She was the most famous actress of my childhood. The woman who first ignited my fumbling sexual fantasies, while teaching me to appreciate women who could kick my ass as soon as look at me. When I was a boy, she’d been my far-off icon of feminine beauty, sex appeal, and power. When she left Hollywood and jumped into the political arena, I was a teenager and lost track of her under the onslaught of hormones and rebellion. But as a college student, stomping my way through the debate circuit and honing my writing skills with editorials and social media virality, I’d cast my eye across local campaigns, looking to hitch my wagon to a rising star and had spotted her.

I hadn’t even gotten an interview with her team.

My fantasy. My dream. Now a real-life progressive candidate moving from local school council to alderman and then to the mayoral race, which she lost the first time around. Mostly—in my expert twenty-seven-year old opinion at that time—because her campaign manager was an idiot who thought name recognition and some movie star glamour was all she needed to get into office. I could’ve told him different. Everyone from our city knows we might love our local celebrities, but our precinct bosses will back the savvy candidate who knew how to deliver benefits to the ward over a famous face, no matter how gorgeous, every time. Her second campaign manager had understood the city better, and scandals had erupted like volcanoes under the administration of the man who’d beaten her. Mayor Anna Fowler had won her second race for citywide office handily.

As a man, a speechwriter with building fame of my own now and a face that lands me on the cover of local magazines running pieces like 30 Hottest Chicagoans under 30 (thanks for the genes, mom and dad) or, most recently, Fabulous Under Forty lists (don’t remind me), I walk into the mayor’s office and try not to kiss the ground she walks on.

She is twenty years older than me and, ultimately, my new boss, although technically I am a temporary outside consultant who reports to her chief of staff, who I’ve known since we tore up the college debate circuit together. Nothing can happen between the mayor and me—not to mention her most recent two relationships have been with women, so who knows if she’s even looking at men these days—but still.

When she arches an eyebrow and smiles at me, I want to fall to my knees and worship her. With my mouth.

“Right. Oscar Aranda.”

I like hearing my name in her mouth. I like the silver streak that frames her face and how it shines against the deep black of the long hair she’s grown out over the years.

Sometimes she wears her hair coiled in elaborate braids, like a crown.

If any woman could pull off royalty in a town where we worship our down-to-earth roots, it’s Anna Fowler.

“You’re the new speechwriter I didn’t ask for, after Madison fired the last one, which I also didn’t ask for.”

Well, shit.

That doesn’t bode well.

“I didn’t hire him. He’s doing us a favor,” my friend Madison-the-liar says smartly. “So be nice.”

The mayor shoots a hard look at her chief of staff, who doesn’t look up as she alternates between a cell phone and a desk phone while shuffling her hands from an open Macbook to a desktop computer. My girl Maddy knows how to multitask, and her boss’s complaints don’t merit more than a millisecond of her attention.

Crap. Madison had made this opportunity—an opportunity I’d given up hiking the final section of my five-year, piece-by-piece Appalachian Trail trek to take advantage of—sound like a dream come true. A chance to indulge in hero worship, do some actual good in my hometown, and add some impressive name recognition to my résumé. She’d made it sound like the mayor was eager to roll out the welcome wagon for me.

Uh-huh. This wagon is a little more Oregon Trail than you led me to believe, my friend. What next? A broken axle and we all die of dysentery?

A sharply dressed young black man leans his head in the open door and catches Anna’s eye. “I’ve got that developer on the phone again. The one looking for rezoning permits downtown? They’re offering to bring in material samples so you can approve the store design.”

The mayor turns to Madison. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Do we have to have a press conference to announce we’re not selling building permits to franchises who let us pick out their flooring and light fixtures?”

She has a nice instinct for alliteration. I make a mental note of it. Knowing what kind of phrasing will roll off your speaker’s tongue naturally, as opposed to in a staccato stutter of discomfort, is key.

“I’ll get Crain’s to interview franchisees and someone from the Building Department about the change in operating procedures. It’ll have a whiff of exposé without being a whole thing,” Madison says, whipping out what looks like a bullet journal to make a note. “Should cut down on some of the personal appeals.”

