chaotic internal stream of consciousness, “I said I’d leave to give her space, and I was going to get a hotel, but then I remembered that you, uh… said you had a spare room, once. And - no, you know what? I will get a hotel. This was presumptuous, I’m sorry-”

He heads for the door, but Rob steps in his way, furrowing his brow and again placing a hand on his arm. Here, hardly inches away from him, he allows himself a moment to take in the sum of him: from his red-rimmed eyes to his rumpled shirt to the sag of his posture, as if there’s exhaustion weighing on his shoulders. He looks, somehow, even worse than Rob imagines he does. He leaves his hand on his arm for just a millisecond too long and only lets it fall when Jesse glances down at it, taken aback.

With a gulp, Rob answers the question he hadn’t asked, “Don’t be sorry. I still have the spare room. You can stay as long as you need.”  

Relief seems to flood through Jesse. Rob wonders if he expected him to turn him out onto the street, if he expected the distance between them to have driven a wedge or for Rob to be angry, but he’s never been able to find it in himself to be angry with Jesse, even when he should be.

“Thank you,” he says lowly.

Their eyes meet for a moment. Even with his windblown hair and red eyes, Jesse draws him in like a tide. He has his own form of gravity.

God, he thinks. He’s missed him.

Rob shakes his head, breaking the spell and heading for the kitchenette, tucked against the wall just beyond the living space as it is.

“Here, sit. Do you want anything? Water, tea, coffee? Something stronger?”

Jesse chuckles sadly, hangs his coat over one of the barstools at the kitchen island, and settles down onto the couch. 

“Tea is fine. Whatever you have.”

He fires off a hasty text to Sigrid - Something came up. I’m sorry. Having my staff send the figures we discussed - then sets about switching on the kettle and rummaging through his cabinets for his paltry tea supply. He’s never in his flat enough to cook or store much food - it never feels like home, all too pristine and devoid of decoration - but by some miracle, he locates a box of chamomile. He sets the teabag into a mug, pours hot water over it, and delivers it to Jesse on the sofa, where the other man is staring off into space, still looking shell-shocked.

“Here,” Rob speaks up, and Jesse startles as if he hadn’t heard him approach. He takes the tea gratefully, and Rob sinks down on the other end of the couch, angling his body toward him. They’re quiet for a moment longer until he asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jesse lowers his eyes. “I don’t want to barge in and unload my martial drama on you.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t care. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

It’s a question with more weight than either of them can handle right now. Jesse hesitates, then sighs as he dunks the teabag with one hand.

“We’ve been having problems for a while. We were young when we got married. We’re… different people now. And my work became an issue. I miss school events, sports matches. I try my best, but she shoulders the burden of most of it. I think resentment built over time. The TikToks didn’t help, either.” Rob feels his throat tighten. Jesse stares at the mug in his hands, forlorn. “All that scrutiny on our marriage, the idea that I was with someone else - even if I wasn’t…” He pauses, meeting his eyes briefly before lowering them again and letting that subject fall to the wayside. “People say I’m an idealist, but I’m not naive. I didn’t think it would always be easy. I know eventually, love becomes a choice. We kept trying to make it work for the kids. But we just…” He swallows. “I don’t know. We just couldn’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rob murmurs.

Jesse shakes his head, stroking the side of the mug idly with one thumb. 

“The worst part was leaving the boys. I feel like I did to them what my father did to me.” He swallows thickly. When he speaks again, he sounds so broken it makes pain bloom between his ribs. “Abandoned them.”

“Don’t say that,” he shoots back, more harshly than he intends. He moderates his tone, moving closer on the sofa and leaning forward. “Of course you didn’t abandon them. You’re an incredible father; I’ve seen you with them. You-” 

The shrill ding of a text coming through on his phone interrupts him. He sighs, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing it, then tapping out a response to one of his many overworked staffers inquiring about exactly which files to send Sigrid. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. “With everything going on in Ukraine, I-”

Jesse shakes his head. “I understand. And besides, I’m the one intruding.”

“You’re not intruding,” Rob insists before rising to stand and holding up the phone for emphasis. “I have to make a call. I’ll get the spare room ready.”

He wants nothing more than to give Jesse his undivided attention, but the truth is that his attention is always divided to some extent these days. After making a call, he steals away to the linen closet for a set of extra sheets and blankets, then sets about making the bed. Of all the rooms in the flat, this one is the least decorated, with the same light grey walls as his room, one cursory art-glass vase, a console table near the door, and a closet he uses primarily for storage. He’d had a roommate early on during his stint in the Kamer, but he moved out a year or so ago, and he’s never had time to downsize. 

He’d told himself the extra space would be nice to host visitors, but who was he kidding? He has no time for visitors.

He looks up just in time to see Jesse appear in the doorway, hands tucked into his pockets as if trying to take up as little space as possible. He looks a bit more steady, more sure on his feet. More than anything, he seems glad not to have to be alone, and again, Rob catches himself wondering why he came here. To him, out of everyone he knows in The Hague: family, other friends.

Him. He chose to come to him. Why?

If he thought Jesse was capable of answering the question now, he’d asked it, but he refrains and simply motions to the bed once he finishes smoothing down the sheets.

“Here you go,” he says. “I’ll grab an extra set of towels, too. There’s one bathroom, so we’ll have to share. It’s a mess right now, sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize. You weren’t expecting me.” Jesse grows somber right then, honing his focus on him in that disarming way of his. “Thank you. It’s good to see you.”

Five simple words. A pleasantry, but also an implicit apology, Rob can tell. Jesse says a lot often by saying very little, and over the years, Rob has grown good at reading his body language. He wasn’t going to bring it up, but now that Jesse has given him an opening, he doesn’t see much reason to be anything other than honest.

“It’s been too long.”

“I know,” Jesse utters under his breath, again lowering his eyes and folding his arms as if to wall himself off. “I… I know. I’m sorry. Our marriage was struggling. I didn’t want to feed into it all. I thought putting distance between us would help.”

He folds his arms, too, not backing down.

“It hurt me,” he says before relenting and confessing, “I missed you.”

“I know,” Jesse murmurs, lips perking up into a tiny smile. “I missed you, too.”

For a while, all they do is stand there as the reconciliation settles over them. Even like this, in a rumpled sweater and washed-out jeans, Jesse is stunning. He emanates some sort of internal light. He can’t stop looking at him, as if he looks away for a single second, he’ll vanish into thin air. He doesn’t think he’d even realized how gaping the hole without him in his life had become until he was back again so easily, like he’d never left. 

“I should head to bed,” Rob declares abruptly, brushing past him in the doorway. Jesse takes the cue and enters the bedroom, taking it in with his hands on his hips. “I have an early morning.”

“Me too. I feel like shit.” He pauses, then runs a hand through his hair and exhales. “Probably look like shit, too.”

Rob chuckles at the frankness of the observation. “No, you don’t. You look great, all things considered.”

Jesse takes a seat on the bed and begins to unlace his shoes. “Ah, see. I missed that too. The compliments.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he responds, suddenly serious. He sets his sneakers to the side and looks over at him. “I appreciated you complimenting me. I didn’t always feel my best. When our marriage was going downhill… I wasn’t getting that from her.”

“I meant it.”

Jesse shrugs that off. “You were just being nice.”

“I meant it,” he repeats, more firmly this time. Their eyes meet across the room, and his tone eases into something gentler all at once, bubbling up from that place inside him he’d long ago bolted shut and thrown away the key to. “I never said anything I didn’t mean, Jesse.”

With that, he flips off the hall light and leaves him. 

He realizes, as he goes, that he has no idea what he may have opened the door to tonight.

Chapter Text

He runs in the early mornings.

Before five AM, usually. The streets are empty and dark when he sets out, lit sporadically by streetlamps. It’s the only time the government’s security team deemed safe for him to run unaccompanied. No listening to music; he needs to be aware of his surroundings. Never the same route, either. If he runs the same route, he becomes predictable. 

If he runs the same route, he could be followed.

Those early morning hours, steeped in solitude and punctuated by the ragged sound of his breathing, are the one time he feels free. Under cover of darkness, he can be anyone. He can be no one. He realizes, sometimes, how badly he wishes he had the luxury of being no one again.

It’s the only time his mind shuts off entirely, too, drowned out by the ache in his muscles. The only time the angry words from his partner on the last night they’d spoken ever go truly silent behind his eyes.

“Why were you looking at him like that anyway? Do you want him to fuck you? Is that it?”

“What? No! You’re being ridiculous-”

“I don’t think I am. Thousands of people noticed it, too. You’re biting your goddamn lip looking at him in those videos-”

“People read too much into it. I was just-”

“Can you honestly tell me you don’t feel anything for him? Honestly? And don’t lie to me, Rob. You owe me the truth.”

It’s still dark outside when he returns from a run on Jesse’s second morning in his flat. Sweaty and breathless, he opens the door to find the other man at his coffee pot. Jesse is in a similar state of disarray, barefoot with bleary eyes and frizzy curls, more undone than he’s ever seen him. It makes something twist beneath his breastbone, his heart snagging in his chest, though he doesn’t let it show.

“Hey,” he greets as he closes the door behind him, locking it reflexively. 

He catches Jesse staring for a half-second as he steps into the light. It occurs to him that he’s never seen him in so casual a setting, either: hair wild, clad in joggers, sneakers, and a hoodie. Even in uni, they always had a buffer of suits and ties between them, but he feels oddly exposed now. 

As quickly as he notices, however, Jesse snaps out of it.

“Hey,” he replies, pulling the carafe out of the machine and holding it out for emphasis. Rob notices he’s set two mugs on the counter in front of him. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” he says, then watches as Jesse fills his mug for him. The warm, bitter aroma seems to seep right into his bones, edging out the winter cold. “Thanks.”

“You take it black, right?”

Rob blinks, pressing his fingers to the warmth of the mug. “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Of course I remember. How long have we known each other? I always thought you were crazy. Still do, for the record.” He finishes pouring his own and slides the carafe back onto the machine. “I’m guessing there’s no cream in the fridge, so I’ll be doing the same.”

“Yeah, you guess correctly. I’ll convert you by the time you leave, don’t worry.” He cracks a smile which Jesse returns, and he glances down at his smartwatch to check the time. Then, he holds up the mug, nods, and steps toward the bathroom. “Thanks again. I’m going to hop in the shower.”

Before he can make it far, Jesse’s voice sounds out behind him. “You’re… what, taking your coffee with you?”

Rob stops in his tracks, exhaling slowly and turning. This…

Dammit. He’s never had to explain this to anyone before.

“Yeah, I-” he attempts to explain it casually, although he’s painfully aware when he says it out loud how bizarre it is. “I drink my coffee in the shower. You know. Kills two birds with one stone.”

Jesse looks at him as if he’s grown two heads. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Why? You can’t possibly enjoy it that way.”

“Because,” he lets out a sharp breath, checking the time again, “I need to get into the office by seven. I have a full day today. And every day.” His voice falters, betraying his exhaustion. He clears his throat and steadies it, hoping Jesse hasn’t noticed. “I’d love to stay and chat, but-”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Jesse retorts plainly, not having any tolerance for him. “Sit with me for five minutes and drink your coffee. It’s not going to make the cabinet collapse.”

“Jesse-”

That’s when Jesse fixes him dead-on with that look of his, all slightly inclined head, chocolate curls, and sweet eyes. He realizes that stare could probably get him to do just about anything if employed correctly. It’s dangerous.

“I really don’t have time-”

Jesse just strides over to the little bistro table in the corner and pulls out a chair for him, then circles back around, takes his own seat, and gestures at the place across from him in a way that leaves no room for further debate.

“Sit,” he repeats, raising his eyebrows as if to say, Do you really want to say no to me?

Finally, he acquiesces, sighs again, and sits down across from him. 

“Fine. Five minutes.”

“That’s all I’m asking for,” Jesse cajoles, then makes a face when he takes a drink of the bitter black coffee. For a moment, they sip at their mugs with slight awkwardness in the air between them until the other man clears his throat. “I know it’s an imposition, me staying here. It won’t be for long. Just until I can get something else figured out.”

Rob shakes his head and sets down his mug. “It’s not an imposition. It’s nice to see you, honestly. And I meant what I said. You can stay as long as you need.”

“However we want to divvy up the rent… I don’t mind paying half of it.”

“No, we can’t have any sort of paper trail. That would look suspicious, a party leader giving a minister money. Even if we aren’t doing anything wrong.”

Aren’t they? Over the last day or so since Jesse had arrived at his door, he’s been nagged by thoughts of what the outside world might think of their arrangement. Suffice to say, cohabitating with the opposition is not what a minister should do, especially this member of the opposition and this minister. He often takes sensitive calls and handles sensitive government matters. Jesse has to remain insulated from all of it, and the same goes for him when it comes to the inner workings of GreenLeft. 

They aren’t doing anything wrong, he reminds himself. He isn’t sure, then, why it feels like it.

“I’ll figure out another way to make it up to you,” is what Jesse concludes, finally, taking another drink. “And I think it’s best if we make this a no-work zone: no doing work, no talking about work. If we have to take calls, we make sure the other can’t hear. We keep things strictly-” He smiles. “Unprofessional.”

Rob can’t help but smile back. “Agreed.”

They talk and chat for a few minutes longer. Any last lingering tension melts away, and it’s as if they’re back to the way things used to be before everyone was watching their every move. Here, sequestered away behind these four walls with him, he feels the freest he has in months.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jesse speaks up all at once, tearing him from the reverie. He shifts uncomfortably all of a sudden. “Is it a problem, me being here? For your partner, I mean. I don’t want to cause any issues.”

Rob lowers his eyes, growing solemn. He considers not telling him, then decides that will be futile; Jesse has an uncanny ability to work the truth out of him sooner or later.

“Maybe,” he admits, “if I still had a partner.”

He watches Jesse’s expression pirouette through half a dozen emotions; first shock, then disbelief, then confusion and sorrow, topped off by something perplexing he can’t quite place, something he’d almost call hope if he didn’t know better. He opens his mouth, then falters and lets his jaw snap shut. 

“You mean…?” he drifts off, finally. “Oh God, Rob. I had no idea.”

He just nods grimly, hiding his face in his mug. “We ended things last month. I haven’t gone public with it yet.”

“Was it the job, or…?”

“Yeah. And the distance. He’s lived abroad for years. Other things, too.” 

He can’t mention the other things. But all at once, his words come rushing back, crashing down and caving in his chest until he can’t breathe. Until he feels like he’s dry-drowning.

“So have you been with him this whole time, then? Behind my back?”

“I haven’t been with him. Ever. I swear-”

“But you wanted to.”

“...”

“You won’t even deny it. You won’t even fucking deny it!”

Sensing his pain, Jesse leans forward and rests his elbows on the table. “We don’t have to talk about it. But I’m sorry. I know how long you two were together.”

Rob doesn’t allow his expression to give anything away. Over the years, the ‘Robot Jetten’ moniker has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy; he’s so used to hiding how he feels that it’s second nature now. Showing his cards is weakness. Showing his cards could be his downfall - especially with the man sitting before him.

Without warning, he rises to stand, downs the last of his coffee, and steps away from the table, shutting down at once.

“Thanks again for the coffee,” he tells him, holding up the mug as if in a toast. “I’ll see you later.”

He can feel Jesse’s eyes on him as he goes. Jesse’s eyes have always followed him, he thinks. At debates, around the chamber, at official functions and events. Places he could keep him at a distance, because part of him was always afraid of what would happen if he let him too close.

He’s close, now. Closer than he’s ever been. 

Closer, maybe, than he ever should’ve let him.

-

It’s only temporary. 

That’s what Rob tells himself. That’s what Jesse tells him, too, but quickly it becomes apparent that Jesse doesn’t want to leave, and he doesn’t want him to either. 

Rob, for his part, has always prided himself on being logical. A realist. Pragmatic. He doesn’t have lapses in judgment, and this is a lapse in judgment for the history books if he’s ever seen one.

Still. He doesn’t want him to leave, either.

Somewhere inside him, he’d buried the part of himself that longed for a ‘Welcome home’ at the end of a long day. It was like scar tissue; dead and nerveless but no longer painful. He was so used to returning to a cold, empty flat that he’d convinced himself it no longer bothered him. But now, Jesse is there after those endless days, lounging on the couch with a light on, smiling that infectious smile when he comes into view, and he realizes how much he had.

They’re both so busy he usually only sees Jesse in short intervals: ten minutes in the morning, an hour or two at night. He proves to be a relatively unobtrusive and considerate roommate. He mostly keeps to himself, and Rob keeps to himself, too, and he thinks maybe that arrangement is better for both of them.

The day Russia invades Ukraine, he works himself half to death in a flurry of statements, interviews, and press conferences about the possible energy crisis, and will the Netherlands have enough gas to get through the winter? and what further sanctions will the EU be imposing on the purchase of Russian energy in response to the invasion? By the time he drags himself back to his flat at ten, his only plans involve making a last few calls and crawling into bed. He assumes he’ll probably dream in talking points and energy usage projections, too.

When he opens the door, however, he’s smacked in the face by a barrage of smells. Ginger. Garlic. Spices.

Food. 

He finds Jesse in his kitchen, still in his clothes from work, cooking - and not the sort of cooking Rob usually does, which involves frozen meals or reheating takeout. Actually cooking, with a dozen fresh ingredients spread out across the kitchen island and a pot of something simmering on the stove.

He furrows his brow as he makes his way inside, closing the door behind him. Finally, Jesse glances up at him from his vantage point behind a cutting board, chopping away at a small red chili pepper.

“Hey,” he greets, and Rob blinks as he slips off his oxfords in the entryway.

“Hey,” he replies, furrowing his brow. He comes to a stop on the other side of the kitchen island and shrugs off his suit jacket. “What’s all this?”

“I’m making you dinner,” he answers as if this is completely normal. As if he does this every day.

Rob can only manage to gape at him. He drapes his suit jacket over one of the barstools numbly. 

“... Why?”

“Why? Because I’m sure you’ve had a shit day. I know I have. And,” he continues, gliding over to the stove to check on one of the bubbling pots, “if I can’t pay rent, then I want to earn my keep somehow. When was the last time you ate a real meal?”

He tries to remember but comes up empty. “I’m… not sure. But you really don’t have to, I-”

“Too late,” Jesse quips. “I already am.”

For a moment, Rob pauses and takes it all in: the kitchen towel slung over one of his shoulders, the ease with which he chops away at the peppers, the way he looks completely at home. The way he just fits. He’s the picture of domesticity, and it strikes him this is Jesse in his element, an intensely private side of him hardly anyone has the privilege of seeing.

“Let me help, then,” he insists, circling around the island. He was half-asleep when he stepped through the door, but now he feels jolted awake from the shock of it all. “I’ll feel bad if you do all the work. What is this?”

“Sayur kare. Indonesian vegetable curry. I know you don’t eat meat, so.”

It could be the heat from the kitchen, but standing so close to him here, almost pressed shoulder to shoulder, makes his blood run hot in his veins. Feeling cheeky and a bit delirious from exhaustion, he grins and reaches over to a little bowl full of some sort of orange paste, swiping some onto his finger, then sticking it into his mouth to taste it.

“No, Rob, don’t, that’s-”

Jesse’s warning comes two seconds too late. Immediately, he’s hit by a concentrated assault of flavors, spices, garlic, and heat. It makes his eyes water, and before he knows it, he’s coughing helplessly, pawing at his cabinets for a glass, and filling it with water at the sink.

Jesse takes no pity on him. He just laughs, shakes his head, and goes back to chopping. 

“You’re not supposed to eat that on its own. That’s the bumbu bali.”

“The what?” he croaks, feeling his nose begin to run.

“The bumbu bali. It’s the base of the curry. What you just did is like eating Thai curry paste right out of the can.”

He crosses the room and blows his nose into a paper towel. “And I was supposed to know that how?”

“Not everyone goes around the kitchen eating unidentifiable things. You’re a menace. Now here,” he chastises him like a child, sets down his knife, grabs an onion, and holds it out to him. “Dice this onion and keep your hands to yourself.”

Rob glowers. But in the end, he marches back over to the kitchen island and obeys.

“How was your day?” Jesse finally asks as he sautees a pan of vegetables on the stove.

He says it like any normal person would. Like he doesn’t already know the answer.

Rob scoffs. “Well, in case you hadn’t heard, Russia invaded Ukraine.”

“Really,” the other man feigns shock. “This is the first I’m hearing of this.”

He snorts and looks back down at the onion in front of him. “I spent all day being briefed on our gas reserves. Running through scenarios: what happens if Russia cuts us off completely, what happens if we reduce our reliance by varying degrees. What our alternative energy sources are if this drags on.” He pauses, furrowing his brow. “Wasn’t this supposed to be a no-work zone?”

“Alternative energy sources like coal plants and gas from Groningen, you mean,” Jesse continues on without acknowledging the question. “You need to accelerate the transition to renewables, not fall back on fossil fuels.”

“The government is considering every option,” he tells him, parroting that old boilerplate excuse he’s given to the media so many times he’s lost track.

“I don’t want to know what the government thinks. I want to know what Rob Jetten thinks.”

Rob releases a slow breath. Over the past two months, he and the government have become one and the same; he’s nearly forgotten where he ends, and it begins. His personal feelings are immaterial - everywhere else in the world, at least. But not here, with Jesse.

“Personally? I agree with you. You know I do,” he confesses, letting his guard down and meeting his eyes across the kitchen. “But we have to be realistic. We can’t risk running out of gas to die on the green energy hill. People’s-” His voice catches, as the fatigue begins to wash over him again. “People’s lives depend on us. On me.”

“I feel better about it all knowing you’re in government now, at least,” Jesse says with sudden sincerity. “I know you always try to do the right thing.”

Rob looks away sheepishly. “I should record you saying that and play it back for the media the next time you criticize us.”

“Very funny,” he snarks back, then glances down at the cutting board in front of Rob. “Good God. The way you’re cutting that onion is a crime against all vegetables.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s not how you do it,” Jesse declares, as he places the wooden spoon on the side of the pan and saunters over to stand behind him. “Here. Like this.”

Rob expects a bit of well-intentioned verbal instruction. What he doesn’t expect is for Jesse to be quite so hands-on, circling his arms around him from behind, showing him precisely where to place his hands, and talking him through it in that soft, intensely-focused voice of his. His touch is feather-light. His hands are softer than he remembers. The press of his body makes him gulp. So does the heady scent of him; the lingering smell of his cologne, the one he’d complimented him on ages ago, with cedar and sage and an underlying, primal sort of musk.

