Second Chance Chapter 15 -- Election Blues
It had been a challenging weekend. Julio and I had each had a bit of a meltdown, but I was pleased that we had been there for one another and made it through. The week ahead ended up being easier, as I'd hoped it would, but the following week was devastating, and neither of us was prepared.
On Monday morning, after I had slept at his place, Julio's alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. He got out of bed and went into his living room, where he proceeded to do sets of push ups, crunches, chair dips, and other exercises. I lay in bed for a bit, just watching him from my warm spot under the covers.
"So that's why you look so good?" I asked.
He paused between sets and said, "Well, I don't have time to go to a gym. And I don't want to get fat or flabby." He did a set of what must have been 50 crunches.
"Plus, it helps clear my head in the morning and gets me to focus," he added, a bit out of breath. "I start most days this way."
"It shows," I said. "And here I thought you were just naturally hot."
I made him laugh as he was trying to do push ups, which caused him to lose his rhythm.
"Stop!" he said. "Let me finish."
I got out of bed and pulled on the clean clothes that were in my overnight bag.
"I'm going to head out," I told him.
"Okay," he said. "I'm about to shower and head to work."
He hopped up off of the floor from doing his exercises and gave me a kiss. He was slightly sweaty, and I got a whiff of his odor that made my dick twitch.
"So sexy watching you work out," I said.
He rolled his eyes and laughed.
"You're distracting me!" he complained as he pushed me gently toward the door. "I need to finish up so I can get to work."
I laughed and squeezed the muscles in his arm. "So strong!" I teased him
"I'll see you Wednesday," he told me on the threshold, then I gave him a final peck on the lips before heading out.
Since I was not going to fit in my usual Monday morning run, I decided that I would walk home to get some exercise. It was a cool morning, in the early 40s, but not too breezy. Overall, not bad for Chicago in November. As I walked, I thought about how emotionally taxing the weekend had been and felt reassured that Julio and I had been able to work things out with each of our issues. It was funny that we had each experienced a freak out and had each been able to help the other through. We were a new couple, but I was glad that we seemed able to calm one another down and offer support.
As I walked past Klein's Bakery, I stopped to order a bagel sandwich to take home and eat. After all that had happened this weekend, I had decided that I would work at home today. I didn't have any in-person appointments, and Stephanie and I could switch our meetings to Zoom. Since she worked at home a couple of days most weeks, we were already used to on-line meetings.
I picked up the newspaper on my way in and turned on WBEZ, the Chicago National Public Radio station, as I made the coffee. Then I sat down to sip my coffee and eat my bacon, egg, and cheese bagel. Both the paper and Morning Edition were going on extensively about the neo-Nazi rally that Trump had organized in New York City and the offensive comments that one of the participants had made about Puerto Ricans. I was both horrified by the event and relieved that maybe this time Trump had gone too far. After laying bare his extremism, I was certain that most decent Americans would not vote for him.
I showered and put on a dress shirt and slacks but not my usual suit and tie. I filled my coffee cup again, then I went into the third bedroom that was set up as a home office. When we bought the condo back in the early 1990s, Pablo and I had a vague idea about adopting children, so we had wanted the extra room to make that possible. As it happened, those plans never cam to fruition, but we had had the extra room, and we had initially set it up as a second guest room. We kept it that way for a decade, but we'd only ever needed space for multiple guests one time, so around 2000 we took out the daybed that we'd had in there and converted the room into an office by putting in a desk. It was a small room, and we had never really used it much, but during Covid, before Pablo got sick and I went on family leave, it proved to be such a blessing to have the separate room. Since I went back to work, it had remained mostly unused.
Stephanie and I met once in the morning then again in the early afternoon. She was concerned about whether I was sick, since it was rare for me to work at home, but I assured her that I had just been feeling lazy and wanted to stay in. Between meetings, I worked on materials for a couple of cases and reached out to a couple of potential witnesses for an asylum case that I'd taken on. I took only a quick break for lunch and was done with most of what I needed to accomplish by around 4, so I decided to break out of my usual schedule and go to the gym for a late afternoon workout. It wasn't a very good workout, because the gym was so much more crowded than during my early morning workouts. I had to wait for the circuit machines several times. But I felt better after sweating a little. I came home and showered and then took the chicken and noodle soup whose preparation had been interrupted the day before out of the fridge and heated it back up, letting the chicken and vegetables cook down a bit more before I added the noodles. I finished reading the newspaper while I ate a big bowl of the soup.
Julio called me around 8:30 that evening.
