Chapter 7
THE AFTERMATH
Darcy throws a piece of popcorn at the television.
“Play it again.”
“It’s a news segment, Darce. I can’t rewind live TV.”
“Then change the channel. Someone else is running it. Everyone is running it.”
She’s right. I flip to the next station and there it is again—the clip.
My face filling the screen, studio lights catching the black dress, the microphone still pinned to my collar.
My voice coming out of the speakers and into the living room where I’m sitting with my sister and a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of wine that’s doing more work than either of us.
“His pregnant mistress. Carrying his child while he was using spermicidal lubricant on me without my knowledge to make sure I would never carry another one.”
My chest tightens every time I hear it. Not regret—something closer to vertigo. The feeling of having jumped off something very high and still being in the air.
The anchor comes back. Grave face, measured voice. They cut to a graphic—CAMPAIGN IN CRISIS—and start running the cascade. Campaign suspended. Party distancing. Donors fleeing.
“There’s Robby.” Darcy points with a popcorn kernel.
On the screen, Bennett’s campaign manager is speed-walking past reporters outside the campaign office, phone pressed to his ear, jaw tight.
He looks like a man whose house is on fire and nobody will hand him a hose.
“Poor bastard. He’s the only one in Bennett’s orbit I almost feel sorry for. ”
“Almost?”
“Almost.” She eats the popcorn. “He still helped build the machine. He just didn’t know the machine was rotten.”
The anchor mentions a hashtag. I don’t look it up.
Darcy already did—she showed me earlier, scrolling through her phone with her eyebrows climbing higher with each post. The reproductive coercion framing hit something national.
Bigger than a local political scandal. Bigger than an affair.
Women are angry, and not the polite kind.
“Women’s advocacy organizations are calling for a criminal investigation into Representative Cole’s conduct, citing the reproductive coercion allegations as potential grounds for prosecution under state law—”
Darcy whistles through her teeth. “Criminal. That’s not just career-ending. That’s handcuffs.”
The anchor keeps going. ”Cole’s primary opponent, State Senator Diana Webb, released a statement this morning calling for his immediate withdrawal from the congressional race, saying—” The anchor pauses, reading—”‘The people of this district deserve a representative whose family values extend beyond the campaign stage. Bennett Cole should step aside immediately.’“
“Damn.” Darcy tips her wine glass toward the screen. “Diana Webb doesn’t miss.”
They show a photo of Bennett. Outside his attorney’s office—dark suit, sunglasses he never wears, shoulders hunched. His mouth is open mid-stride and his chin is tucked and he looks like a man trying to disappear into his own collar. The photo is ugly. Good.
Darcy pulls her phone out, reads something, and snorts. “I heard his mistress left him, too.”
I look at her.
“Megan. Gone. Apparently finding out your boyfriend’s wife can fill a news cycle with your name isn’t great for the relationship.” Darcy shrugs. “Shocking.”
“I thought so,” I say. Darcy looks up at me and cocks her head in question. “Megan returned the necklace. No note and it was by courier. I still hate the bitch, but I give her credit for returning the necklace. Not like I’ll ever wear it again, but it does feel good to have it back.”
Something moves through me—not sympathy, not satisfaction. Just the bleak arithmetic of a man who burned every woman in his life and ended up with none of them.
“His attorney tried the play,” I say.
Darcy’s head snaps toward me. “Which play?”
“Erratic behavior. Consistent with unresolved grief.” The words taste like ash.
The same card he’s been playing for years—fragile Claire, emotional Claire, the grieving wife who can’t be trusted to know her own mind.
He played it privately at the kitchen counter and his attorney played it publicly in a courtroom and neither of them had a new idea between them.
“My attorney shut it down in less than a minute.”
“Tell me.”
“My client isn’t erratic. She’s been chemically prevented from conceiving by a man who was simultaneously impregnating his mistress. That’s not grief. That’s malicious reproductive manipulation without consent.”
Darcy’s fist comes down on the couch cushion.