He still wears it, he realizes. Like he still wears the grey suit, and the turtleneck, and the coat, and everything he’d told him he liked. He wonders if it’s a coincidence.

“Slice it in half, then place it down on the flat side. Then cut here, and run it through the middle, like this,” Jesse coaches patiently, still pressed against him from behind. Rob shifts where he stands. He doesn’t think he imagines it when he hears a resulting hitch in Jesse’s voice. “Then slice through the length of it, and… Perfect.” 

There’s a moment before Jesse pulls away. A millisecond of the in-between, like that fleeting moment right after waking when there is no outside world, no future or past. Rob turns his head and catches his eye. He is staring right back, mouth slightly agape, as if there are words on the tip of his tongue he doesn’t know how to give voice to.

Jesse moves away at all at once, and his back is met with a rush of cold air. Just like that, the spell is broken.

“Would you mind setting the table?” Jesse asks as he retreats to the stove. “This will be done in a few minutes.”

Flushed and struggling to regain his composure, Rob nods wordlessly and sets about doing just that. He opens a bottle of wine, too, and not long after, they huddle around the little bistro table to eat the bowls of piping hot yellow curry and rice. The lights are low, all dark save for the one hanging above them. It feels intimate in a way that sets him on edge all over again, just him and Jesse and hardly more than a few feet of space between them.

“Oh my God,” he murmurs as soon as he takes a bite, squeezing his eyes shut. It’s the first bite of real food he’s had all day, a far cry from the vending machine snacks, granola bars, and diet Coke that usually sustain him. “That’s incredible.”

“It was a team effort,” Jesse demurs, and he rolls his eyes.

“Please. I chopped one onion and stuck my finger in the curry paste.”

“Actions of a truly invaluable sous chef,” he teases. “You were good for morale, at least.” 

Rob laughs at that, loud and full, deep in his chest. He realizes he can’t remember the last time he laughed like that; it’s been months, at least since before he accepted the ministry post. He feels like everything about him has become more dignified, more somber, trying to act like a minister, but God, sometimes all he wants is to act foolish in a way he never has. Sometimes all he wants to be is young and stupid.

“Thank you,” he tells him honestly. “For doing all this. You’re right; it’s been a while since I had a real meal.”

“You need to take care of yourself. You can’t let this job consume you, because it will.”

He rubs his lips together, staring down into his food. “I know.”

“You know, I realized I never really congratulated you on it. The minister role, I mean,” Jesse mentions as he takes a sip of wine, then holds it up to him. “Cheers to you, Your Excellency.”

He chortles at the use of his official title. “Do not start calling me that. It makes me sound medieval.”

“You should be proud, though.” Something darkens in his expression. “You’ve really moved up in the world.”

The words are friendly but laced with something deeper, and Rob knows what it is instantly. He knows Jesse had wanted his party to govern. He knows he’d coveted a minister role, too; probably this very one, in actuality.

“I’m sorry,” he remarks. “I know you probably would’ve preferred it all to be yours instead.”

The other man shrugs off the suggestion and chews for a while in contemplation before answering.

“It wasn’t meant to be. And if it was going to be anyone else, I’m glad it’s you. I know how hard you’ve worked. You deserve it.” He changes course, diverting the attention away from him. “I do miss you around the Kamer, though. Everyone else is such a nightmare. Wilders is as cantankerous as ever. I think Thierry has finally lost his few remaining marbles.”

“I wasn’t aware he had any remaining marbles. Or that he came here with any, to begin with.”

“Everyone’s a bit more unhinged than usual. Going stir-crazy with all these lockdowns. I can’t stand the people there, most days.” He changes his tone, growing more serious. “It’s good to see you again. I shouldn’t have shut you out like I did. I thought it would stop the Resse thing, all the videos… But I lost one of my oldest friends. It wasn’t worth it.”

“You were doing what was best for your marriage. I understood.” He considers ending it there, then adds, “The Resse thing didn’t help him and me either. It wasn’t the whole reason we ended things, but… it contributed.”

“I’m sorry. And sorry for giving you too many winks.”

He can’t help but laugh, feeling the wine leech into his bloodstream and loosen him up a bit. “I’m sorry I told everyone I like to flirt with you on national radio.”

“I don’t blame you. I mean, have you seen this face? These curls? Deadly combination.”

They share a laugh, and Jesse meets his eyes across the table, and that smile, that smile, and those eyes, and the way his nose crinkles when he laughs, and-

It strikes him all at once that he isn’t sorry. For any of it.

They finish their meal, and Rob clears the table while Jesse loads the dishwasher, falling easily into a domestic routine as if they’ve been doing this for years. They joke and laugh. Jesse splashes him with water from the sink in response to some snarky jab of his. He laughs the most he has since his breakup, feeling the weight of the world lifted off his shoulders - if only for a moment. 

He’s in the midst of drying a wine glass and gabbing away while backing up toward the kitchen island when he feels a hand on the small of his back, suddenly. Jesse’s hand. He’s laughing too, errant curls falling in his face, guiding him away from a utensil drawer he hadn’t noticed was open behind him.

“Careful,” he chides. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

He doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s a friendly gesture, nothing more, but it makes him go as still as death. It feels like it stops the world from turning, for a second. The smile drops from his mouth, and Jesse’s dies too, though he still hasn’t moved his hand.

Without warning, Rob snaps out of it and steps away, clearing his throat. “I, uh… I should get to bed. I have an early morning.”

When he finally drifts off that night, he sleeps in fits and starts. His dreams feel like fever dreams; hazy and interrupted but unbearably hot, all hands and heavy breathing and curls beneath his fingertips. In the midst of it, he hears his words, again.

Careful. Don’t hurt yourself.

Too late, he thinks. Too fucking late.

Chapter Text

Four weeks into living with Jesse, the first note appears.

He returns from his morning run to find the flat empty, which is unusual because Jesse doesn’t usually leave for the office so early; he’s fallen into the dreadful habit of insisting that Rob take five minutes to drink his coffee with him, which he pretends to loathe but secretly enjoys. Oddly disappointed, he shuffles his way over to the coffee pot, beginning to brew a pot - when a little yellow sticky note on the fridge catches his eye.

He furrows his brow and reaches out to pluck it off, finding Jesse’s messy handwriting there in pen.

Early meeting, sorry. There’s spaghetti and veggie meatballs in the fridge.

Then, on a second note just beneath that-

PS: Don’t drink your coffee in the shower. :) 

He can’t help but chuckle at the smiley face Jesse has drawn next to the words. He takes down the notes and slides them into his desk drawer in his bedroom, not having the heart to throw them away. Then, he grabs the container of spaghetti and goes about his day.

I’ll drink my coffee in the shower if I choose, thank you very much, he texts him once he reaches the office.

It only takes a moment for Jesse to reply, as if he’d been waiting for his reaction.

Rob.

One word. The rebuke is implied. He can’t help but chuckle, and then, another message appears.

I don’t even understand the logistics. Where do you set it? How do you avoid getting water in it?

Gnawing on a grin, he taps out, 1) The ledge of the tub and 2) I turn my back to take a drink so the water doesn’t get in it. What part of this is hard to understand?

He wonders what Jesse is thinking now. If he’s smiling into his phone like an idiot too.

If he’s imagining the mechanics of this. Picturing him in the shower. If-

You’re an absolute terror, Jesse responds, which Rob thinks is probably fair.

He just checks his watch, grabs his notes for his next meeting, and lets him have the last word.

He may not see Jesse all that much beyond their standing coffee reservation in the mornings, punctuated now and then by brush-pasts in the bathroom and brief chats at night, but his notes become a fixture in his flat. 

Often, a new one appears in the same spot on the fridge, whether Jesse is there or not. Other times, he finds it hidden away in the reusable containers Jesse packs his food in, or on the coffee pot, or next to the sink. Usually, it’s mundane things like We’re running low on toilet paper. I’ll pick some up, or The dishes in the dishwasher are clean, or It’s your turn to take the trash out.

Jesse also has a habit of leaving laughably bad motivational quotes, like You are the change you’ve been waiting to see. I think that’s the phrase? or Do or do not. There is no try -Yoda. Or, it’s sardonic observations about their colleagues, like I think Wilders’ hair is a prime location for a wind turbine. He’s enough of a blowhard to power it singlehandedly.

Most days, he’s surrounded by negativity: online, offline, in debates, in committee meetings. The severity ebbs and flows, but the pace is constant. Something about Jesse’s bright little post-it notes feels like a lifeline, a serotonin boost in an otherwise draining world.

You look great today, Jesse writes one morning in a note when he’s already departed for an early meeting before their daily coffee ritual.

He won’t deny the way the words make him melt. The way they make some long-dead feeling bubble back up inside him: excitement, promise. The thrill of embarking on a new flirtation. It’s been so long since he experienced anything like this, but-

Jesse is his friend, he reminds himself. His temporary roommate. More importantly, he’s his colleague and, in all but name, his enemy. He doesn’t mean anything by these notes like Rob hadn’t meant anything by his compliments. Still-

You didn’t see me this morning, he can’t resist texting him before he leaves his flat. How do you know how I look?

It isn’t until midday, when he’s grabbing lunch at a café on Het Plein with Sophie Hermans, that his phone buzzes with a response. He ignores it at first, trying his best to focus on their conversation because they’ve rescheduled this lunch approximately a dozen times already, and he’s missed Sophie. She’s one of the many faces who have disappeared from his daily routine, nestled away in another building and another world.

“How is it, the job?” she asks as she picks away at a salad in front of her. “You look exhausted.”

“Professionally? It’s wonderful. It’s perfect for me. I’m doing what I love.”

Are you? a little nagging voice inside him asks. Are you really?

He ignores it and continues on, “But it’s a lot. Everyone in The Hague wants a meeting. Somehow I have even less free time than before, which I didn’t think was possible. Things have gotten worse after Ukraine. And it’s… changed things.” He reaches over and takes a sip of his coffee, lowering his eyes. “Well. You know.”

Sophie gives him a sympathetic look. “Have you spoken to him since?”

During the endless cabinet negotiations, often he and Sophie were the only two anchor points keeping it all from falling apart. Often they were the only people keeping each other from falling apart, too. She’s one of the few in The Hague who know about his breakup, having seen him nearly at his wit’s end in December when everything started to fall apart. Now, they serve a similar function, albeit in different places: him as a punching bag for the government’s sins, her as a punching bag in the Kamer for the sins of Mark Rutte. 

He shakes his head and chews a brussels sprout for an excuse not to respond. Then, he sighs. “No.”

“You should,” she urges. “Maybe you could work towards being friends, at least.”

“I don’t have time to have friends outside of this place,” he jokes, though it isn’t really a joke at all, and that is when he feels his phone buzz for the tenth time since their food arrived. He sighs, finally giving in to its demands and retrieving it from his pocket. “Sorry. One second.”

“No, no. Take your time.”

Jesse’s name is the first he sees displayed on his lock screen, with a message below that reads, It was a safe assumption. You always look great.

He softens. Out of nowhere, he remembers when he’d told him the same thing. For what it’s worth, you look great today. You always do.

I thought compliments were my job, he taps back.

Three dots appear in an instant; Jesse typing. Then-

Just take the compliment, Rob. 

Fine, he replies, then adds in a second message, I’m sure you look great today, too.

He doesn’t realize he’s grinning from ear to ear until Sophie pipes up across from him, “Speaking of friends … who is that?”

“Uh, no one,” he mutters, remembering himself and settling back into his prim, proper facade. He switches off the phone and tucks it back into his pocket. She gives him a skeptical look, and he rolls his eyes. “What?”

“I know that smile, and it’s not no one. Who is it?” she pries gently. “If there’s a new man in your life, you can tell me. I won’t say anything.”

He exhales sharply but lightens up a bit. “I - there’s not. He’s just…” 

Just what? Just no one. 

Just Jesse. Just everything. 

Finally, he settles on: “Just a friend.”

“Some friend, to make you smile like that. Where’d you meet him?”

He considers shutting this down right here. If he did, he knows Sophie well enough to know she wouldn’t push, but he spends so many days biting his tongue that, for once, he finds himself unable to.

“Through mutual friends,” is all he gives her, which isn’t entirely a lie. He’d met Jesse that way in university, through the ever-tangled web of bright-eyed, politically active students, where everyone is friends with everyone and no one at the same time. “It’s not a thing. Really.”

Sophie just raises her eyebrows dubiously. Somehow, that is enough to get him to fold.

“Nothing has happened between us. He’s… come over and cooked for me a few times.” The image of Jesse bopping around his kitchen with all the energy of a golden retriever, spatula in hand, makes him grin again. “But that’s it.”

“Why has nothing happened?”

“He’s-” He cuts himself off, sighing, before continuing, “married, technically. Separated, but still married. It’s complicated.”

“Is his name Jesse Klaver, by chance?” Sophie jokes, and he swears his heart stops for a second.

He recovers quickly, however, and forces a chuckle. “Very funny.”

“Good for you, though. I’m glad you’re getting back out there. And it’s good you have someone to cook for you. You never eat.”

He spears another brussels sprout with his fork and holds it up for emphasis. “What am I doing right now?”

“What’s his name?” she wonders aloud in between bites. He panics internally again before giving her a reproachful look, and she can tell immediately that she’s ventured too far. She holds up a hand in surrender. “All right, fine. I’m just happy for you, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” he responds, a smile tugging at his lips before he can help it. “I’m happy, too.”

He’s surprised by how much he means it, for once.

-

This place is like a jail cell. You really should decorate, appears on a note one morning a few days later.

Rob notices it on the fridge before heading out and plucks it off with an eye-roll, sliding it into the desk drawer with the rest, then pulling out his phone to respond as he usually does. Their text messages have become a chain of banter over the past month since Jesse arrived on his doorstep, and he never lets an opportunity pass him by.

Are you really living in my flat rent-free and critiquing my decorating? he types out, laughing under his breath.

It doesn’t take Jesse long to respond.

Again. What decorating?

Rob snorts. If it bothers you so much, then decorate it yourself. I have a closet of stuff you can use next to the bathroom.

Fine, Jesse responds in under a second. Maybe I will.

Rob leaves it at that, not expecting anything to come of it. The closet is full of trinkets he’s accumulated over the years; awards, photographs, gifts, and knick-knacks. A cardboard cutout of himself he’d had made for some reason he can’t even recall. It’s like a time capsule of his life since he came to The Hague five years ago, and he’s never had the time - or the will - to sort through it.

A few days pass, and he sees Jesse in passing, but they’re both so busy with the upcoming municipal elections that they don’t speak much. On top of his work, he knows Jesse still visits his children regularly, spending weekends with them while Rob retreats to his home in Ubbergen. 

However, he returns home at half-past eleven one night to a peculiar sight: his flat, decorated. 

It’s not what most people would call decorating. It’s mostly a gaggle of plaques, trinkets, and old pictures in the Kamer hung on one wall in his living room, but he can tell Jesse has spaced them neatly and hung them straight. He’s rearranged his near-empty bookcases, too, arranging the rest of the awards there. 

He spots the little Talkibot toy he’d been given by a friend after his ‘Robot Jetten’ fiasco. There’s a little Pride flag above it. A mini wind turbine beside that, a gift from some site visit or other. An old photo of him in glasses with a group of young climate activists holding a banner, all bright and eager. His diploma, too, from university. Too many awards to count; best this, best that. A plethora of things that had all felt like hollow achievements - up until now. 

He’d never had time to hang any of it, but Jesse has taken the time, even in the midst of campaign season when he has hardly any to spare. It’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things, his flat being decorated, or even any of the decorations themselves. They don’t matter. Not really.

What matters is that Jesse did this. For him.

He feels his throat swell with emotion. He goes still for a moment, unable to move, until he hears a throat clear behind him. When he turns, he finds Jesse there, having emerged from his bedroom in his shirtsleeves and slacks. He’s as rumpled as ever, obviously exhausted, but gives him a shy smile nonetheless.

“You like it?” he asks, tucking his hands into his pockets. “You can rearrange it if you want.”

“I…” He can’t find his voice for a moment, choked up and stunned. “No. I love it.” He pauses, smiling back at him. “Thank you.”

Jesse folds his arms and comes to stand at his side. It’s there that they stand for a while in silence, admiring his work, until Jesse steps forward and points out one of the photographs he’d hung near the center: the two of them and a group of other MPs after the passage of the Climate Act, both beaming and fresh off their victory. Jesse is holding up a bouquet of flowers, and Rob is looking sideways at him, mid-laugh with his own bouquet in hand. He remembers that moment, how enchanted he’d been by the brightness in Jesse’s eyes. All the hope and optimism they’d had for the future.

They were happier times. He isn’t all that sure things have changed for the better since.

“I like that photo of us,” Jesse muses lowly. “We were so young back then.”

“It was only three years ago.”

“It feels like a lifetime.” Jesse thinks for a moment, then meets his eyes. “I miss the glasses.”

He scoffs. “I don’t. They made me look like a student.”

“Maybe. But they were…” Jesse drifts off, searching for the right word. “They were nice. I liked them.”

They fall into a comfortable silence for a while, surveying his work. Rob can feel a sort of heaviness in the air, the subtle urging of words unsaid, but he doesn’t let it take hold. They haven’t seen each other in days, but just being here with him, even in silence, feels like enough.

“You know, it’s funny,” he ruminates after a while. “All these awards, all these accomplishments, even after getting my job now… and I still don’t really feel like it’s enough. I don’t know what I’ll have to do for it to ever feel like enough.”

“At some point, we have to be satisfied with what we’ve achieved. But I know what you mean. Any change we make… no matter how big or small, we probably won’t live to see the real consequences of. And all these awards and trophies and plaques don’t mean anything if we fail and our country is underwater in a hundred years.”

Rob turns inward for a moment, realizing how right he is. It’s why he works as hard as he does, with the ever-looming threat of climate change like a hammer lowering itself toward them; it’s for something greater than he is, something bigger than himself. In the end, he wonders if any of it will matter; the Climate Act, all his sleepless nights, all his interminable days. Everything he’s sacrificed to get where he is now. 

He catches a glimpse of Jesse’s left hand right then, clasped around one of his elbows, and frowns.

“Your ring,” he says softly, furrowing his brow. “You took it off?”

Jesse looks dazed, like someone just awoken from slumber. He untucks his arms and holds out his hand to look down at it glumly.

“Oh. Yeah. I thought about keeping it on for appearance’s sake, but… I don’t know. It felt disingenuous.” He swallows and points his eyes at the floor, releasing a sad breath. Rob notices him start to massage the space the ring had used to occupy. “I keep thinking this is all a bad dream, and I’ll wake up.”

“I know,” he tells him, meeting his eyes. He pauses to collect his thoughts, then turns to face him fully. “I’m glad you came here, honestly. It helps not to have to go through this alone.”

Jesse meets his eyes, smiling. “I’m glad, too.”

He can see Jesse making some sort of decision, the gears in his mind turning. Finally, without warning, the other man moves forward, bringing him in for a hug. Jesse feels like he envelops him entirely somehow. He isn’t wearing cologne now; he just smells like fresh laundry and body heat, and his curls brush the side of his face, and Rob feels it as far down as his knees.

He’s struck by the way he’d forgotten what it’s like to be shown tenderness just for the sake of tenderness. The way it feels unfamiliar. His first instinct is almost to flinch and pull away from it, the same way he would pull away from pain.

He’s struck by the way he doesn’t want to retreat now. By the way Jesse’s arms feel like home. 

By the way he just holds him and the way, for once, he lets himself be held.

-

He can feel himself falling slowly. He doesn’t know how to stop.

Maybe falling isn’t quite what it is, Rob thinks, because it feels like something that has always been inside him. It isn’t new. It’s always been there, heavy and present, stirring like a beast emerging from hibernation between his ribcage. He finds himself waiting all day to return to his flat, making excuses to leave the office early on the off chance of seeing him, trying to drag out their morning coffees together as long as he can.

They can’t, he knows this. He can’t. He’s being stupid. This - even what they’re doing, just living together - could cost them everything.

Still. He can’t stop.

One night, he winds up working until almost two AM, hunched over his laptop on the coffee table in the living room long after Jesse and most of the country have gone to bed. He’s halfway through making so many edits to one of his staffers’ memos that he might as well be writing it himself when he finally begins to see double. He sighs and curls up on the sofa to rest his eyes for a moment - but at some point, he must drift off because he’s jolted awake by Jesse’s door creaking as he emerges from his room.

He doesn’t open his eyes. He stays where he is, humming softly and burying his face back into the throw pillow when the other man switches on a light. He hears Jesse fill a glass with water at the sink before turning and noticing him there.

For a moment, there’s only silence. Then, he hears Jesse give what sounds like an amused sigh, walk over to him, and reach over for the blanket hung over one of his armchairs. 

Soft fabric, then. It folds over him in a plush embrace, and then Jesse must stand back for a moment, watching him doze on the sofa, drowned beneath a pile of papers and the blue light of his laptop screen.

At last, he hears him chuckle under his breath, “Oh, Rob.”

Rob doesn’t give any indication he’s heard. He cracks an eyelid as the other man walks away, watching him pad quietly across the floor toward his room. Jesse pauses in the doorway to glance back at him, a frizzy-headed silhouette all lit from behind, before chuckling again and turning off the light.

It's the moment he falls. The moment he knows there's no going back.

Chapter Text

Over the years, Rob forgot the way you truly get to know someone when you live with them.

He discovers all sorts of things about Jesse, living in such close quarters with him. Like how he always hums while doing the dishes and sings in the shower when he doesn’t realize Rob is home. He has a nice voice: a soft, high, melodic tenor. He has eccentric taste in music, too, everything from musicals to carnival bands to Sean Paul and Shaggy. He always has something playing, and over time Rob catches himself asking the names of songs, then adding them to his own Spotify.

He has irritating habits, too, like chronically forgetting to clean the lint trap in the dryer and leaving clutter dotted around the living area; a pamphlet here, a notebook there. Rob doesn’t mind. He knows for a fact he has enough of his own idiosyncrasies that one of his old staffers in the Kamer drafted a bulleted list to pass on to her replacement.

Part of the issue is that he’s just not used to having a roommate. 

He does things unconsciously, like slamming doors or wandering out into the living room wearing only a towel. He does the latter one morning in March, hair still damp from the shower and dripping beads of water across his chest. He’s running on three hours of sleep and all but zombified, shuffling his way over to the coffee pot to switch it on for them.

In the month since he’s arrived, Jesse has managed to successfully break him of his shower-coffee habit. He will never admit it to anyone - least of all himself - but the promise of spending a few minutes with him every morning had been enough to do the job.