What? I’m not saying I have a dozen bujo YouTubers bookmarked in an effort to teach myself the organizational planning method, but I can spot washi tape and fancy handwriting from twenty paces, for sure.

It’s a system.

The mayor turns back to me with a nearly audible snap, her attention refocusing like a laser.

“I’m not going to be able to deliver the pension contribution the last bastard promised the teacher’s union when they signed, because he also tanked the tax rolls with TIF districts, so good luck writing something that keeps thirty thousand teachers from striking in six weeks.”

Excellent. Fabulous.

I love my job.

* * *

Every time I turn around for the next two weeks, he’s there.

Okay, maybe not there. Madison’s friend, the hotshot speechwriter who’s on the fast track to becoming a big name in DC despite looking young enough to be my kid if I had one, god forbid, doesn’t actually hover. In fact, he’s disturbingly good at fading into the background in a room. I keep forgetting he’s there, watching me, which ought to be harder to do for a guy who looks like that. Wavy, dark hair that’s a little too long on top, more scruff than most up-and-coming political movers and shakers allow themselves, a prominent nose, and heavy, dark brows. It’s a mesmerizing combination even before you factor in the razor-sharp intelligence and intense observational awareness behind those eyes.

He’s distracting. And that’s when he isn’t saying a word. When he shifts in his seat or straightens from his lean against a wall, and starts talking?

I’m not the only one who can’t take her eyes off him.

His voice is kind of growly for the first ten seconds, every time. As if he’s forgotten how to use it. Then it smooths out and he’s all charm, with licks of sharp humor and a kind of present sexuality I’m not used to noticing.

Maybe it’s because this isn’t really “work” for him. I’m perfectly aware that Oscar Aranda gave up what might very well have been his last vacation for years to come in order to rescue my communications team from whatever clusterfuck is keeping us from getting our message out. Maybe that’s why everything about him radiates laid back intensity, instead of the on-edge, uptight vibe I’m used to my team churning with. Maybe in his head, he’s still moseying down the path of the longest hikers-only trail in the world.

That doesn’t mean I relax around him.

I try, but I can’t.

He’s never inappropriate. None of my ants-in-my-pants feeling is directly attributable to this intense man who’s determined to memorize every frigging detail about me and my speech patterns and style and whatever the fuck else he’s “observing” when he listens in on my day.

But I blame him anyway. Because if I don’t, if I can’t. . .

Well, then, it’s not him, it’s me.

Part of me thinks I just need to get laid. Sex is good for me. My brain and my body both work better when I get to switch off work every night and plug into some sweaty, physical ecstasy. It’s one of the things I miss most since Di and I ended our engagement. Di rarely initiated sex—she said it wasn’t something she usually thought about, and would generally have worked or networked her way through every evening right up until she was ready to fall into bed—but she responded enthusiastically whenever I did. And getting her to switch off her brilliant brain for an hour or two had been one of the pure pleasures of my day.

Also, orgasms. Lots and lots of orgasms. Always a plus.

So yeah, maybe not getting laid is the problem. Because something is definitely fucking with my head.

I keep staring at Oscar’s mouth when he’s reading, on his phone or hard copies of city files. He chews on his lip sometimes when he does. For someone with such a pretty mouth, he doesn’t use it much. For the first couple of weeks Oscar is around, I hardly have a conversation a day with him. He writes some short pieces for my press conferences and they’re . . . good. Unexpectedly so.

I knew he was supposed to be brilliant, and I trusted Madison’s recommendation implicitly. But somehow I’d still thought he’d be like every other speechwriter I’ve worked with. Someone who wrote pretty words that I struggled to bring to life as I read them off pages or teleprompters.

But Oscar’s speeches—even the little ten-minute ones he’s written for me so far—are different. They aren’t just well-framed words on a page.

They sound like me. Like I wrote them. And yes, every good speechwriter tries to do this, but I’ve never worked with someone who pulls it off.

It’s not much. Not yet. I can’t even pick out the parts where he’s done something in particular to make a sentence sounds like it’s rolling off my tongue spontaneously. But when I’m giving a press conference about increasing our cooperation with the Department of Justice to investigate abuses within our police department, I feel more natural at the podium than I’ve ever felt yet in my entire political career.