The segment cuts to a split screen. Two pundits arguing.
One calls it unprecedented and the other calls it the most devastating self-inflicted wound in local campaign history and I pull the blanket tighter around my legs and feel something I can’t name.
Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Something heavier.
Something that sits in the hollow space behind my ribs where the fury used to live.
I changed the locks this morning. The locksmith came and went and now there are new keys on my ring that don’t match anything Bennett carries.
I don’t know where he’s sleeping. I don’t care.
His last text—You’re going to regret this when you calm down—is the last thing he’ll ever say to me through a screen.
The news anchor is still talking. The pundits are still arguing.
Darcy is still eating popcorn and providing commentary like it’s a sporting event.
Bennett’s face fills the screen again—the unflattering press photo, mid-stride, sunglasses catching the light—and I look at it and my throat gets tight and my eyes sting and I press my knuckles against my mouth because I will not cry for him.
Not anymore. The tears that are trying to push through aren’t for him—they’re for me.
For the woman who stood in a closet holding an empty velvet box.
For the woman who asked her husband about his day and got a blank stare and a potato stabbed off a plate.
For every night I lay next to him and wondered what was wrong with my body while he poured poison into his hands and put them on me.
My phone buzzes. Not Bennett—I blocked his number. Not my attorney.
Nolan.
I grab the remote and mute the television. Bennett’s face freezes mid-stride on the screen. Darcy looks at me.
“Who?”
I hold up the phone. She reads the name and her eyebrows lift and she doesn’t say a word, which for Darcy is the loudest possible commentary.
I answer. “Are you watching this?”
“I was. Just turned it off.” His voice is low. Steady. The voice from the SUV. From the office. From every moment he’s been the calmest person in any room. “You doing okay?”
“I’m drinking wine and watching my husband’s career die on cable news.”
“How’s the wine?”
“Better than the news.”
A beat. Then, quieter: “Want to come over? Have a drink that isn’t alone?”
My fingers tighten on the phone. My pulse does something I don’t give it permission to do.
“Yes.”
“I’ll send you a pin.”
I hang up. Darcy is watching me with an expression that’s trying very hard to be neutral and failing spectacularly. Her mouth is pressed into a line that keeps twitching at the corners.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking a lot of things.” She picks up the remote, unmutes the TV, and settles back into the couch. “Go. I’ll lock up.”
I grab my keys—the new ones—and stand. The television is still playing. Bennett is still frozen on the screen. The old life, on a channel I can turn off whenever I want.
“Claire.” Darcy’s voice catches me at the hallway. I turn. She’s looking at me over the back of the couch, and her face is soft in a way she almost never lets it be. “You deserve this. Not just the revenge. This.”
He’s waiting in the lobby when I pull in—glass doors, a doorman’s desk, the kind of building with key fobs and security cameras and hallways that smell like clean carpet.
He holds the elevator and we ride up without talking and the silence isn’t awkward.
It’s loaded. He unlocks his door and the apartment opens up behind him—warm, dim, lived-in.
Books everywhere. Stacked on shelves, piled on the coffee table, one open face-down on the kitchen counter. A leather couch. A leash hanging on a hook by the door—Rico’s leash, still there a year after the dog that wore it died.
“Bourbon okay?”
“Perfect.”
He pours two glasses. Hands me one. His fingers brush mine around the glass and neither of us pretends it’s an accident.
We end up on the couch. Close but not touching—the same distance as the SUV, except there’s no console between us and no camera and no husband on a porch swing across the street. Just bourbon and low light turning everything gold.
“You’re the most composed person I’ve ever worked with.” His eyes move over my face—slow, thorough, nothing like the quick professional read from our first meeting. “The broadcast. The way you held that room. Twelve years in this business and I’ve never seen anyone do what you did.”
“Composed is just another word for performing.”
“You’re not performing now.”
No. I’m not. My mascara is yesterday’s and my hair is in a knot I tied without looking and the black dress is at home in a heap on the bathroom floor and I’m not performing a single goddamn thing.