He’s rummaging through his cupboards for clean mugs when he hears Jesse’s door creak open. The other man steps out in an old t-shirt and sweatpants, then halts in his tracks the moment Rob comes into view, blinking. At first, he has no idea what could be wrong, but then he looks down, realizes he’s half-naked, and freezes too.

“Shit,” he mutters, then laughs. “Sorry. Sometimes I forget I don’t live alone anymore.”

“Uh, no. No, it’s fine. You’re - you’re, uh, fine.” He clears his throat, inclining his head, folding his arms, and peering over at him. “You’re in… amazing shape.”

Rob doesn’t have to be told that; he knows it full well, but something about the bashful way Jesse says it makes him melt. A wicked little lightbulb goes off over Rob’s head, and he decides to toy with him, grabbing a mug, filling it with hot coffee, then walking over and holding it out with a sultry grin.

“Thanks. Coffee?” he asks, watching as Jesse reaches out and grips the mug so hard his knuckles pale.

He draws back, leaning one hand on the counter and placing the other on his hip. He can tell how hard Jesse is trying not to look anywhere other than his face; he’s gone positively red by now, with something Rob suspects may not be embarrassment.

“Should I leave the shirt off?” he teases, which finally seems to snap Jesse out of it.

He manages a shaky laugh and turns away. “You weaponize your good looks, for the record. That’s not fair.”

“Oh, and you don’t?” he snorts, turning back to pour his own cup. “This is your game too,  Klaver.”

He does eventually go and put on a shirt. Jesse’s hands still tremble as he drinks his coffee across from him.

-

Then there are other things. Other, more intimate things.

He’s a minister, but he’s still a human being. He’s a hot-blooded male. He isn’t above carnal desire, as much as he might sometimes wish he could be. But he doesn’t have time to find anyone to serve as an outlet for it, and Grindr is a no-go zone now that he’s in cabinet; he can only imagine the headlines if he were spotted there. There are days when he feels like he’s about to tear off his skin. Jesse being around, with all his teasing looks and little smiles, only exacerbates the problem.

There are days when he needs someone. Something. When he can feel that churning in his chest and stirring further south. When he needs to be filled.

He arrives home one Sunday night to find the flat empty and dark. He doesn’t get much alone time now during the week, and the moments he does get are precious. He looks around, then double-checks Jesse’s room to ensure he’s gone. 

Once he’s certain he is, he seizes the opportunity. 

He closes the door to his room almost completely, leaving a small crack for reasons unbeknownst even to himself. He teases with his fingers first, opening himself up and feeling his muscles relax at the familiar sensation; it’s not quite as good as someone else doing it for him, but it will serve. He can feel his cock hardening, his body beginning to respond to his touch, but he needs something more: fuel for the fire, an image to hold in his mind.

He thinks of dark eyes. Dark curls. He thinks of the way Jesse’s hands feel when they brush him in the doorways. He wonders how they would feel between his legs. Inside him. He wonders how he would feel buried inside him with no barrier, no condom. Nothing separating them.

He can imagine him moaning. He can imagine tangling his hands into those curls and pulling his mouth down onto his cock. He can almost feel the impossible heat of it all, like two supernovas colliding.

He holds those images in his head when he mounts his toy and begins to ride. The feeling is hollow, unsatisfying in a way. It’s nothing like the heat of fucking a man, making him moan, pinning him down and claiming him, and riding him until they both go mad with pleasure, but when he drives it against that spot inside him, he finds he doesn’t much care. He pictures Jesse beneath him, peering up at him with those eyes of his. He wonders how he would sound, if he would grab at him.

If he would beg to come inside him. If he would let himself be destroyed.

He moans freely as he delves down, throwing his head back and allowing the moonlight from the window to pour over him. He doesn’t hear the door open or the footsteps that follow. He’s too far gone; he loses himself in the fantasy as his muscles lock up, his body buckling under the pleasure. He comes with a long, hoarse moan and barely catches himself as he falls forward, swearing under his breath.

It’s then that he hears the creak of the floorboards beyond his door, and he realizes he wasn’t alone.

-

Do you like mulled wine?

He sees the text from Jesse right as he’s getting ready to film a public service announcement in the ministry’s little soundstage. He furrows his brow, reaching down to type a response as an intern clips a microphone onto his lapel.

It’s my favorite, but it’s not really the time of year for it?

“You millennial ministers and your incessant texting,” a voice remarks beside him, followed by a giant hand clapping him on the shoulder.

He scoffs and slips his phone back into his pocket. “Hugo. How are you?”

Although once he’d viewed Hugo de Jonge as one of the Rutte old guard desperately needing to be put out to pasture, he’s grown to like him since becoming a minister. He’s battle-hardened, having slogged through the trenches as Health Minister during the worst of the pandemic. Unexpectedly witty, too, and cooler than he’d expect a Christian Democrat to be. He’s probably the closest thing he has to a friend on the Council of Ministers, though he trusts him about as far as he can throw him.

Which isn’t very far, considering their size disparity. 

“Perpetually on a tight schedule,” the older man responds, positioning himself beside one of the many signs branded with his new ‘Flip the switch’ energy-saving campaign. He looks it up and down, raising his eyebrows. “Ah. One more reason for people to hate us, hm?”

“Add it to the list. Does it ever stop?”

“People hating us? God no,” Hugo quips as he tucks his hands into his pockets. “It’s just varying degrees of contempt until the cabinet falls or we resign. Public service is so rewarding, isn’t it?”

He hums, folding his arms. “Do you ever get tired of it, being a talking head? A government puppet?”

“Every day,” is all Hugo says, cocking his head to one side and grinning a handsome grin. “Then I go to sleep and wake up and do it all over again. I’m a glutton for punishment. Are we ready?”

Rob laughs under his breath, hits his mark, and turns his eyes to the teleprompter as it begins to roll.

It isn’t until they’ve wrapped filming that he has a moment to head back to his office and breathe. He knows, invariably, the public won’t respond well to being asked to conserve energy in the face of the war in Ukraine; the public rarely responds well to anything he does. It was always that way as MP, but the severity of the hatred has ramped up since he became a minister to a degree he didn’t even know possible. He soldiers on with the unwavering belief that he’s doing the right thing, even as the attacks volley from all sides. He figures he doesn’t have any other choice.

He plops down into his desk chair like a bag of bricks and reaches into his pocket for his phone, finding Jesse’s response awaiting him on his lock screen.

I’ll make some tonight if you’re not heading back home. Not seeing the kids until Sunday.

He doesn’t usually see Jesse on Fridays; the other man is either still at work or off with his children, and Rob tends to escape The Hague immediately after business hours for his haven in Ubbergen. As a rule, Friday nights have become lonely affairs, his only companions a glass of wine and his dog Muja. It might be nice to have company for a change - although he, Jesse, and any sort of alcohol feels like a recipe for disaster.

His life is one long perpetual disaster, though, he figures. So what is one more spiral in the whirlpool?

Okay, he taps out. I’ll be home around six.

Six is admittedly an early time for him to finish working, but he tries to reserve Friday nights and half of Sundays for himself. He’s never really grasped the concept of work-life balance - much to the chagrin of his staff - and now that he’s single again, he sees even less need for it, but something about Jesse makes him understand the appeal.

There’s a pool of excitement in his stomach when he reaches his flat. The mulled wine is already simmering, an intense aroma of warm winter spices and vanilla chasing away the cold in his bones. He hangs his coat in the closet and peers around the corner to look for Jesse, but all he finds is the sound of music playing faintly in the next room, the unmistakable stylings of Shaggy. The other man strolls out of his room not long after, swaying to the music and marking up what looks like a speech with a highlighter. He’s shoeless as he dances and hums, in a world all his own.

He loves watching him like this when he isn’t aware he’s being watched. Jesse Klaver transforms into something else entirely in front of the eyes of the world, but here, behind closed doors, this Jesse is for his eyes only.

Rob smiles, enjoying the view until the other man happens to look his way and jumps. 

“Oh, hey. Sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“By all means,” he chuckles, rolling up his shirt sleeves and kicking off his own shoes, “don’t stop on my account.”

Jesse rolls his eyes and pads over to the stove to check on the wine.

“It’s almost done,” he tells him, then grabs his phone and holds it out for emphasis. “If you haven’t eaten, we should get Indonesian from our spot.”

Our spot. That makes his smile widen.

“No, I haven’t. I can pick it up. Remember my order?”

He starts to dial and holds the phone up to his ear. “Vegetarian nasi padang, right?”

He feels his heart twinge. “That’s the one.”

The restaurant isn’t far from his flat, and he’s back with their takeout secured within the hour. They eat at the tiny table, debriefing about their weeks and catching up with each other. The no-work policy has become far less stringent over time, and now and then, it slips into their conversation because Rob doesn’t have much else to talk about - because he doesn’t do much else besides work.

“You need a hobby,” Jesse comments as if reading his mind.

Rob lowers the bite of food he was about to take and glares. “I have hobbies.”

“Running isn’t a hobby.”

“Says who?”

“I mean, it’s a hobby, but you’re not creating anything. It’s not relaxing, either. When was the last time you read a book for fun?”

“Last week, actually,” he replies, raising his eyebrows as if to say Check and mate.

Jesse doesn’t look like he believes him. 

“What was it?”

He hesitates, lowering his eyes. “A… trashy gay YA novel. About a high school track star.”

Laughter dances in Jesse’s eyes as he chews. “Sounds like it could be your biography.”

“Don’t belittle me for needing some escapism, alright?” he scoffs. “I can’t go home and read about politics, or nitrogen, or carbon emissions. I’ll fucking die.”

“I’m not belittling you at all. Are you happy?” Jesse asks point-blank, such a non-sequitur that it throws him for a loop.

He blinks. It’s a question he asks himself often, though one he never really has a good answer for. He doesn’t ever want to dwell on it, honestly, because he’s afraid he knows what the answer may be.

He deflects with ease. “Are you?”

“Less than I used to be. But my marriage just ended, so.” He leans in slightly, fixing his eyes intently on him. “I asked first.”

Rob sighs, then confesses, “No. Not really. Not since I took the job. But-” He sucks in a breath and meets his eyes. “Since you’ve been here? I’ve been happier.”

A look passes between them. Jesse’s eyes soften.

Finally, the other man smiles. “Good. I’m glad.”

Eventually, they make their way over to the sofa on opposite ends and sample the mulled wine, which Jesse pours into two mugs for them, reminiscent of their morning coffee ritual together. The moment Rob takes a sip, he raises his eyebrows, puckering his lips and making a face at the burn.

“God, that’s strong,” he says. “What did you put in here?”

“Cointreau and Licor 43,” he answers, unfazed. “It’s my secret recipe. I make it every year for Christmas, but I ran out of time this year.”

Rob takes another sip, already feeling himself grow hot from the drink. It warms him inside out, dilating his blood vessels, collecting in his stomach, creeping ever lower. It feels dangerous: the two of them here, sealed off from the outside world. So little space between them. All barriers that have always separated them gone. The air itself feels like it’s simmering, too, shot through with tension and building toward a boiling point.

He clears his throat. “You don’t have to keep doing this, you know. Making food for me. Or what you did with the decorating. You don’t have to earn your keep.”

“I want to,” he responds, then quips, “No offense, but you seem like you need someone to take care of you.”

He scoffs. “I do not.”

“Whatever you say. But really.” He grows serious. “I do it because I want to. You look better now that you’re eating real food.”

He knows he’s right. Even Sigrid had remarked on it the last time he’d seen her, and he remembers how Sophie had commented on how happy he seemed, too. Even if this has to remain strictly platonic for both their sakes, he won’t deny that it’s nice to have someone who cares about his well-being in a world of people who only ever seem to wish him ill.

“What would the other members of GreenLeft think if they knew you were aiding the enemy?” he asks as he takes a long drink.

“They probably wouldn’t be thrilled. But we don’t view you as the enemy. You know the games we have to play, attacking the cabinet for not doing enough. It’s all just messaging. Even if I do think you’re dragging your feet on implementing an energy price cap. But-” He thinks for a second, then adds, “I haven’t told anyone I’m here. My members or… my wife. Ex-wife. Wife?” He furrows his brow and takes a sip too. “Anyway. It would just complicate things.”

“Why?” he presses knowingly, unable to help himself.

“You know. The Resse thing. Even if that really wasn’t anything.”

Rob feigns shock. “Don’t tell me everything we had meant nothing to you.”

Jesse rolls his eyes. “I mean, you’re a handsome man, Rob. More than that - you’re… you’re gorgeous. If you’re fishing for compliments, there you go. Honestly, it-” He cuts himself off, a flush creeping onto his cheeks as the steam rises into his face from his wine. “I don’t know. I guess it did make me realize I’ve always been a little curious about it. Men, I mean.”

It isn’t exactly a revelation. He’s always sensed that Jesse might be less than heterosexual, with the way his eyes would linger on him, the way he always seemed drawn to him more than anyone else in the Kamer. The questions he’d ask, sometimes. He’s known too many bicurious men to count over the years, though few of them would ever do something as dreadfully un-masculine as admitting it out loud.

“I could tell,” he replies, and Jesse goes bright red.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he repeats. “I have incredibly accurate gaydar. And you weren’t subtle.”

“Oh, come on. It’s normal to wonder, isn’t it?”

“To wonder, yeah, but is that all you were doing?” Jesse has the look of someone who has just been caught in a lie, his eyes widened slightly and lips parted in surprise. Rob can tell at once he’s pushed too far and eases back. “Sorry. But, I mean, if you’re curious, you should try it. Why not? You’re single.”

Jesse shakes his head and drinks again. “I’m too old now. And I can’t exactly go on Grindr. That would be a news story in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” he divulges, lowering his eyes. “I can’t meet anyone that way, and meeting anyone the normal way is pretty much impossible. I have too much baggage. Media attention, all the threats I get from the farmers… Then there’s the Resse thing. I think maybe I’m just meant to be alone.” 

“Sometimes I think that too,” the other man says softly as he tucks one leg up underneath himself. “I’m too old to start all over again.”

“Me too.” He pauses, then jokes, “Maybe our soulmates died.”

“Maybe,” Jesse agrees, catching his eye and smiling. “Or maybe we just don’t have souls.”

As the hour grows later, their pot of mulled wine dwindles accordingly, divvied out into their mugs. Rob can feel the liquor abrading his self-control, whittling it down until he can’t help but move a bit closer to Jesse on the sofa, laughing and touching him on the arm as they talk. Jesse develops a habit of doing the same thing: placing his hand on his knee or arm when he doesn’t really need to, whenever they share a laugh or tell a joke. His cheeks are scarlet in the dimness, his hair wild and eyes growing increasingly wilder. The drink makes him so beautifully undone Rob almost can’t stand it.

He’s been dying to get him alone, he realizes, for longer than he’d ever dare to admit. The wine has him running hot, and he unbuttons the top few buttons of his shirt and acts as if he doesn’t notice the way Jesse’s eyes follow each movement of his fingers with curious longing.

“What’s it like?” Jesse asks abruptly, shattering his reverie. “Being with a man, compared to a woman. You’ve done both, right? Before you knew.”

Loose-lipped and tipsy, Rob pipes up, “Yeah. Well, it depends on what you’re doing. Bottoming or topping. Bottoming is-”

“I know what bottoming is,” he cuts in with a nervous laugh. “Thank you.”

“I never really liked topping, but bottoming…” He pauses to think, choosing the right words and resting one arm over the back of the sofa. He spreads his legs a bit, almost unconsciously. “Honestly? Bottoming is mind-blowing pleasure. It’s not like the way you come when you’re with a woman. It’s… deeper inside you. It can destroy you with how good it feels. Sometimes all you can do is moan. Shake. You can lose control, completely.” He pauses, then jokes, “If being gay is supposed to be a sin, God probably shouldn’t have configured our anatomy that way. He was practically asking us to do it.”

It takes a moment for him to look over at Jesse again. Once he does, he finds the other man looking back, reddening and squirming in his seat; he can’t remember the last time he saw him so agitated. It looks like something has short-circuited inside Jesse, and he shifts again, adjusting the front of his sweater until, all at once, he rises, grabbing their empty mugs like he’s desperate to put distance between them.

He wonders if he’s thinking of the night he’d heard him moan. He wonders how much he had seen.

He begins to have the sense that he meant it for his eyes. That he’d put on a show for him.

That he’d wanted to be seen.

“I should probably-” Jesse’s voice catches. He clears his throat and retreats over to the sink. “I should turn in. I - shit.”

Rob’s eyes track him across the room in time for him to hear the sound of glass shattering as one of the mugs falls to the floor. He stands and goes to him in an instant, kneeling right as Jesse does to pick up the pieces.

“I got it,” Jesse tells him, and when Rob doesn’t budge, he repeats more forcefully, “I got it.”

The color is still high in Jesse’s cheeks, his hands unsteady as he picks up the pieces. It’s clear his words have shaken him to his core, rattled something loose inside him - some long-buried, choked-down desire, some intensely repressed yearning. He can sense he’s gone too far again, but he can’t seem to stop himself from testing the boundaries of whatever this is. Pushing and pushing and trying, whether consciously or not, to make something snap. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, shifting back onto his heels. “I shouldn’t have-”

“No,” Jesse cuts him off with a sigh as he rises to stand, and Rob follows his lead. He holds the broken pieces in his palm, staring down at them with an odd sort of sadness. “It’s not… It’s nothing you did.”

Rob extends his hand for the shattered bits as if in a peace offering. “Here.”

Their hands brush when Jesse obliges, the contact electric. Rob can see Jesse’s eyes watching him, the pupils dark and wide with desire, lips parted ever so slightly. He can feel it between them, the mutual war they’ve both fighting. 

He can’t. They can’t. He knows better. He’s better than this. Above this. They aren’t ordinary people, free to give in to casual desire. So he sucks in a breath, backs up, and places a hand on Jesse’s lower back as he moves behind him to toss the pieces in the garbage. 

And that touch - chaste, five fingers and a palm - is all it takes.

He feels something fracture in Jesse at the same second something fractures in himself. He inhales sharply, and his head snaps in his direction, meeting his eyes with half desire and half horror to realize what he’s just done - but then he’s moving closer, slowly inching toward Jesse and pressing him back against the counter, moving in close enough to kiss him, and suddenly all that trepidation goes silent. Suddenly he’s enveloped in his heavy breathing, in the smell of his cologne and the look in his eyes, the pressure of his hands where they settle onto his hips. The puff of his breath where it meets his cheek. The unfamiliar, all-too-familiar closeness.

Somehow nothing about it feels new. Not really. He’s been here a hundred times in his mind. He’s done this before in dreams, at nights writhing between cold, lonely sheets, fingers or a toy buried inside him. He’d blocked it all out afterward, never told a soul - unfaithful in thought but never in deed. If no one knew, it’s as if the thoughts didn’t exist.

But they did. They always did. 

“Rob,” Jesse murmurs, begging for something he doesn’t dare say aloud.

Rob decides to make him.

“Why did you come here?” he demands lowly, fingers sliding across the leather of his belt and tugging up the edges of his shirt. “You could’ve gone to friends. Family. You came here for a reason.” He swallows. He feels insane, yet somehow at the same time, he’s never felt such blinding clarity. “Say it.”

He’s backed him into a corner, forced him to make a choice. They’re standing side by side on the banks of this Rubicon, and part of him expects Jesse to balk. To be startled. Maybe even to flee.

He doesn’t. He just meets his eyes and-

“You,” he breathes, finally. “I came here for you.”

Chapter Text

He doesn’t kiss him. Not at first.

For a moment, Rob lets the words echo in the space between them. The silence that follows is deafening, but he doesn’t withdraw either; he stays rooted to the spot, his hands anchored on Jesse’s hips and dancing around the waist of his slacks. He’s half-hard for him already, he can tell, and he hasn’t even kissed him yet.

You. I came here for you.

Deep down, part of him had always known. But Jesse could never say it, and he could never ask. He shouldn’t have asked. He shouldn’t have done any of this: let him in that first night, let him closer each night since, but he couldn’t help himself. He’s wanted him from the first moment he set foot in the Kamer five years ago. Suddenly all those pent-up desires are chomping at the bit inside him, spilling through his fingers like sand as he tries to dam them up, and he’s helpless in their wake. 

“Why?” he murmurs, voice scraping his throat. He leans in closer, tucking his face into his cheek to hide from his eyes. He nuzzles his cheek and presses a kiss to his jawline, then one lower on his neck, feeling Jesse gulp. “What is it you want? Do you want to fuck me?”

“I… Rob-” he breathes, trying to cling to some semblance of self-control, but they’re so far past the point of pretending now that he almost laughs.

“Say it.” Admit it. Stop lying. Tell me the truth.

The truth. They’re politicians. The truth will ruin them. 

This will ruin them.

“Yes,” Jesse pants. His pupils are wide enough to eat up his irises, as black as coal. Rob’s hand dips lower for a moment, pressing against his fly, and he can practically feel Jesse’s knees weaken. “I didn’t… I didn’t push you away because of TikTok. I pushed you away because I wanted you. So bad. I kept dreaming about it. I couldn’t stop. I-” He pauses, flushing. “I want to make you feel everything you said. How it’s mindblowing. How you… how you lose control. I want to make you feel that.”

“Have you earned that?” he coaxes with a wry smile. “I don’t know if you have.”

He’s putty in his hands, desperate, the bulge in his slacks giving him away. He’s practically begging for his kiss, so needy it kills him. He’s beautiful. So beautiful, all chocolate and wild curls against a backdrop of pink cheeks. 

All his. Or at least he will be.

“Teach me,” is all Jesse can manage, placing his hands on his hips and tugging him closer until their groins are flush against one another. “Everything. Plea-”

He kisses him silent.

He doesn’t do it forcefully. He doesn’t grab him by the curls to pull him in or tug his body against him. He just leans in and presses his lips down onto his, teasingly and almost chastely, in a way he knows will drive him mad. He captures his lower lip between his and sucks it. Jesse makes a sound of desperation that shoots straight to his cock, and before he knows it, Rob is pulling away, pulling him toward his bedroom, following the siren song ringing in his ears and pulling him to both their dooms.

He shouldn’t do this. He can’t do this.

He should. He can.

The words morph into a drumbeat behind his eyes until they’re the only thing he can hear: not Jesse’s soft whimpers against his mouth, not the hiss of the blinds as he draws them, not the rustle of clothing as he disrobes himself and then sets about undressing Jesse. The moment he kisses him and reaches for his shirt buttons, however, he feels a sliver of tension jolt through him; hesitation, maybe, or surprise at the expeditiousness of it all. Whatever the cause, he pulls back at once, allowing them both to catch their breath but leaving his hands on the other man’s waist.