"How are you feeling after this weekend?" he asked after I greeted him.
"I'm good," I assured him. "I'm better tonight than I was yesterday. And you?"
"I was too busy at work to think about anything else," he told me. "I'm fine."
"So we made it through our first big crisis," I said.
"We did," he responded. "And we're still together." I could feel him smiling through the phone.
We chatted for a while about nothing much. He described the dinner he'd picked up on his way home. We discussed what we might do this weekend. We talked about the Trump rally the day before and how scary we thought the country could sometimes be. It was nice to have someone just to share things with from the very mundane to the more serious. I went to bed feeling happy and secure.
The week went by very quickly. I talked with Tom on Tuesday night. Things were still going well with Jeffrey. He said that Julio and I should come visit him in New York and maybe we could meet Jeffrey.
Karen couldn't meet for lunch on Wednesday, so we made plans for her to join Julio and me for dinner on Friday or Saturday. Then Julio came over on Wednesday night, just like the week before. We fooled around, ate dinner, fooled around some more, then held each other in bed.
"I wish I could sleep with you in my arms every night," he told me as we were falling asleep. Just as before, he left early in the morningand went home to his apartment to get ready for work.
Thursday was Halloween, and neither of us did anything special to celebrate. I had bought a package of large candy bars, and I handed out six -- two to the kids who lived upstairs in my apartment building, one to a small girl from the next building who was dressed as an adorable princess, and three to a group of kids who looked to be middle school age who were ringing every doorbell they could find. That was more trick-or-treaters than I usually got. I talked with Julio around 10 that night, and he said that the only indication he'd seen of Halloween was the drunk adults in silly costumes he passed coming home.
We had a fairly quiet weekend. Karen met us for dinner on Friday night at a nice place in River North. We split two bottles of wine and had a grand time talking for hours. Karen told lots of funny stories about me that made Julio laugh. By the time we finally headed home, there was only one other table that still had customers. We apologized to the staff for staying so long, but we left a large enough tip that they wouldn't mind too much.
"It was so great to get to know you better," Karen told Julio as she hugged him goodnight. "Judah only tells me only flattering things about you, so it's nice to see that you're actually human."
"Wait!" he protested. "What did I show you that was unflattering?"
"Well, you laugh very loudly, for one thing," she said, and then they both laughed very loudly as Karen climbed into her Uber to head home.
"I like her," Julio said as we watched her ride away.
"And she liked you," I said. "I can tell."
"So I passed the test?" he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
"There was no test," I assured him. "But, yes, you passed it."
On Saturday we shopped for some things for Julio's apartment and then cooked together at his place. We had talked about going to a movie, but there wasn't anything really interesting on. We both hated horror movies, and since it was the weekend after Halloween, that's most of what was in the theaters. The big winter blockbusters like Wicked wouldn't be out for a few weeks. Instead, we watched a TV show on his laptop in bed, since he didn't have a television. I left his place early on Sunday so that I could go home and change before going to church, since I was ushering. Then I went home in the afternoon after church and did chores around the house and made my usual big meal to eat throughout the week.
The next week started ordinarily enough. I did my morning run then went into the office, where I had two meetings with clients on Monday in preparation for upcoming immigration hearings. One of the hearings was on Tuesday morning, where I accompanied a young man from Eritrea named Yonas who had arrived in the United States after a circuitous and dangerous trek from Sudan to Brazil and then up through South and Central America, before crossing the border in Texas and claiming asylum. He was granted provisional status and traveled to Chicago, where he had a cousin and got a job as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant. He had been in the US for four years, and I had been working with him for most of that time. His claim for asylum was based on his experience being conscripted into the Eritrean army and denied the right to leave. After ten years of forced service, he escaped and crossed the border into Sudan, making his way to Khartoum, where he bought a ticket to Rio, then flew to Medellin, from where he made his way to the US mostly on foot. I had arranged affidavits from two experts on forced conscription in Eritrea and another from a psychologist on the mental health impact of his experiences. I had all three experts available to testify if needed, but in the end, the judge looked over the case, asked the applicant a couple of questions, and granted his request for asylum.
Outside the immigration courtroom, a small group of Eritreans cheered when he came out and gave a thumbs up. Several of them gave me awkward hugs and said thank you in heavily accented English. I shook Yonas's hand and took my leave. As I walked back to my office from immigration court, it struck me as ironic that immigration had become such a prominent issue in the election that was happening today. It seemed to me that people like Yonas -- honest, hard-working, respectable -- made America a better place, but I realized that many people did not agree with me.
