Indecent Proposal (27 page)

“No,” she said, turning on the lamp as she walked past it to the kitchen. “I’m just hungry.”

“I had Dave pick up some more graham crackers.”

Oh, she didn’t know what to do with those little things he noticed. Those small domestic kindnesses. “Thank you,” she said, and grabbed the box from the cupboard and poured herself some milk.

Going back to her room had been her plan, but she couldn’t leave Harrison out here, torturing himself with his opponent’s smear ads.

“Why are you watching that garbage?” she asked, dunking her graham cracker in milk.

He shrugged and rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t have an answer that sounds sane.”

“Isn’t the debate tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

“You’re neck-and-neck in the polls, Harrison. And without that guy’s budget, you just have to trust that the message and the work that everyone’s doing will get to the right audience.”

“Is that what I have to do?” he asked, shooting a weary smile over his shoulder.

She handed him a graham cracker, which he took. And then she held out her mug of milk for him to dip the cracker into.

“Is this a pregnant thing?” he looked dubiously at the milk.

“It’s a childhood thing. Try it.”

He did, and then lifted the dripping graham cracker to his mouth.

“Not bad,” he said after he ate it, and she handed him another.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you doing this? Running for office? Why now? I mean … is it all about trying to fix what your dad broke?”

“Is that such a bad reason?”

“Well, it’s kind of overkill, isn’t it? Dedicating your life to sweeping up after your dad?”

Harrison broke the graham cracker in his hands into smaller squares and then smaller ones. “I knew I would be going into politics. I wanted to go into politics, but I
knew everything I did would be measured or colored by what my dad had done. And so from the very beginning I was thinking about that. About who I was in comparison to my dad.”

“Who are you when you’re on your own?” She swirled her cracker through the milk in a slow figure-eight pattern.

In the long years of exile from her family she’d figured out who she was outside of the confines of that neighborhood. Outside of that last name. And they had been hard years, but she realized, suddenly, that they’d been good years, too. She’d figured a lot of shit out.

He was silent for a long time and that wasn’t a good sign; he was quiet only when he was thinking.

Maybe the guy needed a little more exile to answer that question.

“I want to serve the public,” he said. “I want to help people who need it. I want to make people’s lives easier in fundamental ways. And I think government, in its purest form, can do that. I can do that.”

His earnestness, his absolute conviction in his ideals, made her chest tight, as if her heart were suddenly too big for her ribs.

“Your mom told me the first time we met that you cared.” She watched cracker crumbs bob and drown in her milk because she couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “That you cared more than anyone else in the family.”

“Ashley—”

“Ashley’s not even on the same curve,” Ryan said. “But all these smear ads, all these Maynard op-ed pieces, you can’t change them. Those things they say about your dad, they’re true, and trying to keep them covered up or ignore them, it only feeds that fire.”

“You saying I should 8-Mile it?” She glanced up in time to see a dimple, and then it was gone.

“I’m saying you need to get a little more Zen about it.”

“Zen?” He scoffed. “I don’t think that’s something I can do.”

“You should try,” she said, and handed him her last graham cracker before heading back to her bedroom.

“Ryan?”

Don’t turn. Just keep walking. Pretend you didn’t hear him
.

But that would be ridiculous and cowardly, so she turned.

He was going to ask her to stay. She knew it. It was written on his face, in that lonely slump to his shoulders. He was going to ask her and she wanted to. So badly she wanted to sit down next to him on that couch and comfort him with her body. And be comforted by his.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and then rushed into her room before she gave in to the mercurial demands of her foolish heart.

On a cool morning in October, Harrison and Ryan worked at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, boxing and sorting food for the Thanksgiving event that would be taking place in an hour.

The director of the food bank, a kind but stern woman named Abby, worked with them. Abby was talking about the food bank’s initiatives and kept using the words “food insecure.”

A term that made Ryan snort-laugh through her nose.