“Good?” he pants, and Jesse blinks, then nods.

“Yeah. Yes. Just-” He exhales. “Moving fast, that’s all, I…”

Rob melts at once. In the heat of it all, it had been easy to forget that Jesse has never been with a man before, and this is entirely unfamiliar territory to him. He worries for a second that he’s startled him, standing before him nearly nude in only his briefs, so he moves closer, pecking him lightly on the lips before sinking to his knees.

“We’ll go slow,” he promises, giving him the dark doe eyes that he knows full well could make any man on earth crumble. “If you want to stop, just tell me, all right?”

Jesse stares for a moment before nodding and making a choked sound of assent. Without another word, Rob slips his deft fingers through his belt loops, working his trousers off before sliding his hands up his thighs. He smirks and maneuvers himself up just enough to press a kiss to his erection over his boxers. He can feel Jesse tremble at the contact, so much so he considers asking him if he needs to sit down, but instead, he grins, choosing violence instead.

“Should I stop?” he purrs, and Jesse almost whines.

“No,” he pants, head tilted back, eyes squeezed shut. One of his hands comes to rest on his head, fingers raking through his hair. “Please, no.”

When he finally slips off his boxers, he pauses for a moment to take him in; he’s about as big as he’d thought because Jesse’s tight pants often leave little to the imagination, with a slight upward curve and perfect girth. He can feel Jesse’s eyes on him from above, rapt, as he leans forward and mouths his tip, not parting his lips to take him inside just yet. He keeps one hand wrapped around the base, the other massaging up and down his thigh. When Rob finally goes in for the kill and takes him into his mouth, humming around him, he really does think Jesse might collapse. He’s a sight to behold from below: head tipped back, lips parted in a gasp and curled into a breathless smile.

He’s a minister—a powerful man. One of the most powerful in the country, and yet he never feels more in control than he does on his knees.

He works him for a minute longer before pulling back, making his way north once more, and guiding him over to the bed. He doesn’t mind taking charge; there’s something so perversely wonderful about teaching Jesse, showing him this new side to pleasure. He shucks his underwear, leads him over to the bed, sits him down, then sinks beside him, guiding one of Jesse’s hands to his cock and urging him to wrap it around him. 

There’s an inquisitive look in those eyes of his as he explores him, squeezing tentatively, then brushing a thumb over his head so tortuously lightly it makes him cant his hips upward in search of more. He touches him like something divine, with tender reverence, but he can feel the stirring beneath the other man’s skin—the yearning for more.

“Fuck,” Jesse breathes and kisses him again.

Cheeky as ever, he grins against his lips, “That an order?”

Jesse acts as if he hasn’t heard, pecking him on the mouth again and drawing his hand back.

“I want to taste you,” he says, and Rob expects him to sink to his knees and take his cock into his mouth before he adds, “Turn over.”

Well. He never has known Jesse Klaver to mince words.

Jesse also, as it turns out, is alarmingly good with his tongue. As soon as he positions himself on his hands and knees on the mattress, he’s kissing at his lower back, then down to the cleft of his ass, before he spreads him wide and moves in for the kill. He presses his lips against his hole tentatively at first, exploring the unfamiliar sensation, but Rob can feel the moment something inside Jesse’s mind breaks and the floodgates open because he moans, low and raw with need, and surges forth in search of more.

“God,” he pulls away long enough to groan. “Rob.”

Rob opens his mouth to respond, but Jesse has resumed his ministrations before he can, and he has to bite his tongue to keep from giving away how desperate he is, too. He’s never had anyone eat him out so frantically, like they’re starving, and he’s their last meal. He can feel his wild curls brush his cheeks as Jesse pries him apart further and delves in deeper, just barely probing past his entrance with his tongue, and suddenly he’s burying his face into the mattress, his orgasm coiling fast in his belly.

“Stop,” he chokes out all at once, and Jesse moves back as if he’s been shocked.

He takes a moment to catch his breath before managing, “Did I… do something, or-”

“No,” Rob laughs, sitting up and turning to face him. He feels flushed all over, reaching up to wipe the sweat off his forehead. “But I’ll come if you keep doing that, and I want you to fuck me first.”

“Oh,” Jesse says, eyes lighting up. “I… S-sure.”

Something between them shifts just then, the fever breaking. It was easy to get caught up in it all, but they pause for a moment and come back to themselves; just Jesse and Rob, the same as they’ve always been - albeit with less clothing than before. He allows himself to take in Jesse for a moment. His body isn’t nearly as toned as his, his build average, but his skin is smooth and olive, his chest and groin dusted with hair a shade darker than his head. He isn’t his type on paper, but God, then Jesse’s dark eyes peer down at him, and somehow he doesn’t think anyone has ever been his type more in his entire life.

Selfishly, he wants to pin him down and ride him until he begs for mercy, but he settles on talking him through things patiently. It’s been ages since he coached anyone through their first gay experience; at his age, he’d thought he was past it, but it isn’t a chore when it comes to Jesse. He can tell how badly he wants to touch him, although he doesn’t always know how. He’s cautious, insisting on a condom even though they trust each other implicitly. When he slicks his finger with lube and presses it into him, he’s so careful Rob has to urge him on.

“Deeper,” he coaxes, shifting where he lays on his back and adjusting his hips. “Crook your fingers, and - ah-”

His voice dies in his throat when Jesse’s fingers find exactly the right spot. That’s also right about when he realizes how quick of a study Jesse is.

He’s something of a contradiction: inexperienced but incredibly resourceful. Intuitive with his body in a way few others have been before. In the low light from his bedside lamp, he can see those damn eyes watching him, clocking every reaction: from the clenching of his abdominal muscles to the tiniest hitch in his breathing as he presses against that spot inside him that floods Rob with sensation.

“Like that?” Jesse asks with a knowing smile, and Rob manages a trembling laugh, head thrown back on the pillow.

“Don’t get cocky,” he quips before realizing the unintentional double entendre.

Jesse glances down between his legs and raises an eyebrow as he rolls on a condom. “Bit late for that, I’m afraid.”

He passes Jesse the lube and watches as he works it down over his shaft, then wipes off his hand with a towel he’d swiped from the bathroom. He doesn’t move further for a moment, however, staying where he is on his knees, with Rob spread out before him: his cock on display, his ass wet for him, every atom under his skin vibrating in anticipation of the press of his body. Jesse is watching him with wide-eyed wonder, lips parted as if about to speak. He’s watched him too many times to count, but never anything like this. 

Never like a heathen looking at his new god.

Finally, Jesse moves in, anchoring his hands under his thighs and settling over top of him. He kisses him as he guides his cock into him, probing slowly and gauging Rob’s reaction as he does. He won’t deny there’s a hint of discomfort - it’s been a long time since he’s fucked someone, longer than he wants to admit - but it’s drowned out by the look of pure ecstasy on Jesse’s face. His eyes fall shut, and he releases a shuddering breath as he moves inch by inch until he’s buried to the hilt inside him.

“Oh, fuck,” he pants with another blissed-out, loopy smile. “I’m not gonna last long.”

The thought shouldn’t make him moan, but the idea that his body has done this to him, driven him to the edge with no effort at all, makes him wild with want. Jesse feels so hot inside him that it’s almost scalding, the connection searing.

Fuck. Fuck. He shouldn’t have done this. He should never have opened this door, either.

Now that he’s started, he is never going to want to fucking stop.

He isn’t practiced or smooth when he begins to move - not at first, jittery with nerves and bashful as he explores his body - but Rob gets all the satisfaction he needs just watching Jesse enjoy himself. He luxuriates in his body, kissing and sucking at his neck. Rob can tell he isn’t going to get him off this way, but his own pleasure is an afterthought; he focuses on squeezing his muscles to meet Jesse with every thrust, working him from below with a devious grin until his breathing is ragged, and he can tell it won’t be long now.

“Oh, God,” Jesse cries, thrusts growing increasingly erratic and desperate. He hides his face in his throat, groaning against his skin. “I’m close, I-”

Rob can feel him holding back, fighting not to come so quickly, as if somehow he imagines he’ll be disappointed by him. Gently, he reaches down, grabbing at his ass as if to pull him deeper and opening his mouth to talk him through it as he feels his muscles start to lock up.

“Come for me,” he purrs, coiling his arms and legs around him like vines. He feels almost possessive; he has this piece of Jesse now, this first, this moment. He wants more. He wants all of him. He kisses his cheek, panting into his hair,  “Don’t fight it. Let go.”

Don’t fight it. Let go.  

He wonders after the double meaning of those words. Wonders if Jesse isn’t the only one here he’s trying to convince. 

Jesse doesn’t answer. His face is still hidden in his throat, his mouth spilling cries against the juncture of his neck and shoulder. His face is almost twisted in agony. He’s never seen anyone battle so hard to keep from coming in his life, but then it’s like his words pierce the veil, and he can feel him edging ever closer, letting himself be dragged down by the undertow of his pleasure. Still, he won’t give in completely, so Rob opens his mouth again, velvet words sliding off his tongue.

“If you’re good, I’ll let you fuck me bare next time,” he teases into his hair, eyelids falling shut. “I’ll let you come inside me.”

“Rob-” he chokes his name out, pressing into him in short, frenetic bursts, but Rob isn’t finished.

He has so much he wants to say. Things he wouldn’t dare. He’s his. His. He wants to fuck him every day like this for the rest of his life. He knows it’s only pheromones clouding his judgment, loosening his tongue. He bites the words back.

He doesn’t lose his head and say things he doesn’t mean during sex. He doesn’t lose his head, period, but he ponders what’s happened to bring them here, and he thinks there’s really no other word for what he’s done tonight.

“Come for me.” His words cut off into a moan. He squeezes his eyes shut, holding on for dear life, feeling himself inch closer, but he’ll be damned if he comes first tonight. “Right now, right fucking now, Jesse -”

For someone just as stubborn as he is, for once, Jesse gives in with remarkable ease.

He buries himself balls-deep and roars out his climax into his shoulder, freezing, tightening, then gasping like he’s coming up frantically for air. It rattles through him like a freight train. He sounds as if he’s in pain, and Rob wonders if he is, if the pleasure is so much that it’s crossed over to the point of hurting him. If he’s realized what Rob has realized: that he’ll never be able to go without this again. He’s suddenly aware of the condom between them, the barrier stopping him from feeling him. He wants to peel it off and ride him again until he fills him once, twice. Until he takes everything he has to give and then some.

Atop him, Jesse raises his head, peering at him for a moment with hazy eyes. He looks unrecognizable at first, like his mind has been broken. Like he’s been ruined.

Their eyes meet. Rob begins to open his mouth.

Then, Jesse moves in.

He’s hardly even recovered before he’s kissing his way down his sweat-slick abdomen and taking his cock into his mouth, then sliding his fingers between his legs and crooking them inside him. It takes Jesse a moment, but then he finds that spot inside him again and moans around his cock simultaneously, and Rob cries out, sucking a sharp breath into his lungs. He’s close just from their fucking, but this-

This is too much. Too much. Too good. 

Jesse may have given himself over entirely to pleasure, but Rob doesn’t, as a rule. The intrinsic vulnerability and complete surrender of orgasm make him uneasy. He doesn’t like being under someone else’s control. Part of him almost prefers not to come at all after getting fucked. It’s easier. He can get himself off later, behind closed doors. He can stay in control.

Not like this. Fuck, anything but this-

“Jesse-” he manages to bite out his name, throwing his head back onto the pillow and grasping at his curls. “Oh, fuck - don’t, I’ll… come in your mouth if you-”

The look Jesse gives when he pulls back to speak is positively rabid: pupils blown wide, saliva dribbling down his chin.

“I want it,” he moans, taking him into his mouth again. “I wanna taste you.”

It’s like a multifront siege on his senses: the warm feeling of his mouth, the swirls of his tongue, the swipes of his fingers through the mess of his hole, still loose and wet from their fucking. The way Jesse is begging him to come in his mouth, completely undaunted though he’s never done any of this before. The feral, filthy look in his eyes. He’s eaten him out. Now he wants to taste this part of him, too, sampling him like a delicacy.

He cries out before he can help it. It sounds like a cry of agony. It is agony, realizing the pandora's box he's opened tonight. Then, like a domino, he’s collapsing under the weight of it, his vision whiting out as he falls back against the pillow, grabbing his curls and spilling into his mouth, and he nearly comes twice in a row when he feels Jesse swallow him down like he doesn’t want to waste a drop. 

He moans something. It might be a curse or his name, or maybe he curses his name. He doesn’t know. He’s beyond knowing anything at all.

All he knows is that when the haze clears, he looks down and finds that Jesse has raised his head, still positioned between his legs like he’s content to stay there forever. He has the look of someone hooked on a new drug. He spots a drop of his come on the side of his lips, glistening like a pearl. Loose-limbed and weak, he draws him up, wiping it off tenderly and drawing him in for an equally tender kiss. He tastes like him twice over, and it makes him moan again.

He wasn’t innocent when he stepped through this door. He’s even less so now, but Rob is gentle with him when he lays him down at his side nonetheless, letting him rest his head on his chest as they recover, because he knows he’s had a part of him that can only be given once. For a while, he lets them lay there in silence as if in recognition of the fact. Then, for even longer, he kisses him, over and over, gentle, feather-light kisses across his lips and chin and nose.

He fights the urge to scramble away. To send Jesse back to his room. To build a wall between them. He knows himself well enough to know that he’ll try that later, but he finds he can’t do it to him now. He’s weaseled his way into his chest with all his longing gazes and little notes and forced coffee dates. He’s taken up residence in his flat as much as he has in his chest.

This is just sex. Only he begins to have the very unnerving realization that it isn’t.

“So,” he jokes, finally, as the night closes in around them and Jesse begins to grow drowsy, “was it everything you imagined?”

Jesse moves up to lie beside him on the pillow, meeting his eyes. His hair is a mess, his eyes cloudy. He can still see a bit of saliva on one corner of his lips. No one has ever occupied his bed as gently as Jesse, he thinks, painted across his sheets in soft brushstrokes.

He’s never seen anyone look so beautiful.

“And more,” Jesse says, kissing his lips softly. “Thank you.”

Run. Run. Every instinct and rational brain cell in him is telling him to run. But his flight response won’t seem to trigger. It’s like something has shorted out.

Run. Run. But he doesn’t. He can’t anymore. His eyelids flutter shut. 

Instead, with Jesse in his arms, he sleeps.

Chapter Text

-Can we talk?

The text comes through in the middle of the Council of Ministers when he’s sandwiched between Hugo de Jonge and Christianne van der Wal-Zeggelink at the head of the table in the Trêveszaal. 

He looks over the moment the screen lights up and feels his heart stutter, whisking it away into his pocket and hoping no one has seen. He should change Jesse’s name in his phone, it occurs to him as he picks up his pen once more. He should get a burner to communicate with him.

Or really, he should just never communicate with him ever again, he thinks as he pictures the media getting a hold of the story somehow, then the Tweede Kamer demanding both their resignations, and then political ruin, in that exact order. 

He hasn’t seen him in two days, leaving in the mornings before he rises for their morning coffee ritual and arriving long after he has gone to bed for the night. They hadn’t spoken the morning after; he hadn’t seen him then, either, but had awoken between their sweat-soaked sheets and made himself scarce before pillow talk could enter the realm of possibility. He’s sure Jesse can sense avoidance, but he can’t talk to him, either. If they don’t discuss it, it’s like it never happened.

He can move on. And he would - if he could stop picturing Jesse’s body working over top of him with desperate strokes. If he could stop imagining him inside him and the press of his tongue between his legs and his-

“Minister Jetten? You’re next.”

The sound of Rutte’s voice jolts him back to earth. He glances around him, startled and inexplicably terrified that somehow he knows what he has done, their astute, waiting eyes trained on him. He notices Sigrid among them on the opposite end, seated in a pressed navy pantsuit and analyzing him with her gaze in the same ruthless way she would analyze any political opponent. She knows him better than he’d care to admit, enough to know that a lapse of attention for even a second is an anomaly. 

Dammit.

“Right,” he pipes up, clearing his throat and sitting up straight. “Well, my office will be reaching out in the next few weeks to schedule our quarterly check-ins on each of your departments’ transitions. In the meantime, I have the latest figures on our gas reserves. If you’ll look to the packets that have been distributed, on page five, there-”

He manages to fumble through the rest of his briefing while seeming like he has everything perfectly together, a talent he long ago cultivated as an MP. It’s a sort of political mastery that comes second nature to him, saying a lot whilst saying nothing of substance, and when the meeting adjourns, he stands eagerly, beginning to collect his papers.

“Rob? Do you have a second?”

Sigrid. As unfailing as Dutch rain, Sigrid comes sauntering up to his seat at the head of the table, flanked by an aide and clasping a padfolio against her chest. He winces internally but can’t exactly refuse her, so he just nods, stepping to the side as the room clears.

“I need you to stand in for me at the NOS debate tonight,” she tells him. “I had a scheduling conflict, and I think it might be good for you to get a chance to talk directly to the public anyway. You know. Reassure them, talk to them about the war effort. You’re the public face of the energy crisis.”

A messenger to be shot, more like.

“Uh, yeah,” he says unthinkingly, eager to escape her prying eyes as quickly as possible. He’s scared of what she might sniff out without him having to say a word; she’s as close to a bloodhound in human form as he’s ever known. “That’s fine. Have your staff send me the information.”

“Thank you,” she replies with a reserved smile. “It won’t be anything major; hardly anyone pays attention to the provincial elections. The other party leaders might be a pain in the ass - Klaver especially, you know how he can be - but you know how to handle them. I’ll have my staff send you over the debate prep we’ve done too.”

Klaver. He can feel his heart sink, though he’s become a master of deceit over the years in The Hague, and he doesn’t let it show. Of course, there is no avoiding Jesse as they enter the final days before the provincial elections. In any usual time, he could sequester himself away in the ministry across the street from the Kamer - but just his luck, he’d have to face him sooner than he’d planned.

But then he thinks of his lips. The brush of his curls. The way his orgasm had broken him apart, split his skin in half, unleashed something he wasn’t sure he even had a name for. The way Jesse had looked in the liminal dawn the morning after, asleep at his side.

They lost control. He lost control, and he never loses control. He isn’t in a position to be anything less than unimpeachable. He doesn’t make mistakes. He hardly ever puts a foot wrong, and two days ago, he fucked Jesse Klaver, and he liked it. 

And given the opportunity, he realizes, he would do it all over again.

-

Most days, he feels like a dam eternally pushed and pulled by opposite currents.

The status quo on one side. The farmers. The right. The old world battling the inexorable tide of change. He doesn’t hate them - not really, because he doesn’t truly hate anyone except maybe Thierry Baudet. They’re fighting to maintain the only world they’ve ever known. They view him as an antichrist, some government drone swooping in to take that all away; of course they would hate him. Of course they would threaten him. Their ire isn’t the ire that truly bothers him.

No, that comes from the left. The climate activists. The dreamers. The young people. The Jesse Klaver’s of the world - and Jesse himself, often. His former allies often turned foes. The ones who think he isn’t moving fast enough, that are never satisfied, no matter what measures he implements. He can’t move faster than the rest of the cabinet or the country will allow him.

He has to be methodical. He has to move slowly. He’ll risk outright revolt if he doesn’t, but they don’t understand. They never do.

He has a chair in his office - a piece of art gifted to him by a young man not long after he was sworn in. It’s nothing flashy: a little wooden chair set up on blocks to symbolize how high it would need to be lifted to be above sea level. The blocks are nearly as tall as he is. Every time he looks at it, he envisions the room filled with water, the city flooded, half of the country destroyed. It reminds him of their constant peril, centers him whenever he loses focus. It’s a reminder that it will all be worth it; the attacks from all sides, the public revilement, the threats to his life. He can save them. The country. Everyone. 

He’s trying to save them. They just don’t see.

He knows he’s not going fast enough. He knows the war will hamper their transition. He doesn’t need to be reminded that powering the coal plants back on if they have to isn’t ideal, that drawing more gas from Groningen is a step in the wrong direction, but he can’t let the country freeze. He’s sure the debate will only be more of the same, of Jesse and everyone telling him it isn’t enough. 

He wonders if it will ever be enough. Wonders if maybe they’re right, and he’ll move too slowly, and in a hundred years or two hundred years, when the whole of the country is underwater, it will be all his fault.

The debate is a familiar gauntlet, all showmanship and grandstanding. Jesse is there in a beige suit, hair a bit more ruly than normal; he can tell he’s just gotten it trimmed the way he usually does before big television appearances. He feels the tension in the air the moment he steps inside the NOS studio, but Rob doesn’t greet him and sticks to the opposite circle of party leaders as they chat in the run-up to the broadcast. He looks like a neglected puppy when he catches his eye, and Rob feels his heart seize up. He looks away as quickly as possible. 

When the countdown timer hits zero, he plasters on his game face, takes a deep breath, and flies.

He hasn’t done a debate since giving up party leadership years ago, and he can’t say he’s missed it. It’s hollow, empty theatrics for the most part, the opposition leaders espousing their beliefs that the government is doing this wrong and that wrong, and it’s all wrong, but surely they could do it better if they were in charge. He’s measured in his responses, and mercifully he and Jesse don’t debate one-on-one.

He does his absolute best to rush off after the cameras go dark, shielding himself with a wall of staffers, but Jesse is as persistent as ever and catches him in one of the dark, snaky hallways behind the soundstage.

“Rob,” he calls out, stopping him in his tracks. As he draws closer in the darkness, illuminated only by buzzing servers and neon, he sees Jesse gulp. “Do you have a second?”

He gives his aides a look and waves them along, waiting until they disappear to turn to face him. Once they do, he exhales sharply and guides him into an alcove near the dressing rooms, glancing around to ensure no one is listening before opening his mouth.

“I don’t have time for this now,” he hisses under his breath, shutting himself off enough though he can feel Jesse’s eyes wearing him down by the second. He can’t. He can’t . “I have a meeting in fifteen.”

“Are we going to talk?”

He clenches his jaw. “About what?”

Jesse almost flinches at the harshness of his tone. Everything about him seems to deflate when he realizes there won’t be any warmth between them, that maybe they have made a grave mistake. But then he swallows, undaunted, and moves in a bit closer, enough for him to catch that cologne, that one that drives him wild and even now makes him harden against his will in his slacks. 