When I got home from work, I made a quick dinner and turned on the news. It was too early for any election results, of course, but I tried to glean what I could from estimations of turnout and other possible indicators of which way the winds were blowing. The lack of information was making me uptight, so I switched the news off and instead turned to Hulu and started the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building. I watched two episodes, then around 8 o'clock, I switched to MSNBC to hear coverage of the results that were trickling out. It became immediately clear to me that things were not looking good. Harris was running behind what was needed in cities like Philadelphia. Some of the states that were supposed to be close had already been called for Trump. Commentators were trying to explain possible routes for a Harris victory, but it was clear that they were worried, which made me worried.
I watched the TV for a few more minutes, but it was making me feel very stressed, so I switched it off.
Around 8:30, Tom called from New York.
"What the fuck is wrong with this country?!" he demanded. "Why are all you fucking Midwestern assholes voting for a convicted felon again!?"
"Hey, my state voted for Harris," I countered.
"I can't believe this shit!" Tom howled. "I can't deal with four more fucking years of Trump!!!"
"I don't get it," I said. "I don't understand how people can support someone who is so hateful."
We chatted for a bit longer, then Tom thanked me for letting him rant and hung up.
A few minutes later, my sister called. We had talked a couple of times since I'd had my fight with her, and we were in a good place again. She had invited Julio to her home for Thanksgiving.
"Judah, are you watching the election results?" she said in a concerned voice.
"I turned them off. They were stressing me out," I told her.
"This is bad, Judah. This is really bad."
"It is," I agreed.
"I don't understand it," she said, her voice dripping with disgust. "All these people who claim to be Christian voting for someone who so obviously offends every value they claim to embrace. I mean, out here in the suburbs, I've seen a few Trump signs -- but it's mostly contractors and small business people who think he'll cut their taxes. I ..."
"Elizabeth!" I interrupted her. "This is stressing me out too much. Let's talk later."
"Oh," she said. "Of course. I'll call you later in the week."
As I hung up, I noticed a few messages on my phone. Karen had texted, saying simply, "We're all fucked."
Carl had started a text chain that included me, Langston and Dave, Andy and Steve, and a few numbers that I didn't recognize.
"What's going on with America?" Carl had started, and a few responses had come in.
Just as I was reading the texts, the phone rang again. This time it was Julio.
"I just got off from work. I saw the headlines on my phone," he said in a concerned voice. "It looks bad."
"It IS bad," I said. "Trump is going to win. It may not be firm for a few days, but it looks obvious. The Republicans are going to take over the Senate, and they might keep the House too. It's bad."
There was a pause. Then Julio said, "I'm scared, Judah. I don't have my green card yet. I'm just here on a work visa."
"It is scary," I agreed. But then I tried to reassure him. "But you're the kind of well trained immigrant they want. You have higher degrees. You're in a high tech industry. You're not in danger of deportation."
"But I'm Black, Judah," he said, "And gay. And from one of those `shithole countries.'"
"I know, baby, but I'll make sure you're fine. I'll be there for you."
We said goodnight, and then I turned notifications off on my phone and went to bed. I tossed and turned, unable to sleep for a couple of hours but eventually drifted off.
I woke in the morning feeling depressed. I couldn't believe that my country had the opportunity to elect its first woman president, a Black and Asian woman with tons of political experience, and instead they chose a man who campaigned on hatred of immigrants, hatred of trans people, hatred of anyone who disagreed with him.
When Trump was elected last time, it had created extraordinary hardship for the people that Pablo and I worked with. As an immigration lawyer, I was inundated with cases. In fact, I was one of those who went out to O'Hare Airport when Trump's Muslim ban was announced to offer my services to the hundreds of people who were delayed and detained. As the director of a service center for immigrants, Pablo was even more affected. He had to help families whose breadwinner was suddenly deported. There was a Salvadoran man who had been in the United States for twenty-five years, who owned a landscaping business, paid his taxes, sent his kids to public school, and had never had any issues with the law who was detained and then deported, leaving his wife and three kids in middle and high school scrambling to survive. It had been a truly terrible time for us, because it was a terrible time for the people we worked with.
I could not understand how people could choose to go back to a leader who was so cruel. And hypocritical, having married two immigrants, with his current wife having apparently been undocumented at one point. Trump's own family was pretty new to the United States, and apparently his own grandfather only spoke German. The cruelty shown to immigrants, with children being taken away from their parents, some of them never reunited -- it was just sickening to me. Someone had said at the time that the cruelty was the point, and that seemed very true to me.