“What …?” Abby looked over at Harrison on the other side of the warehouse, as if he might explain why his wife was laughing at the thought of families going hungry. But he wouldn’t have the answers. For all his compassion, he didn’t have any idea what it meant to be hungry.

Sorry, food insecure
.

“What is so funny?” Abby asked.

“I’m sorry.” Ryan shook her head. “It’s just the term. ‘Insecure.’ When you’re a kid and you’re hungry and you know there’s nothing at home for dinner and won’t be until the end of the month, ‘insecure’ isn’t exactly the right word.”

“What word would you use?” Abby asked.

“Scared. Food scared.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrison put down a box and turn to stare at her.

“Your family didn’t have enough food?” Abby asked.

“Some months my dad’s disability check didn’t cover everything, and meat was always the first to go. Then vegetables and fruit. Milk. Even the powdered stuff for emergencies. Then the macaroni and ketchup. If we were lucky, we’d only have to get by without dinner for a few nights.”

“What did your father do?”

“Drove buses for the city until he slipped on some ice and hurt his back, and then we lived on his disability. Which could get us through as long as no one needed new shoes, or the car kept running. And I guess I’ve never really thought about this, kids usually don’t, but I can’t imagine how my dad must have felt those nights.”

She pushed hair off her shoulders as she knelt to pick up another bag of rice. “It must have killed him knowing he couldn’t always give us a good meal … I can’t even imagine what he’d call it. But I doubt it’s ‘insecure.’ Food anger? Food rage?”

“Mrs. Montgomery—”

“Please, call me Ryan.” She still wasn’t used to “Mrs. Montgomery” and frankly didn’t think she ever would be, considering her mother-in-law.

“I think you’d be a great spokesperson for us.”

“For hunger, you mean?” She laughed, but no one
else did. Harrison was staring at her over the boxes he’d stacked. Abby was doing the same.

She could feel the blood pounding in her cheeks, sweat dripping down her sides from her suddenly sticky armpits. Oh, this attention sucked.

“Yes, in a word,” Abby said.

“That’s … I’m …” She glanced at Harrison, hoping he would bail her out with some kind of story about how busy they would be in Washington, how badly he needed her on the campaign, but he just kept those level blue eyes on her. “I’m not really …”

“You’d be great at it,” he said. “Perfect, I think.”

Her ears buzzed and she laughed, a wheezy, empty thing.

“Look,” Abby said. “I know you’re busy, but perhaps after the election you can come in and talk to us.”

“That’s … We’ll be …” she stammered into silence.

“Just think about it. We’d love to have you,” the director said, and then quickly checked her watch. “Let’s open the doors!”

After the food was handed out and the photos were taken, Harrison was back in the limo with his wife.

When she thought he wasn’t looking, she’d unbuttoned the top button of her skirt and pulled the thin fabric of her yellow-and-green print shirt over her stomach. Her clothes were getting uncomfortable lately; she wouldn’t say it, but she did that sort of thing a lot.

And tried to hide it from him.

He wondered what she would do if she knew how badly he wanted to strip those clothes off her, reveal her in the sunlight so he could soak in the sight of her, learn the reality of her so his dreams, his imaginings, his pre-dawn fantasies of her would be made more real. More concrete.

So this whole damn relationship of theirs would be made more concrete.

This charade that they were living was wearing him down. The closer they got to the election, the more real the next step in his life, the more he wished they could have those moments back on the couch. The more he wanted to just stop … pretending.

At first the charade had been in public, the smiles and hand-holding. The kissing and whispers. The united shoulder-to-shoulder front they presented to everyone. But now … since that night in September, and maybe since before then, maybe gradually, minute by minute since they’d been together, the tide had turned and the time when they were alone felt like the large lie.

The chill with which they handled each other. The careful indifference, as if showing the other how they might care, or how they were invested in each other, might somehow tip this boat over.