“Don’t be this way,” Jesse murmurs, eyes wide-open, almost innocent. “I… what we did-”

“-Was a mistake. It won’t happen again,” he tells him, cold and resolute. He clutches his notes between them, a barrier. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

He starts to take a step away, but Jesse catches his arm once more. Rob pulls back as if he’s been burned.

“Rob-”

“Look, I’m not here to be your experiment. Or your teacher. I’m not in a position to play this kind of game; you know that full fucking well, Jesse. You aren’t, either. It’s dangerous.” He pauses, then exhales again, forcing himself to do what needs to be done. “I think it would be best if you found somewhere else to live.”

Jesse’s eyebrows knit together. “What?”

“I’m going to Brussels the day after tomorrow,” he barrels on. If he pauses for even a second, he’s scared Jesse might be able to sway him, and there is only one way this ends. “You should have your things out by the time I’m back.”

Again, he starts for the exit. Again, Jesse catches his arm; one final, last-ditch attempt at persuading him, with those deep brown, pleading eyes, his features twisted into a look of hurt. Surely, Rob thinks, he couldn’t have been stupid enough to imagine they could embark on something like this together. It would ruin them if it ever got out. With a coalition that sometimes feels like it’s only held together by blind faith and the promise of mutually-assured destruction, it would do more than ruin them - ruin the government, ruin everything he’s worked for, and the country needs him. 

He swore a vow to the King. He’s given his life in service. His personal feelings are irrelevant. He’s a non-person, a passing ship. A negative space. That’s all he gets to be.

His duty comes first. It must always come first.

“Rob, please, don’t-”

“Don’t touch me,” he bites out, but Jesse doesn’t drop his arm this time.

For a second, they do nothing more than breathe the same oxygen, and oh, suddenly, all he wants to say is Touch me. Touch me. Please. Suddenly all he wants to do is feel, to be like anyone else, to be able to give his whole heart and fall without glancing over his shoulder to see where he’ll land. He wants to trust that he’ll be caught. He wants to love again - wholly, completely, helplessly.

He rips himself away and hurries down the hall. He knows better than to want what he can't have.

-

He spends election night in Amsterdam at a D66 watch party, drenched in neon green lights, that same shade that he’s worn half a thousand times: on ties, dress shirts, hoodies, the whole lot. It used to feel like it symbolized promise. Now, as he sinks further into his cups and tries not to seem as miserable as he is, he can only ponder how it feels like he’s green with envy - of the normal world around him, of everyday people, the beaming interns who shake his hand and tell him how much they want to be like him one day.

Trust me. You do not want to be like me, he wants to say, but of course he doesn’t.

He wonders where Jesse is; a similar watch party, no doubt, probably with roughly just as much damn green. He imagines him packing his things tomorrow and going back to his wife. He feels even sicker with jealousy at the thought.

He takes a train to Brussels earlier than he needs to the next morning, drinking his coffee in the shower and running like a bat out of hell. Jesse’s things are still there when he departs his flat, though Jesse isn’t; he thinks he stayed the night in Amsterdam after his rousing election victory speech. GreenLeft had done well, likely at D66’s expense, but he doesn’t have time to lament those losses.

He boards the train, and he gets to work.

Brussels is a gauntlet, too, though it energizes him. He spends the day mired in meetings and negotiations with the other European energy ministers, who, by and large, have the same goals he does: tackling climate change, ending European dependence on Russian energy, accelerating the transition to green energy. It’s a welcome distraction, though he feels his stomach fill with dread as the day drags on and the meetings come to a close. He can switch his brain off almost completely when he’s working; when he isn’t, it runs amok. It runs to Jesse.

There’s a cocktail reception on the indoor terrace of the Europa Building for ministers and their staff after the day’s events conclude. He eases into the comfortable numbness that comes with a few drinks, but they still don’t fully take the edge off his nerves. He wants to board a train, run back to his flat, catch Jesse before he leaves - just as much as he wants never to set foot there again. He makes small talk with the Spanish energy minister to distract himself, but again and again, his mind wanders back to Jesse. His fingers itch for his phone to text or call him. With a pang, he thinks of his last message: Can we talk?

Four drinks in, he decides they can.

He tugs on his coat, shuffles off to the outdoor portion of the terrace, and peers down into the glittering canvas of city lights that is Brussels at night, like a blanket of stars. Since he started coming here, it has always seemed so alive to him, full to bursting with diplomats and politicians and ministers. A center of progress. A place of unity, not as hostile to him as his own country. He shivers, though the terrace has outdoor heaters running at full blast, and rummages through his pockets until he finds his pack of cigarettes, popping one between his lips, lighting it, then dialing his number.

It rings once. Twice. By the third time, he assumes Jesse won’t answer, and he wouldn’t blame him. Jesse gave himself to him, opened up to him. Trusted him. 

He threw dirt in his face. He threw him out.

A click. His heart jumps. Then-

“Rob?”

Wind whips around the side of the building. He shudders again and feels his throat tighten. There’s a wary edge to Jesse’s voice but still a note of hope, too. There always is, with Jesse, though he’s the last person who deserves his tenderness.

He swallows. “Hey.”

A pause. He places his hand on the ledge and grasps it so hard his fingers turn white. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s silver-tongued; he could talk himself out of nearly any situation, weasel through any debate or Energy Council meeting or press conference, yet here, where it really matters, he’s speechless.

Jesse ends the silence finally with a sigh. “What do you want, Rob?”

To be with you. To never see you again. To be no one. 

To be yours.

“I… I don’t know.” He leans his weight on the ledge, pulling smoke in his lungs and letting it settle. He wonders if Jesse is somewhere like this, looking out across the city, or in his flat, peering out into the cobbled street below. The thin telephone line bonding them feels like a lifeline. He breathes the smoke out on a sigh. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

He lets the silence take hold for a moment. He doesn’t do this kind of thing: confess feelings, pry open his chest and sew his heart on his sleeve. He feels foolish even trying, and he doesn’t know what he’s expecting Jesse to say to that, but all he gets is-

“Well, you’ve heard it,” Jesse says flatly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be gone by the time you’re back.”

Before he can say anything more, he ends the call. Rob realizes he doesn’t deserve anything less. 

He chose this, he thinks. Chose to become a minister. Chose to devote himself to the service of king and country. He just didn’t realize how lonely it would be after all was said and done.

Still, he doesn’t deserve anything less. Precisely what he deserves, he thinks, is to wander down to the red light district along the Place Fontainas, abuse his temporary anonymity here to find a man with curls to bring back to his hotel room and close his eyes, and pretend that it isn’t all wrong: the feeling of his cock inside him, the too-rough graze of his hands, the scent of his cologne, the sound of his voice. 

It’s precisely what he deserves. So it’s precisely what he does.

He deserves the way it hurts just a little, just enough to remind him that it isn’t Jesse. He deserves the faint, creeping shame he feels after, eyeing the wrinkle in the sheets where the other man had lain before he’d paid him and sent him on his way. He deserves the way he can’t forget Jesse. 

He deserves the way he doesn’t sleep afterward. Even if he could, he knows who he would dream of, too.

-

His flat is dark when he steps inside the following evening.

It used to be that that was nothing abnormal; his flat was dark as a rule, but after Jesse had filled it with light, with his smiles and notes and coffee rituals, the sight makes an unfamiliar pang of loneliness twist like a knife in his abdomen. But those were just habits, he reminds himself, and habits can be kicked; like smoking, although he never fully manages to drop that one. He wonders if Jesse will prove to be roughly as difficult. 

Sighing, he flips on the light and wheels his suitcase in behind him, peering into Jesse’s bedroom and finding it empty, the sheets neatly made, as if he was never there - but no.

There’s something on them, he realizes as he catches a glimpse of the familiar highlighter yellow post-it notes that the other man had always left for him. Frowning, he walks over and takes it into his hands, reading the very Jesse, very messy scrawl on it.

I’m at the Park Hotel. Room 203. If you want to talk.

-

The Park Hotel is a modest hotel on a narrow street in The Hague’s old city center, modest enough that he can slip through the lobby undetected. It’s raining outside, the marble floor streaked with water and dirty footprints. Clad in a long wool overcoat, he’s still shivering from the cold by the time he reaches his room and raises his hand to knock, glancing over his shoulder to ensure no one has seen him.

At the last second, he dithers. There have been many points of no return so far with Jesse; he has the sense he’s standing at yet another dividing line. It isn’t too late to let this thing die, to move on and pretend it never happened. In fact, this may be his final chance to reverse course. This is insanity.

But he doesn’t think he’s ever been sane, not by any normal human standards, so he knocks anyway.

It takes Jesse a moment to answer the door. When he does, he’s in his shirtsleeves and slacks, hair disheveled but eyes perfectly alert. He can’t help but ponder the reversal of their roles; how he should be the one at Jesse’s door now, pawing like a stray cat. He wonders briefly if he should’ve brought flowers. Some sort of apologetic token. But they aren’t two lovers courting each other, he reminds himself. They aren’t the flowers and chocolates type; they’re the darkened corridors and hotel rooms type, shamefully scavenging for each second together.

They don’t say anything at first. All he can do is look over at him penitently, head inclined, heart in his throat. Against all odds, he can see that little flicker of hope in Jesse’s eyes, the spark that his cruelty hadn’t managed to stomp out, and he knows all isn’t lost.

“Hi,” he rasps, finally, when it becomes clear Jesse isn’t going to speak.

He sees something thaw in Jesse despite his best efforts. 

The other man sighs and opens his mouth. “Hi.”

A beat. Neither of them makes a move. 

“Can I… come in?” he asks, looking around nervously.

Jesse hesitates. Rob can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, but it’s a pretense; they both know he wouldn’t have left him that note if he didn’t want him here. They’ve spent almost half their lives pretending with each other, trying to tamp down the mutual attraction before it could take hold. Acting as if the lingering gazes in front of the eyes of the nation meant nothing. No more, he thinks.

No more.

“Fine,” Jesse answers tersely, and Rob crosses the threshold and kisses him like the world is ending - and he thinks, for them, it might be.

Chapter Text

They don’t get much farther than the door before Jesse pushes him away.

“I invited you here to talk,” he pants, turning and crossing the room to put distance between them. “So talk.”

It’s colder than Jesse usually is to him - or anyone. At first, all he can do is blink before pausing to take inventory of the room around them. It’s small and not particularly upscale: nothing more than a bed, a desk, a television, and an armchair in the corner. His suitcase is near the bed, unpacked. It’s clear he hasn’t settled in, although there is an opened bottle of red wine on the nightstand with a glass beside it. 

He’s no stranger to hotel rooms like this. He’s been with closeted men before, men who secreted him in and out when he was too young and naive to know any better. He wonders if he’s taken a step back into the darkness now, with Jesse.

However, he doesn’t let those thoughts linger, shucking his coat and taking a seat in the armchair. He thinks for a moment Jesse might offer him wine or water, but he does neither. He just stares at him from where he’s leaning against the desk, arms folded defensively across his chest, the same crouched tiger mannerism he’s always used while waiting to approach a debate. He’s wounded, he can see it in his eyes, and it’s clear he expects some form of repentance. 

Rob sighs, deciding for once not to be stubborn.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, lowering his eyes. “For the way I acted. I was… I was an ass.” Jesse doesn’t say anything, just continues peering at him across the room with an expression Rob can’t read. Not sure what else to do, he moves to stand. “Jesse-”

“I opened up to you,” Jesse interrupts him, and he aborts any attempt to get closer at once, sinking back into his seat. “I’ve spent my entire life trying to ignore how I feel about men. I thought I could trust you. I did trust you. But you just made me feel….” He drifts off, wilting, “ashamed, all over again.”

“I’m sorry.” He gulps. He doesn’t often do this, either: admit that he was wrong. He might as well be allergic to it, but even for him, a master of spin, there’s no other way to spin what he had done to him. “I panicked. It’s been a long time since I…”

“Since you what?”

“Since I wanted anyone,” he makes himself say before he can lose his nerve, “like I want you.”

For a moment, all they do is stay there without a word: Rob seated with his eyes lowered, Jesse peering over at him from above. It feels fitting, being at his mercy. He has the sense that he has to do this, subjugate himself. Put them back on a level playing field.

He’s been a runner all his life. Sometimes he feels like he’s perpetually on the lam from one thing or other, and he wants more than anything to run again now, but Jesse’s gaze keeps him pinned there. He can’t move a muscle.

Finally, Jesse sighs. “We shouldn’t have done what we did.”

“No,” Rob agrees flatly.

Jesse stands up straight. He takes one step forward. Then two. Rob feels like a man approaching the execution block, a deathly calm about him as he stares down his demise.

“We shouldn’t be here now.”

Rob stands, too, just as Jesse comes to a stop before him. There’s still a deflated air about him, so Rob reaches down, slipping his hand into the other man’s, then hiding his face in his cheek like he’d done before in his flat.

“I’m sorry I made you feel ashamed. That’s-” His voice catches in his throat. “That’s the last thing I want.” He cups his cheek, urging his chin upward to meet his eyes. “Forgive me.” He kisses him gently, then whispers across his lips, “Please.”

It’s reflexive, the way he drops to his knees without a second thought. It’s easier, more than anything, closing down a conversation with sex before it can really begin, a familiar defense mechanism he’s fallen back on what must be a hundred times in his life. He descends with the single-minded devotion of Mary kneeling in front of the cross, but before he can get far, he feels two hands gripping his forearms.

“Hey, hey,” Jesse chides gently, urging him back up. “No, Rob.”

He blinks. “You don’t want…?”

He shakes his head and nods back toward the bed, taking his hand. 

“No. Just come lay with me.”

In all honesty, he’s disconcerted by Jesse’s undemanding touch. All he can do is watch, stunned, as Jesse strips and sets about removing his clothes, too, leaving them both in their underwear; him in boxers, Rob in briefs. He lays him down and tucks them both under the covers, kissing him lazily, then spooning him from behind for even longer afterward as the hour grows later.

So much for talking, he thinks. They can do that in the morning. For now, he lets the silence do the talking for him. It’s more articulate than he could ever be, anyway. 

Outside these four walls, Rob knows perfectly well the reality that awaits them: the public like piranhas circling, their colleagues and the media even more so. The second they step outside this door, he ceases to be a human; he transforms into a persona, Minister Jetten, Robot Jetten, a man he isn’t even sure he likes most days. Jesse will do the same. But they aren’t those people here, in each other’s arms.

They’re just flesh and bone. Fallible. All-too mortal.

Because he’s chronically unable to be still, he grows restless after a while, shifting against Jesse where he is pressed against his ass from behind. It isn’t intentional, but then he hears the other man inhale softly at the friction. When he does, a filthy lightbulb goes off over his head. He wriggles back again, more forcefully this time, and it achieves precisely the response he wants: he feels him begin to harden in his boxers. 

Finally, Jesse exhales, sounding amused and exasperated. He places a hand on his waist, fingers toying with the elastic waistband of his underwear and beginning to inch it down.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rob apologizes with an utter lack of contrition and a sly smirk back at him. “Was I bothering you?”

“You’re a little tease, you know,” Jesse chuckles, pressing a kiss to the nape of his neck from behind, then dipping his fingers into his underwear and slipping them between his cheeks.

“I resent being called little.”

“So do I,” he jokes. “I think you already know I’m anything but.”

He scoffs. “You’re horrible.”

“Is there anyone around here who isn’t?” he quips as he withdraws, presumably to locate his bottle of lube.

Rob can’t help but think that he’s right. Even Jesse, the moral compass and climate crusader in the eyes of the world, has had to learn over time to become a player in The Hague. It’s a dirty world: the backroom deals, the unscrupulous lobbyists, the money, all the grimy cogs that make the wheel turn. He’d been disabused of any notions about how things really work here not long after arriving half a decade ago. He tries to operate as cleanly as possible, but he’s done things he isn’t proud of. 

He’s kept his mouth shut for the sake of party loyalty. He’s compromised his beliefs for the sake of power. Jesse has, too. Stifling a laugh, he can’t help but think that there’s probably no one else in the world who understands him the way Jesse Klaver does. 

He wonders if they’re perfect for each other.

It takes Jesse a moment, but before he knows it, he’s peeling the covers back and folding himself against him once more. He gnaws on his lower lip in anticipation when he hears the sound of a bottle cap popping open, and then there are Jesse’s fingers again, peeling back his briefs, caressing his hole. He hums softly, rocking his hips.

For his part, Jesse doesn’t rush. He moves slowly. He urges his chin back enough to kiss him. He slides his fingers past the ring of muscle at his opening. He reaches around front to palm his cock over his underwear, and Rob has to pull his hand away because he’s so hard it hurts, and he knows it won’t take much to bring him off. He only moves further when Rob loses his senses and mutters something along the lines of you better not fucking make me beg - but God, he almost thinks he would.

When he hears the crinkling of foil behind him, he glances over his shoulder.

“Don’t bother,” he pants, and Jesse freezes, furrowing his brow. “I just mean: I trust you. And I want-” He turns back, sniffing and struggling to maintain his composure, “I want you.”

He could say what he really means. Be as explicit and filthy as he truly wants to be because he wants him to fuck him, come inside him, fill him so he’ll have something of him to carry with him when he leaves this hotel room. It feels like a biological imperative, something primal in his bones yearning to be claimed. He wants that part of him, too, along with every other part he’s already had, all his firsts. But he has the sense verbalizing all that right now might spook Jesse, and he’s resolved to take things slow, no matter how frustrating it might be.

“If you’re sure,” Jesse answers, and Rob can’t help but laugh.

“Do I look unsure to you?”

Jesse manages a laugh, too, and positions himself at his entrance, urging one of his legs up for better access. 

“You’ll tell me if it….”

He drifts off, but Rob doesn’t need him to say more.

“Believe me; it won’t.”

Something shifts the moment Jesse enters him. Like one tectonic plate slipping against another, hundreds of years of tension built up to their breaking point, imperceptible yet catastrophic. He can feel everything in his body a hundred times more, all at once: the goosebumps on his skin when Jesse presses his mouth to his shoulder, the thump of his heartbeat in his ears. The tsunami of pleasure that takes over when Jesse adjusts his angle and hits that spot inside him. 

Beginner’s luck, he thinks. But then he does it again and again until he’s melting into the sheets and moaning wantonly, and oh, no, he realizes that can’t be what it was at all.

Before, Jesse had been the one to lose his head. Now, it’s like he can sense that the roles are reversed. He reaches around, taking his hand and allowing Rob to squeeze it as his hold on gravity grows increasingly tenuous. He can feel his orgasm tightening, not just between his legs but up his spine and as far down as his toes.

“Slow… slow down,” he manages to breathe through the pleasure, stamping it out like a spark. “Wanna make this last.”

It’s not entirely a lie. He hasn’t seen him in days. Before he came here tonight, part of him wasn’t sure he’d ever see him again - like this, at least. Before he came here tonight, they still had a chance, a feasible escape route, but that’s been sealed off now. They grow more damned every moment they spend in this bed, he thinks.

With a hum, Jesse obliges, his breathing ragged, and busies himself kissing the nape of his neck, then across the planes of his shoulder, before settling on a spot behind his ear. He slows the pace, and eventually, Rob begins to respond, pushing back on him as they rock together. It isn’t all-consuming this way. 

It’s just easy. Good. Hard and fast is his nature - both in the bedroom and outside - and this runs contrary to that, but he finds it’s almost addictive, wrapped in Jesse’s arms and body heat. It all drowns out his senses until he’s no longer sure where Jesse ends and he begins. Their shadows paint the walls, indistinguishable.  

He can’t remember the last time anyone made love to him. Fucked him with any real sense of passion, even. His bedroom died long before his relationship, a product of distance and the throttling-back of passion that comes with any long-term relationship, and of course, the night in Brussels had meant nothing; he’d spent it imagining Jesse.

Jesse. Jesse. His touch drowns out all else and his body goes numb, and there is only Jesse, inside him, all around him. 

After a while, Jesse urges him to lift one of his legs, and he anchors a hand under it, using it as leverage to quicken the pace. He can feel the increased desperation in his thrusts, the stuttering rhythm. Once more, he lets his eyes fall shut, resting his head on the pillow, breathing through his moans; he hates giving away how lost he is, though he thinks Jesse probably already knows.

He hones in on the chorus of sounds behind him: the sound of skin slapping against skin, Jesse’s heavy breathing, and the few words he manages to make out, coos and cries about how good he feels. He opens his mouth to joke back that he’s perfectly aware of how good he feels, but the words die on his tongue when Jesse reaches around his front, tugging his cock out of his briefs and pumping it in time with each thrust.

“Do you want me to-” Jesse bites out, then moans. “Oh, fuck - inside, or-”

“Yes,” is all he can manage, hiding his face into the pillow as if somehow he can hide from the pleasure. “I want it, just - fuck, Jesse … ”

He moans like an animal in heat when he feels Jesse’s muscles lock up behind him, thrusting once, twice, before he buries himself deep and pulses inside him. He can feel the warmth of his seed, the inexplicable, instinctive gratification of it all: knowing that he’d felt good enough to do this to him, to earn his prize.

To be made his.

Before Jesse even pulls out, however, his lithe hand is back, wrapping around his length and pumping steadily again. Then all he knows is his palm, the pressure of his fingers, the stretch of his length still inside him forming a veritable assault on his senses - and that’s all it takes for him to fall to pieces too. He spills into his hand, helpless and trembling and moaning into the pillow.

They don’t say anything at first, after. Jesse stays inside him for a while, face tucked into his neck. He can’t look into his eyes, yet somehow Rob thinks he’s never felt so close to another human being, their bodies locked together as the afterglow creeps in. Eventually, he pulls out and fetches a towel from the bathroom to clean both of them. Rob flips over onto his back, allowing Jesse to take care of him without a word, though he’d insist on doing it himself if it were anyone else.

“You know,” Rob tells him after he’s propped himself up on a pillow, peering over at where Jesse is rummaging through his suitcase across the room, “I want to run the country all day and fuck you all night. I really should just keep you chained to the bed.”

Jesse scoffs and makes his way back. They come together effortlessly in a kiss before he pulls away to tuck himself under the covers.

“Is that your plan to sabotage Groenlinks? Take me out of commission?”

“That would be an unintended benefit.” He pauses and grows serious as Jesse reaches for his hand, kissing it idly. “I don’t want to sabotage you. I want to be on your side. I just can’t always be.”

“I know.” The light is dim, his eyes dark and sincere. “In a way, I consider pleasing you my civic duty. Essential to the fight against climate change. I need to keep my minister performing so he can save the planet.”