He takes the glass out of my hand. Sets it on the coffee table beside his. His hand comes back—not to the glass, to my jaw. His thumb traces my cheekbone and his palm is warm and rough and my eyes close before I decide to close them.
“Tell me what you want.” His voice is low enough that I feel it more than hear it. “Not what you’re supposed to want. Not what someone told you to want. What do you want?”
Nobody has asked me that in fifteen years.
“You,” I say. “Right now. Just you.”
He kisses me. Slow. His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck and he pulls me closer and his mouth is warm and he tastes like bourbon and I make a sound against his lips—raw, aching, a sound I didn’t know was trapped in my chest until his mouth set it loose.
He pulls back enough to look at me and his eyes ask the question again—this? still this?—and I answer by pulling his shirt over his head.
The couch is too narrow and we both know it.
He takes my hand and leads me down the hall to a bedroom with dark sheets and a paperback on the nightstand instead of a campaign schedule.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and he lifts it off me and his eyes drop to my skin and the way he looks at me makes my breath catch.
Not assessing. Not managing. Learning. Like my body is a language he wants to be fluent in.
He lays me back and his mouth finds my collarbone and my throat and the hollow behind my ear.
My fingers dig into his shoulders and his weight settles over me—solid, unhurried, present in a way that makes my chest ache.
His hand slides down my ribs, my hip, unbuttons my jeans and peels them down and his mouth follows—my stomach, my hip bone, the inside of my thigh.
“Nolan—”
“I’ve got you.”
His mouth lands between my legs and my spine arcs off the mattress.
His tongue moves slow and deliberate and devastating—long, flat strokes that make my thighs shake, then tight circles around my clit that pull sounds out of me I’ve never heard before.
My hand fists in the sheets. The other finds his hair and grips it.
He groans against me and the vibration sends a bolt of heat through my entire body and I’m already close, already climbing, my hips rolling against his mouth because he’s reading every signal my body gives him and responding like the answer matters.
I come hard. Gasping, back bowed off the bed, his hands gripping my hips and holding me steady while I shake apart. His mouth softens but stays, easing me through it, and when the aftershocks slow he kisses the inside of my thigh and looks up at me and his face is wrecked in the best possible way.
He rises over me. I pull him down and kiss him and taste myself on his mouth and something about that—the intimacy of it, the rawness—makes my hands desperate.
I reach between us and wrap my fingers around his cock and he exhales hard against my neck.
Thick and hard in my hand and when I stroke him his hips push forward and his teeth graze my shoulder and I feel powerful in a way that has nothing to do with revenge.
“I want you inside me.”
He pushes in slow. So slow I feel every inch and my mouth drops open and my nails bite into his back.
He holds still—forehead pressed to mine, breathing, letting me adjust. Then he moves.
Deep, steady thrusts that make my vision blur.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he moans my name against my throat. Not Mrs. Cole. Not babe. Claire.
His hand slides between us and his thumb finds my clit and works it while he fucks me and the combination wrecks me—the fullness and the pressure and his mouth on my neck and his breath ragged in my ear.
The second orgasm builds like a wave and I tell him—right there, don’t stop, right there—and he listens.
He listens. His pace doesn’t change, his thumb doesn’t move, he gives me exactly what I asked for and when I come this time I clench around him and he follows me over—his whole body going rigid, his hips snapping forward, a sound tearing out of his chest that I want to hear again for the rest of my life.
We lie there. Tangled. His hand tracing slow circles on my hip. My cheek against his chest, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.
His sheets smell like soap. The nightstand holds a paperback and a glass of water. No polling numbers. No briefing books. No empty velvet box. No blue dress hanging in a closet.
I press my palm flat against his chest and feel his heart and it is the simplest thing in the world. A heart. A hand. A man who asked me what I wanted and then gave it to me.
I don’t want to be anywhere else.
Thank you for reading!