Rogue Affair

by Tamsen Parker

  Sometimes she wears her hair coiled in elaborate braids, like a crown.

  If any woman could pull off royalty in a town where we worship our down-to-earth roots, it’s Anna Fowler.

  “You’re the new speechwriter I didn’t ask for, after Madison fired the last one, which I also didn’t ask for.”

  Well, shit.

  That doesn’t bode well.

  “I didn’t hire him. He’s doing us a favor,” my friend Madison-the-liar says smartly. “So be nice.”

  The mayor shoots a hard look at her chief of staff, who doesn’t look up as she alternates between a cell phone and a desk phone while shuffling her hands from an open Macbook to a desktop computer. My girl Maddy knows how to multitask, and her boss’s complaints don’t merit more than a millisecond of her attention.

  Crap. Madison had made this opportunity—an opportunity I’d given up hiking the final section of my five-year, piece-by-piece Appalachian Trail trek to take advantage of—sound like a dream come true. A chance to indulge in hero worship, do some actual good in my hometown, and add some impressive name recognition to my résumé. She’d made it sound like the mayor was eager to roll out the welcome wagon for me.

  Uh-huh. This wagon is a little more Oregon Trail than you led me to believe, my friend. What next? A broken axle and we all die of dysentery?

  A sharply dressed young black man leans his head in the open door and catches Anna’s eye. “I’ve got that developer on the phone again. The one looking for rezoning permits downtown? They’re offering to bring in material samples so you can approve the store design.”

  The mayor turns to Madison. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Do we have to have a press conference to announce we’re not selling building permits to franchises who let us pick out their flooring and light fixtures?”

  She has a nice instinct for alliteration. I make a mental note of it. Knowing what kind of phrasing will roll off your speaker’s tongue naturally, as opposed to in a staccato stutter of discomfort, is key.

  “I’ll get Crain’s to interview franchisees and someone from the Building Department about the change in operating procedures. It’ll have a whiff of exposé without being a whole thing,” Madison says, whipping out what looks like a bullet journal to make a note. “Should cut down on some of the personal appeals.”

  What? I’m not saying I have a dozen bujo YouTubers bookmarked in an effort to teach myself the organizational planning method, but I can spot washi tape and fancy handwriting from twenty paces, for sure.

  It’s a system.

  The mayor turns back to me with a nearly audible snap, her attention refocusing like a laser.

  “I’m not going to be able to deliver the pension contribution the last bastard promised the teacher’s union when they signed, because he also tanked the tax rolls with TIF districts, so good luck writing something that keeps thirty thousand teachers from striking in six weeks.”

  Excellent. Fabulous.

  I love my job.

  Anna

  Every time I turn around for the next two weeks, he’s there.

  Okay, maybe not there. Madison’s friend, the hotshot speechwriter who’s on the fast track to becoming a big name in DC despite looking young enough to be my kid if I had one, god forbid, doesn’t actually hover. In fact, he’s disturbingly good at fading into the background in a room. I keep forgetting he’s there, watching me, which ought to be harder to do for a guy who looks like that. Wavy, dark hair that’s a little too long on top, more scruff than most up-and-coming political movers and shakers allow themselves, a prominent nose, and heavy, dark brows. It’s a mesmerizing combination even before you factor in the razor-sharp intelligence and intense observational awareness behind those eyes.

  He’s distracting. And that’s when he isn’t saying a word. When he shifts in his seat or straightens from his lean against a wall, and starts talking?

  I’m not the only one who can’t take her eyes off him.

  His voice is kind of growly for the first ten seconds, every time. As if he’s forgotten how to use it. Then it smooths out and he’s all charm, with licks of sharp humor and a kind of present sexuality I’m not used to noticing.

  Maybe it’s because this isn’t really “work” for him. I’m perfectly aware that Oscar Aranda gave up what might very well have been his last vacation for years to come in order to rescue my communications team from whatever clusterfuck is keeping us from getting our message out. Maybe that’s why everything about him radiates laid back intensity, instead of the on-edge, uptight vibe I’m used to my team churning with. Maybe in his head, he’s still moseying down the path of the longest hikers-only trail in the world.

  That doesn’t mean I relax around him.

  I try, but I can’t.

  He’s never inappropriate. None of my ants-in-my-pants feeling is directly attributable to this intense man who’s determined to memorize every frigging detail about me and my speech patterns and style and whatever the fuck else he’s “observing” when he listens in on my day.

  But I blame him anyway. Because if I don’t, if I can’t. . .

  Well, then, it’s not him, it’s me.

  Part of me thinks I just need to get laid. Sex is good for me. My brain and my body both work better when I get to switch off work every night and plug into some sweaty, physical ecstasy. It’s one of the things I miss most since Di and I ended our engagement. Di rarely initiated sex—she said it wasn’t something she usually thought about, and would generally have worked or networked her way through every evening right up until she was ready to fall into bed—but she responded enthusiastically whenever I did. And getting her to switch off her brilliant brain for an hour or two had been one of the pure pleasures of my day.

  Also, orgasms. Lots and lots of orgasms. Always a plus.

  So yeah, maybe not getting laid is the problem. Because something is definitely fucking with my head.

