Grace smiled when she crossed her legs in the passenger seat and felt a tug of discomfort at the juncture of her thighs. She hadn’t lied to Aaron about her sexual experience. No, she would never to that. But quite some time had passed since her first two years of being semi-experimental in art school—and neither one of the two boys and one girl she’d been physical with had been experienced as Aaron, apparently. When she thought back to those sweaty dorm encounters, she could only recall her thought process. Should I pretend it feels good? Is he or she pretending it feels good?
There hadn’t been time for those awkward worries in the field because she’d been struck in the head by a falling lust crater the moment they’d locked lips. She pressed her nose up against the passenger’s side window, half expecting to see her prone form, lying spread-eagled in the grass, sending her a thumbs-up.
The image made her laugh as Aaron climbed into the driver’s side, starting the engine while casting her a look of concern. “Something funny?”
God, she wanted to straddle his lap and—do something to snap him out of the funk he continually fell back into, just when she thought they’d broken free. Maybe a two-finger poke to the eyes, à la the Three Stooges. Or a knock-knock joke in his ear. A kiss. Maybe…maybe that would work. The thought of it caused her smile to fade, the pulse between her legs to pick up again. “It feels like your fingers are still inside me.”
Aaron froze in the act of putting the Suburban in gear, his jaw flexing in the near-darkness. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
Grace had expected him to say that, but she hadn’t foreseen the twinge of pain in her middle following. “Why not?” Needing to move, she tugged the seatbelt across her body, buckling it with a loud click. “Because you’re going to work for my father?”
She could hear him thinking in the long pause that ensued. “Among other things,” he said in a low voice, pulling the Suburban back onto the road, into the snowflakes that were beginning to taper off. “You’ve never asked me why I’m here. What I’m doing sneaking into pancake breakfasts in Iowa. Do you think that behavior is typical of me?”
“No.” She tilted her head, regarding his strong profile in the passing streetlights. Light, dark. Light, dark. “I guess I was returning the favor, since you never asked me what I was doing inside the school at night.”
“Well, ask me now.” He delivered the order in a near-shout, seeming to surprise himself, then settling back into the driver’s seat with a raked hand through his hair. “Ask me why I needed to be snuck in the back door, instead of walking through the front like everyone else.”
“Not everyone else. Not me.”
That seemed to upset him, but he didn’t comment. Not directly. “Ask, Grace.”
Her chest experienced a sudden hollowness. “No. I don’t want to.” Why wouldn’t he look at her? Had she imagined that connection they’d forged in the field? “What would it matter?”
“It would. Matter.” He steered the Suburban onto the highway, the engine struggling to comply with the request for an increased pace. “It matters what happened to you, too. Whatever the…tragedy was. Matters. If you want to live believing life is a series of moments, you have to account for the past moments, too. They don’t just fade with the newer, prettier ones.”
Heat stole up Grace’s neck as she turned in her seat. “Actually, you’re wrong. They do fade. But you have to work at it. You have to try.”
“I don’t want them to fade.” She heard his hands tighten around the cracked leather steering wheel. “I don’t need to make them weaker for the sake of comfort.”
“Is that what you think of me?” Grace whispered. “That I’m weak?”
A touch of horror made it into his gaze as he cast her a glance. “No. I think we’ve found different ways to be strong. And I think the method I use makes me very bad for you. Everything you feel is so…huge.” His throat worked. “I try not to feel anything at all. My way leads to people being hurt. Isolation through alienation.”
In the intimacy of the humming Suburban, Grace was tempted to ask Aaron about what had brought him to Iowa, as a man trying so desperately to regain his luck. Because it was the opposite description of the man who drove so capably, who’d touched her with such skill and had a quick answer for everything. But some intuition told her, Grace, you’re better off not knowing. And she’d learned the hard way never to ignore her intuition ever again. So she sat back in her seat, staring out through the windshield to regroup. Pretending she hadn’t essentially been broken up with by someone she wasn’t even dating.
“What is your job going to be for my father?”