When I glance over at where Oscar is standing in the corner of the room, dark eyes resting calmly on me, I’m enjoying myself so much—for once—I have to fight back a weird urge to wink at him.

I shouldn’t be staring at his mouth so much.

Of course, after he’s been with us for two weeks, memorizing my “style” or whatever, he opens that mouth and starts talking.

And then I want to strangle him.

“I get it. You’re pulling an Al Franken,” Oscar says, face guileless as if he hasn’t just finished telling me he’s decided to completely upend the image I’ve created for myself, one that’s gotten me as far as the mayor’s office of one of the biggest cities in the nation. “Keep your head down, tight focus on policy and gravitas. It was a good strategy, for a while.”

“It is a good strategy. And now you want me to change it.”

“Yup.”

“Do I get to ask why?” My staff would be ducking and covering at this level of sarcasm from me, but Oscar either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t back out of the room, apologizing all the way.

“You can ask,” he says smartly, and I consider throwing him out the window. City Hall isn’t exactly a skyscraper, but he’d make a nice splat on the sidewalk below if only there weren’t a couple hundred pedestrians heading across the street to the Thompson Center for lunch at the basement food court. Taking out voters with a Wile E. Coyote plan to eliminate the guy Madison foisted upon me is not a useful campaign strategy.

He lets my annoyance build just long enough to irritate before smiling with an infuriating amount of charm. “Look. I can spend hours explaining to you why I’m going to make serious changes to the way your communication department creates your message, or we can just go ahead and get to work. Stop wasting time.”

Is he fucking with me now? Because he’s smiling at me, like he finds the sight of me fuming at him appealing. I know I’m a control freak who pretty much only trusts one person in my office to know exactly what I want and need, but I’m not being ridiculous right now. He is. “How about you spend a little time explaining it to me just this once?”

“Do you ask Madison to explain every recommendation or decision she makes for you?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

Of course not. You can’t govern if you spend all your time doing other people’s jobs for them. The only way to be effective is to hire excellent people, trust them to do their jobs, and then recognize that you can’t be in charge of every detail. On policy, I pride myself in mastering as much information as possible, so I can evaluate the recommendations given to me, but there’s always a point at which you’re trusting the summary a junior staffer wrote of some detail you don’t have time to research for yourself.

This is different though.

Which is exactly what I say to him.

“This is different. And yes, when I need it, when it’s a big move, I absolutely ask Madison to break decisions down for me before she takes action.” I take a deep breath. “Every word you’re saying right now is making me anxious and in order for me to trust you, I need you to do more than expect me to trust you.”

“I want to let you off the leash,” he says, after a pause that feels like a battle of wills. “I see how you are here, in the office, surrounded by people you know well and trust, and I see the image you and your staff have carefully presented from when you first ran for office.”

I try to keep my defensiveness under wraps. One of my major flaws is my kneejerk instinct to defend my people, even when they don’t need it. “We knew we were going to get hammered on the Hollywood dilettante angle. Eastwood and Schwarzenegger can get away with going into politics without major questioning of their credibility, but women never get the same treatment, period. And that’s before you factor in the chain mail bikini movie stills. I had to be serious. Focused. Always.”

You weren’t allowed to crack jokes on the campaign trail when your entire campaign was being held up as a joke already. And although the money I’d made from my film career was what had allowed me to run in the first place, the baggage that came with it was enormous.

“It was a good call.”

“I know it was.” I don’t need reassurance on this point, but it’s nice to hear anyway. Hell if I’m going to let him know that though.

“But now it’s holding you back. The voters can feel it when you don’t trust them with your genuine self. More than that, they can see it. You’re a cultural icon and they’ve all seen you in movies and interviews and at awards shows, where you acted very differently than you do these days as the mayor. At a different moment in time, it wouldn’t matter. If the economy were brilliant, and the president didn’t hate us because the last guy came from here, and everything in the city’s budget was in the black, you could be superficial and cautious with every word you say in public. But you’re in crisis mode. You have a lot of bad news to deliver, and if you can’t find some authenticity while you do it, the voters are going to turn on you.”