My minister. Rob furrows his brow, feeling something unfamiliar turn over in his chest.

“You should want me to fail,” he murmurs.

“Maybe. But I don’t.”

Jesse turns his hand over and presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist, eyes still locked on his. He’s stunned into silence, both by the admission and by his tenderness; he and Jesse have always done an odd sort of dance around each other, from enemies to allies and then back again. On the world stage, Jesse will inevitably criticize him for some inaction or insufficiency. Here, for once, he’s admitted the truth: that he’s with him.

Rob shakes the thoughts away and finally paws around on the bed for his phone, which he raises to his face with a squint. It isn’t late, but late enough that he should probably be going, with a hellish week of press appearances and site visits ahead, a chaotic, unrelenting ouroboros that never pauses, not for a moment. He wonders how much longer it will be until he’s chewed up and spit out by it, or perhaps he already has been.

“I should go,” he sighs, and Jesse frowns.

“Are you sure?”

“Not really,” Rob chuckles, tossing the phone aside. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Jesse leans in and kisses him more tenderly than he’s ever been kissed in his life.

“Stay,” he says, and there isn’t a world in which Rob could say no.

-

He awakes in the morning to four missed calls and a dozen text messages.

At first, he has no idea what could be wrong - until he checks the time and sees that it’s almost ten, hours later than he would usually be at the office. The texts are mostly from his senior staff, inquiring respectfully about his whereabouts, followed by a notably less respectful text from Sigrid, who demands to know where he is with no pleasantries whatsoever.

He groans. That’s when he catches a whiff of a familiar, bitter aroma.

Coffee.

Rob rolls over, blinking in the warm morning sun, and finds Jesse puzzling out how to operate the little hotel room coffee machine. He’s shirtless in only a pair of grey sweatpants, frizzy-haired, and disheveled from their activities the night before. He seems to have had some success because a stream of coffee has begun to pour from the spout into a little disposable cup. As soon as it’s finished, he retrieves it and turns, smiling when he notices he’s awake. 

With the sunlight cutting through the curtains and streaming over him, Rob could almost be fooled into believing he’s an angel, for a moment.

“Good morning,” Jesse greets, handing him the cup.

“I’m late,” Rob croaks, rubbing a hand over his eyes. He’s still naked, modesty preserved only by the sheets over his lower half. “Fuck, I missed our fraction meeting. Sigrid’s going to kill me.”

Jesse shrugs. “I would’ve woken you sooner, but you looked like you needed the rest.”

“I should go,” Rob mutters as he peels back the covers, but Jesse moves in, placing a hand on his arm to stop him.

“Don’t, just yet.” He smiles, raising his eyebrows. “Drink your coffee with me. Take five minutes. You know the drill.”

Rob hesitates before finally acquiescing and laying back against the pillows. “I can’t tell if you’re an angel or the devil, you know.”

Jesse stands and turns back to look at him, one half of his face illuminated, the other thrown into shadow. Something seems to falter in him for a second before he smiles again.

“Why not both?”

Once Jesse has procured his own cup, he sinks down onto the bed beside him. They sip in silence for a while, prolonging their peace between these four walls - even if it’s only an Indian summer, with reality on the brink of crashing in.

“So,” Jesse pipes up at last. “We never did talk. And that’s why I asked you here.” He chuckles. “Well, part of the reason.”

Rob lets the steam from the coffee rise into his face for a moment before he takes a sip, wincing slightly at the burn.

“I… don’t know where to start, honestly,” he confesses.

“We both know the risks of doing this. If it ever got out, our careers would be ruined.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No,” Jesse bursts out, then clears his throat, lowering his voice. “Of course not, I just….” He pauses and takes a sip of his coffee. Then, he meets his eyes. “It’s enough for me, I think. This. Enough for me to accept the risk.”

“For me, too,” he echos without a second thought, then wonders aloud as Jesse inches closer to him on the bed, “How was it… that TikTok saw it before we did?”

“Well, there’s blindness, and then there’s willful blindness,” Jesse replies. “I was always yours. Even when I tried my hardest not to be.”

Rob allows himself a moment to do nothing more than look into Jesse’s eyes, the corners of which have sprouted creases from age in the years since he joined him in the Kamer. He recalls the day he’d first walked inside in 2017 and seen him standing there, young and fresh off his victory with his eyes full of hope. He remembers that echo of desire that had bubbled up inside him like a reflex, desire he’d spent every day afterward trying to tamp down - until, as desire usually does, it won out in the end.

They’re both older, now. More jaded - or perhaps just more realistic. But something about Jesse makes him feel young and wild and reckless again. They’d said it was too late for them to start all over again with love, but-

Maybe it isn’t.

They sit in contented quiet for a while, sipping their coffee, until Rob clears his throat and speaks up again.

“I want you to come back. But if we’re doing this, things have to change. It’s too dangerous for you to stay with me.”

Jesse nods. “I know. I’ll stay here until I find something permanent.”

“I will miss living together like students, though.” Rob grins cheekily. “And your notes. I’ll miss your notes.”

“I won’t be far,” Jesse undertones. “I promise.”

Rob knows he should hesitate. He should have a thousand more reservations than he does. But he’s lived most of his life governed by should’s. Instead, now, he lets Jesse take his coffee from his hand and set it aside, then capture his lips gently, sealing their fates with a kiss.

It’s mutually-assured destruction if this goes wrong, he thinks, and it’s more likely than not to do just that. They’re working for something far bigger than them, than their impulses and selfish desires. But then Jesse pulls away, closes his hand into a fist, and bows his head to kiss the back of it, and he decides he can allow himself to be human, just this once.

Chapter Text

“People hate us, you know.”

The thought bubbles up out of nowhere as he’s seated with Sigrid in her office during one of their weekly check-in meetings that have increasingly evolved into therapy sessions as of late. Between D66’s embroilment in an intraparty sexual assault cover-up and the energy crisis, he can’t remember the last time he slept more than a few hours at a time. By now, he thinks his bloodstream might consist purely of caffeine.

The window is cracked slightly, the unseasonably warm June air filtering into the room. The Ministry of Finance is all modern and sleek, as if someone mashed an office building and a greenhouse into one, with glass ceilings in the central atrium and high windows in every office. 

Briefly, Rob thinks of that old saying about people in glass houses throwing stones. He can’t help but appreciate the irony.

Sigrid sighs and picks up the cup of coffee on her desk to take a sip. “The new opinion polls, you mean?”

“My approval rating is in the twenty-percents. That’s on the higher end of the ministers. Opinions on the coalition are worse.”

“Have you ever really been concerned with being liked?” Sigrid quips dryly, and he scoffs.

At first, he had. The ‘Robot Jetten’ and ‘klimaatdrammer’ jabs had smarted. He’d tried to be perfect, untouchable, with the end result being that he came off as unrelatable. Once he’d loosened up somewhat and remembered how to be himself, things had improved, and he’d given up caring what the public thought. He was young. He was gay. He was trying to upset the status quo. Of course he wouldn’t be liked. Over time, he’d learned to accept that, but-

“No,” he answers with a sigh, resting his chin on his hand. “But I’d rather not be universally reviled.”

She seems to consider that, then deadpans, “Well, not universally. You still have twenty percent.”

He can’t help but bark a laugh at that; in the midst of it all, Sigrid’s dry, dark sense of humor is one of the only things that can get him to laugh these days. That, and Jesse, whose flat has become a refuge for him more and more as of late, even if he only has the energy to crawl into bed and let himself be held most nights. It’s striking how normal it all feels, falling into a routine with him, as if it had never been any other way.

He isn’t sure he could call himself happy. But in Jesse’s bed, with his legs draped over his shoulders and his arms wound around him like vines, he almost remembers what living should feel like.

“Hoekstra is getting anxious about the nitrogen emissions targets again,” Sigrid mentions with a frown. “The Farmer-Citizen Movement is up in the polls. He’s taking heat from inside his own party.”

“I know. I spoke with him Monday.” 

“You don’t think he’d break ranks and say anything publicly, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Rob murmurs, running a hand over his face and sitting up in his chair. “Maybe. Better that than withdraw support, and he wouldn’t go that far. God, it really is like herding cats, tying our destinies to… Mark Rutte and a gaggle of Christians.” He pauses, then rifles through his folder and withdraws a piece of paper, sliding it across the desk to her. “They’ll be happy about this, at least. I think we’re going to have to fire the coal power stations back up to full capacity. Our gas reserves aren’t where we need them to be. We can’t risk it heading into winter.”

Sigrid peruses the paper, then sets it down with another, deeper sigh. It occurs to Rob they do just about as much sighing as they do talking these days.

“I know you were hoping we could avoid this,” she remarks, and he nods grimly. 

“If people can’t heat their homes, they’ll do more than show up at our doors with torches and groceries.”

The unpleasant memory of the farmers showing up at his door years ago bubbles to the surface, too, before he can help it. It was a thinly-veiled threat, although somehow more unnerving than the outright death threats he’s gotten over the years. The government’s security team had insisted on beefing up security at his house again last month, installing all sorts of cameras and motion detectors. Sometimes he could almost believe he lives in a military bunker instead of a home.

“We can’t announce until after the party congress,” Sigrid tells him. “It’s been a difficult few months for us. I want to give everyone a sense of hope.”

“Even if it’s a lie?”

She just grins cheerlessly. “Have you ever really been concerned with that, either?”

It’s a fair point, though it feels like a gut punch; Sigrid has a way of cutting right to the heart of things that verges on brutal, sometimes. At times like this, he tries to recall how he’d felt the night of the election only a year ago, how they were so sure they were standing on the precipice of real, tangible change with the power to achieve it finally in their hands. The ugly realities of governing have driven out more of his optimism than he’d care to admit since.

They lapse into silence for a while. He allows himself to look at Sigrid for a moment more closely than he usually does. She’s still every inch the Dutch Iron Lady the papers had labeled her years ago as a diplomat in Syria, though she looks increasingly beaten down in the same way he does. Sometimes he isn’t even sure what progress they’ve made, with half a dozen crises raining down upon them and a nation more polarized by the hour.

His phone buzzes on his lap right then. He glances down to find Jesse’s name on the screen.

-Found your note. Minister Jetten, you old romantic

He stifles a smile. He and Jesse have fallen into the habit of leaving each other notes over the past three months, with little flirtatious phrases or motivational sayings or inside jokes. He’d left him one this morning on an impulse: You smile like the sun breaking through the clouds.

A bit corny, for him. But Jesse makes him want to be.

“There is one other thing,” she says abruptly, bringing him out of his reverie. “I spoke to the security department yesterday. They want you to stop running, at least while you’re in The Hague. Doing it at home is safe for the time being. The farmers are planning more protests, apparently another large-scale one here at the end of the month. There have been threats ramping up against you again.” She pauses, flattening her lips into a line. “I told them I’d rather you heard it from me.”

He sits silently, processing, even as he feels his heart sink. It was never much to ask for. An hour of freedom, away from the government cars and gilded cages. A brief remembrance of how his life used to be - before he ceased to be human and became whatever he is now. Something about having this last little liberty torn from him makes him feel wildly hopeless.

“It’s-” he starts, then cuts himself off. “It’s an hour at most. I do it early in the morning. I follow every other protocol, I-”

“I know,” she interrupts with a sympathetic look. “It wasn’t my call, Rob.”

It’s clear the conversation is closed. It’s his nature to be poised for debate, but it’s clear there won’t be any of that, either, so he sinks back into his chair, deflating and trying not to let it show. He excuses himself from the room shortly after, striding down the long corridor and fishing his phone out of his pocket to respond to Jesse. 

He needs him, suddenly. Needs to see him as much as he needs to breathe, away from these buildings, these offices, these fucking people. Preferably away from any clothing, too.

-Come over tonight?

He hesitates, then adds:

-I’ve missed you all week and I’ve had a shit day

Jesse’s response comes hardly a minute later.

-What do you want for dinner?

As he steps into his car to return to his own ministry, he catches himself grinning into his phone.

Jesse, reliably, recognizes the important things in life.

-

He’s still working when Jesse steps through his door, hunched over his laptop as he reviews his press team’s first draft of his remarks for next week when they’ll hold a press conference to announce the lifting of restrictions on the coal plants. He’s already prepared to work through the weekend on it, even though staring at the words now fills him with existential dread, all the statistics and flowery language cloaking the sinister reality.

Ten megatons of CO2 over the next two years. That’s how much he’ll release with the flick of a pen. He thinks images of billowing smokestacks will haunt his dreams for roughly as long.

He closes the document when he hears the sound of Jesse’s key turning in the lock; he’d never given it back after moving out, and Rob hadn’t asked him to. He stands just in time to see the door swing open, and in steps Jesse. His hands are full: takeout in one and a bouquet of flowers in the other, the latter of which makes Rob furrow his brow.

“Hey,” Jesse greets, making his way over and pecking him on the lips. He sets the food on the kitchen island, then holds out the flowers. “These are for you.”

He balks, at first. He can’t remember the last time anyone brought him flowers outside of the perfunctory congratulations now and then at work. It still throws him off kilter, having someone do something nice for him for no reason other than that they want to.

He chuckles and sets the flowers aside as Jesse grabs the plates for dinner. “You didn’t… This isn’t necessary-”

“Completely necessary,” is all Jesse says over his shoulder. “You had a bad day. And you told me once how much you like fresh flowers but never have any here. Besides, you know what I think about your decorating.” He pauses setting their places at the kitchen island long enough to wink. “This place desperately needs some color.”

“I hate you,” he scoffs as Jesse walks over and places his hands on his hips to embrace him. It’s the first time he’s seen him in what feels like ages, and he melts into his touch immediately with a sigh. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too. What happened today?”

“I-” he exhales sharply, closing his eyes. “I can’t tell you.”

Jesse hums, unfazed, as he draws back. 

“Something I won’t like, I take it?” Rob gives him a reproachful look, and he holds up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“If I could, I’d tell you everything. You know I would.” He sighs, leaning against the kitchen island, and watches Jesse unpack their food. “How was your day?”

“Oh, got in a tussle in debate with Caroline van der Plas. She really is unbearable, that woman. She’s part of the reason the farmers are so radicalized. She questions science. She… misleads them on purpose. They’re out for blood - yours and mine especially.”

“I know. They told me I shouldn’t run alone anymore while I’m in The Hague. I’m surprised they haven’t told you to be more careful.”

“Despite my best efforts, I’m not a minister.”

Rob hums and folds his arms, watching him for a moment in silence.

“The coffin,” he muses lowly, at last. “Do you remember the coffin they paraded around a few years ago?”

“Oh, with our names on it?” Jesse asks with a chuckle before growing solemn all at once. “I remember. Takes ‘til death do us part to an entirely new level.” Jesse looks at him more closely, frowning. “I’m sorry about the running. I know how much you enjoy it.”

“It’s… fine,” he sighs. “Sometimes I just think this job would be easier if I… I don’t know. If I wasn’t a person. If I didn’t exist and just existed in everything I do.”

“If you don’t want people to think you’re a robot, you really have to stop saying things like that,” Jesse replies as he finishes setting their places, then circles around the island and takes his hands. “No more talking about work. Come eat.”

They eat side by side, tucked into his barstools with their faces buried in bowls of Thai curry. Jesse turns on music, his playlist cycling through in the background. Every now and then, Jesse’s hands wander over to his leg or his knee, or his arm when they laugh. 

For the first time all week, Rob feels like he can breathe. He feels like a living thing again, touching and being touched.

After a while, Jesse’s music cycles around to an old familiar song about Brabant, one they both know the words to by heart. Jesse sings along in that strong, high voice of his as he clears away the dinner dishes, and Rob only rolls his eyes until Jesse abandons his task entirely, strolling back over to him.

“Dance with me,” he cajoles, and Rob blinks.

He’s certain he’s joking and laughs. “What?”

“Come on. Dance with me.”

He tugs him out into the living room. He laughs again right as an accordion kicks in, and the song’s chorus comes over the speaker once more.

“I don’t know how to dance-”

“So?” He breaks out into a grin so wide that any of Rob’s inhibitions fall away immediately. He places a hand on the small of his back, using the other to hold Rob’s hand beside them. “Just move with me.”

“This is… this is madness.”

“It is,” Jesse answers, not missing a beat. “I like madness.”

It’s not what any onlooker would call good, or smooth, or practiced. Rob steps on Jesse’s toes more than once, and Jesse returns the favor, but by the end, he’s laughing in a way he hasn’t laughed in years. The music dies eventually, and he pulls back to look at Jesse, who is still smiling, too, that impish smile that lights up the room. He loves it: the way his eyes sparkle, the way his nose wrinkles, the way he inclines his head slightly as his shoulders shake with mirth. He’s captivating, boyish and bright-eyed, like nothing he’s ever seen before. 

He folds himself into his arms again, thinking that he just might be content with doing this forever.

“Sometimes I wish I’d never left Brabant,” he confesses as they sway slowly to the sound of silence. “I wonder how much easier my life would’ve been.”

“Easier, maybe. But then we wouldn’t have our ‘klimaatdrammer.’ We wouldn’t have someone leading the way who really understands.”

He pulls back, shaking his head. “There would be someone else.”

“The country needs you,” Jesse tells him, voice full of soft conviction. “Not anyone else. Well-” He laughs. “Me too, ideally.”

He winces internally. He wonders how Jesse will feel in a week’s time after the announcement. If he’ll still believe in him like this.

“I wish everyone had as much faith in me as you do.”

They lapse into quiet for a moment, just holding each other in the middle of the living room as they begin to lose the light outside. It feels like his entire world is in his arms right then; his past and present and future, every memory, every daydream, every desire. For someone perpetually unsatisfied, always reaching for higher heights, for once, he can’t think of anything more he could need.

“What would you do?” Jesse asks suddenly. “If you weren’t doing this.”

He sighs. “It’s… embarrassing.”

“Tell me.”

“I’d own a cafe. Or a pub. It’s always been a dream of mine. A pub in a village back home. A small town, somewhere I knew everyone. Somewhere it’s quiet and slow and… people are kinder.” He pauses, then adds, “Somewhere I’m safe.”

“You’re safe with me,” Jesse murmurs, pressing a kiss just below his ear. “You’re always safe with me.”

It isn’t long before Jesse takes his hand and leads him to the bedroom, stripping both their clothing and drinking him up with unmitigated hunger. Rob comes into his arms so naturally, like the sun falling heavily into the horizon. Like he was always meant to.

If he were stronger, Rob thinks, he might have the sense to fight the way Jesse’s fingers press into his skin and leave it rippling long after he’s pulled away, or the moans Jesse wrings from his throat as he lies back and lets him ride his face, his nose buried between his cheeks. He closes his eyes and bites the fabric of his headboard, trying not to cry out, but then Jesse’s hand wraps around his cock too, and his body buckles under the force of it all, so violently it startles both of them.

They lay together afterward. Not speaking. Not moving. They let the silence fold over them, and Jesse tucks himself in at his side, slinging an arm across his chest as he drifts off.

And fuck, Rob thinks, the way he smiles and the soft feeling of his curls on his chest and the way he’s starting to think he couldn’t live without it… This-

This is trouble.

-

The day of the announcement feels like a waking nightmare, hellish and surreal. The flashes of the cameras at the press conference blind him. The journalists’ voices are deafening yet somehow eerily distant, muffled. His talking points all sound stale and overly rehearsed to his ears. He sits before the media and takes the verbal beating he knew was coming, though somehow, it hurts more than ever. He’s self-aware enough to recognize his own hypocrisy.

He keeps his mouth shut and bites his tongue until it bleeds.

We are taking these measures to ensure that we are as prepared as possible. This involves having to make some tough decisions, including revoking the output limit for coal-fired power stations. This will increase CO2 emissions in the Netherlands, which we intend to compensate for with additional measures-

What additional measures? He doesn’t know yet. There’s nothing, really, that can repair the damage it will do. That he will do.

He knew, going in, that he would have to make difficult decisions. He knew it wouldn’t be easy. If his younger self could see him now, he thinks he would probably call him a traitor, a sellout—a government drone. Social media likely is already, though mercifully, his back-to-back meetings for the rest of the day prevent him from checking.

“You look exhausted,” Sophie Hermans remarks during their brief encounter later that day outside the Tweede Kamer’s building, both flanked by retinues of staff. “When was the last time you slept?”

He can’t remember. He worked all weekend to plan the announcement, running through every possible question that could be asked with his press team, and still, somehow, he hadn’t felt prepared. But he did the right thing, he tells himself. No one will run out of gas this winter. They can extend their extra reserves to other European countries if the need arises. He did the right thing.

He isn’t sure why it doesn’t feel that way.

He stays in his office long after most of his staff have departed for the night, aside from the woman staffing the front desk in the lobby and his legion of security officers, all of which are required to stay as long as he does. He should do them a small mercy and let them go home, but he can’t bring himself to move. He just stays seated at his desk in his shirtsleeves, looking around at the high ceilings and elegant decor, feeling for the first time the true burden of his office.

The risk of doing nothing was too great, he tells himself. There was no other way. But what if there was, and he’d failed to realize? What if-

His phone rings before him on his desk, startling him out of his thoughts.

He clears his throat and answers, “Hello?”

“Minister Jetten, Mr. Klaver is here to see you. Should I send him back?”

Jesse. Jesse is either here to console him or chastise him, and he can only hope it’s the former because he feels on the verge of breaking down completely, running on caffeine and half a protein bar he ate around midday.

“Yeah. Thank you.”

A minute passes, and then the door opens. Jesse strides in with his suit jacket slung over his arm, cheeks red with indignation and a steely, hardened look in his eyes. Rob isn’t able to open his mouth to so much as greet him before Jesse bursts out with-

“The coal plants, Rob? That’s your answer? The fucking coal plants?”

So it’s this, then.

He feels his stomach twist, but he just swallows, running a hand over his face. “Now is not a good time, Jesse.”

“I could argue it isn’t a good time to send ten megatons of CO2 flying into the air, either, but that’s a moot point now, isn’t it?”

He clenches his jaw but moderates his tone. “What would you have me do? Let people run out of gas this winter? Let the country freeze?”

“There were other solutions,” Jesse counters, striding over to his desk and tossing his suit jacket on one of the chairs. “We’ve said for months the government should be treating this like a crisis. You sat on your hands and did nothing. You could’ve forced the industrial sector to save energy. Banned short-haul flights. Scaled down the production of non-essential sectors-”

“You don’t think we considered all that? Of course we did. This was our best option-”

“You don’t believe that.” Jesse looks almost unrecognizable in the low light, with fury in his eyes. So different from the man who had held him and danced only days ago. “I know you don’t believe that.”

