Fixer: A Bad Boy Romance

by Samantha Westlake

  Quickly, Tanner tried to throw himself back in his chair. He prayed that the tall back of the winged armchair would shield him. A moment later, he heard footsteps behind him, approaching, but didn't let himself turn around.

  "Tanner?"

  Shit. God fucking dammit. Tanner swallowed, tried to take a deep breath, coughed instead as the air didn't manage to make it down his windpipe. He sat forward, and Alicia's hand patted him on the back between his shoulder blades.

  "Tanner, are you alright? Just try and breathe."

  After a minute, he managed to draw in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "Alicia?" he asked, turning and looking up at her beautiful, concerned face. "What are you doing here?"

  "What am I doing here? You texted me," she answered, frowning a little deeper at him.

  What? "I didn't," he protested, reaching for his pocket.

  "Yes, you did," she insisted. She waited, rolling her eyes mildly at him as he unlocked his phone. Sure enough, Tanner saw with a surge of horrified embarrassment that, instead of sending a text to Freddie with his location, he'd instead sent it to Alicia's number!

  "Oh. Shit."

  "Not sure why you're so set on getting drunk so quickly," Alicia said, pushing his feet gently off of the ottoman in front of the armchair and sitting down delicately on the cushion instead. "But I was sitting around the office, Duecent was harping on me about something, and I figured that hey, there's nothing more I can do for my education bill tonight. Honestly, we've done just about everything that we can, haven't we?"

  "Uh huh," Tanner nodded, grunting as an invisible knife twisted in his guts, reminding him that he'd betrayed this woman just hours earlier. He retrieved his drink from her hand, swallowed the rest of it. The attentive waiter immediately darted forward to take the empty glass from his fingers.

  "So I thought that I might as well come enjoy a drink as well," Alicia went on. "Maybe it's a bit of a jinx to think about celebrating before the bill's been called to the floor, but I think that I've earned it." She smiled at Tanner, a smile that sent another crack lancing through his already shattered heart. "Who would have guessed that being a senator could be so exhausting?"

  "You didn't notice the white hair on all your peers?" he replied, his mouth operating on autopilot as his brain tried to squeeze itself to death and his heart slowly fractured further. "It's not that they're all old - they've just picked up twenty years in the last decade from trying to please the American public!"

  Alicia laughed, high and clear and agonizing. "It does make a horrible kind of sense, doesn't it? Anyway, let me go get a drink from the bar, and I'll be right back."

  "I'll be right here," Tanner called after her, unable to resist plunging another knife into himself by watching her cute ass swing back and forth as she walked away. She wasn't the hottest woman in the world, he tried to remind himself.

  But the words didn't mean much when he wanted her desperately, more than any other he could imagine.

  Tanner's waiter showed back up, fresh scotch in hand. "I brought you a double," the man disclosed, instantly earning himself another ten percent on top of his tip in Tanner's mind.

  "Thanks." Tanner swallowed a big slug, not even tasting the complex flavors of the scotch. His mouth still felt dry as ashes. "Keep them coming."

  The waiter nodded, and Tanner tried to paste his fake smile back on as Alicia turned and smiled back at him, giving him a little wave from the bar. His heart ached, broke, came back together only to shatter once again.

  And it was at that moment, looking at this infuriating woman who wouldn't get out of his mind, that Tanner knew beyond a doubt that he'd made a terrible mistake.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  *

  The rest of the evening flew by in a haze of smiles on the outside, matched by Tanner's growing self-loathing and hatred inside his own head.

  Somehow, Tanner managed to keep up a happy appearance for Alicia. He matched the female senator's happy tone, trying his best to keep the conversation away from talk of the education bill that would come up for a vote the following morning. Thankfully, Alicia also didn't want to spend the whole night talking about the bill, and he managed to keep most of the conversation on lighter topics.

  Even with other topics of conversation, however, Tanner kept feeling the agonizing pain growing inside his chest, eating away at him from the inside. He smiled at Alicia, matched her flirty comments, leaned in as she ran her hand over his leg, while repeating to himself that he was absolute scum. He needed to just tell her the truth, break it to her before she discovered the full extent of his betrayal tomorrow.

