42
By the time I had finished with Anna, I apologized for monopolizing her time. “Nonsense,” she said. “Now I can’t make any promises, but ...” She winked conspiratorially.
“Anna, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Wait until there’s something concrete to thank me for,” she said. “And then don’t be a stranger. Henry loves feeling like he has his finger on the pulse of Washington.”
“Invite us and we’re here.”
“Give my love to your parents,” she said. “Maybe I should invite them both to my next party separately. I can lock them in a closet until they reconcile.”
Remembering the country club debacle, I wasn’t sure my mother wouldn’t just burn the whole gorgeous house down, Mrs. Rochester–style, just to get out of there. But I said that if I didn’t have them back together by the election, I would take her up on it.
I made my way through the party, knocking back an additional glass of champagne in celebration as I looked for Michael, whom I eventually found in a conversation with Secretary of Defense McNamara.
Catching his eye, I flashed him a discreet thumbs-up. For a moment he just stared at me, then his face split into a wide grin. McNamara turned to follow his gaze, then patted Michael on the arm with a laugh. Michael excused himself and came to me.
“Really?” he asked quietly.
“How did it go with Henry?”
“Well, I think. What happened with Anna?”
I looked around. The Post knew better than to report something overheard at one of Anna’s parties if the Wainwrights didn’t want it reported, but any gathering of such high-profile individuals was bound to have people listening. “When we leave,” I said cautiously.
“Is it rude to go now?” Michael asked, his eyes sparkling with reflected string lights.
I took his wrist and checked the time. Even if I had bought a new watch, I wouldn’t have worn it with a cocktail dress. “No. Anna knows I have kids.”
Michael offered me his arm, and I took it, a warmth spreading through my abdomen that had to have been from the champagne and victory with Anna. Surely that spark hadn’t been there when I took his arm on the way in.
Had it?
We made it down the long drive onto R Street and walked past the Oak Hill Cemetery toward Montrose Park, before Michael pulled me to a stop. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
“She’s going to work on Henry,” I said. “They’re going to endorse you over Sam.”
“Did she say that?”
I smiled. “When Anna wants something, it happens.”
All of a sudden, I was twirling through the air. Michael had picked me up and spun me around, while I laughed. But as he went to put me down, time slowed to a crawl as my body brushed down the length of his. My head tilted up, and his angled down toward mine, and it was like watching in slow motion as his lips came closer and closer to mine until finally, they touched. That electricity that I had tried to blame on champagne, on proximity, on literally anything except what I felt for this man, was now undeniable as his mouth moved against mine, my lips parting just as hungrily for his.
But abruptly, Michael moved away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and my stomach sank. For him it had just been the champagne and the victory of the party and the endorsement. I was a fool.
“Don’t be,” I said, turning away.
But Michael took my hand and pulled me back to face him. “I have to tell you something.”
I didn’t look up, afraid to meet his eyes. But he put a finger under my chin and lifted my face. “You asked me once why I was running for office, and I didn’t give you the full answer.” I looked at him questioningly. What could that possibly matter right now?
“Okay,” I said softly, trying to figure out why that made him stop kissing me.
“I—Bev, it was your father.”
I pulled back. “My father?” My chest began to hitch with shallow breaths as I connected the dots. Of course. That was why he had hired me. I knew that. It was why I told them who I was. I wouldn’t have had a shot if I hadn’t been Bernie Gelman’s daughter. But I was more and more certain that my father was also why Larry had married me. And here I was, walking right into the arms of another man who wanted me for the provenance of my birth, not for me. “I see,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. The night was hot, but I was chilly now.
“No,” Michael said. “Let me explain—I didn’t want you to think that had anything to do with ...” He gestured at the space between us. “Your father spoke at my college graduation. I had already been accepted to law school, mostly because it was the career where I could make the most money. I didn’t want to be poor anymore. I wanted to buy my parents a house and raise my own kids with everything I never had. But he—he changed my life that day. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and at that graduation, he looked around the room and said he had sat there, graduating from the University of Maryland, and said he remembered the graduation speaker telling them that they would change the world.”
Michael took a breath, looking at something in the distance over my head, before he focused on me again. “He said that his charge to us wasn’t just to change the world, but to fix it. And he told us to look at ourselves in the mirror every single morning and ask ourselves what we were going to do to make the world better that day.” He reached down and took my hands in his. “And I didn’t think anything of it. But the next morning, when I woke up, I saw my reflection, and I asked myself that. It became something I did every morning. Something I still do. And when I read about that filibuster on civil rights, I looked in the mirror, and I told myself I needed to do more. Because Sam wasn’t just hurting people who grew up like I did; he was hurting people who didn’t have a voice. And I—I heard your father’s voice when I looked in the mirror.”
He looked down at our joined hands. “It felt like fate when you walked into the office that day. But, Bev, I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here.” He stopped himself. “I’m saying this all wrong. I’m here because of that. But I’m here on this sidewalk, with you, because of you . And I know—”
But I didn’t let him finish. It wasn’t a conscious decision by any stretch of the imagination, but I was on my tiptoes, I had pulled my hands from his, and my arms were around his neck. And this time, I was kissing him.
For a second, he was too surprised to respond. I think his lips were still moving in the rest of his sentence at first. But then, he did, as an arm wrapped around my waist, bringing me closer, the other at my neck.
Time stopped altogether. It could have been seconds or years that we stood there. No one had ever kissed me like that. Not the handful of boys in my youth, and certainly never Larry. There had never been a kiss that left me so breathless and dizzy and hungry for more.
When we eventually pulled apart, I bit my lower lip. “Sorry,” I said, echoing his earlier apology, feeling anything but.
Michael grinned and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I have lipstick on me, don’t I?”
I nodded and raised a hand to wipe it away, but he caught it, bringing it to his lips and kissing it. Then his smile faded. “This is where you tell me we can’t do this, isn’t it?”
Reality crashed back onto my shoulders, the weight of it pressing me into the earth, the mugginess of the night suddenly too oppressive to breathe.
“I think this is where we mutually decide that,” I said quietly. “You can’t be with someone who isn’t even divorced yet, and my lawyer said I can’t do anything that—”
“Larry would use against you,” Michael finished. “He’s right of course.”
Part of me had hoped, irrationally, that he would say none of that mattered.
But of course, he wouldn’t. Even if he cared more about me than the campaign, which he didn’t, I wouldn’t have felt the same way if he had dropped everything for me after what he had just confessed. And he knew, as I did, that keeping the kids was the most important thing in my life.
“We should head home,” I said lightly. “I’ll behave.”
“I will too.”
Don’t, I wanted to say. There had been that moment in his car, but I saw now, with the clarity of hindsight, that his behavior the day before, when my mother left the kids at the office, was the tipping point for me.
“Things may be different after the election,” I said as we approached Michael’s car.
He brought my hand to his lips again, and I had never felt such a strong pull of desire. “That’s not so long. It’ll be September in a couple of days.”
“Not long at all,” I said as he opened the car door and I sat. “Especially with how much we still have to do for the campaign.”
He walked around to the driver’s side and got in. “I can’t believe how much you’ve accomplished for me already.”
I smiled wryly. “For us.” He looked over at me. “I was at that graduation.”
“You were?”
I nodded. “I was sixteen.”
“You’re that young?”
I smacked him lightly in the chest with the back of my hand. “Are you saying I look old?”
“You look perfect,” he said. “Besides, it’s a good thing.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’re not old enough to run for the Senate yourself. You’d beat me in a landslide.”
I laughed as he pulled away from the curb, taking us through Georgetown and along the Potomac as we headed back toward Maryland and home.