“So, what’s your plan?”

“I want you to let more of your personality shine through. You curse. You’re sarcastic. You crack jokes at your own expense and laugh at them. You get angry and you get fierce. I want to let all of that Anna Fowler back into the game.”

“You want me to curse at a press briefing?” Ai yi yi. I can already picture the headlines.

“I’m not going to have you up there dropping f-bombs, but I think you can stand in front of the people of this city and say, ‘We’re screwed, but here’s how I’m going to fix it.’ I think that’s going to get people to listen long enough for them to start hearing you. You. Not ‘the office of the mayor.’ And I think they want to hear you. Also I think you should talk about Di more. Stop hiding that you two still talk and maintain a relationship with each other.”

That is certainly unexpected. The strain of having to act as if I’d ended things with my ex and walked away without another thought has been . . . worse than I’d expected. I’m used to staying friends with my lovers when things end. I have excellent taste in partners. Just because we don’t work out in the long run has never been a reason to stop talking to someone I care about.

“It’s been suggested I keep my continuing friendship with my exes off the radar.” Keeping my voice level is a struggle. I hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—although of course he had—my discreet phone calls to my ex whenever I needed a moment of friendly conversation to recharge before heading back into the fray. My throat is thick. “That it’s too confusing to voters to see me maintain a relationship with Di.”

* * *

“I think that’s bullshit.” My voice is sharp. It’s been hard watching Anna’s isolation, seeing how limited her personal life is without the fiancée who used to accompany her to every city function. I don’t know if I can save her administration from the bad news they’re going to have to deliver to the city, but if I can do one thing, it’ll be to find a way to get Anna’s friendship with Di out of the shadows. The woman works tirelessly as mayor. She deserves a goddamn friend. “I think with a fifty percent divorce rate and thousands of families co-parenting kids and maintaining relationships with their spouses, voters can handle you being friends with your ex-girlfriend.”

“Most of my advisors don’t agree with you.”

I know Maddy does, but there are always a lot of loud voices with strong opinions to take into account when your career depends upon raising enough money to run for office every four years.

There’s more than one leverage button to push on this issue, though, even if I might be crossing a line here.

“Plus, if you’ve got to deliver rough news about the teachers’ contract that sounds like it ought to come from an austerity Republican, it won’t hurt to . . . uh, remind people. . .” I’m used to speaking my mind with my candidates, but my discussions don’t usually involve their sexualities. As progressive as the candidates I’ve worked for have been, we’re still in the Midwest and most of them have been straight.

“That I’m a real, live, liberal bisexual who had a female fiancée when they elected me, and not a teacher-union smashing conservative, despite the wedding being called off?”

“Yes.” I wince. Reminding anyone of their most recent breakup, especially one that had been dissected in the local news for months, is probably not a brilliant move. I’m better on paper, I swear. Conversations are minefields. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

I get a hand wave in return. “You didn’t. We wouldn’t still be friends if things had ended badly.”

“Why did they?” I ask, genuinely curious. The two women had been a powerhouse couple in the city, Anna breaking into the rarified air of the mayor’s office and corralling state and DC politicians in her orbit, while Di harnessed the power of the business world with the investment firm she presided over from the top of a shining steel skyscraper on a peninsula jutting into the lake.

“We’re too much alike. Both of us are always in front of the cameras, always under the microscope. I think we thought having a partner who understood exactly what that meant would be easier, but it turned out it just doubled the scrutiny.”

Ugh. My stomach churns for her. There’s a reason I’ve chosen the behind-the-scenes role of speechwriter, and it isn’t because I can’t deliver a punchy bit of oratory myself. I’d mown down the opposition on the same East Coast elite college debate circuit that had launched Ted Cruz to his political careers. (Not that I’d ever aimed to emulate Ted Cruz. Just saying.) I have the brain and the mouth and the face for politics. But the idea of signing up for a lifetime of being in the spotlight had made my skin crawl. No, thank you. Ugh. Yuck.