Something in him snaps just then. It’s the crescendo of an entire week’s worth of nerves and sleepless nights, and all at once, he finds he can’t bite his tongue anymore; if he bites any harder, he’ll chew it clean off. He shoots to his feet all at once, scooting his chair out with a shrill creak and glowering at him.

“It is so fucking easy for you, isn’t it?” he hisses. “It’s so easy for you to sit on the sidelines and criticize every move we make and say you’d do it better. Is it jealousy? Is that what it is? We all know you’d get on your knees for a cabinet post.”

It’s a low blow. Conversely, it’s not exactly a secret in The Hague; GreenLeft has continually positioned itself as a contender to be a member of the ruling coalition, though it has never come to fruition. He knows Jesse covets the job he has now. He knows he desires more power than he has, and he must hit his mark because he sees the other man’s expression darken.

“Maybe I would’ve, once. But seeing what it’s done to you, I’m not so sure.” Jesse shakes his head, leaning forward and bracing his hands on the desk across from him. “You’re a puppet, Rob. You’ve gotten so caught up in trying to change the system from the inside that you’ve become the system. Or are you so delusional that you really don’t see it?”

He feels his throat swell with emotion, of all things, as if he might cry. He won’t. He won’t give him that satisfaction.

“Don’t you think I’d do more if I could?” he retorts as he draws back and stands directly before Jesse. “I am moving as fast as I can. I am trying.” He’s almost shouting now, his voice hoarse from overuse and exhaustion. “Will it ever be enough for you, Jesse? Just once?”

His words seem to pierce the veil of Jesse’s anger. All the tension floods out of him, and he tilts his head to one side, looking at him closely.

“Rob-” he tries to soothe, realizing he’s misstepped, but Rob shakes him off and crosses the room, standing near one of the windows. 

For a while, both of them are silent. Slowly, Jesse approaches him from behind, stopping near him but not reaching out to touch him again.

“You think it doesn't keep me up at night?” Rob chokes out, finally, with his back turned to him. “I can’t even begin to fathom the damage this is going to do. But I didn’t have a choice. I can’t-” His voice hitches. He swallows, turning back to look at him. “I can’t do more than the coalition will let me. I can’t… move mountains. I know the threat we’re up against. I know what will happen if I don’t move fast enough. Half the fucking country will be underwater, and it’ll be my fault, and I-”

Before he can say another word, Jesse is kissing him, raising both hands to his cheeks and capturing his lips. It’s gentle, slow. Penitent, in a way, like he’s silently begging him for forgiveness, and Rob wants to stay angry, but as soon as his lips press down on his, he dissolves into his touch. 

It only lasts a moment before Jesse pulls away, then presses their foreheads together, rubbing his forearms soothingly. Before he can help it, Rob finds himself grasping them, desperate to be moored by something. He feels like he can’t breathe, like the smog from the coal plants is fucking suffocating him already. Jesse feels like oxygen. 

“It won’t be your fault,” Jesse soothes. “I’m sorry. I didn't mean what I said. I was just angry.”

A moment passes in silence. Then, Rob sighs.

“I do everything I can. Always. You have to know that. But it’s not like it is for you. I can’t be who I used to be. ‘Klimaatdrammer.’ Posing for photos in front of shuttered coal plants. I have to think about the coalition. I have to work with the farmers.” He sucks in a breath, feeling his chest uncoil, and the tension in his muscles unfurl. “I’m trying to build a new world. I have to build it for everyone.”

“So we will,” he tells him without hesitation. “We’ll build it together.”

Jesse takes his hands, enclosing them in his and resting their foreheads against one another. There’s a determined glint in his eyes, suddenly, that bright, idealistic spark he fell in love with the first time he saw it. It falters and flickers at times, but never fades. Sometimes Rob thinks he’s lost his way, that he doesn’t believe in anything anymore, but right then-

He believes in Jesse. In this. Right then, he isn’t sure he needs any other creed.

Chapter Text

They blockade the streets of The Hague as tractors roll across the country.

It’s not the first time Rob has witnessed a farmer’s protest; he’s no stranger to them and often the target of their vitriol, even more so now than as MP. It’s a familiar turn of events: the heightened security at his office, the squad of protection officers whenever he goes. The police car parked outside his house in Ubbergen night and day. He should be used to it, but the sickening feeling in his gut has never entirely subsided. 

Seeing Jesse is a reprieve. They keep a comfortable routine, secreting themselves away to one of their flats when they can spare an evening together. They’re good at being careful - save for one near-miss one afternoon as he’s settling into his office with Sophie for a quick lunch together. He pulls his food out of his lunch sack - curry from Jesse - not noticing the note from the other man tumble out onto the floor until Sophie makes a soft humph.

“What’s that?” she wonders aloud, stooping down to pick it up, and before he can say anything to stop her, she’s unfolding it.

His heart turns to stone. Jesse sometimes signs his notes; sometimes, he doesn’t. They vary in content; overtly sexual, relatively tame, cheesily comical. He has no idea what this one might say, and all the blood drains from his face as she opens her mouth to read it aloud.

“‘I made this extra spicy to build your tolerance. Reward me with something spicy tonight.’” Sophie’s mouth drops open with a chortle, and he releases a breath when he realizes she doesn’t look horrified, so the note must be unsigned. Leave it to Jesse to write something so cringeworthy yet endearing. “Minister Jetten, you whore!”

He can’t help but burst out laughing, relieved enough to cry. “Did you just call me a-”

“So mystery man is still in the picture, is he?” she presses. “Come on. You can’t keep him a secret from me forever.”

“I prefer to keep my private life private,” he parrots the canned response without blinking, suave as ever.

She rolls her eyes and plops down in one of his chairs. “Whatever you say. I’ll get it out of you one day, mark my words.”

He cringes but says no more and takes his seat too. 

Sophie does, generally, have a habit of doing that.

Fortunately, she lets the topic tumble to the wayside. They fall into easy conversation, chatting about the farmer’s protests and the cast of characters in the Tweede Kamer and the evergreen chaos of the coalition, held together by sheer necessity as it is. It’s only after she’s gone and he has a minute between meetings that he allows himself to have a minor panic attack at his desk as he slips the note into his pocket with trembling fingers.

If Jesse had signed it. If he’d said something else, something that would have identified him-

Everything could be over. As much as he likes Sophie, her loyalty is to Mark Rutte and the VVD in the end, not to him. Friendships are never normal in this place; they’re colored by party loyalty and political motivations. He wishes for once he could say what he really feels to her - to Jesse, to all of them. 

He supposes it would probably be easier if he just didn’t feel anything at all.

His nerves are shot for the rest of the day. He goes through the motions, only barely managing to muster up a smile for his meetings, a never-ending deluge of advocates and lobbyists and people wanting something from him, even though he doesn’t think he has much left to give.

There’s a private reception for MPs and ministers later that night at the Mauritshuis, some annual celebration the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science hosts every year. He goes to make an appearance and have a few drinks to quell his anxiety, though it isn’t lost on him that this sort of function is emblematic of everything the farmers hate them for: the government elite sipping cocktails in their proverbial castle on a hill, raising the drawbridge while the world goes up in flames around them.

Art, however, is a thing that has almost always been lost on him. He doesn’t deal in symbolism; he needs the concrete, solid. Hard facts and numbers. He needs to be told what something is, not wonder after a million different interpretations of what it could be. He spends a while strolling around the rooms with Sophie, who is quite the aesthete herself, relaxing a bit as she tries to get him to be even slightly imaginative. 

Eventually, they part ways, and he’s sipping a glass of wine and pondering de Heem’s Vase of Flowers when he feels someone brush his arm in wordless greeting. He knows who it is without looking by the way the hairs on the back of his neck stand up; the energy of the room shifts palpably when Jesse Klaver enters, in the same way it would before a lightning strike.

“Minister,” Jesse acknowledges with a nod of his head, taking his place at his side. “Good seeing you.”

Rob bites back a loopy smile. It’s been a while since they’ve crossed paths at an event like this with dozens of their colleagues around them, all blissfully unaware. He does his best to keep his body language from giving him away.

“Likewise.”

They stand for a moment without a word until the room clears, and they are briefly alone. It catches Rob off guard, the way he feels like he has to fight every muscle in his body to keep from reaching for Jesse. His fingertips prickle with the need to touch him. 

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” he says eventually.

“I didn’t either. I wasn’t planning to come. But I figured you might be here, so.” He meets his eye with a wink. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. This one is your favorite?”

Rob blinks as Jesse points at the painting. “Uh, yeah. It is. I’ve always loved the still life paintings of flowers.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are they your favorite?”

Caught off guard, Rob flounders for words momentarily like a fish out of water. He’s so unused to being asked anything personal about himself in a genuine way that it throws him for a loop.

“I… don’t know. I guess they remind me of my garden, and that’s the one place I’m most at peace.”

“It is beautiful. But if you look closer-” He steps forward, pointing out a lower section of the painting beneath the vase of flowers, “there’s hidden darkness. Decay. The salamander looking at the spider. The ants. The fly there, on that stem.” His voice is low, intensely focused. Hypnotic. “It’s a memento mori. ‘Remember that you must die.’”

Rob winces and takes a sip of his wine. “Given all the death threats lately, I can’t say that’s comforting.”

“Sorry,” Jesse apologizes. They lapse into silence for a while, and he takes a look around the room. After he’s determined they’re alone, he places a hand on the small of Rob’s back, leaning over to purr in his ear, “You look stunning tonight. I wanted to tell you.”

The room is dim around them, all opulent and baroque, the paintings backlit and radiating their own light. Surrounded by the Dutch masters on every side, suddenly, Rob is viciously certain none of their work holds a candle to the man next to him.

He swallows. “We can’t, here.”

“I know,” he relents, drawing his hand away. “I’m sorry.”

A few others wander into the room, and they take that as their cue to slip into the next, which is largely empty. There’s a bust in the center, chalky-eyed and expressionless, a Protestant princess of someplace with a rather dreadful haircut. They walk around it together, Jesse with his hands behind his back and his lips pursued in thought. With the drink and adrenaline coursing through his veins, Rob feels like a bull in an arena, circling his target.

He wants him. Needs him. He can hear the sound of blood pumping in his ears. His heartbeat fills his head like a drum. He takes a drink of his wine and licks his lips when he lowers his glass. Jesse watches, pupils dilated with that same naked want.

“I wish I didn’t have to do any of this,” Rob confesses, finally, as they continue to circle under the pretense of admiring the bust. “Make appearances. Do things just to be seen doing them. All I want…” His eyes flick up to meet Jesse’s. He feels drunk. He feels mad with desire. “All I want to do is be with you.”

He slows his pace, and Jesse comes to a stop behind him, standing just far enough away to deny him the press of his body, just enough that any onlooker wouldn’t bat an eye. He feels his breathing quicken, every nerve ending in his body standing at attention. He can’t, here.

He would. In front of all of them. He wants them all to know.

He glances around the room, suddenly panicked at the thought. As if able to read his mind, Jesse leans into his ear, keeping them angled toward the bust under the pretense of explaining it to him.

He lowers his voice so only he can hear. “It’s all right. We’re alone. It’s just us.”

“Jesse…” he mutters, a half-hearted protest.

Jesse doesn’t budge, continuing as if he hadn’t spoken, “I feel the same. I spend every second I’m not with you waiting until I can be.” He sighs, a mix of frustration and desire. “I don’t know how I ever went without it.”

“Without what?”

“Having you,” Jesse answers and draws away all of a sudden, leaving his head reeling.

Dazed and tipsy, he trails behind him into the next room, where Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs, surrounded by a railing to keep anyone from getting too close. There are a few other MPs milling around with their plus-ones, and so they keep a safe distance, standing side by side and staring back at the nameless girl with her steady, fixed gaze. 

Her lips are parted as if to speak. Rob wonders what she would say. He wonders who she was. Who she loved. He wonders if people will look at photographs of him like this one day, too, and know similarly little of his truth - not his titles, not his accomplishments, but who he was. He isn’t sure a story can be a story if there’s no one left to tell it, like a dead language or a lost tradition.

And in the end, he thinks, maybe he'll get his wish. Maybe it will be like he was never anyone at all.

“I envy her anonymity, you know,” Jesse remarks as if he can read his mind. “She’s no one. When I was younger, that was all I wanted: to be someone. Now, I think…” He turns inward, folding his arms. “Maybe being someone has just hurt me more than it’s ever made me happy. Not being able to be who I am.” Their gazes cross. Jesse gives him a slow, sad smile. “Not being able to be with you.”

“You are with me.”

“It doesn’t make you angry sometimes? That I’m not out, and you are?” His voice falters, breaking somewhat. “That I live a lie.”

“Of course not,” he asserts. “Everyone comes out in their own time. I know the position you’re in. I would never be angry with you.”

Jesse smiles again, that same distant smile. “I envy you too, you know. How free you are.”

He scoffs. “I’m not free.”

“To be yourself, I mean. I know how much courage that takes. You’re braver than I am.”

It strikes him like a blow to the stomach, out of nowhere, that this thing between them is ill-fated. It can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, they’ll reach an inflection point where they decide the risk outweighs the benefit, where the happiness he feels when they’re together no longer drowns out the pain of hiding because he hid who he was for years and he vowed to himself once that he would never, ever do it again. Or maybe it won’t come to that, and it’ll all burn down around them first.

He’ll burn with him, Rob decides. Sometimes he swears he’s already burning a candle at both ends, living this life on borrowed time.

“I meant to tell you,” Rob pipes up suddenly as they make their way to the next room, “there’s a story coming out about me in a few weeks, a profile in De Groene Amsterdammer. My relationship came up in the interview. I gave them permission to go public about the breakup.”

“You’re all right with them printing that?”

Rob sets aside his wine glass on a tray table in the corner and sighs. “I’d rather not hide it anymore. Not that it’s really anyone’s business.”

“Our personal lives have always seemed to be everyone’s business-”

“Ah, there you are! I lost you.”

Sophie’s voice sounds out behind them, and they turn to find her there, all floral print and high heels, curls somehow even more untamed than Jesse’s. Rob remembers Jesse joking once that they should swap hair care tips sometime. He tries not to appear frustrated by the intrusion, but there always seems to be some intrusion on their time together, no matter where they go.

“Sophie,” Jesse greets, and she nods in return.

“Jesse. Looking forward to the debate next week?”

“I’m looking forward to being done with it,” he snorts. “I have nightmares about the nitrogen crisis at least once a week.”

She hums. “I am tired of talking about it.”

Seeing his opening, Jesse teases, “Well, if you’re tired of talking about it, the government could always just… I don’t know, do something about it.”

Jesse looks over at him with raised eyebrows, and Rob holds up one hand as if in surrender. “Don’t look at me. Talk to our nitrogen minister.”

They share a laugh, and Sophie looks over to Jesse again. “Do you and your wife have any plans for the summer recess?”

“Oh, we’re just going to Italy in August with the kids. Amalfi Coast.”

Rob frowns. Jesse hadn’t mentioned that to him, and he knows it’s foolish, but he can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. It’s a necessary arrangement, he reminds himself, and Jesse has always insisted on trying to keep his family together as much as possible. Still-

“What about you, Rob?” Sophie asks, stirring him from his thoughts.

He blinks. “Uh, Croatia and Slovenia. With a friend.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What friend?”

“A female friend,” he corrects her with an eye roll. “But you never miss an opportunity to pry, do you, Sophie?”

“You know me so well,” she remarks, then sighs. “Well, I’m going to go see if Mark is still around, ask him if he has any bags that need carrying. I’ll see the two of you later.”

Once she’s gone, he turns to Jesse and folds his arms. “On that note, your place or mine?”

“Yours. But I need a few hours. My staff is having a going away for one of our policy advisors; I promised them I’d stop by.”

He opens his mouth to ask about Italy, then shuts it at the last moment and says only, “Later, then?”

“Later. I’ll text you.” Jesse turns to go and looks back long enough to give him a polite nod. “Your Excellency.”

He smiles wide enough that it feels as if it could break his face in half, returning the gesture. 

“Mr. Klaver.”

-

By the time he arrives back at his flat, he’s sobered up enough to pull open his laptop and plug away for a while at remarks for a speaking engagement next week.

He’s just about to start trying to find the hundredth new way to say the government is doing all it can to stave off the energy crisis - even though he knows that’s an outright lie - when he hears a key turn in the lock; Jesse’s key, which he’d never returned after moving out, but somehow it had felt right for him to keep it. The other man steps through the door shortly after, stumbling a bit and holding his suit jacket over his shoulder.

“Hey,” he greets, closing the laptop as Jesse ambles over to the counter where he’s seated.

Jesse leans in to peck him on the lips. “Hey.”

“You smell like a bar,” Rob observes as soon as they pull apart. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” he mutters defensively, rubbing a hand over his face and depositing his suit jacket on the other barstool. Then, he lets out an absurd chuckle and throws up his hands. “Okay… yes. Yes, Sherlock Holmes, you’ve deduced another mystery!”

“I thought you only drank mulled wine.”

“Normally,” Jesse remarks as he makes his way over to the sofa and plops down on it like a lead weight. “But our interns coerced me into a drinking game. And I tried to say no, but they called me a boomer! I’m a millennial, for Christ’s sake. It was… it was vicious peer pressure; you should’ve seen it. Kids these days are… ruthless. Now-” He fixes his gaze on him, leaning forward. “Enough of that. Stop working and bring your perfect little ass over here.”

Rob feigns outrage but obliges, standing over him with folded arms. “Only my ass? That’s rather reductive.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” he slurs, tugging him down into his lap. “And your brilliant mind and handsome face and kind soul and vampire teeth and all of it. There’s a reason they call you the James Dean of The Hague, y’know.” He reaches up, tucking a loose strand of hair behind Rob’s ear with bleary eyes. “Someone like you should never be alone.”

“Wait a second,” he laughs. “Vampire teeth?”

“Yes, you have unusually pointy incisors.”

Struck speechless by that, he just shakes his head. “You’re drunk.”

Jesse pulls him in for a kiss, sloppy and far too much tongue, but Rob has to appreciate the enthusiasm. Before long, he gives himself over to it, shifting on his lap in his sweatpants and humming softly against his mouth. One of Jesse’s hands creeps lower, cupping his ass, urging him down against his groin. The world around them is still, the city quiet. The space behind his eyes is equally so. Being with Jesse is the only thing that temporarily drowns out the chaos raging inside him, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he falls asleep. 

He’s spent so long steeped in rhetoric and speaking in political jargon that he’s forgotten how to just be. Jesse reminds him.

“I am very drunk,” Jesse admits once they break apart. “But you’re not any less beautiful.”

It’s enough to make Rob weak in the knees, but he hardens his resolve, frowning.

“You didn’t tell me,” he says softly. “About Italy.”

Jesse leans back, sighing. “I… I know. I didn’t have the chance. We just made the booking Monday.” 

He climbs off his lap, sinking onto the sofa but staying angled towards him. Jesse moves closer with that puppy dog-eyed expression he knows all too well.

“Are you mad at me?” he asks, and Rob balks.

“No, I-” he cuts himself off, exhaling. “I know you’re trying to keep your family together.” Jesse lowers his eyes. Rob swallows. “Are you going to share a bed with her?”

The other man hesitates. Then, he sighs. 

“Probably. But it’s over between us.” He takes his hand, tilting his head forward to meet his eyes. “I promise. I’ve spent… years wanting you. I don’t want anyone else, ever again. And if you don’t want me to go, I won’t. I’ll-”

“No, that’s not-” he cuts in. “I would never want to take you away from your boys. But she’ll be with you, and I won’t, and-”

“You’re with me now,” Jesse assures him, reaching up and placing a hand on his cheek to force him to meet his eyes. He moves in closer. “We’ll go somewhere together. Away. Away from here.”

Rob can’t help but chuckle at the wild, drunken sparkle in his eyes. “Where? And with what time?”

“I don’t know. Paris, Mykonos. Or Morocco. I’ve always wanted to go there. We’ll stay in a villa with a courtyard and a pool and eat tagine until we’re sick, and no one will know who we are. And we won’t be anyone. Just ourselves. None of this will matter.” He sighs wistfully, leaning his head back and staring up at the ceiling. “God, I am wasted, aren’t I?”

Rob doesn’t answer at first, brooding silently beside him. He knows as well as Jesse does that they won’t go to Morocco or Mykonos. Or Paris. Or anywhere. These are wild dreams, drunken ramblings. He’ll take his holiday, and Jesse will take his, and they’ll come back here to his flat. These four walls, this sofa, this bed - it’s as far as they’ll ever get. 

And yet. Maybe there’s a shred of possibility, somewhere, somehow, some moment in time that-

“You are,” Rob interrupts his thoughts before they can spiral down that particular rabbit hole. He rises to stand. “Go to bed. I’ll be there in a bit; I still have a few things to do.”

Jesse catches his hand, partly to use it as leverage to pull himself up but partly to stop him from returning to his laptop, which feels more like his captor than it does an inanimate object most days.

“Stop working,” Jesse whines, wrinkling his nose like a petulant child. “Come with me.”

“Jesse-”

Jesse ignores him, draping Rob’s hand over his shoulder and leading him into the bedroom with it like a dog on a leash. 

“Work won’t love you back, you know,” he slurs over his shoulder. 

Would you?

Rob doesn’t dare say the words; he may be brave, but he isn’t brave enough for that. Not brave enough to scare away this fragile, beautiful, secret thing they have.

Not brave enough to hear the answer, either.

His room is a mess, with clothing tossed lazily beside the hamper and an unmade bed, but Jesse doesn’t bat an eye. They undress without exchanging many words and crawl together beneath the covers, pressed skin to skin, chest to chest, bone to bone. Jesse dusts drunk little kisses along his jawline and nuzzles the hollow of his throat. Rob hums in contentment, the boundaries between them growing fuzzy until he’s no longer sure they exist at all. He wishes they didn’t. He’d felt them more than usual today.

He falls asleep with his head on Jesse’s chest, as equally troubled as he is happy. He’s never been sure, exactly, if he knows what happiness is. Sometimes he thinks he’s felt echoes of it. Sometimes he thinks he’s felt it in dreams. Most times, he swears he’s spent his entire life convincing himself he’s felt as much happiness as any person when that probably couldn’t be farther from the truth. He lives. He exists. He’s always content. Not happy, per se.

But this must be it. It has to be.

Jesse’s voice draws him back in from the edge of oblivion right then. It’s as soft as a whisper, like he doesn’t want to wake him. Almost, Rob thinks, like he doesn’t want him to hear.