  He tried, several times, to summon up the courage to come clean. But each time he opened his mouth, he looked at Alicia, felt his heart break again, and knew that he was too much of a spineless coward to do it.

  What the hell was his problem? He'd broken up with dozens of girls before Alicia, some of them with incredible callousness. None of them ever so much as disturbed his sleep the next night.

  But none of them were Alicia.

  "Hey," the woman said, cutting into his anguished thoughts. "What's going on with you? Your thoughts are all tied up with something, and it's not me."

  "Right. Sorry." Tanner shook his head, wishing that she'd stop smiling at him, stop looking at him like he was the most special person in the world. "I guess my mind's just distracted. Maybe I ought to call it an early night."

  "You sure it's not the dozen shots that you've put away?" Alicia asked, her eyes dipping to his glass, once again almost empty (Tanner caught a glimpse of his waiter, hovering on the periphery and ready to lift the glass out of his fingers as soon as he took the last gulp). "I didn't see how much you had before I got here, but if I had all that alcohol inside my body right now, you'd have to drag me home by slinging me over your shoulder."

  "Yeah, it's probably the booze," Tanner said, glad of the excuse. He swallowed the last bit of liquid and handed his credit card off to the waiter when he stepped forward. "Just add thirty percent on for yourself," he added to the man, who nodded with a growing smile.

  "Generous," Alicia grinned at him. She reached down and caught at his hand, tugging him up from the chair. Tanner staggered on his feet, the scotch making his vision spin and blur, and she quickly ducked forward to help hold him up. "Easy, now."

  "I should probably go home alone," Tanner groaned out, but Alicia just ignored these words as she walked him towards the door.

  "Nonsense," she insisted, as the waiter returned and accepted Tanner's illegible scrawl across the bottom of the receipt before passing back his black card. "You'll probably not even make it up to your apartment if I let you go off alone. Trust me, I'm used to caring for drunken idiots - you should have seen some of my brothers, growing up."

  "Brothers?" he repeated, feeling like the entire conversation was out of his control.

  She nodded. "Two older ones. Three and six years older, respectively. They used to show up at my college dorm room, wasted off their asses, and crash on my couch and floor. I got really good at cleaning up after them." She smiled up at him, as Tanner gloomily pictured how two large men might show up and beat him into a pulp after they found out how he betrayed their younger sister.

  Outside, Alicia called a car and bundled a still-protesting Tanner into the backseat. Leaning forward, she gave the driver Tanner's address, and then curled up against him, nestling into the crook of his arm as the car pulled away from the curb.

  Back at his apartment, Alicia once again easily resisted Tanner's efforts to convince her to go home, that he had everything under control. "I'm not going to be able to fall asleep tonight anyway, thinking about the bill's vote tomorrow," she told him, not seeing him wince in the darkness outside his building. "And I'm sure that you feel the same way. So we might as well not sleep together, don't you think?"

  Any other time, the idea of a girl - especially sexy, gorgeous, perfect, wonderful Alicia - practically dragging him into bed with free reign to do whate
ver he wanted to her would have seemed like a perfect fantasy. Tonight, it just stabbed another blade into Tanner's gut. Still, he couldn't manage to convince her otherwise, and instead watched with horror as she helped him up to his penthouse apartment. He felt a bit like he was having an out of body experience, stuck watching as his life came apart in slow motion.

  "I need to talk to you," he finally managed to croak out as he sat, drunk and helpless, on his couch inside his apartment.

  Alicia, standing up and wandering around looking at the scattered knickknacks on his shelves, glanced curiously over her shoulder at him. "Sure, go ahead. Going to tell me some of your history, now that I've revealed most of mine?"

  "My history?" Tanner repeated, distracted and confused.

  "Sure." Alicia picked up a picture of Tanner with a few of his college buddies, examined it, put it back on the shelf. "How'd you end up working as a fixer? For the Republicans, no less?"

