Maggie slept on her stomach, her face buried in pillows.

She slept with her feet kicked out from under the quilt.

And she mumbled. Nothing he could catch, but he stayed up listening to her anyway.

The mumbles. The breathing. The soft, sweet reality of Maggie Perkins in his bed.

Jay was forty years old. He had a bad knee from rugby. He needed glasses for reading but so far couldn’t be bothered.

He was flawed. Flawed in a million ways.

And she was, too. He wasn’t delusional. She was stubborn. She was optimistic to a fault. She believed the best about people when there was no reason to.

And he thought, I can be anything to her. I can be anything for her. With one exception.

Before tonight he would have gone on being her sword. Her right-hand man.

But now…after this?

He couldn’t even be her affair. Her dirty secret.

I can’t be her second choice.

There was no having this woman in pieces. He should have known that after all these years of practicing and never succeeding. Of trying to control how he felt about her.

Tonight, he thought. He had tonight. And it would just have to be enough.

He closed his eyes, pulling her deeper into his arms.

It would have to be enough.

---

Curled in Jay’s arms, her back against his chest, Maggie fell into a sweet, dreamy sleep in which she was nineteen again. A college freshman watching a boy with hair that wouldn’t behave getting his ID picture taken.

He kept trying to pat it down. He’d even licked his hand and tried to press down the brown curls. The girl taking the picture had laughed and tried to help. She was flirting, and Maggie wanted to rip off the girl’s fingers for touching him in a way Maggie had been too nervous to do.

Jay, she said in the dream in the way she hadn’t in real life, let me help you.

And when they touched everything started to ring.

Like crystal wine glasses. Like…cell phones.

“What the hell?” Jay muttered, and she was snapped out of the dream. Their phones were going crazy.

“Make it stop,” she said, assaulted by cold ringing when the dream had been so sweet.

“Good God,” Jay muttered, rolling over and getting out of bed. “We get it. We get it.”

“Is that mine, too?” Maggie asked, pulling herself form under the covers, as well. It was harder than she expected. She was leaving something of herself behind in that bed. Something she liked.

In the kitchen, Jay was standing over the counter looking down at a cell phone. He’d pulled on sweatpants, and he looked so much like his younger self her breath caught.

“I thought yours was in the limo,” she said.

“I have two. Your purse is ringing.”

“What time is it?”

“Five.”

“Shit.” She got her phone out of her purse and answered her assistant’s texts. Hair and makeup were waiting for her at her apartment. She was on-air in an hour. “I have to go.”

“Yeah,” he said.

She pulled on her skirt. Her chemise. Nylons? Where were her nylons?

The phones kept buzzing. Text notifications coming in faster than they could reply.

Coming, she texted her driver, who had been texting her steadily for the last half hour.

“Here,” he said, handing her a fistful of black silky things. Nylons and underwear.

She started to pull them on.

His phone buzzed, and he swore reading the text. “I’ll draft a statement about my leaving the campaign,” he said. “Toby could do it, but—”

“Don’t be hasty.”

“There’s nothing hasty about it. I should have done it last night instead of getting drunk and—”

“Laid?” she asked, smiling at him. He did not smile back.

Uh-oh. Jay clearly had spent the night thinking.

His phone buzzed again. “You have to go,” he said, reading the text.

“How bad do I look?” she asked, smoothing down her hair.

“Well, as the man who fucked you last night, you look amazing. As your former campaign manager…” He shook his head. “You still look amazing.”

“I’ll call you after—”

He shook his head, even went so far as to step away from her. “I’ve been thinking—”

“No,” she said. “No thinking.”

“It might be something good.”

“It’s not. I know your face, and you’re thinking…we need to cool off. Not see each other.” Her phone buzzed in her hand. “Jeez, I have to go,” she breathed.

