Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop)

by Molly O'Keefe

  “I’m not drinking—”

  “It’s decaf, honey,” Wallace said and she slumped in her chair, her hair slipping over her face. As Harrison watched, her shoulders shook.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, astonished. Was that what it took to win this woman over? Lukewarm decaf from the coffee shop down the street?

  “No,” she snapped, and then gave Wallace a warm smile. “Thank you.”

  “Most welcome.” Wallace turned with a flourish. “And for you, Harrison, Golden Child, I bring good press.” He plopped down the armful of newspapers, which Harrison immediately began to rifle through. They weren’t on the cover of any paper, but the Journal-Constitution, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times all had stories of them in inside sections. All accompanied by a picture, most commonly the one of her kissing him.

  They look happy, he thought. Whoever that couple is, it seems real.

  “We are incredible actors,” she said, tapping the picture.

  “You are,” he said. “I just follow your lead.”

  “Well,” Wallace said, “before you start thinking it’s a clean sweep, Maynard from the Journal-Constitution isn’t buying it.” Wallace flipped the paper open to an op-ed piece and started to read. “ ‘The Montgomery Family has lied so often and with such flagrant disregard for voters’ intelligence or morality that this new love match of Harrison’s reeks of just more of the same.’ ”

  “Ouch,” Ryan said into the silence after Wallace threw the paper down.

  “Maynard has never liked me,” Harrison said.

  “Well, he’ll be out for blood in the next few weeks. So, just be careful. But fear not,” Wallace said. “I did some polling—”

  “Wallace,” Harrison cried. “We don’t have the money for polls.”

  “We’ll find it. In fact, I imagine we might find it easier than we think, because …” Wallace pulled a creased paper out from his back pocket. “We’re doing great. Like … better than great. Like I haven’t seen numbers like this. Ever.”

  Harrison’s eyes scanned the numbers. They had skyrocketed. He was blown sideways by something like joy. But not quite. Happiness, but not really.

  Relief.

  Harrison was relieved.

  That was where his pendulum swung: between relief and stress, and no farther.

  “It worked,” he said, beaming up at her, and she blinked as if his face were the sun and it was too bright and then … she smiled. Right back at him.

  Animosity. Apple-throwing. The icebergs. His family. It was all gone. And it was like the bar the night they met. Just two people and the chemistry of kindness.

  And his pendulum strained toward happiness.

  “I’m glad,” she whispered.

  “Good,” Wallace said. “Because we have a little over two months. The fundraiser with your sister at the end of the week. And two more rallies after that, a debate, a thousand press events and community center speeches, and then, if we can keep this momentum … we should be in the clear.”

  Harrison nodded, not really listening to Wallace, and he reached over for her and before she could duck away, or stop him, he pulled her into a hard hug.

  Her face against his chest, the weight of his arms around her shoulders, his hands wide against the smooth bare skin of her back revealed by her tank top.

  To his surprise, his pleasure, she sighed into the sensation, caught unaware without her guards, and she sank right into that hug. His starved body soaked up the contact.

  “Thank you,” he breathed against her hair. “Thank you.”

  For a man who seemed to only ride around in the backseats of cars, sit behind a desk, and occasionally blow press conferences, he was fantastically well built. She knew this because she was currently face first against his chest.

  He was lean but taut; not ripped, but hard-seeming. The muscles in his back and arms rippled as he stroked her hair.

  The gesture sent a surprising hot wind through her that felt suspiciously like desire.

  Weird. Because she’d thought sexual desire had been overrun by stress and nausea. A general dislike and confusion toward Harrison.

  But the Internet had warned her that, too, would come back. For some women, with a vengeance.

  Don’t let me be some women, she thought. How much more tenuous would this situation be if she wanted Harrison? As in really wanted him.

  “Well, you haven’t won the election yet,” she said, finally coming to her senses and pulling away. She stepped back and even that wasn’t enough, so she went around the counter to pick up the apple she’d thrown, the chunks that had splintered off. Then she realized she had no idea where the garbage can was in this kitchen.

  It was time she learned, if this was her home.

  It was time to figure it all out if this was her home.

  “I’m going to need to find a doctor,” she said. “An ob/gyn.”

  “You can call my doctor,” Harrison said. “He’ll have someone he can recommend.”

  She wanted to resist that, wanted to make it harder somehow, but that would have been pointless. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’ll text you his number,” he said, and then took a deep breath. “I have to go pick up my sister in Bishop, Arkansas, this week.”

  “Is that … do I need to go with?” Bishop, Arkansas, sounded terrible. And hot. And … terrible.

  “Need? No. But if you’d like—”

  “Actually,” Wallace said, “we could use her at the League of Women Voters luncheon … with your mother.”

  “You’re going to leave me with your mother?” she asked. “Without a chaperone?”

  “I don’t know how much trouble you can get into with the League of Women Voters.”

  She put the smashed apple on the counter and lifted an eyebrow. Shockingly, he laughed.

  And her reaction at this point was so predictable it was ridiculous. Ten minutes ago she’d been throwing an apple at his head, and now he was laughing and it made her want to smile. It made her want to investigate that bare chest a little further.