  Tanner grimaced. Maybe, he thought wildly to himself, he could drive her away if he gave her the real, unvarnished truth here. Then, the betrayal tomorrow would just be one more rock to add to the pile.

  "They had more money, more desperation, and fewer morals," he answered honestly. "I majored in political science at Georgetown, didn't really pick a side at first. But I saw that, while all of the Democrats had these crazy ideals that wouldn't work in the real world unless every single person cooperated fairly, the Republicans were at least realistic about how fucked up everything was. I figured that, as long as there were some Republicans around, I'd need to be selfish if I wanted to get anything for myself. Might as well learn from the best."

  "That's rather cynical," Alicia commented, but she was still listening, a little smile still flickering around the corners of her mouth.

  He shrugged. "I figured that I wanted to be rich and powerful - who doesn't? If it meant that I had to fuck over a bunch of poor people to get it, well, that's how the world works." He knew that his words were harsh, cruel, but he kept going.

  This time, his barbed insult flew true. He saw Alicia wince for a moment. "Well, cruel as it is, at least you're not trying to disguise it as help, like some of your comrades-"

  "That's because they still need to pander to the idiots that keep on electing them," Tanner cut her off. He hated these words, hated saying them, even though they were all true. "I don't have that problem. This is how the real world works, anyway - people lie, cheat, cut all sorts of scammy deals in order to further their own ambitions. Even if it fucks over others, people that they love."

  Another wince from her. "But you don't have to-"

  "I lied." It came bursting out of him, louder than he intended.

  He saw Alicia frown, not understanding. "Yes, I know. I saw through it, remember?"

  "No, not that." He had to tell her. She deserved to know, even though it would hurt her more than he could imagine. "Tonight. Today. I wasn't out sick."

  He waited, watching her face. He expected to see suspicion appear, her realization that he was still a liar, always a liar, that he could never be better than what he was. But instead, she kept on looking at him, still open, still trusting him. She believed in him, and he was about to destroy her using that belief.

  "What were you doing?" she asked, her voice still not shaded by the hatred that he knew would come soon.

  Here it came. "I was meeting with some of the Senators. I killed the education bill."

  Nothing. She didn't believe him. He saw her eyes flick back and forth, trying to determine whether this was some sort of cruel, unfunny joke. He kept going.

  "That was my job, Alicia. From the beginning. Richard Pribus, the head of the RNC, hired me to kill the education bill. To stop you. The Republicans are scared of you, and they wanted to shut down your agenda right away. So they hired me, told me to find a way, any way, to make sure that this education bill didn't pass, without it looking like a purely Republican attack against American education."

  Finally, it was starting to sink in. Her eyes held pain, now, betrayal even worse than he'd imagined. He plunged on, knowing that, as bad as this was, he had to say his piece.

  "All of our time together - I was searching for weaknesses, ways to crack through your support. I did it today, the day before the bill goes to the floor of the Senate for a vote. I called in favors, leaned on Senators, didn't follow the rules. I killed it. It won't get nearly enough votes tomorrow to pass. Both Republicans and Democrats will vote against it."

  Alicia sank down onto the chair across from the couch where he sat, her eyes brimming with tears. "No," she said, almost too quietly for him to hear.

  "Alicia, I'm sorry," Tanner said wretchedly, knowing that the words were a band-aid slapped over a fatal wound. "I know that I broke the truce, that you didn't expect this-"

  But she just looked back at him, and he hated the expression that he saw on her face. He'd been prepared for anger, sorrow, frustration, maybe even rage. He'd expected her to start throwing things, maybe wreck his apartment as she stormed out.

  Instead, however, she looked disappointed, but not surprised. Almost as if-

  "I should have expected this," she said, almost inaudibly. "I kept waiting for it, in the back of my head. A little part of me hoped that you'd be different, that I'd prove myself wrong."

  She stood up, brushed at her knees as if dusting off a little bit of invisible dirt. "But I was right."

  And that was it.