“I spent the night thinking about this. And you have a lot going on, Maggie. And a lot that would be at risk. The election—”

“You keep telling me things I know. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I can’t be your second choice,” he said. Spat, really. The phone fell to her side, forgotten. “I can’t be casual. I can’t be a secret. I can’t…be with you and not really be with you. I thought I could. For the chance to have you. For one night. I thought I could be anything. But…now I’ve had you. Touched you. Kissed you. I can’t go back. So I think it’s best if we’re not together.”

Their phones both started ringing again.

“You have to go,” he said.

She wanted to stay and fight. She wanted to tell him all the things he needed to hear. The things she needed to say. But—

“I have to go,” she said.

She grabbed her purse, tried her best with her hair, and turned on him.

He opened the door. “Good luck,” he said, leaning against it. “Remember when you denounce me, make it good. Spit, maybe. Or make the sign of the—”

She kissed him. Hard, right on the lips. Too hard, maybe. Her tooth hit her lip and she tasted blood.

“We aren’t done.”

It was obvious how much he wanted to believe her. And he would. When she was done, he would believe her.

“I have to go,” she said regretfully.

“You have to go.”

---

Jay called Phillip, his assistant, and told him he’d be in at ten to clean out his desk. He’d have a statement ready for Toby to release to the press in fifteen minutes. He called his personal lawyer, who told him it would be his honor to represent him against the bastard.

And when all of that was done, he had no choice but to make coffee, turn on the TV, and sit down to watch the morning shows.

He found her on Good Morning, New York.

She was on a satellite feed from the office in her home in Brooklyn. He recognized the art from the students at her old grade school in Lackawanna. She looked good. Poised and polished. The skin of her neck revealed almost no beard burn, but what was visible made his dick twitch.

Caveman, he thought. And he kind of liked it.

“You don’t think Jay Schulman did something wrong?” the host, a good-looking blond guy who appeared twelve years old, asked.

“I didn’t say that, Tom,” she said, and he liked the way she never let people twist her words. “What he did was completely wrong. Violence serves no purpose in my campaign or in the future of New York State. Violence does us no good. Full stop. But because Jay did something wrong doesn’t make Bill Bishop right. Bill Bishop and the producers that have the men and women of his ilk on their shows—”

“Ilk?”

“Bill Bishop is a liar. And he’s a racist and a misogynist. And those points of view serve no purpose, either.”

“So Jay Schulman did the right thing by punching him?’

She smiled, patient to the very end. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. But perhaps asking rational and reasonable men and women to argue irrational and unreasonable points of view as if they have merit—maybe that’s the real wrong here.”

Oh, God. He loved her so much.

“When we do that,” she kept saying, “no one wins, because we’re all covered in mud.”

“So?” Tom the child asked. “What do you suggest instead?”

“Oh my God.” Her eyes went wide and bright. She clapped her hands in front of her like a kid on Christmas morning. And it wasn’t sarcastic, it was real. It was one hundred percent real, and it was why people loved her. “Let’s go back to investigative journalism. The hard stuff. The good stuff. The kind that made us all think critically. And facts! Remember facts? Let’s go back to facts.”

The handsome blond boy interviewing that goddess looked like he wasn’t sure what to say in response. Luckily, the female host spoke up.

“I remember facts,” she said. “I miss facts.”

“Me too,” Maggie laughed.

“Thank you, Mrs. Perkins, for joining—”

“I’d like to say one more thing, if I can,” Maggie said, and something went painfully still in his chest. His heart. His heart went painfully still.

“By all means,” the female host said.

“I met Jay Schulman our freshman year of college. We had a class together and I sat next to him. Well, not next to him, one seat away. And I waited most of the first semester for him to notice me. He didn’t.” She smiled as he said it. “He was too busy making plans to change the world. And I always had the sense that he didn’t notice me because I wasn’t as important as his plans. As his dreams and goals, not just for himself but for this country. I…thought I was his second choice.”

The hosts exchanged a look. Jay sat up on the edge of his couch.

“It’s come to my attention that I was wrong. That he did notice me. And there have been a lot of years between us. But I want to say, publicly, that he’s not my second choice, either.”

