Chapter 23

“Once you are elected, you have to go back and forth from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta a few times a year to keep everyone happy,” she continued. “But I can stay and take some psychology classes at Georgia Tech, maybe help out at the food bank …”

“And not have to suffer living with me?” He tried to make it a joke, but it didn’t come out that way and they both knew it.

The room was hushed, the moment heavy, and he didn’t know what to say about it. Or do about it.

Every time he looked at her, all he was aware of was how much he wanted her and how wrong that felt.

“That good-luck charm thing,” she said. “You know it’s not true. You’re ahead because you’re the right guy for the job. And the world knows those ads are bullshit.”

He waved it off. Painfully. Her being good luck had been true, and now it seemed he was working hard to make it untrue.

And she’d backed right off since that Monday. Choosing not to come with him on any more events unless he asked.

And then he’d stopped asking.

Why, he was not sure.

Because I want her to be beside me because she wants to be.

That sounded ridiculous; he understood that. They’d signed a contract. He was in fact paying her.

But he wanted her to want to share this with him.

See, he thought, she was right. You would drown her and not even notice.

“I was sort of thinking you wouldn’t have to suffer living with me,” she said, her eyes carefully someplace else. “You’d be able to work and I wouldn’t get in the way of anything.”

“You’re not in the way of anything.”

“Well, I’m not really in anything, am I?” She tried to make that sound like a joke, but it didn’t work. The night broke open around him, revealing all kinds of ache.

“I know you’ve stepped back from the campaign, and that’s fine, but you can come back anytime.” He stood up from his desk, stepping out of the golden pool of lamplight into the shadows by the door where she stood.

I’m sorry, he thought, remembering the morning he told her to stay home. The way she’d been unable to hide the disappointment. The hurt. She’d backed off because of him.

God, somehow this complicated relationship had gotten even more complicated.

“But isn’t this ideal?” she asked. “I mean, it’s not like we have a real marriage. Why continue pretending?”

There were a thousand answers he could give right now. Polished, political, perfect answers, the types of which he’d been giving to almost every question asked of him in the last month.

But instead he was silent. Totally silent.

Because he couldn’t stop thinking, what if we stop pretending?

What if we just stop?

“Jesus Christ, Harrison, I’ve watched you talk nearly nonstop for weeks now and the second we’re alone, you’re silent. I can’t …” She shook her head, shoved her fists into her pockets, and stared, unblinking, at the corner of his desk. “Ever since Paul destroyed my life, my sister … my whole family has made me feel like I’m good for nothing.” She sniffed and nearly smacked away the tears that had the audacity to fall from her eyes. He reached for her, but she stepped back.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t touch me. It’s the hormones. Let me just finish this.” She took a deep breath. “I think I’ve been believing them, my family, for years. Proving them right, while I pretended not to give a shit. The crappy jobs in bars, the bullshit modeling, the fucking … psychology textbooks, I collected and read like they mattered at all in my life. It was all nonsense. My life was nonsense.”

He wished he could touch her. Wished he were that man who knew how to just casually reach past the wall she’d put up, because she needed to be touched. Hugged. Comforted, the way she’d done for him over and over again. But he didn’t know how, not without her permission.

And not in the silence of his house. Not without a witness making it somehow … less real. An act. A show.

Not a gesture of his affection and care.

Fuck. I am just like my parents.

“And then you come along with this … proposal. And this campaign, and you give me this stupid little part in it—”

“Nothing about you is stupid. Nothing.”

“Everything,” she spat. “Everything about me has been stupid. Because I started to believe that maybe I could be a part of this thing you’re building. And maybe I could build something of my own, too. With school and the food bank. And you. And then, God, Harrison, the sex …” Her eyes, wet and wild, met his. “It’s been four years since I’ve let anyone touch me. Four years. And I didn’t have sex with you lightly. Not in New York and not here. Then … I don’t know what happened, Harrison. You said you didn’t agree with your dad, that you don’t think I could poison the campaign.”

“I don’t agree with him!”

“Then why did you push me away? For God’s sake, I’m being as honest as I can be; at least try to do the same.”

Honest. Fine. “I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

“Take advantage of me?” she cried. “This is a job, Harrison. You are paying me to smile and wave and talk to the press.”

“But we had a contract about the sex.”

“I could have said no. I would have if I wanted to. I’m not your servant or a kid you picked up off the streets. I’m not scared of you or impressed by your money. I want you, Harrison, just you. You have an overinflated sense of your power if you think you’re taking advantage of me. You can’t take from me what I don’t want to give.”

I want you, Harrison, just you.

He had no idea what to say to those words. How to process them.

Once when he was young, and his parents were filming a radio spot with his whole family, Harrison had gotten a cold and lost his voice and his mother had done a casting call to replace him.