  “Well, before you worry about that,” Wallace said, “you’re heading to Sweet Bliss Bakery today to talk about small business in Decatur.”

  “Me too?” she asked.

  “Yes, you too,” Wallace laughed. “You and Harrison are attached at the hip until he leaves for Arkansas. Welcome to marriage and the campaign.”

  Wallace drove over to Sweet Bliss with them, briefing Harrison on the remarks he would make at the bakery. She couldn’t say she understood the finer points of tax breaks, incentives, and relief, but she figured it was part of her job to at least try and pay attention.

  “Unemployment numbers came out yesterday,” Wallace said.

  “And?” Harrison asked, glancing up from his notes.

  “It’s bad.”

  Harrison sighed the kind of sigh she understood so well. Sometimes there was just so much wrong, it was hard to figure out what to try and change first.

  The bakery was a funky storefront on a cool, leafy business street lined with cafés and park benches. Inside, it was crowded with people, a few reporters and the owner, Sandy, a smiling Mexican woman who jumped out from behind the counter to welcome them.

  “There’s Maynard,” Wallace whispered, his eyes trained on a guy she recognized from the press conference on the far side of the bakery, and Harrison nodded to confirm he heard him, while continuing to shake hands with every person in the room.

  Ryan stepped back, fading into the woodwork and the loaves of bread, trying to breathe through her mouth. Because the smell of baking bread and cookies didn’t smell good now; it smelled sour.

  Proof that God could be so mean.

  The stop was a short one. Harrison had a coffee and a Danish, and sat at a table and answered questions about tax breaks for small business and incentives for entrepreneurs.

  “I have a question,” Maynard said when things were winding down. She saw Wallace, in the back of
the room, glance up, his entire body taut at the sound of Maynard’s voice.

  “Shoot,” Harrison said, and took his first sip of coffee, which now had to be cold.

  “It’s for your wife.”

  Every eye turned to her where she sat on a stool beside the counter, a cup of tea at her elbow.

  Instinctively she wanted to flinch or narrow her eyes and demand to know what they thought they were looking at, but she smiled instead, hoping she looked delighted and surprised. Like she knew what the hell she was doing.

  “All right,” she said.

  From the corner of her eye she caught Wallace and Harrison share a quick look of fear, which did nothing for her confidence.

  “Unemployment numbers came out yesterday.”

  “Not good, are they?” she said.

  Maynard blinked, and inside she did a victory dance. “No. They’re not. Particularly for women. Women are the fastest-growing demographic in unemployment.”

  “What exactly is your question?”

  “Do you have any insights into that?”

  Wallace on the far side of the room stood up as if he were going to put a stop to the whole event, but she knew if they did that without her answering the question, all the good press from today would start to fade away and Maynard’s voice would get louder.

  She remembered her brother after finding out she was pregnant. You’re broke. Alone and about to have a baby.

  Had she stayed in New York, she would have applied for unemployment.

  So yeah, asshole, she thought. I have some insights.

  “I don’t think we can talk about women and unemployment unless we talk about reliable and affordable day care, or health care, or safe neighborhood schools. Raising children falls more often than not on the mother’s shoulders, and sometimes it’s impossible to hold down a job and be pregnant. Or hold down a job and keep our kids safe and cared for.”

  “Amen!” Sandy, the owner of the bakery, shouted from her spot behind the counter. “I couldn’t start this bakery until my kids were in school full time and able to get themselves home from where they were being bused.”

  “There you go,” Ryan said, pointing at Sandy. “That’s my insight.”

  A few other people started clapping, and while sweat trickled down her spine and her head went fuzzy, she caught Harrison’s eye.

  The summer before her mom died she was on a T-ball team, a Bridesburg neighborhood thing sponsored by the Gas ’N Go. But Ryan had taken that shit seriously. She’d stood at first base with her mitt up, her eye on the ball, waiting for her chance to make a play. Any play.

  Dad had stood in the tall weeds past the first base line, smiling at her like she’d invented the game.

  Proud.

  That’s how he’d looked at her.

  That’s how Harrison was looking at her now.

  Like she’d invented the damn game.

  Ryan smiled at Sandy, and then, because she was nearly light-headed from stress and relief and the sour smell of sourdough bread, she reached over and squeezed her hand.

  Sandy hauled her into her arms and the way Ryan was sitting, her face went right into her boobs. Which made both of them laugh.

  Flashbulbs went off.

  Harrison stood up and came over to her, helping her off the stool, wrapping his arm over her shoulders. “Thanks, everyone!” he said, waving and saying goodbye, and within minutes they were settled in the backseat of the town car again.

  With Wallace, the grinning, bouncing maniac.

  “You are a goddamned natural!” he cried, all but punching her in the shoulder.

  “A natural bullshitter,” she laughed.

  “Maynard thought he had you,” Harrison said. That smile flirted around his lips, his eyes were glittering, and she’d never seen him so … shiny. This was the Harrison on the video footage. Harrison Montgomery the candidate. And all that shine, all that glitter, it was falling down on her, too.