“So…Jay Schulman is NOT leaving the campaign?”

“No,” she said. “He’s fired. Totally gone from the campaign. But he’ll be around in other ways. I hope.”

Jay was on his feet, realized it, and sat back down.

That didn’t feel right, so he stood up again.

“I have to…” he murmured, and at that moment, his phone started ringing off the hook. Completely blowing up.

Fuck it.

He just had to get to her. See her.

He tossed the phone down on the couch behind him, shoved his feet into his running shoes, grabbed his wallet and keys, and headed out the front door of his apartment.

Outside he encountered a miracle when a cabbie was idling at the front curb, checking his phone.

Jay hurtled into the backseat and gave the cabbie Maggie’s address.

What…what do I say? he wondered. What do I do?

The place would be packed with people. Crap, he should have changed. Sweatpants? Really?

He still smelled like sex and booze, too.

This was a bad idea.

But he didn’t tell the cabbie to turn around. If this train was going to crash, he’d see it all the way through to the explosion. The cab dropped him off in front of Maggie’s brown house, and he took the steps two at a time to knock on her front door.

Belinda, one of Maggie’s assistants, answered. “Shit,” she said at the sight of him and then yelled over her shoulder. “Colin! You win, it’s him.”

“Win?” he asked.

“We had a bet going how long it would take you to get here. Colin bet a half hour.”

“Congrats to Colin. Is Maggie—”

“In her office. Go, man,” she said with a smile. There were hoots and hollers from staff as he made his way to her office, and he couldn’t fight his grin.

They were happy hoots and hollers. Good-natured teasing from people who liked him and loved Maggie. Who wanted to believe as badly as he did that something could happen between them.

They were suckers for a good story. Just like him.

He knocked on the closed door to her office, and his heart raced when her voice said, “Come on in.”

He eased open the door and found her behind her desk, signing something, Toby beside her.

“Go away, Toby,” Jay said.

“I don’t think you’re my boss anymore—”

“Go away, Toby,” Maggie said with a smile, and Toby laughed.

“I know when I’m not wanted.”

Toby took whatever papers Maggie handed him and left, patting Jay on the shoulder as he went. The door clicked shut behind him and it was just Jay and Maggie in the bright room.

“You sure know how to make a scene,” he said.

“Just following your lead,” she said.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said, taking one step closer.

“I think I did.”

“Endangering your campaign?”

“You always were melodramatic. Nothing is endangered.”

Except my life. My whole existence. My heart.

“I waited that entire semester for you to look at me. To see me. But you never did,” she said.

“I was watching you out of the corner of my eye. I was giving myself migraines.”

“How different things would be if we’d just been a little braver, maybe,” she said, and he nodded.

“I loved Ben with my whole heart, Jay.”

“I know. I did, too.”

“But you’re not my second choice. You could never be second to anyone. I can love you and have loved him.”

He blinked. Swallowed. “Love?”

“Yes, dummy. Love.”

Yes, dummy. Love, was now the most romantic thing he’d ever heard. The best thing he’d ever heard.

She stood and circled the desk. She’d kicked off her heels, and her smooth legs, again in black nylons, just…they just wrecked him. He remembered in a flood exactly how she tasted.

He reached behind him and locked the door.

Her eyebrow raised. “What are you doing, Jay?”

“What I should have done the first day of that semester,” he said and stalked toward her. “Making you mine.”

The feel of her in his arms was so new and so right at the same time. He didn’t understand how she could be familiar and startlingly different at the same time, and he loved it. He was going to spend so many years figuring out that mystery.

“I should have punched a guy out on national television a long time ago,” he said.

“Or you could have asked me out.”

“Sure. That was an option.” He sighed, his arms around her back. “What do you suppose happens next?”

“You’ll get sued. We’ll fight it. I’ll win the election. We’ll go on a brief vacation and we’ll figure out how to save the world. Or at least make it better.”

“God, that sounds good.”

“Which part? The sued part?”

“All of it,” he said, kissing her. “With you, all of it sounds good.”