And what then?
he wondered. What would be the great disaster if he let his wife—his goddamned
wife
—know what he thought. How he felt. They’d said no lies between them, but all they did was pretend not to be so painfully aware of the other. Staring out windows, taking phone calls.

It was his childhood all over again. But worse, somehow. A thousand times worse. Because he knew what he was missing out on. What
they
were missing out on.

It seemed impossible that the woman who had stayed with him, held his hand, let him into her body, comforted him, counseled him, shared her graham crackers, now stood beside him a stranger, pretending at love.

“You should think about it,” he said to his wife. “Working with the food bank.”

She looked out the window, even harder if such a thing were possible.

“You’d be good.”

The sound she made was partially disbelief, but he couldn’t be sure because he couldn’t see her damn face.

Fuck this
, he thought on a sudden wave of anger, and he rolled up the partition between the front and back seats. They did not need any witnesses for this half-formed idea of his.

Chapter 21

“Look at me,” he barked, and she whirled to face him, stunned and disgruntled by his tone.

“What is with you?”

“What is with me is how we get in the backseat of this car and pretend like we don’t know each other.”

She blinked, as if confused. As if he didn’t make sense. As if he were speaking nonsense.

“Tell me.” With one hand he reached around her, between her body and the seat, until she was shifted toward him, his hand at her back. She was so slight, so small, it took almost no physical effort on his part to pull her halfway across the bench seat.

“What are you doing?” she asked, slapping her hands down against the leather seats to stop herself.

“What is the lie?” he asked. “When we’re alone, or when we’re out in public?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.” He bit off the words right in her face, and he watched the anger ignite in her. Felt it in her body, and he liked it. Liked the reaction. Wanted more. Wanted anything that was real. “I can’t keep it straight anymore. What is real and what is pretend. Do we like each other? Do we love each other? Are we indifferent? Is it hate we feel when no one is watching?”

He’d pulled her close enough that he could smell her breath. Gum and orange juice. The lotion she wore,
something sexy and flowery. And beneath that her skin. He could smell her. Like an animal he could smell her.

His cock got hard. His cock got very hard.

“Are you my wife?” Boldly, recklessly, he took his life in his hands and put his free hand on her knee because he knew this woman was capable of taking off his head if she chose. And suddenly, he dropped the idea that he was taking advantage of her. This wasn’t about the power that came from money or connections or big houses. Or the contract they’d signed.

This was about the power of choice.

And she could choose, right now, to stop him.

Or she could let him in.

He could stop waiting for them to be equals because in this, they were. They always had been.

Her skin was warm under his touch and he slid his palm up higher on her leg, until he felt the silk lining of her skirt on the top of his hand, the trembling muscles of her leg under his palm.

A flush climbed out from the demure edge of her suit jacket and he watched it cross the boundaries of her collarbones, up the pale, beautiful length of her neck into her face. Her panting breaths gave away her secrets; so did her dilated eyes. Her hands at her sides, opening and closing as if they couldn’t make up their mind.

“If you want me to stop, I will,” he breathed.

“What are you going to do?”

“Put my fingers inside of you. Make you come.”

The sound she made was part laugh, part sex sound. The sound she made when he pushed inside of her.

The blood in his veins nearly boiled.

“Do you want that?” he asked.

She nodded and he laughed, pressing the smallest, most tender kiss to the corner of her lips.

“Say it,” he breathed into her mouth.

“I want that.”

Another kiss, and when she turned her mouth to kiss him back, to send them furious and rabid into each other’s clothes, he pulled away. “Say the whole thing.”

She grabbed his head in her hands, holding him so she could stare right into the center of his brain, his soul. Whatever he expected from Ryan, he always somehow got more. Something more hot. More fierce. As if his imaginings were somehow clichéd, watered-down boy fantasies, and she came at him a whole woman.

“I want you to put your fingers inside me and make me come, and then I want you to lick your hand clean.”

Good Christ
. Done. He was done. She’d just finished him.