It was ridiculous to remember that now, but there it was.

“Who was Heidi to you?” she asked.

The world went still. Soundless.

“Harrison?”

“Is that what my father was talking to you about?”

“He said I wasn’t the first woman to try to con you. She was the girl in the car crash?”

He turned away from her, back to the desk, that safe island of thank-you notes and emails, but she grabbed his elbow. She grabbed him, pulling him back to her. “How do you know about that?” He finally found his voice.

“My brother sent me some information about your family when we got married, just so I would know what I was walking into, and then, later, I was able to put it together.”

“Did it say she was pregnant?”

“No,” she gasped. She still held onto him, her fingers stroking the weave of his shirtsleeve, like she was petting him. He wondered if she even knew she was doing that. “Tell me.”

“Heidi was a twenty-five-year-old intern from Iowa during Dad’s vice-presidential campaign. She was bright and beautiful. Ambitious. Very ambitious.”

“You think she slept with your dad to get ahead?”

“She slept with me to get ahead.”

Her mouth fell open and he reached out; with his thumb against her skin, he tilted her mouth closed. Her hand at his elbow, his fingers at her cheek—the little points of contact that were somehow paramount, somehow keeping him on his feet.

“I’ve never told anyone that.”

“Harrison,” she sighed, the word, her eyes, her whole body saturated with sympathy.

“It’s okay,” he said. Though it wasn’t really. Like a wound that never saw sunlight or fresh air, it just kind of festered, hidden away. He remembered the pain of realizing he was being used as if it were ten minutes ago. “I’m not the first twenty-two-year-old kid who thought he was falling in love.”

“Doesn’t make it any less awful.”

“True. It was awful.”

“What happened?”

“I met Heidi her first week on staff. We went on a date a week later and not long after that, we had sex for the first time. I didn’t want anyone to know about it; I thought I’d get in trouble. So we were hot and heavy for about two months, and I brought her to the house a few times under the guise of work. In hindsight, I should have seen it. The way she was always angling for my dad, but … I don’t know, I was young and stupid and I wanted to believe she wanted me for me. After a while she stopped returning my calls and she got harder to pin down about seeing each other. And then the rumors started about her and Dad. I didn’t believe it, but then Dad and Heidi got in the car accident and they both lived, but she had a miscarriage.”

“Did you think the baby was yours?”

“I absolutely did. I was … I was totally devastated. But then I overheard my parents fighting at the hospital, and Heidi was only one month along, so the baby couldn’t have been mine—we hadn’t had sex in months. And then Dad … Dad confessed to the whole affair. My mother said she’d take care of it and as soon as Heidi could travel, she was gone.”

“All that were left were rumors?”

“There were always rumors about my dad. About women and drinking and corruption, but I never believed them. When I was younger, my dad walked on water, but once I saw what happened with Heidi, I could never look at him the same way.”

“Heidi was far from innocent.”

“That doesn’t make the way my family dealt with it any better, does it? She’d miscarried, nearly died, and my mom gave her money, doped her up, had her sign a confidentiality agreement and then sent her away. I mean, I thought the whole point was to hold ourselves to a better standard. She was an employee and half his age. The power dynamics of it all are totally skewed.”

“I’m not Heidi.”

“I know you’re not.”

“No. I don’t think you do. I’m not Heidi angling after the family dynasty. And I’m not Heidi getting used and discarded, either.”

He turned away, because he really didn’t believe that. There were a thousand forks in the road between them—different ways things could pan out. And almost all of them involved her getting set aside with a bunch of cash once she’d served her purpose.

Unless I can convince her to stay, he thought, but he knew that everything he’d done toward her, every hot-and-cold moment, only alienated her further. Pushed her to this point—of proposing separate lives. Separate homes.

“This explains a lot about how you reacted to my being pregnant.”

“I’m sorry for that,” he said, turning back to her. “For the way I acted in your apartment.”

“That’s why you wanted to marry me,” she said. “The thing you said about making your father’s mistakes.”

Her fingers were still touching him, and he knew, he really did, that he should step away, break the connection, but he didn’t want that. He didn’t want that at all.

He wanted more connection.

Like a dog begging for more affection, he pressed harder into her hand.

It was odd how little he knew about her, how narrow their association was. For instance, he didn’t know what her face looked like in sunlight until that first press conference (beautiful, was the answer); he didn’t know what she liked on her tacos, what she took in her coffee. He didn’t know if she had nightmares or remembered her dreams at all.

She’d slept on her stomach that night at the hotel, her hair a curtain he’d lifted with his fingers so he could watch her for a few moments longer before leaving.

But he knew that she was fierce. Loyal. Proud. Funny. Smart. In some ways smarter than him and Wallace, with all their degrees and experience.

If he reached forward—just a little, not even a full extension of his arm—he’d touch that big button. The body beneath it.

