Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop)

by Molly O'Keefe

  His icy blue eyes met hers, wide with surprise, but then he glanced away, hiding himself again. She’d hit a nerve, she thought.

  Smarter women might leave him alone. Go back to staring out the window and gathering reserves for the coming weeks. Smarter women would shut up and not poke at the man in his cage.

  She’d never been very smart.

  “I was talking about your parents.”

  He didn’t pause, didn’t look up. She wouldn’t have known he’d heard her if it weren’t for the muscle flexing hard in his jaw.

  “Complaining about the in-laws already?” He flipped a page so hard it sounded like the paper tore.

  “Has it always been like that?”

  “What? Dad drunk and Mom furious? Yes. It has always been like that.”

  “Do you hate them both equally?” she asked. “Or are you saving something special for your father?”

  Slowly, so slowly, like the earth turning, he lifted his eyes toward her. “What makes you say that?”

  “You barely looked at him.”

  “I only had eyes for you.” His smile was a cold, hard slice in his face. The most ineffective smile ever smiled.

  “Why do you hate your dad so much?” she asked. “Is it the drinking?” Honestly, she didn’t expect him to answer. There was no precedent set between her and Harrison. Or even Harry, really, who’d managed to tell her very little about himself, all while she was falling headfirst into his bed.

  “I don’t hate him,” he lied, and she laughed.

  “Your mother you talked to—not kindly, but you answered her questions. You did her the honor of argument. But your father …” She shook her head. “That was a heavy-duty freeze-out. Top notch, really, because you were smiling the whole time.”

  He shifted in his seat as if he were sitting on nettles. “My father and I disagree on a lot of things politically.”

  “What was happening during that ceremony wasn’t political, Harrison. I may not be smart. But I’m not dumb.”

  “This whole thing is political. The marriage, you being here. None of this would be happening if I weren’t in politics.”

  She shook her head, enjoying his discomfort, his angry clinging to lies and defenses he’d already created in regard to how he dealt with his family. She wondered when he’d done that, how he’d learned it. Was it something that happened to Montgomerys at birth? Alcoholics were thick on the ground back home and she’d watched plenty of families get destroyed, plenty of husbands and wives and kids turn themselves inside out pretending there was nothing wrong in their homes.

  Well, that nonsense would end with her baby. Her baby wouldn’t lie to keep the family skeletons in their closets.

  “But for your family politics is personal, and I must say, that heavy-duty anger toward your dad, it felt pretty personal.”

  “Plenty of fathers and sons don’t get along. I can’t imagine what your father thinks of your brother?” He lifted an eyebrow, sending her what she imagined was usually a cutting glance, but she had nothing to lose. Nothing left to cut. He could not touch her with his poor efforts.

  “My father would lie down in traffic for all of us,” she said. Or he would have, once upon a time. Now, she couldn’t be sure.

  “How lovely.”

  “And your dad, would he do that for you?”

  Harrison laughed. “He would only lie down in traffic if it got him good publicity.”

  “Is that why you hate him?”

  “No, Ryan,” he snapped. “I hate him because he’s weak. He abuses his power. He pretends to be something he’s not.”

  “Oh,” she breathed, sort of stunned that he’d actually answered. Sort of stunned that dishonor was at the heart of his dislike for his father. She’d believed that dishonor was part of the political package. The Montgomery reality.

  “Why haven’t you talked to your sister in six years?” he asked, turning the interrogation over onto her.

  She barely controlled the flinch, the instinctive recoil, because that was what he wanted. She’d played this game of polite torture, delicate cruelty, before with her sister and it was poisonous and destructive. But she was very, very good at it.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “She called me just the other morning to tell me not to screw up our little sister’s life any more than I have.”

  “And that’s something you’ve done?”

  I screw up everyone’s life, she thought. Just watch.

  “It’s why I am marrying you, you know. If it were just me, I wouldn’t give a shit about the press. But my sisters. My dad. My brother. This baby. Marrying you and your money will change everyone’s lives.”

  And maybe … maybe it will let me back in.

  “Why did you marry me?” she asked.

  Harrison shook his head and reached back into the small hidden compartment in the seat between them for the scotch. “We’ve covered this, haven’t we? A sex scandal would ruin my career.”

  “I know what you told me, Harrison. But what your mother said tonight is true—there were other ways to handle this. So why marriage? And I’ll remind you I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  “Yes, the human lie detector claim. Did you learn that from your years behind the bar or those psychology books in your apartment?” His eyes glittered from under his lashes.

  “Oh no,” she laughed, fairly convincingly if she did say so herself. “I just look at the pictures in those books.”

  “Now who is lying?” he asked, his voice a quiet whisper before he took a sip of the scotch.

  Oh, he was far better at this game than she was.

  Because he’d seen the secrets, the small desires she kept in her apartment, those stupid books. That stupid dream to go back to school. And he would mock it. Diminish it. Just to hurt her, because that was the awful game she’d started.

  And she knew nothing of him. Nothing at all.

  I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t spend every minute of my life playing some kind of chess match with this man, wondering what is real and what isn’t.