The truth is that I did not WANT to understand how people could choose someone like Trump. I resolved that I would do everything I could to avoid the news for as long as I could. When I got up, I did not look at any newsfeeds on my phone as I usually did in the morning. I saw that there were a number of additional texts in Carl's text chain on my phone, but I didn't open the messages. I set the text chain on mute so that no new messages would pop up on my screen. Then I went for my morning run, but having slept so little, I made it a short jog around the neighborhood rather than my usually longer run along the lake. When I picked up the paper on my way back in, I tried my best not to even look at the headlines in the front section. Instead, I turned straight to the arts and entertainment section and read about movies and plays and music. I did the crossword puzzle rather than reading the news.
I considered working at home again today, as I had the week before, but I also thought that going into the office and focusing on my work might help take my mind off of the depressing state of the country. I didn't feel like interacting with people more than I had to, so I called an Uber to go into the office rather than taking the L.
Walking into the office, I could immediately tell that the mood was sober. Arlene at the front desk didn't give me her usual greeting. She just looked at me and shook her head, with a sad expression on her face.
I sighed and said, "I'd say good morning, but it's not."
"People are so stupid. What's this millionaire and his millionaire friends ever gonna do for them?" she said.
"I know. It's terrible. I don't get it either."
Stephanie looked uncharacteristically ragged when she came in. She had clearly been up late watching election results.
"Are you okay, Stephanie?" I asked her.
"Of course I'm not okay!" she said angrily, and then she burst into tears.
"I'm sorry Mr. Ellis," she said through her tears. "It's just ... I'm just..."
"I get it" I said. "The country is not what we thought it was."
"I mean, we could have had the first Black woman president! And instead people voted for a rapist and a crook!"
"I know. I know," I said. "Stephanie, if you need to take the day off, I'm sure we can..."
"No!" she said vehemently. "I'm not going to let these selfish people screw up my life. I'm going to do my job well and start applying for law schools, cause I want to find a way to fight them!"
"That's the spirit!" I said. "I wish I had that kind of energy. I just feel depressed."
It turned out to be an extraordinarily busy day. With Trump having run on an anti-immigration platform, we had emails and calls all day from clients wondering what they could do to speed up their applications for green cards or citizenship. We also had calls from potential new clients who wanted to try to get their papers in order before the new administration began. We had to tell new clients that there was no way that they could have a green card processed in two months but that we could at least begin the paperwork.
I ended up staying later at the office than usual, and as I was leaving around 7:30, waiting for my car to pull up, Julio called.
"Hey my sweet, shall I come over?" he asked.
"Oh, Julio, I'd forgotten it's Wednesday. I'm just leaving work," I said.
"I'm not sure that I'll be very good company tonight," I sighed. "Maybe we should just wait until the weekend."
"No," he said. "I need to see you. The world seems so dark right now. I need to see your light."
"I don't feel very light," I told him. "I feel defeated."
My car pulled up.
"But okay, come over" I said as I climbed in. "My car is here now, so I'll be home soon. See you in a bit."
I had only walked into my apartment when Julio buzzed and I let him up.
When he came in the door, he pulled me into a deep, long kiss. He pulled back, and we just looked at each other for a long moment.
"I want to say everything will be alright," Julio said, "but I'm not sure that's true."
"We should be fine," I told him as we walked into the apartment and sat down together on the couch.
"They'll go after gay people," he said. "They'll go after immigrants."
"But, honestly," I replied, "you and I, we're not that vulnerable. We're well educated. We have good jobs. We live in a blue state. It's just the country I'm worried about and so many people who aren't as fortunate as us."
"I was already in the US when Trump was elected. I was in Pennsylvania, and there were some students who had problems, but ... you're right. It didn't really touch me directly." He thought for a moment. "Well, until Covid. That was crazy. Everything was so poorly managed, and there was no leadership. The university was sending everyone home, but I didn't want to go back to Brazil. The US had Trump, but Bolsonaro in Brazil was even worse. I knew we wouldn't get the medicines we needed, and Bolsonaro was more anti-gay than Trump even. I just couldn't go back there. A few of us got to stay in the dorm, but we had to fight for them to let us. It was such a bad time."
"For me and Pablo," I said, "it was dealing with all of the immigration problems. They way they treated immigrants, like they were all bad people, it was just do awful."
"Did Pablo have troubles? I mean as an immigrant."
"No," I replied. "His family had legal status, and he'd been a citizen for thirty years. But running a center for immigrants, well, it was a tough time."
"I was a student when Trump was president, so I wasn't really an immigrant, just a visitor. Now that I'm trying to stay here, it makes me worried."
