“Talk to me,” I whisper, my gaze pleading with hers to talk to me. “What are you scared of?”
She bites her lip and gathers her courage. I watch her do it, the blues of her eyes solidifying, her shoulders quietly squaring. “You.”
“Me? You’re scared of me?” I laugh. “Why in the world would you be scared of me?”
“Because it’s too easy to be with you. Even at this slow pace we say we’re going at . . .”
I lift her chin with my fingertips. “It’s crazy, huh?”
She nods, her eyes wide. “It’s so crazy. I’ve spent the last few years making sure all of my ducks are in a row so I never get trampled by anyone again.”
“The only place I’ll trample you is in this bed,” I grin.
“The parallels from what I went through and this are so similar. What if I get caught up in this, in you, and you get elected? Don’t get me wrong—you should be elected. You’re smart and funny and charming and have the best heart. But you move to Atlanta and . . . what then?”
“Then we figure it out,” I say with as much confidence as I can muster. “What if I lose? Will you want to fuck a loser?”
She shakes her head. “Even if you don’t win, you won’t be a loser.”
“Even if I win, that doesn’t make me a winner.” I say the words before I think about it, before I realize I’ve said them aloud. Something clicks and I know she’s going to ask me to expound on the idea, and I grimace and wait for it.
“What does that mean?”
I huff a breath and think about lying to her, but the openness we have in conversation is nice. Cathartic, even.
“It just means,” I say, grabbing a strawberry, “that sometimes in this business you have to agree to things you don’t necessarily believe in.”
“Like what?”
“Like a bill about some land around the state.”
“Don’t agree to it,” she says simply. “If it’s not what you believe in, how could you?”
“Because you have to sometimes give on things to win on others.”
She bends over and presses a sweet kiss to my shoulder. “I don’t think you believe in yourself enough.”
The words hit me hard because it’s true. I start speaking again without thinking. “It’s hard to believe in yourself when you aren’t sure you’ve ever accomplished anything on your own.”
“How can you say that?” she asks. “You won the mayoral election.”
“Did I?”
I raise my eyebrows and watch her face twist in confusion. Her mouth opens to reply, but she shuts it just as quickly.
“Yes, I’m the mayor,” I say, my throat burning. “But did I win it on my own ideas? Or did I win it because of my name or my looks?” I look away because I’ve never said these things aloud to anyone, although I’ve thought them nearly every day for years. “Or did my father influence it somehow?”
The last one is the kicker. It’s something my opponents have projected a number of times, that my father paid off certain people and thereby bought the election. He denies it, but of course he would. I don’t really think he’d do that, but there’s always a niggle of doubt. My dream was his dream before it was mine.
The silence between us thickens and I switch off the television. I realize I’ve done what I can’t do. I opened my mouth. It’s Politics 101: Never Open Your Trap. Everything is kept close to the vest, everything in the dark.
So why in the hell did I just say that?
Her hand rolls mine over and she laces her fingers through mine. She doesn’t respond for a long while, just holds my palm like it’s enough. Maybe it is.
“Barrett?” she asks, her sweet voice barely audible.
I turn to look at her. Her features are soft, her lips still telegraphing that they’ve just been kissed. I love the look on her, like she’s just been thoroughly adored. It’s what she should always look like.
“Even if that is true, and I don’t believe it,” she says, taking a breath, “it just means even more that you need to prove to yourself that your ideas are enough.”
“But what if they’re not?”
“If you say what you feel, that you don’t agree with the Land Bill, and you don’t get elected—is that the worst thing that could happen?”
The answer to that is complicated and both yes and no. It would end the work of so many for so many years. I have no backup plan; politics has always been my career, the trajectory up the ranks as quickly as I’ve been able. But looking at her in my bed, trying to make me feel better, the answer is also this: the worst thing is losing the person that makes me feel alive and enough for the first time in maybe forever.
“It’s not,” she says, shaking her head. “The worst thing would be for you to have your legacy tainted by a bunch of half-truths. By your grandkids asking how you felt about this or that in your career and having to lie. It’d be better to not win.”