  It was heady stuff.

  “But he didn’t!” Wallace cried, and he and Harrison went on to break down the event and her performance.

  She felt herself blushing. And it was hard to breathe, actually.

  Growing up, she’d thought she was a part of a clan. A team. The Kaminskis. Someone in that house always had her back, always made sure she was okay. She knew that if it was required, people would go to war for her. And she would do the same for her sisters and brother. Her dad.

  They were never alone when they had each other.

  But she’d been kicked off that team and she’d been alone. Really, really alone for a long time.

  But not anymore.

  In the strangest places she’d found herself another tribe. An unlikely team.

  She turned her face toward the window so they wouldn’t see her crying.

  Chapter 17

  Friday, September 6

  The morning that Harrison was leaving for Bishop, Arkansas, it was raining. A dark day pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a fog obscured the view of the city and the trees she’d gotten used to in the last few days.

  And oddly, it matched her mood.

  It was weird that she would be alone here. In his house. Without him.

  “Other than the Voters luncheon, you won’t have anything on your schedule,” Harrison said, putting his suitcase by the door. “Have you called the doctor?”

  “I have an appointment tomorrow.”

  He nodded, as if that were all that needed to be said about that.

  For all their team spirit, the baby was still a no-man’s-land between them. Never discussed. Sometimes she got the sense that he wanted to change that, ask her about it, be involved, but perversely she wouldn’t allow it.

  She had to stop herself from getting sucked so totally into this huge life of his. He could use her for the campaign and she could like it, even love it. The meetings and the events. The glitter by association. The teamwork. It was exhausting, but she felt like she was a part of something.

  And that was seductive.

  But something had to remain hers; not everything could be used as fuel for his campaign. And the baby was what she was clinging to. The baby and her red teacup and being stubborn and perverse for the sake of being stubborn and perverse.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Sleep, mostly. I have to call my landlord and end my lease.”

  “What about your stuff?”

  “My brother is going to box it up for me.”

  “He can send it here?”

  “He was going to deliver it personally and then stick around for a week,” she said, straight-faced. “He can sleep on the couch, can’t he?”

  “Is that a joke? That’s a joke.”

  “Is it?”

  In the end she couldn’t keep a straight face and they both smiled, cracking the strange tension of his leaving and the doctor’s appointment.

  From the back bedroom she’d been calling home, she heard the ringing of her cell phone.

  “I need to go get that,” she said, putting down her teacup and ducking out of the kitchen and away from Harrison.

  The room was dark, the curtains still drawn. The bed she slept in was shoved in the corner, covered in amazing gazillion-thread-count sheets and blankets. In the corner was a treadmill, which might explain her husband’s physique if it weren’t covered top to bottom in boxes.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and grabbed her phone from the windowsill where it was charging.

  The number had a Philly area code.

  Nora. It was Nora. She must have gotten word from the bank that the mortgage had been paid and maybe that a bank account had been set up in Olivia’s name.

  She suddenly had two hearts, one in her stomach the other in her throat.

  For a moment she allowed herself to imagine the words coming out of Nora’s mouth: Come home. We miss you.

  “Hello?” she said, her eyes closed, daring to hope.

  “What the hell hav
e you done now, Ryan!” Nora snapped.

  “What … what do you mean?”

  “I got a call from the bank today. I have to go down there and sign papers because the mortgage has been paid off and an account has been set up in Olivia’s name and I’m in charge of it?”

  “Why are you making this seem like a bad thing?”

  “How’d you get the money?”

  Don’t, she told herself. Don’t make it worse. Don’t be awful just because she is. But in the end, she’d bitten her tongue enough in the past few days and she couldn’t anymore.

  “Well, you’d never believe this, but I made enough sucking dick—”

  “Ryan!” Nora exhaled, long and slow. “Can we talk seriously?”

  “You’re the one who called with accusations, Nora.”

  “Okay. How did you get this money?”

  “I married Harrison Montgomery. It’s all part of our prenup.”

  The shocked silence on the other end of the line should have been satisfying, but her world was too messed up. “You married him?”

  “I did. If you ever read a newspaper, I imagine you’ll see my picture.” She almost told Nora about the baby, but the poor baby had been through enough the past few days.

  “Are you … okay?”

  Ryan closed her eyes against the sting of tears, but somehow that wasn’t enough. She had to climb up onto the bed and lie there in a fetal position, her head buried in the mound of blankets on the unmade bed.

  “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully, unsure of where that would get her with her angry sister.

  “Are you in danger?”

  My body, no. My heart, maybe?

  “No. I’m … he’s nice.”

  “And you’re such a good judge of men?”

  “I would have thought you’d be grateful!”

  “Don’t tell me you did this for us?”

  “Who else would I do it for?”

  “Yourself! Oh … God, Ryan. I don’t … what the hell am I supposed to say to that?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, beyond exhausted. Beyond defeated. “Can we start with thank you?”

  “Fine. Thank you.”

  The connection buzzed with silence. “Dad … Dad misses you. Olivia’s harassing me all the time to get you to come home …”