  No yelling. No breaking things, no angry insults or accusations. Tanner almost wished that she'd yell, that she'd get her anger out, that she'd attack him for destroying what would have been the first big accomplishment of her career. A career that he had just confessed that he was doing his best to kill.

  But Alicia didn't say anything. Not even goodbye. She just turned and slowly, almost emotionlessly, left his apartment. She didn't even slam the door behind her; it just closed softly, noiselessly, leaving no trace of her behind.

  All that remained of her was the faintest trace of her perfume, floating in the air for a few seconds before dissipating.

  Tanner didn't get up from the couch. His head still buzzed with the after-effects of the drinks he'd consumed earlier that evening, but he doubted that he could choke down another swallow. His stomach already roiled, angry at him, not understanding why this stress and self-hate had emerged so suddenly.

  He finally grasped the sides of the sofa and hauled himself up to his feet - and then immediately sprinted for his bathroom. His stomach lurched, rejected its contents, and he barely made it to his knees in front of his toilet before the first heaves began.

  Fitting, he thought darkly to himself as he purged the last couple of drinks from his system.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  *

  The next morning, the sunlight stabbed into Tanner's eyes like daggers, even through his closed eyelids. He turned and growled, trying to pull his pillow over his head to block out those rays - but the movement made his stomach heave, and he froze in place as he struggled to maintain control.

  After the queasiness passed, at least for the moment, he slowly sat up, reaching up to wipe away some of the crustiness that clung to his eyelids. He felt like a similar crust had formed over his tongue, drying out his mouth and making him gag. He pulled himself up to his feet, swayed for a moment, and then staggered for the bathroom to scrub his tongue with his toothbrush.

  After scraping his tongue off, he looked up into the mirror across from his sink. He scarcely recognized the face that stared back at him - pale, drawn, fine lines starting to betray his age. He tried to put on a smile, but it just made him look even more like he belonged in a coffin, front and center in a funeral ceremony.

  "You're a dumbass," Tanner croaked to his reflection. The reflection just nodded, in full agreement.

  He knew what he needed to do today. This morning - in just a couple of hours, in fact - the Senate would meet, and the vote for the American Quality Education Bill would be called. There would be some discus
sion, most of it pointing out issues with the bill, why everyone should vote against it.

  Alicia Stone, of course, would do her best to mount a strong defense of the bill, arguing for why it was not only advisable, but necessary for America to improve the quality of education that it offered.

  It wouldn't be enough. Speeches made great sound bites for the news networks to play that evening, but just about every Senator in the chamber would have already made up his or her mind - either based off of their own beliefs, what a more senior member instructed them to think, or based off of the corporation that helped fill their campaign war chest coffers. Her speech would earn applause from everyone - and change the minds of no one.

  And then, just as Tanner wanted, the bill would die, failing to be passed.

  He'd earn his pay, keep on maintaining his extravagant lifestyle, his luxury apartment, his oversized bank account balance, keep his memberships to all of the elite Republican clubs and keep on paying off the big bar tabs he racked up at them. He'd once again prove that he was the best fixer the RNC owned, that he could pull off political feats unmatched by the efforts of anyone else.

  Still staring into the eyes of his wan and haggard reflection as it stared back at him, Tanner couldn't even begin to feel the slightest bit of pride in his accomplishment.

  He got dressed, did his best to fix his appearance. He shaved off the stubble that coated his cheeks and jawline, but his lack of focus added several little cuts to his features. He cursed and blotted them with tissue paper.

  Tanner looked through his walk-in closet, trying to decide between all of the identical appearing suits. Eventually, he grabbed one at random. Despite being individually tailored for his body, at great expense, it felt loose on him. He tied the necktie, tugged it roughly into place, and then left the apartment.

  He'd woken up late, and the speeches by various Senators were already well underway by the time that he stepped into the visitor's gallery. Mounted on the upper floor and overlooking the Senate chambers, Tanner at least felt like he could hide in the back of the visitors area, avoid being spotted by anyone downstairs.