  I keep staring at Oscar’s mouth when he’s reading, on his phone or hard copies of city files. He chews on his lip sometimes when he does. For someone with such a pretty mouth, he doesn’t use it much. For the first couple of weeks Oscar is around, I hardly have a conversation a day with him. He writes some short pieces for my press conferences and they’re . . . good. Unexpectedly so.

  I knew he was supposed to be brilliant, and I trusted Madison’s recommendation implicitly. But somehow I’d still thought he’d be like every other speechwriter I’ve worked with. Someone who wrote pretty words that I struggled to bring to life as I read them off pages or teleprompters.

  But Oscar’s speeches—even the little ten-minute ones he’s written for me so far—are different. They aren’t just well-framed words on a page.

  They sound like me. Like I wrote them. And yes, every good speechwriter tries to do this, but I’ve never worked with someone who pulls it off.

  It’s not much. Not yet. I can’t even pick out the parts where he’s done something in particular to make a sentence sounds like it’s rolling off my tongue spontaneously. But when I’m giving a press conference about increasing our cooperation with the Department of Justice to investigate abuses within our police department, I feel more natural at the podium than I’ve ever felt yet in my entire political career.

  When I glance over at where Oscar is standing in the corner of the room, dark eyes resting calmly on me, I’m enjoying myself so much—for once—I have to fight back a weird urge to wink at him.

  I shouldn’t be staring at his mouth so much.

  Of course, after he’s been with us for two weeks, memorizing my “style” or whatever, he opens that mouth and starts talking.

  And then I want to strangle him.

  “I get it. You’re pulling an Al Franken,” Oscar says, face guileless as if he hasn’t just finished telling me he’s decided to completely upend the image I’ve created for myself, one that’s gotten me as far as the mayor’s office of one of the biggest cities in the nation. “Keep your head down, tight focus on policy and gra
vitas. It was a good strategy, for a while.”

  “It is a good strategy. And now you want me to change it.”

  “Yup.”

  “Do I get to ask why?” My staff would be ducking and covering at this level of sarcasm from me, but Oscar either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t back out of the room, apologizing all the way.

  “You can ask,” he says smartly, and I consider throwing him out the window. City Hall isn’t exactly a skyscraper, but he’d make a nice splat on the sidewalk below if only there weren’t a couple hundred pedestrians heading across the street to the Thompson Center for lunch at the basement food court. Taking out voters with a Wile E. Coyote plan to eliminate the guy Madison foisted upon me is not a useful campaign strategy.

  He lets my annoyance build just long enough to irritate before smiling with an infuriating amount of charm. “Look. I can spend hours explaining to you why I’m going to make serious changes to the way your communication department creates your message, or we can just go ahead and get to work. Stop wasting time.”

  Is he fucking with me now? Because he’s smiling at me, like he finds the sight of me fuming at him appealing. I know I’m a control freak who pretty much only trusts one person in my office to know exactly what I want and need, but I’m not being ridiculous right now. He is. “How about you spend a little time explaining it to me just this once?”

  “Do you ask Madison to explain every recommendation or decision she makes for you?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

  Of course not. You can’t govern if you spend all your time doing other people’s jobs for them. The only way to be effective is to hire excellent people, trust them to do their jobs, and then recognize that you can’t be in charge of every detail. On policy, I pride myself in mastering as much information as possible, so I can evaluate the recommendations given to me, but there’s always a point at which you’re trusting the summary a junior staffer wrote of some detail you don’t have time to research for yourself.

  This is different though.

  Which is exactly what I say to him.

  “This is different. And yes, when I need it, when it’s a big move, I absolutely ask Madison to break decisions down for me before she takes action.” I take a deep breath. “Every word you’re saying right now is making me anxious and in order for me to trust you, I need you to do more than expect me to trust you.”

  “I want to let you off the leash,” he says, after a pause that feels like a battle of wills. “I see how you are here, in the office, surrounded by people you know well and trust, and I see the image you and your staff have carefully presented from when you first ran for office.”

  I try to keep my defensiveness under wraps. One of my major flaws is my kneejerk instinct to defend my people, even when they don’t need it. “We knew we were going to get hammered on the Hollywood dilettante angle. Eastwood and Schwarzenegger can get away with going into politics without major questioning of their credibility, but women never get the same treatment, period. And that’s before you factor in the chain mail bikini movie stills. I had to be serious. Focused. Always.”

  You weren’t allowed to crack jokes on the campaign trail when your entire campaign was being held up as a joke already. And although the money I’d made from my film career was what had allowed me to run in the first place, the baggage that came with it was enormous.

  “It was a good call.”

  “I know it was.” I don’t need reassurance on this point, but it’s nice to hear anyway. Hell if I’m going to let him know that though.

  “But now it’s holding you back. The voters can feel it when you don’t trust them with your genuine self. More than that, they can see it. You’re a cultural icon and they’ve all seen you in movies and interviews and at awards shows, where you acted very differently than you do these days as the mayor. At a different moment in time, it wouldn’t matter. If the economy were brilliant, and the president didn’t hate us because the last guy came from here, and everything in the city’s budget was in the black, you could be superficial and cautious with every word you say in public. But you’re in crisis mode. You have a lot of bad news to deliver, and if you can’t find some authenticity while you do it, the voters are going to turn on you.”