  She hated the very thought of it, a future spent on high alert, looking for weaknesses to exploit just to wound him. Just to find the human being beneath that façade of his—it made her feel like she was drowning.

  Tears burned behind her eyes and she looked away from his sharp gaze.

  The wheels hummed along the highway, the world a blur outside the window. “If this is going to work,” she said, pressing her hand against the cool glass and then her forehead, “to the world outside, we’ll lie our faces off. But you and I …”

  The words Let’s be kind. We’ve both been hurt enough wouldn’t come out of her mouth into the horrible coldness between them.

  “No lies between us?” he supplied.

  She nodded and whispered, feeling more painfully vulnerable than she had all night, “No lies between us.”

  “I married you because I am not my father. I may make his mistakes, but I am not my father.”

  “Mistakes?” she asked, his words slipping down along her neck, through the skin down to her bones. Where it hurt.

  Me, she thought. He means me.

  She thought of that girl nearly dead in a car crash and how she’d been pushed aside until she vanished.

  “You wanted honesty,” he said.

  “Yeah, that will teach me, won’t it?” She curled away from him, staring out the window at a world rushing by.

  Chapter 13

  Harrison bought his loft a few years ago in one of his early efforts to prove he wasn’t his parents. He used every scrap of his meager savings, collected over the years from his stipend as director of VetAid. He’d also used the trust his grandfather had set up in his name.

  Just about everything he had except this loft had been eaten by the campaign. Until the election was over and he was back to earning a living in some capacity, he was as broke as he’d ever been. As he ever wanted to be.

  The contract for his driver was paid fo
r.

  The jet belonged to his parents, and he was stupidly grateful for it.

  The unit he bought was in an old cotton factory, part of the revitalization of unused urban spaces. It was in direct contrast to the home he grew up in on Clifton Road overlooking Druid Hills Golf Club in a leafy neighborhood off of Ponce de Leon Ave.

  “You live in a factory?” Ryan stared up at the old brick building.

  “Not what you expected?” he asked, leading her into the building.

  He took no small amount of pleasure in surprising her. He was still sore from the way she’d slowly pulled him open inside the car, as if all his carefully kept secrets, all those things the Montgomerys hid away so well, were just readily available to her. As if she could just reach into his chest and play tic-tac-toe with what hurt him the most.

  He’d hurt her, too, in the car. It had seemed like the only way to get her to back off.

  Another reason to stay removed from her. So they could come through this without tearing each other apart.

  “You can use the second bedroom,” he said as they walked in, and he flipped on the lights. He pointed down the hall toward his guest room, which had a bed shoved into the corner surrounded by boxes and a treadmill he didn’t use enough. But it was clean and the sheets were fresh. “It’s a little cluttered, but it should work.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” she said, polite and subdued, which was kind of terrifying in her.

  “There’s a bathroom right beside it,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

  His entire floor plan was open concept, and he’d bought the furnished showroom with its modern furniture. The sleek leather sectional and the dining set next to the floor-to-ceiling windows faced a neon downtown.

  A metal spiral staircase led up to his bedroom, bathroom, and a small study. The walls were brick and the metal beams across the ceiling were original, and he remembered once upon a time liking that. Liking how different it was from anything he grew up in. How independent it had made him feel.

  His sister was halfway around the world saving lives and defying their parents by living in poverty, and he showed his rebellion by buying an industrial loft.

  Sometimes he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

  In the corner the kitchen was an eat-in counter, and he paid his assistant to grab groceries every week. Most of which piled up in his fridge until he threw them out, but he was glad at the moment to have food he could offer the pale woman still standing at the door.

  “Would you like a sandwich?”

  Her face tightened. “No thanks.”

  “You should eat something.” He hadn’t noticed it until now, but she looked much thinner than she had that night at the hotel. As if something had been slowly whittling her down to bone and muscle.

  “Not unless you want me to throw up all over your floor.”

  He paused while pulling ham out of his fridge. “Is that something you do a lot of?”

  Hollow-eyed and exhausted, she looked at him, and he could tell that she was figuring out the distinction between no lies between them and keeping parts of herself safe.

  He’d done the same thing in the car, figuring out just how much truth to give this stranger he’d married. It was cold. Calculating. And the only way to get through the next few weeks. To say nothing of the next two years.

  Then it occurred to him that marrying her had been his biggest rebellion, and he didn’t know how he felt about that. He’d spent so many years putting distance between himself and his family, storing away parts of himself like he was hoarding it. But for what? For whom?

  To be his own man. To distinguish himself from the long line of Montgomerys who’d squandered and abused every single advantage they’d had.

  He’d spent so much time—every minute of every day since he’d been twenty-two—deciding who he wasn’t while still measuring himself with their yardstick. He envied his sister and her clean break from the family, but he could not get where he needed to go without them.

  Simultaneously he cared about none of it and too much about all of it.

  He felt sometimes that he’d spent so much time polishing all the wrong things about himself, leaving too much of real value to be forgotten, grown over with weeds and rust.