Grace asked the question so casually, never expecting the answer to be so catastrophic. Talking politics tended to give her a stomachache and frustrate her. People were people, not numbers and polls and pie charts. Maybe that was why she’d never considered Aaron’s position with the Pendleton campaign or given much thought about what he’d be accomplishing, side by side, with her father. But when he spoke, the answer changed everything. Everything. So much so that she was hit by an urge to fling open the passenger’s side door at the first stoplight and run for her life.
“My focus will be on the eighteen to twenty-five demographic.” His tone had gone from challenging to practiced. “Using the way they think, the mediums they utilize, to bring them over to the Pendleton camp.” He threw her a tight smile. “They want to vote for him, they just don’t realize it yet.”
Ice formed along the inner walls of Grace’s lungs, forcing her to breathe in labored drags. Speaking was out of the question. She’d known, on some level, that the Pendleton campaign must be trying to reach the younger voters through various forms of social media—which she didn’t personally use—and attempting to make her father appeal to a younger audience. Of course, with the presidency at stake, the campaign would employ every trick in the book to get the right hole punched on Election Day.
But she hadn’t anticipated it being Aaron’s role in the Pendleton campaign. He would essentially be influencing—maybe even tricking—young people into wanting a certain outcome. How was that different than what she’d experienced at YouthAspire? Or on the couch of her psychologist in Austin, who’d fed Grace her parents’ rhetoric through patient suggestions?
It’s wasn’t. It was worse, because it was on such a larger scale. Not just a camp full of kids who didn’t get enough attention from their parents and were willing to believe anything for positive adult reinforcement. Not just a girl trying to talk through her memories and make sense of them. No, this was everything she’d been fighting to get over. Right there in front of her.
When she’d been sent to YouthAspire at sixteen, back when it had been a leadership camp—a far cry from the youth shelter and recreation center it had recently become—the infiltration of ideas had started slowly. As daughter of a prominent politician, younger sister of a popular student at the local high school, Grace had been a target from day one. The counselors had flocked around her, sat with her at every meal, given her choice of bunkhouse, extra free time. Even at sixteen, she’d gleaned their goal. To bring more registrants the following summer, perpetuate the YouthAspire name, and ultimately, make more money. And she’d wanted to help. She’d wanted to spread the word about their unique teaching format, which included lectures from corporate professionals, workshops designed to increase the campers’ understanding of leadership. Teach them how to be a winner. How to make the correct decisions.
Aaron would be doing the same thing.
God, when she thought back to how easily she’d been led, the memories threatened to overwhelm. So much that when the Suburban hit a bump, she startled, palms flying up to cool her cheeks.
“Hey. Hippie.” Aaron’s concern reached through the fog, but it wasn’t a welcoming distraction. She didn’t want to let him distract her, the way she would have done in the past, as a young girl. With such trust. Making her wonder if she’d learned a damn thing from her experience. “I don’t think you’re weak. All right? You misunderstood me.”
She forced her hands down, laying them flat on her thighs. “I know.” How far were they from home? “It’s okay.”
A beat passed. “You don’t seem okay. Should I…pull over or something?”
“No,” she said too quickly. “I just want to go home.”
Something she never thought she’d say and actually mean, but in this case, home was the lesser of two evils. Maybe not right this second. But the deeper Aaron swam into her father’s end of the pool, the more corrupt he would become. And she’d been distancing herself from those who sought to control or manipulate far too long to take another chance. That separation guaranteed she wouldn’t make another mistake by trusting the wrong people, believing truths that were nothing more than falsehoods.
When they finally turned down the road leading to her family home’s endless driveway, Grace unhooked her seatbelt. “You can let me out here.”
“What?” His incredulity was thicker than the night’s dark edges. “You think I’m going to pull over and let you out on the side of the road?”
“You can’t very well pull into my driveway, can you?”