“Work won’t love you back. But people can,” he murmurs as he rubs his arm, his voice floating across the sheets, up to the ceiling, up to the sky, and right down into his sternum; a quiet calamity. “I do.”

If he really were brave, he would open his eyes, look up at him. Tell him he feels the same. Somehow, that feels like it would be a death sentence in itself. 

So he takes the coward’s way out. He pretends to be asleep, and he says nothing at all.

Chapter Text

He still runs in the early mornings.

He sets off on a run early one morning in late June, so long before sunrise that he could almost pretend for a moment that he’s the only living man in The Hague. It may be a subversion of his security protocols, but he feels as if he’ll go mad sitting cooped up in his flat for another second; he’s felt more uneasy than usual lately, especially since Jesse’s sleepless confession a week ago. 

So he tears himself away from the other man’s side, slips from between their sheets, and dresses, jogging down the narrow cobbled streets with only the streetlamps for company. No music. New route, as always, to avoid being followed. He feels like a rat in a maze, the walls of the city increasingly closing in.

Then he hears it. Footsteps. Running. Behind him.

He glances over his shoulder, sure he must be hearing things, and finds a shadowy figure there, trailing him in the darkness. Not too close; at a safe distance, as if hoping not to be noticed. A man’s frame, as far as he can tell, with broad shoulders and a steady pace.

He rounds a corner. Coincidence, he figures. A fellow jogger.

The shadow follows. 

He quickens his own pace, his breath coming in increasingly panicked gasps. The world around him looks like a skipping film reel, disjointed moments stitched together by his panic-addled brain. He glances behind him again, and the figure is closer. It seems larger somehow. They jog around one of the barricades in the streets erected in anticipation of farmers’ protests, and that’s when he realizes-

They’ve come for him. Again.

He takes a left, hoping he’ll lose them. They hang a left with him. He runs faster. They speed up too. He feels like a spooked animal, prey backed into a corner. He’s no one here; that’s what he’s always loved about his runs. He’s anonymous. A shadow. A blank face. No one, and suddenly all that fills his mind are the messages all over social media, the hatred, the death threats.

The coffin with his and Jesse’s names on it. The knock on his door in the night.

He runs until his lungs burn for air and his legs feel ready to collapse beneath him. He runs, and they follow. He runs faster than he can ever recall running in his life. Finally, he makes his way back to his building, yanking out his key fob and slamming the door behind him, shutting the shadow out, suddenly unsure if it was real at all or a figment of his imagination. 

He hurries up the stairs to his flat, unlocking the door with trembling hands and barreling inside. He finds Jesse in a familiar place: in front of the coffee pot, dressed in a suit for work with sleep in his eyes. He looks up immediately, furrowing his brow and making his way over to him.

“Rob?”

Rob’s first instinct is to shake him off. He can’t seem to catch his breath; his chest feels like a python is wrapped around it, squeezing him to death. It feels as if it’ll cave in his sternum, puncture his lungs, steal his breath once and for all, like scores of people would probably prefer. He isn’t safe here. Neither of them is.

They found him before. Showed up at his doorstep. Now they’ve found him again, and they always will, and he can’t run, he can’t-

“Someone was… someone was following me,” he manages, as Jesse rests his hands on his arms. “I didn’t see their face. Farmers. One of the fucking farmers-”

“Following you? Are you sure?”

He vacillates. He isn’t sure. He feels like he’s going mad. He couldn't have slept more than four hours last night, even fewer the night before. Some nights he doesn’t sleep at all, for fear he’ll fear a knock on his door in the middle of the night again, see the glare of a torch in his bedroom window, like they’d done to Sigrid.

He nods. “I think so.”

“Why were you out running?” Jesse demands, equally as flustered now. “You know that’s not safe, especially now! You could get yourself killed, Rob-”

“Don’t you think I know that? I know !”

Silence reigns for a moment, the broken edges of his voice echoing around the cathedral ceiling. Jesse reaches out again, and Rob steps backward. He mutters something about going to shower, brushing Jesse off a final time and absconding to the bathroom, where he closes the door behind him, strips off his clothing like it’s contaminated, and switches on the shower. He stops momentarily at the mirror above the sink, bracing his hands against the porcelain.

At first, he just stares back at his reflection in the harsh white light: at the flecks of grey near his temples, the lines in his forehead, the dark shadows beneath his eyes. The sharp juts of his cheekbones. The angles in his face he’s never noticed before. He looks waxy and hollow, like some sort of walking corpse, rotting from the inside.

It’s worth it, the cause he’s working towards. At the expense of everything else. It’s worth it. It is.

It being worth it is the only option. Because if it isn’t, and he’s lied to himself for so long, given up so much-

He steps into the spray of water just as a knock sounds out on the other side of the door.

“Rob? Are you all right?”

He can’t catch his breath. He can’t calm the rattling in his bones. He slides down the cold tile wall into a heap, leaning his head back against it. He can feel his heart hammering between his ribs as if trying to burst through his skin. He hears Jesse call out his name again, and he closes his eyes but doesn’t answer. Time seems to skip, and the next thing he knows, the door is open, and Jesse is there, stepping into the shower fully clothed without a second thought. Coming to him. Pulling him in like a lifeline.

He crumples into his side at once, as small as a child.

“It’s all right. Hey, it’s okay,” he soothes. “I’ve got you.”

Rob doesn’t answer. He can’t find his voice. The world goes fuzzy around the edges, slipping into soft focus. The overhead recessed lights feel blinding. The pelting of the shower water on his body feels like little ice picks, all chipping away at him. He thinks that soon, there may be nothing left to chip away at, but then Jesse adjusts their position so Rob’s face is buried into one of his forearms, and his fingers tighten their hold on his soaking dress shirt - and he feels grounded again, if only for an instant.

“Home,” he’s dimly aware of saying as the water grows lukewarm. “I want to… I want to go home.”

“Okay,” Jesse affirms as he presses a kiss to the crown of his head. “I’ll take you. Just breathe for now. Just breathe.”

They don’t say anything more. All Rob knows after that is the metallic squeak of the faucet as Jesse switches it off, then a towel draped across his body as he dries him off, and then there is only soft bedsheets, Jesse’s arms, and darkness. 

And he obeys him. He breathes.

-

Jesse has never been to his home.

It’s a step they’ve never taken, venturing beyond the sterile pieds-à-terre they occupy during the week in The Hague. Primarily for safety reasons, yes, but Rob wonders if there are reasons beyond that - if giving Jesse a physical space in his inner sanctum will make this all feel more real somehow.

They take Jesse’s car that evening, forsaking his government plates and immediate identifiability, but also because he doesn’t feel steady enough to drive them. He phones ahead to his security team, concocting a lie about staying at a friend’s and borrowing their car, and they accept it without a second thought. They switch places a few miles down the road, with Rob driving and Jesse ducked down in the backseat like a stowaway as they pass the police car outside. If Rob were capable of doing so, he would laugh at the sight, but his nerves are too frayed at the edges.

Once the garage door lowers behind them, he exhales for the first time all day.

“We’re here,” Jesse soothes from the backseat and laces their fingers together on the center console. “Come on.”

His home is eerily peaceful when they step inside, his dog Muja off at a friend’s until tomorrow. He flicks on the lights, and the place comes into view in stages: the sleek, blinding, minimalist decor, the high, cavernous ceilings supported by wooden beams, the dusty surfaces and television he can’t remember the last time he used. It feels cold and unlived-in - because it is, he muses. It’s his home, but he doesn’t live here anymore. It’s the same as any other place now, no more familiar than a hotel room.

He watches Jesse take the place in, roaming the perimeter and peeking into his home office. It desperately needs redecorating, with its harsh green walls and messy bookshelves. Jesse raises his eyebrows, looking plainly horrified.

Rob laughs. “What?”

“Your interior decorating is atrocious.”

“Excuse me?”

“So is your fashion sense, sometimes. Aren’t you supposed to be gay?”

He chuckles again, loosening up and crossing the room to stand before him. “I take offense at that. And I’m happy to show you exactly how gay I am.”

Jesse hums, eyes still scanning the place. “There’s so much security. I feel like I was just escorted to meet the King.”

“No,” Rob purrs and pulls him in for a hungry kiss. “Just to fuck a minister.”

Much to his surprise, Jesse moves back after a moment.

“And I will do that. But you need to eat. You haven’t had anything all day.”

Rob grumbles under his breath but doesn’t fight it when Jesse makes his way into the kitchen, pawing through the cabinets in search of something remotely edible. It’s a daunting task, Rob has to admit, but somehow Jesse cobbles together a half-empty box of pasta and enough dry spices and canned tomatoes to make a sauce. He delivers the bowl to Rob on the sofa, where he sits in silence, wrapped in a knit blanket like a trauma patient.

“Thank you,” he sighs, letting the steam rise into his face before reaching down to take a bite.

He chews for a moment in silence before Jesse pipes up beside him, “Are you going to tell your team about what happened?”

“Yeah. But not today. If I do it today, it’ll just be… phone call after phone call, and the security team will want to come here and interview me, and I-” He sighs. “I can’t, today.”

“I understand.” Jesse glances sideways at him, almost a bit timid but with that disarming, puppy-eyed look about him. “I can give you space if you want-”

“No,” Rob scoffs, somehow managing a chuckle. He reaches over and takes his hand. “That is the last thing I want.”

He finishes the rest of the food nestled into Jesse’s side, cloaked in the blanket. He feels almost as if he’s training his lungs how to breathe again after nearly drowning, washed up on shore and focusing intently on each inhale and exhale. After he’s finished eating, Jesse takes his hand and traces the space between his thumb and forefinger. Rob leans his head on his shoulder and breathes. Breathes.

As long as he has him. As long as he has this - an oasis in this desert, an eye in this storm - he can breathe.

Jesse shifts next to him after a while and nudges him gently. “Do… you want to go to bed?”

The words have no overt insinuation, though Rob can tell he’s testing the waters, seeing if he will rise to the bait. And of course he does: Rob sits up straight and moves in, pressing their foreheads together, then their lips, and then their bodies, until he’s worked his way onto his lap. He wants pleasure to drown out everything else.

More than anything, he just wants to stop fucking thinking.

Jesse isn’t forceful, for his part; he’s overly gentle with him, like he might shatter at any moment. He strokes his arms and then moves his hands to his back, dipping lower into his sweatpants to cup his ass. His body flows into him, languid and easy. Rob pushes forward, almost frantic to take it all in like it could be gone at any second. He knows now how easily it could be.

Breathless, he pulls away and nods. “Yeah.”

They leave a trail of clothing in the hallway on their way to the bedroom, pausing on every other wall to kiss until Jesse makes a joke about how if they keep that up, they’ll never get there. By the time they make it into bed, they’re both naked as the day they were born. Jesse falls onto the bed and lets him climb atop him, running his hands up and down his body.

It takes him aback sometimes how ferociously Jesse wants him, though he doesn’t always know what to do or how to show it. It’s the release of decades of quelled desire, like a long-brewing earthquake or supervolcano. He almost shudders with restraint, rock-hard in hardly any time at all. Rob looks forward to the day he’ll see him let go fully, though he’d never push; he lets Jesse lead when it comes to setting the pace and parameters for this thing of theirs. Typically, that suits them both just fine.

Until Jesse draws back, opens his mouth, and-

“What if we try something?”

Pleasantly surprised, Rob grins, still straddling his hips, and cocks his head to one side. “Like what?”

“Well, you’re always so in control. Don’t you think, maybe-” He leans his head back against the pillow, grinning back at him and rubbing his hands up and down his thighs, “it might be nice to give it up?”

Well. Here he’d been worried about pushing Jesse somewhere he might not be comfortable. 

He balks but tries not to show it. “Elaborate, please?”

Jesse does so by urging him off, crossing the room, and looking through his closet for a moment. Rob is about to demand to know what he is doing when he returns to the bed with the item he’d been seeking, apparently: a tie. 

Then, he crawls back onto the bed, kissing him again and murmuring across his lips, “Trust me?”

“I…” 

“If it’s too much today, it’s okay.” Jesse kneels before him, pressing a tender kiss to his kneecap. “But I promise you’re safe with me. Let me prove it.”

God, the wave of desire hits him like a kick in the back of the head, so much that it leaves his mind reeling: Jesse Klaver, on his knees before him, curls in his face, eyes wide with supplication but shot through with mischief, too. Like a dream. A devil. Heaven and hell all wrapped into one.

He could ask for anything right then, anything in the world, and Rob thinks he would give it to him.

“Okay,” he hears himself say, the word soft and airless.

Gingerly, Jesse urges him to place his hands behind his back, where he binds them with the tie. He can’t help but shiver at the slip of the silk against his skin, tight but not painfully so. He tests the binding as soon as Jesse pulls away, looking up at him, and something in his eyes must give away his trepidation because the other man pauses.

“Good?” he asks, kissing him sweetly. It sends all the blood in Rob’s body rushing down between his legs. 

He nods wordlessly - though, in reality, he isn’t quite sure.

It feels almost like a switch has been flipped inside him all of a sudden, just by virtue of having his hands restrained. He doesn’t have to think. He’s at his mercy. For once, he doesn’t attempt to take control. He doesn’t act first. He doesn’t move at all, in fact, until Jesse kisses him again and reaches down to stroke him. Then he lies back and urges him to straddle his hips again, pawing for the lube on the nightstand. He slicks his cock and then teases his hole for a while to open him up. It takes longer than usual, probably because of the stress of the day and the unfamiliarity of this new dynamic, but eventually, his body gives way for him like it always does. He shifts atop him and sighs in anticipation. 

It’s ingrained in his bones, wanting Jesse. It comes from a place deep inside him he can’t pinpoint: in his marrow, his core, scrawled somewhere in his genetic code. Him. Him. He was made for him, and he has half a hundred fatal flaws, but none more deadly than that.

He’s still tense enough that there’s an initial burn when Jesse slips inside him. He inhales sharply, and Jesse gasps too but anchors his hands on his thighs, murmuring something soothing under his breath: you’re all right, you take me so well, you’re doing so good. 

That’s all Rob has ever wanted, really: to be good. To be worthy. To be better than everyone else around him, better than those with ten years on him. Twenty. Thirty. He isn’t anything at all if he isn’t the best, but more and more now, the only thing that truly makes him feel whole is Jesse’s touch, Jesse’s bed, Jesse, and that’s dangerous. 

That cannot happen.

It takes some getting used to, riding without the use of his hands to brace himself, but Jesse pulls him down and pushes up just enough that they find a rhythm. He can feel his already tenuous hold on his self-control slipping as Jesse adjusts his angle, finding that spot inside him as if he’s a heat-seeking missile. Already he feels like he’s on the brink of something: crying, screaming, coming, maybe all three at once. His emotions are raw. He feels empty on the inside and so impossibly full of him, buried balls-deep as he is, too much and simultaneously never enough.

“Oh, fuck,” he whimpers, watching himself bob up and down, cock leaking onto his stomach, hating how weak he sounds.

He doesn’t like to lose control. He’s unfamiliar with giving it up, though sometimes he wonders if it’s all an act, if he’s a creature of illusion feigning dominance when it couldn’t be further from his true nature. He jerks his hands forward involuntarily, but the tie doesn’t budge behind his back, keeping them restrained. His cheeks burn with shame out of nowhere, mortified by his own pleasure but not nearly enough to stop. Jesse doesn’t let up, either; he just bites his lip and pulls him down to meet every movement of his hips, making him take him to the root and sending his orgasm coiling hot between his legs.

His throat is exposed, olive and smooth. Rob wants to lean down to kiss it. Bite at it. Mark him. He wants to send him off to Italy with his wife with his brand on him. The irrational, idiotic side of him wants to scream what they have from the rooftops; it feels too large to be contained by this room. He wonders when it will burgeon out of control, when they will reach the day where it no longer can be.

He worries sometimes that it already has.

“I need-” he bursts out, the words truncated by a moan. He feels so hot it’s scalding. He’s losing his head. He’s tiring out, his muscles burning. He’s dying to reach down and stroke himself, but he can’t, and knowing he can’t makes it almost unbearable. “Jesse, fuck-”

“Tell me,” Jesse coaxes with a breathy grin. “Use your words.”

Rob grits his teeth. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t ask. 

But it appears he has no choice here.

“I need to… I-” He closes his eyes, feeling a droplet of sweat fall down his cheek and snake onto his neck. “Just fucking t-touch me, I-”

“You don’t need my hands,” Jesse pants with a downright devious grin. “I’ve seen you.”

That night. He remembers it, bathed in the blue moonlight. Moaning and riding and imagining Jesse beneath him. The crack of the door. The creak of the floorboards. 

The show he’d put on for the eyes he knew would be watching.

It’s easy for him sometimes, coming hands-free. It’s a fluke, an unpredictable, pleasant surprise. The idea of being forced to do it, having no other choice - God, he moans almost in agony, his orgasm pent up to the point of bursting as he drives Jesse against that spot within him relentlessly, but just as he’s about to reach it, over and over, the pleasure recedes.

He’s sweat-soaked now, thighs burning. He pulls at his restraints again like a lion biting the bars of its cage. He loses track of the words he says, if they’re even words at all, jumbled and nonsensical. And he’s so close, so close, a hair’s breadth away, and then suddenly he’s not close enough, and then a second later, he’s overstimulated, and it’s too much. His muscles keep seizing up in anticipation. But he can’t. 

He can’t.

Finally, he stills, gasping for breath, so slick with sweat he can see himself glistening in the late afternoon sun. He’s exhausted, teetering back slightly. He hates admitting that he’s failed. Admitting that he can’t. Admitting that he needs him.

But maybe, he thinks, that’s exactly what Jesse wanted.

“I… I can’t,” he manages finally, shaking his head. “I can’t, Jesse-”

Jesse, for his part, seems as calm and collected as he’s ever seen him, easing into the more dominant role as if he’s been playing it all along. He doesn’t need to be told twice; before Rob can get out another word, he’s placing one hand firmly on his hips, shifting slightly, and fucking into him from below, using his other hand to brace against his chest. He sets a rapid pace, the obscene sound of skin smacking skin filling the room, and the suddenness and unexpected speed are all it takes to pry his last finger gripping the cliffside loose, sending Rob hurtling over the edge.

He comes with a hoarse, pitiful cry, spilling in ropes across his chest. Jesse doesn’t blink, nor does he let up. He keeps going, forcing every last wave out of him, milking him for every drop. He wants to close his eyes, stop seeing, stop feeling, and he can’t, and it’s all too much. He can’t imagine the spectacle he’s making of himself, but shame is a distant emotion now, floating far off in the stratosphere. He never lets go, but it feels so cathartic he feels tears in his eyes, mingling with the sweat. He barely registers Jesse coming too, burying himself deep and pulsing hot inside him. 

The world whites out, and when it fades back into focus, he’s lying at Jesse’s side half-senseless, with Jesse undoing the knot binding his wrists. He can feel the indents where the silk had pressed into his skin as he’d tried to pull his way out of it. He can feel his come inside him, warm and wet between his legs, but he can’t feel much else, head buzzing with white noise and central nervous system full of interference. He can hardly see. He can’t speak. He isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to again after this. He’s trembling, and he can’t stop, the aftershocks battering him like a gale.

Jesse brings his wrists around to his front and kisses them. “Come back. Come back to me.”

He pries open his eyelids long enough to survey the aftermath: the mess of his seed on Jesse’s chest, the tangled sheets beneath them, the scent of sweat and their fucking hanging like a cloud in the air. His hair is wild, falling in his face. He can’t make his arms move to brush it back, so Jesse does it for him, long fingers carding through the black and grey reverently. 

He can’t seem to catch his breath, either, though he does so long enough to manage, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to… make a mess. I’ll-”

Jesse doesn’t bat an eye. He shakes his head and leans over to kiss his forehead.

“Don’t apologize,” he murmurs. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

If he were in his right mind, he might find it in himself to be unnerved that Jesse finds him beautiful even after seeing him like that, a pathetic, moaning, writhing mess, a slave to his own desires. He might find it in himself to be even more unnerved that Jesse was able to bring him to such a state at all, taking him apart with careful hands so he could put him back together just as carefully. Knowing what he’d needed and giving him precisely enough - not an ounce more. 

Jesse traces a finger up and down his spine like a scalpel. Like a slow, methodical dissection. If he’s done this, broken him down with hardly any effort at all, just a tie around his wrists and a kiss as sweet as honey-

Rob wonders what more he might be capable of.

“You’re safe,” Jesse undertones, words hypnotic to him in his blissed-out, loose-limbed state. They sound like a mantra, a chant embedding themselves in the grooves of his brain and smoothing them over until all his other thoughts go silent. “You’re safe with me. I love you.”

Again. There it is again, those three words scything through him like a razor-edged flywheel, and he’s too far gone to fight them. His last bit of common sense - which, since Jesse, has grown decidedly less common - protests.

“You can’t,” he breathes somehow, running a hand over his face to wipe off the sweat. He doesn’t look at him, just keeps his eyes pointed at the ceiling. “Love me. You can’t… do that-”

“Why not?” he asks him, no demuring, no fear of rejection. It’s just a plain-spoken demand for the truth, the same as he does in debates or question hour.

Rob manages a dark laugh. “You know why.”

Jesse lays his head on the pillow beside him, placing a hand on his chin to force him to look him in the eyes. He’s still hazy and fucked-out, his body ringing with sensation like a cymbal. He feels only seconds away from losing consciousness entirely, but Jesse keeps him moored long enough to get him to listen.

“I know,” he admits, scraping a finger down Rob’s lip, catching it on the bottom half. He’s wrecked, too, but maddeningly articulate in the post-coital daze, more so than he has any right to be. Rob hates him for it. “I tried not to. Believe me.”

Rob tries to pull away, moving to the side feebly. 

“You can’t -” he tries, but Jesse says it over and over, each word another incision, each syllable another turn of the knife.

He won’t stop. He’s so used to lying. Or, if not outright lies, then lies by omission, half-truths. He deals in deception. He lives his life straddling the line between true and false, giving everyone around him just enough of both. The naked, brutal, unforgiving truth of Jesse’s words is almost too much to bear. He wants to block his ears like a child. Run. Hide.

As per usual, as it’s been since they started, he can’t.

I love you. I love you. I do.

And for the first time since he swore his vow to the King, or set foot in the Tweede Kamer half a decade ago, or entered this world and became something less than a person: a robot, a talking head, a trained show dog - or maybe, just maybe, for the first time in his life-

He believes it.