  It is the job you’ve chosen, he told himself. It’s the role you play. You want to be in politics. All those things you don’t care about, or don’t want to care about—they matter.

  He looked at her, this fierce woman, perhaps liar, he’d married who seemed somehow so rooted in her flip-flops and shabby green dress, who despite all but selling herself to him managed to stand there defiant and totally her own person.

  And he was envious of her. Envious of her singularity. Of the way she didn’t care about the yardsticks he cared about. He wanted to ask her how she did it.

  “I’m going to bed.” She grabbed her purse and her beat-up duffel bag and walked down the hall toward his spare bedroom.

  Harrison watched her go and then made a sandwich, which he ate standing up. The milk was still good, so he poured himself a glass and stood at his window, watched the headlights on I-75, and toasted his wedding night.

  Alone.

  Monday, August 26

  Before dawn, Harrison woke up to the sound of someone being violently, wretchedly ill.

  Ryan.

  All of it coming back to him in that confusing place between dream and reality.

  He threw pants on and hustled down the metal steps to the bathroom next to the guest room.

  Inside it was eerily silent. He knocked quietly on the door.

  “Ryan?”

  “Go away.”

  “You sound … really sick.”

  “I am really sick. Now go away.”

  He stepped back from the door, feeling helpless, but then the door opened, revealing Ryan.

  Dawn light, rosy and creamy, covered her pale, perfect skin. She wore short cotton shorts that revealed the muscled length of her legs and a thin, tight black tank top like the one from the night in the hotel.

  “Hey,” he said, blindsided by the reality of her, sick and beautiful in his loft. “Everything … okay?”

  “Fine.” She pushed past him toward the kitchen. The tattoo on her back peeked over the tank top’s black edge. The woman’s hands, wrapped in seaweed and flowers, her blond hair a cloud around her face. Her eyes closed in some kind of surrender.

  She was drowning.

  My wife has a tattoo of a drowning woman on her back.

  Ryan stopped, turned around, and went back to her room only to come out with a red teacup that he recognized from her apartment cradled in her hands.

  As he watched, she got herself a glass of water and took a pill.

  My pregnant wife.

  “I have teacups,” he said. “You didn’t need to bring your own.”

  “I like my own.”

  “Can I get you something?”

  “I’m fine.” She sat at one of the high stools that in his memory no one had ever sat on. Ever.

  His parents had barely been to his home. Wallace came once to watch a Braves game when his cable got blown out in a storm—which had been an oddly satisfying experience, despite the fact that he didn’t care much for baseball. He’d never had a party. The few women he’d dated hadn’t been over. If pressed, he would say that he would rather sleep on the couch in his campaign office than upstairs in the bedroom.

  What does that say about me?

  “What happened to no lies between us?” He stepped around her and into the kitchen to start coffee.

  “I have bad morning sickness.” She gave him a wan smile before putting her head back in her hands. “I took a pill, but it just takes a while.”

  He checked his watch. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked, taking in her utterly defeated posture. “Because in a half hour most of my staff is going to be here to get us ready for the press conference.”

  “You bought a wife.” She shook back her hair,
her smile not quite up to full wattage, but he gave her points for trying. “You’ll get a wife.”

  “We can postpone—”

  She stood, uncoiling her body one long, lithe muscle at a time from his stool. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  His team was good, his mother perhaps the best player of the political game in the world, but he had serious doubts that they were going to pull this off. She looked ill, the distance between them was vast and hurtful, and he felt oddly off center. Aware too clearly of the lies he’d been telling his whole life. Not big ones, not terrible ones like his father, but dozens of little ones, about his family. About happiness. And he wasn’t entirely sure of his own ability to carry off another series of lies.

  And the pale, sick, and angry woman who was supposed to help him tell those lies seemed completely incapable of looking him in the eyes, much less pretending to be in love.

  This, he thought, is going to be a disaster.

  Wallace arrived full of ebullient congratulations in a hideous purple tie. Jill brought donuts and a marginally better outlook than yesterday. Dave, his assistant, silent and steadfast, made coffee.

  “Where’s Ryan?” Wallace asked.

  “Getting ready.” It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Wallace that this was never going to work. The press conference, the sham marriage—they should just quit while they were ahead.

  But then Mother arrived with Noelle in tow, carrying armfuls of shopping bags. And he would not admit his misgivings in front of his mother.

  “Where is she?” Patty asked, sniffing the air for Ryan. “I have her wardrobe.”

  And as if the sound of her voice had been the starting bell in a boxing match, Ryan came out of the guest room, wearing a denim skirt and a faded blue Pabst Blue Ribbon beer tee shirt.

  “She wore that just to piss off your mother, didn’t she?” Wallace whispered, biting into a second glazed donut. The remnants of his first were all over his tie.

  Harrison didn’t answer, but he imagined that Ryan smiled when she’d put on that shirt, thinking about Patty’s reaction.

  “Good morning,” Ryan said, looking oddly meek with her wet hair unbound, her face pink and freshly scrubbed.