  “So, what’s your plan?”

  “I want you to let more of your personality shine through. You curse. You’re sarcastic. You crack jokes at your own expense and laugh at them. You get angry and you get fierce. I want to let all of that Anna Fowler back into the game.”

  “You want me to curse at a press briefing?” Ai yi yi. I can already picture the headlines.

  “I’m not going to have you up there dropping f-bombs, but I think you can stand in front of the people of this city and say, ‘We’re screwed, but here’s how I’m going to fix it.’ I think that’s going to get people to listen long enough for them to start hearing you. You. Not ‘the office of the mayor.’ And I think they want to hear you. Also I think you should talk about Di more. Stop hiding that you two still talk and maintain a relationship with each other.”

  That is certainly unexpected. The strain of having to act as if I’d ended things with my ex and walked away without another thought has been . . . worse than I’d expected. I’m used to staying friends with my lovers when things end. I have excellent taste in partners. Just because we don’t work out in the long run has never been a reason to stop talking to someone I care about.

  “It’s been suggested I keep my continuing friendship with my exes off the radar.” Keeping my voice level is a struggle. I hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—although of course he had—my discreet phone calls to my ex whenever I needed a moment of friendly conversation to recharge before heading back into the fray. My throat is thick. “That it’s too confusing to voters to see me maintain a relationship with Di.”

  Oscar

  “I think that’s bullshit.” My voice is sharp. It’s been hard watching Anna’s isolation, seeing how limited her personal life is without the fiancée who used to accompany her to every city function. I don’t know if I can save her administration from the bad news they’re going to have to deliver to the city, but if I can do one thing, it’ll be to find a way to get Anna’s friendship with Di out of the shadows. The woman works tirelessly as mayor. She deserves a goddamn friend. “I think with a fifty percent divorce rate and thousands of families co-parenting kids and maintaining relationships with their spouses, voters can handle you being friends with your ex-girlfriend.”

  “Most of my advisors don’t agree with you.”

  I know Maddy does, but there are always a lot of loud voices with strong opinions to take into account when your career depends upon raising enough money to run for office every four years.

  There’s more than one leverage button to push on this issue, though, even if I might be crossing a line here.

  “Plus, if you’ve got to deliver rough news about the teachers’ contract that sounds like it ought to come from an austerity Republican, it won’t hurt to . . . uh, remind people. . .” I’m used to speaking my mind with my candidates, but my discussions don’t usually involve their sexualities. As progressive as the candidates I’ve worked for have been, we’re still in the Midwest and most of them have been straight.

  “That I’m a real, live, liberal bisexual who had a female fiancée when they elected me, and not a teacher-union smashing conservative, despite the wedding being called off?”

  “Yes.” I wince. Reminding anyone of their most recent breakup, especially one that had been dissected in the local news for months, is probably not a brilliant move. I’m better on paper, I swear. Conversations are minefields. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  I get a hand wave in return. “You didn’t. We wouldn’t still be friends if things had ended badly.”

  “Why did they?” I ask, genuinely curious. The two women had been a powerhouse couple in the city, Anna breaking into the rarified air of the mayor’s office
and corralling state and DC politicians in her orbit, while Di harnessed the power of the business world with the investment firm she presided over from the top of a shining steel skyscraper on a peninsula jutting into the lake.

  “We’re too much alike. Both of us are always in front of the cameras, always under the microscope. I think we thought having a partner who understood exactly what that meant would be easier, but it turned out it just doubled the scrutiny.”

  Ugh. My stomach churns for her. There’s a reason I’ve chosen the behind-the-scenes role of speechwriter, and it isn’t because I can’t deliver a punchy bit of oratory myself. I’d mown down the opposition on the same East Coast elite college debate circuit that had launched Ted Cruz to his political careers. (Not that I’d ever aimed to emulate Ted Cruz. Just saying.) I have the brain and the mouth and the face for politics. But the idea of signing up for a lifetime of being in the spotlight had made my skin crawl. No, thank you. Ugh. Yuck.

  “Well, I think you should invite her to the party if you want to.” The office had been lively with plans for the mayor’s annual summer barbeque for her staff. Several hundred people attended with kids and potluck dishes and no donors were allowed. “Hell, if you two can collaborate on a project, that would be even better. Something within the LGBTQ community maybe? One of my sisters volunteers with a grassroots group raising money to renovate a shelter for LGBTQ kids of color, bet they could use a higher profile.”

  “Interesting.” Her spine straightens and she pulls out her phone, tapping on the screen for a minute before looking at me again. “Thank you.”

  I know what that means, and make a mental note to shoot an email to my sister so she can give them the heads up that they’ll be getting more attention from City Hall shortly.

  “One of the problems you’re having right now is that voters aren’t connecting with you. They want to. They voted for you. But there have been so many scandals—”

  “I swear to god, I would launch that man into the sun if NASA would just loan me a couple of rocket scientists,” she growls, eyes narrowed.