“Do it,” she breathed. Startled, he looked up, caught her eyes. Caught her reading him like a book, all those things he thought he kept so secret.

“Touch me.”

Without thought he put his hand to her stomach, that button, the small curve of her tummy beneath it. And then both of his hands were on her, his arms around her. His body finding those places on hers where they fit, somehow. Where all their edges didn’t clash or cut. Where their unlikely softness found an answering softness.

She kissed him. Or maybe he kissed her; he didn’t know. They kissed. Carefully. Like they’d never kissed before. It was their first kiss here, in the middle of their messy reality. She tasted like mint tea and Chapstick and something strong and bittersweet.

He wrapped his arms around her back and picked her up, just lifted her off her feet, because despite the size of her spirit, and her attack, and her bravery, she was actually quite small. He kept forgetting that. Kept forgetting that she was tiny. And pregnant.

With his baby. And suddenly, thinking about the baby while holding her in his arms—that changed things. That changed everything. He’d been alienated for a very long time, and now he wanted to be welcomed in.

“I don’t know how to ask for things,” he said. “Real things. I mean, my parents didn’t exactly support that kind of behavior.”

“You’re a grown man, Harrison.”

“That only makes it harder.”

She hummed, kissed his throat.

“You just open your mouth and ask, I suppose,” she said.

“I don’t want you to stay here,” he said, pulling away to see her face, flushed and beautiful. Soft and rounder than she’d been just a few weeks ago. But her eyes were sharp. “I want you to come with me. I want to watch your body change and go to doctor’s appointments. I want to be there when the baby is born.”

“Then I’ll come with you,” she whispered, and kissed him while he carried her into his bedroom.

Their clothes fell off without any effort on their part and when he laid her down on the bed, it didn’t feel like his bed, like the place he’d spent so many lonely nights. It felt new.

She was soft and supple under his hands and he found himself obsessed with learning the edges of her, her exact perimeters. The curves at her breasts, her hips, the tops of her thighs. Her belly. The span of her rib cage, the circumference of her wrists, the distance between her chin and collarbone.

The exact beats per minute of her heart against his.

And then, that belly, its upward arch, the downward slope, the tautness of the skin just under her belly button.

“It’s changed,” she breathed as he pressed kisses there. “It’s round.”

It’s beautiful. So beautiful.

He rolled her to her side, cradling her against his chest, his arms wrapped around her.

Pressing his forehead against her shoulder, he prayed for strength or softness or a sign that this was the right thing and that he could keep doing the right thing. That he was strong enough to be the man he wanted to be with her.

“Please,” she whispered pushing against him.

That was all the sign he needed. With a groan, he entered her from behind.

And it was lazy. And sweet. And new.

But also familiar in the most perfect way.

Like they’d been doing this all along.

She cried out, burying her face in the pillow. Her breasts in his hands trembled as she shook and after a moment, after she laughed and blew her hair out of her face, she reached for him, rolling to her stomach and pulling him up onto her back.

He thrust into her, into that hot, clinging welcome, and he felt her thrusting back, meeting him halfway. More than halfway.

It was the most honest and giving thing he’d been a part of.

And it felt so damn good to be a part of it.

It felt so damn good to lie there with her in his arms, sticking to each other as sweat dried on their bodies.

“Why are you called Ryan?” he asked. It was late, but neither of them seemed inclined toward sleep, as if reluctant to let this go.

“They thought I was going to be a boy and so they only picked out a boy name.”

“It didn’t matter that you were a girl?”

“Dad said it would make me tough.”

He laughed against her shoulder. They were spooned, her back to his chest, and he was tracing the outside edges of her tattoo with his fingers. Every once in a while she would flinch away.

“Ticklish?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about your tattoo,” he said, tracing the woman’s blissed-out face. “It’s really beautiful.”

“It’s Ophelia.” She rolled farther onto her stomach so he could see the whole thing. The flowers and the gauzy dress floating around her. The flowers around her feet, twining up her leg.

“Hamlet’s Ophelia?”

“She’s drowning in the river.”

“Dying for love?”

“I got it after my divorce.”

A reminder. She didn’t have to say it. He leaned forward and kissed the vines dragging Ophelia to her watery death.

“I’m not him,” he felt compelled to say.

“I know.

“I went to see your mother yesterday,” she said after a while.

“Why?”

“The Paul thing. She was looking for him so she could pay him to be silent.”

“That sounds like my mother.”

“She loves your father. Or did, at one point.”

He pushed his face into her hair, unwilling to think of how much pain that kind of love must cause.

“Is there a way to do this,” she whispered, “so we don’t turn out like them?”

“Of course.” He wrapped his arms around her, willing it to be true.

And then she turned in his arms, kissing his lips, wrapping her arms around him, drowning him in a different kind of love.