flying to New York to tell it to my face is slightly… well, let’s just say I didn’t anticipate that happening.” His father rubbed his chin with his fingers as he eyed Alex, head cocked to the side, a curious expression on his face.
“I wasn’t exactly hired in a traditional sense, so I thought it would be best if I ended our business relationship in person.”
“Fair enough. Just out of curiosity, what prompted this sudden need to quit?”
“I guess you could say that I’ve found a purpose for myself.” Just the thought of Noah brought a smile to Alex’s face. He already missed Noah, even though he was just down the street, in their hotel room.
Alex straightened himself. This was not the time to get sidetracked. “Which brings us to the main reason for my visit.”
“There’s more?”
Alex nodded. He took a deep breath. This was it. The first real step he was going to take to make sure Noah was protected. “I want to run a national ad campaign.”
His father lifted his brows. “An ad campaign,” he repeated.
Alex squared his shoulders. His father had always managed to make him feel small. A lot of what he said was straight-out criticism, so whenever Alex was in his father’s presence, he reverted to old habits: joke his way out of the uncomfortable situation by pretending to be less than he really was.
Not this time. For the first time since forever, Alex was standing—well, sitting—in front of his father with a cause he was proud of. He’d been preparing for this moment for months. He’d done a hell of a lot of research. He had contacts. He had ideas. He knew his stuff. Alex had practiced his presentation with Noah. They’d brainstormed ideas, contacted people and organizations. Every word Alex was going to say to his father would be laden with meaning and purpose.
“Yes. It’s more of a public service announcement, to be precise,” he said, meeting his father’s gaze head-on. “We want to raise awareness and challenge the FDA to change their blood donation policy for LGBTQ donors.”
His father leaned forward. He closed the lid of his laptop, which was a move Alex had only seen his father execute when he was leaving the premises, but this time, his father simply pushed the computer to the side, placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked at Alex.
“I’m listening.”
Alex threw the hotel room door open so hard that it banged against the wall.
Noah pushed himself up from where he’d been lying on the bed, listening to music, which was something he did a lot ever since his concussion had eliminated reading, watching TV, working on his computer, and pretty much every other activity Noah could do. The headaches had noticeably lessened over the course of the last few months, and Noah could tolerate screen time for about an hour by now, but he still preferred listening to music.
He pulled the earbuds out of his ears and looked at Alex expectantly. “So?”
“He said yes.” Alex threw himself on the bed and exhaled loudly. He felt like he’d been holding his breath for hours. “I have no fucking clue if it’s because he actually believes in the cause, or maybe he sees it as an opportunity to try and fix our relationship, or hell, maybe he just wants to stick it to the FDA. Who the fuck knows? What matters is, he’s willing to lend his expertise.”
“That’s good news,” Noah said. He’d been rooting Alex on and helped him build his case and refine his proposal, but for all the support Noah displayed, Alex knew deep down, he was afraid to let himself hope too much. It was self-preservation, nothing less, nothing more. It didn’t matter. Alex had faith for both of them. He was going to get that ban lifted no matter what because failing was not an option. And the first step was to shed more light on the issue.
There had been campaigns before. Inventive PSAs and attempts to enlighten more people about the problems that the blood ban caused, but the results were slow to follow.
Whenever Alex thought about the fact that in this day and age such blatant discrimination even existed, he got pissed off. It shouldn’t have been that difficult of a concept to grasp that it was necessary to concentrate on whether or not people engaged in risky behavior and not on their sexual orientation.
A straight person who had casual sex could donate without problems,