"Lucky for you your boyfriend is an immigration lawyer," I told him. Talking with Pablo, even about this dark topic, made me feel somehow better.
Working so late, I hadn't made anything for dinner, so I called out for Chinese delivery. We continued to talk as we waited.
"In Brazil, we voted Bolsonaro out, and he copied Trump and tried to steal the election. His supporters attacked the government buildings, just like Trump's people attacked the Capital. But in Brazil, our Supreme Court has blocked Bolsonaro from running for office again. And there are charges against him for attempting a coup. I feel like democracy in Brazil is working better than here now."
I told Julio how all of this made me so depressed. I told him that I felt as though I couldn't listen to the news or read the paper.
"I just don't want to know. If I don't think about it, maybe it won't be true," I said, only half joking.
"If that's what you need for your mental health, then sure," he said.
We were silent for a while.
"The truth is," I said quietly, "what I've been thinking is that maybe it's time for me to retire. I don't know that I have the energy to keep fighting. Last time, it was all so exhausting. Fighting to protect people from deportation, waiting for the courts to overturn policies, and then having them do the wrong thing. It was just too much."
Julio waited to respond.
"It's true that you have to think about your mental health. You need to take care of yourself." He took a breath. "But don't people need you more than ever now, Judah? With all of your experience and all of your skills?"
"I know..." I said.
"I wouldn't pressure you," he said, "but this seems like your moment. This seems like what your career has been about, at least as you've explained it to me."
"Yes, yes," I responded. "I know. I just ... I'll get back there, but I need a break for a little. I just need to mourn for a bit."
"Mourn?" he asked.
"For the country I thought I lived in." Sure, I was being melodramatic, but that's honestly how I felt.
The food arrived, and we ate at the kitchen counter. We kept talking as we shared pot stickers and kung pao chicken and beef and broccoli.
"I've realized that I really live in a bubble," I said. "I honestly don't know anyone who voted for Trump. I mean, there are some Republicans at the law firm -- there always are at law firms, mostly the ones who specialize in business law, torts, and that sort of thing. But they're all more old school Republicans, the kind that believe in limited government and cutting taxes. They all think that Trump is a freak."
I popped a pot sticker into my mouth and chewed for a moment before continuing.
"My family are all Democrats. And of course all my gay friends. I mean, I do live in Chicago."
"A lot of my family voted for Bolsonaro" Julio said, sounding disgusted. "They liked that he campaigned against the gays and against feminists. And he said he was for business and against laziness. I think there were a lot of people like that here too, people who voted for Trump because they couldn't imagine a Black woman as president and because he was against trans people. So much hatred in the name of religion."
I cringed a little, because my experience with religion was very different.
"I don't think anyone in my church supported Trump," I said softly. "At least I hope not."
"I know," he said. "Just... thinking about all these things makes me so sad that I've grown so far from my family." He took a deep breath. "I wish that my mother were still alive."
I reached over and squeezed his hand in an effort to comfort him.
"We'll get through all of this, Julio. Somehow," I said, trying to convince myself as much as him.
After dinner, we watched a cooking show on TV then headed to bed.
"We don't have to fool around, Judah, if you're not feeling up to it," Julio said.
"No," I told him. "I need you to make love to me. I need to feel you inside me. It will help me feel alive again."
And so we made love, slowly and tenderly. He lay me on my back and kissed me deeply and then carefully lifted my legs and entered me. I relaxed into him, and he moved in and out gently, kissing me all the while.
"I love you Judah," he said to me.
"And I love you Julio," I responded.
He raised his body up so that he could drive deeper into me. He held my legs up and moved in and out, all the while staring me in the eyes. I stared back, trying to convey all of my affection and emotion. He started to stroke my cock with his hand, and soon I found myself on the verge of shooting.
"Julio," I panted. "If you... keep doing ... that..." And then I was beyond the point of no return. I cried out and my load ran down his hand and dribbled onto my stomach. A moment later, he cried out and drove himself all the way inside me, and I felt his cock pulse as he grunted.
We both just held there for a moment, his cock buried inside me, his hand on my quickly softening cock.
"I needed that," Julio said.
"So did I, my love," I responded.
He pulled out, and I grabbed the cum rag from under the bed and wiped up his hand and my stomach. Then we crawled under the covers. Julio held me from behind, and we fell asleep, thoughts of the world in decline driven from our minds for the moment.
Sorry this was such a political chapter, but that's the reality my characters are confronting. Let me know what you think about my story. Email nifty1dan@gmail.com
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