“Well, I think you should invite her to the party if you want to.” The office had been lively with plans for the mayor’s annual summer barbeque for her staff. Several hundred people attended with kids and potluck dishes and no donors were allowed. “Hell, if you two can collaborate on a project, that would be even better. Something within the LGBTQ community maybe? One of my sisters volunteers with a grassroots group raising money to renovate a shelter for LGBTQ kids of color, bet they could use a higher profile.”

“Interesting.” Her spine straightens and she pulls out her phone, tapping on the screen for a minute before looking at me again. “Thank you.”

I know what that means, and make a mental note to shoot an email to my sister so she can give them the heads up that they’ll be getting more attention from City Hall shortly.

“One of the problems you’re having right now is that voters aren’t connecting with you. They want to. They voted for you. But there have been so many scandals—”

“I swear to god, I would launch that man into the sun if NASA would just loan me a couple of rocket scientists,” she growls, eyes narrowed.

“Yes.” I try not to hiss, but that is what she needs. “You should say that at your next press conference.”

“Oh, sure,” she says, laughing now. “I can see that going over well. ‘Mayor Threatens Predecessor, News at 5.’”

“You think most of the city doesn’t want to strangle him too? I think you should brace yourself for a standing ovation if you say that.” I cross my arms, leaning back against the desk and staring at her, trying to figure out what buttons to push. “They thought they were voting for the no-bullshit guy who’d clean up City Hall and tell the truth. They got another snake oil salesman who kept power out of the hands of anyone who could use it to expose corruption to the light of day. People feel like they were conned and they voted for you because they want you to be what he was supposed to be.”

“Fuck that. I’m nobody’s cheap substitute.”

Yup. She’s angry now. Excellent. I can work with that.

“No. That’s not it.” I slow down, take a breath, and put my hands up to form a canvas in the air. Paint her a picture. She’ll get that. “They don’t want you to be him. They want you to be what they’d hoped he would be. They want you to be better than him. They want you to deliver on all the hopes and dreams they feel foolish for having had about the last guy. You’ve got a chance to rally this entire city behind you, but they’ve been burned, hard, and they’re gun shy. Everything you do, everything you say, that feels like spin—like politics as usual—is going to set their teeth on edge.”

“So you’re going to give me the spin that feels like the real thing and then everyone will love me?” she asks with an epically arched brow.

“Like I said, I’m going to take your people—and you—off the leash. If you let me. And give them the real thing.”

“The truth? No one’s going to love me for that. It’s nothing but bad news as far as the horizon.”

“Your job is to find a way out. My job is to make people believe you when you do.”

“I’ll think about it.”

And with that, she strides out of the room and every muscle in my body sags with the sudden release of tension. I am very, very good at what I do. I don’t lack confidence in my skills. But there’s always a very touchy moment when you come into an established organization and tell them they need to change. Especially when you’re telling them to change something as core as the very way they communicate with the public.

Anna and her people have done an amazing job getting her as far as they have in the cutthroat world of this city’s politics. They have plenty to be proud of.

But now she’s mayor of a major Midwest city, a platform that could launch her to the governorship, and then. . . ? Except inherited corruption scandals had dragged down her first year, bombshell after bombshell from the previous administration coming to light and buying the ex-mayor a nice, long stay in prison. Anna had doubled down on her campaign commitments of transparency and ethics, but the entrenched political players in the city aren’t playing nice as they battle to protect the existing power structures. Her administration fumbled in their efforts to disassociate themselves from deals made before their time.

Thank god when this past winter’s Snowmageddon had blanketed the city, the salt stocks were high and the city plows fully staffed. This city never forgives a mayor who can’t handle a winter crisis, and Anna’s team had rolled out a flawless response.