“No. I’d thought of that.” He sounded grave. “There’s a dirt turnoff before your driveway—I almost turned down it by accident on the way over. I’m assuming it leads to the woods near the guest house. Close enough that I can walk you.”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re making me real nervous over here, Grace.” The turnoff approached, illuminated by the Suburban’s yellow-tinged headlights, and Aaron took it, traveling over the bumpy, familiar terrain Grace had only ever gone over on foot. It did nothing to calm the nerves jangling in her belly. “Did I…Jesus, did I hurt you?” He stamped his foot down on the break, sending them sliding through mud and snow before the vehicle groaned to an abrupt stop. “Did I?”
Confusion flashed like jagged lightning, unwanted at first, but it snapped Grace out of the paralyzed shock of learning Aaron’s political specialty. What he would be doing for months to come. How it was the one thing she couldn’t get past. Ever. “No, you didn’t hurt me.” Her hands were unsteady as she reached down to button her coat, all the way up to her neck. “But you were right before. We don’t make sense. You said I shouldn’t come within ten feet of you…and I won’t anymore. I don’t want to.”
Grace only looked over long enough to glimpse Aaron’s face turning white before she shoved open the creaking door and jumped out. In a million years, she never expected him to follow. Why would he? Since they’d met, he’d done nothing but explain what made them different, remind her they shouldn’t be in each other’s orbits. So when she heard his feet hit the ground, it startled her enough to spin around. Enough to go still and watch him advance like a wary hunter coming toward a spooked deer. Is that what she looked like?
“Just when I thought I was getting used to your curveballs, huh?” The stilted delivery of his joke—and the stiffness in his shoulders—made it fall flat. “I’m fucking lost here, Grace.”
“Why?” Genuine curiosity was the only thing keeping her from turning tail and losing Aaron even more. That’s what she told herself. It wasn’t the fact that he looked totally bewildered and something about the utter lack of his usual confidence made her chest ache. “Why are you lost? I’m finally agreeing with you.”
“I don’t have to like it,” he said, almost to himself. “I need to know what I missed. You were fine one minute—”
“No. You never thought I was fine. Everything you’ve said? I’ve been listening.” She took in a pull of cold night air. “You think I don’t know my own mind, and if you knew…if you knew how much I resent the insinuation that I can’t think for myself, you would have thought twice.” Grace tried to rein in the accusation dying to be issued—accusing didn’t fix anything—but it knocked free all the same. “Maybe you didn’t want me to know my own mind, so you could make it up for me.”
Aaron drew up short. “Is this about my job?”
“Yes,” she whispered, squaring her shoulders in the face of his astonishment. “Partly. I’m so confused by you. I see one thing—I see and see it—and then it vanishes. And it makes me doubt my own judgment. I’ve doubted my judgment around someone like you before and it ended badly.”
“Yeah. Someone like me.” Out of everything she’d said, those three words seemed to have the largest impact. They paled his face, made the lines around his mouth more prominent. “Just like I’ve been telling you from the beginning, right?”
Grace lifted her hands and let them drop. “Yes.”
For long moments, all he did was stare at her, the soft puffs of falling snow sounding at their feet. “But it seemed like you weren’t believing it…when I said there was no good in me. Or you didn’t want to.” He made the statement almost to himself, but they lanced her nonetheless. “You don’t even have some doubt left?”
“Stop.” Stop what? She had no idea. Stop making her question the decision to put distance between them, stop looking so torn up, stop making her throat burn. In an attempt to forcibly remove any temptation to stay around Aaron in the hopes of seeing beneath his exterior, Grace reached up and yanked all four ribbons out of her hair, approaching Aaron just enough to dump them into his palm. “I know you’ll be working with my father, and I promise I won’t jeopardize that, but we can’t be alone together anymore.”
Aaron’s gaze was riveted by the shredded red fabric in his hand. “How will I know you’re all right?”
She started to back away. Before she did the exact opposite and took a flying leap into his arms. Why did he insist on choosing now to be so silent and still? “I’m always all right. I make myself all right.”
The intensity of his answering look nearly buckled Grace’s knees, but she forced herself onto the path leading home, counting steps to distract herself. She didn’t hear him start the Suburban until five minutes later, when she reached her back door.