Still, polling numbers are lower than anyone would be comfortable with, and Anna has yet to shore up her connection with the city’s voters after cleaning up the scandals. And every time she takes the mic at a press conference—a weekly occurrence at least—tension stiffens her body and chills her voice. Her delivery is forceful and commanding, which had worked well during the crisis months when arrests were snowballing through City Hall, but now . . . now our city needs a mayor they can love and relate to, not just one who scythes through corruption with a flaming sword of righteousness (no, I am not picturing her in the metal bikini armor she’d worn in that medieval action film back in the day, I’m not). A city of mostly polite, rarely subtle hard workers, with a low tolerance for bullshit in any arena except the political, where our fatalism has kept legions of corrupt politicians ticking over from one generation to the next, what we need is a Midwest rock star to remind us that we are better than this.

We’ve taken a kick in the teeth. We need someone to remind us of how we can shine.

And I know Anna Fowler can get us there.

* * *

“They’re going to make papier mâché models of my head and set me on fire in front of the Picasso.” The giant, black steel Cubist sculpture that anchored the plaza in front of the Daley Center next door was a popular spot for protesters to gather before marching through the Loop. I cross my arms on the desk, lay down my head, and let loose a wail I’d never unleash in front of anyone but Di.

Strong hands rub my upper arms briskly. “Suck it up, cupcake.”

“Seriously, Di,” I rant into my sleeve. “If you saw these numbers—I mean the real ones, not the bullshit ones that bastard was snowing everyone with—it’s a fucking disaster.”

“So show me the numbers.”

I should. I mean, after talking to a slew of lawyers who could tell me if it was an ethics violation to show my financially brilliant ex-girlfriend the intimate guts of the city’s balance sheets, I should definitely show her the numbers and beg for help. No one knows how to make money work, but cautiously, like Di. Her investment company’s icon is a tortoise, because they aren’t in it for the quick buck, but for the long haul.

Fuck it. I’m never bad. I never so much as bend the rules, not once. None of my family members are on the city payroll, or bidding for city contracts, or lobbying city departments for permits. I’d put all my own investments into a blind trust that would have sufficed for a presidential run—not that the current guy squatting in the White House had done any such thing—so I could never be accused of making a single decision in order to deliver a financial benefit to myself. I pay for my own subscriptions to all the city newspapers, for Christ’s sake, rather than let City Hall pick up the tab for them. I have always been a scrupulous rule follower, ever since I’d first run for office. And even though rising to the level of mayor of a major city doesn’t exactly come with any security clearance issues, I always watch my mouth, hyperaware that inappropriate conversations in a city where bribery and insider connections had been a way of life can tarnish my reputation in an instant.

I hear Oscar’s voice in my head, slyly provoking me. “I want to let you off the leash.”

Di had been as close as you can get without a marriage license to being my wife. If I’m not allowed to talk to intimate friends, how am I supposed to keep my head on straight?

I grab my government issue phone, the only one I ever use for any calls or texts or emails involving city business, so all my communications will be part of the public record after I leave office, and call Madison.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Bring me a copy of that summary report that gave me a heart attack, will you please? And the breakdowns of the pension fund obligations, the most recent CTU contract, and the TIF districts. Hell, bring me anything you’ve got on that gaping maw of red on our books. I’m going to go over some stuff with Di.”

“Really?” I can hear the surprise in Madison’s voice. Even when Di and I were engaged, I never involved her in city business.

“Really. Your friend Oscar’s really fucking with my head. I’m having all kinds of outrageous ideas now.” I have to work hard to squash the innuendo in my voice as I wrap up that sentence, because I tell Madison a lot of personal stuff, but that my pulse skitters the first time I see Oscar every morning is not something I need to share.

With a laugh and a promise, Madison ends the call. Without even asking, I dial my favorite Thai place and order an orgy of dishes for delivery. We’re going to need fuel.

By the time I hang up, Di has moved to the couch and is leaning back into the corner, so elegant and powerful I can’t look away. We might not work together as a permanent couple, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever stopped appreciating how stunning she is.

It does not escape me that the first person I’ve been interested in since Di is equally handsome, intelligent, and prone to able to focus on me intensely when I need it. Yes, I have a type.

Her voice is throaty when she waves me over and pats the seat next to her. “So tell me about this Oscar, the one who’s giving you crazy ideas.”

I fling myself onto the couch and just crash out full-length next to her, groaning.

“Oh, Di. I thought I was screwed when it came to the teachers’ contract.”