Chapter 26 #2
“Look,” I said, my tone gentling. “I’m a white man, as we’ve established every Monday since I’ve been here.
I know I’m speaking from a position of privilege.
I wish the country was different—that who you were married to wasn’t a factor in whether or not you were qualified for a job—but unfortunately, this is the nature of modern politics. It’s not just about policies—”
“We make sure the attack doesn’t come from her directly,” David broke in.
“It’s better anyway if the stories come from the people Merrick impacted directly, not Kendra herself.
Then all she has to do is express concern and call for accountability.
Say that every Mainer deserves to know who’s asking for their vote. ”
“While you do the dirty work underneath,” Maya said, her face lighting up as she pointed at me.
“Well, that is what you all hired me for.”
Maya sighed. “She’s going to push back.”
“She’ll come around.”
I’d sat across from enough reluctant politicians to know exactly how the conversation would go—the principled objections, the what-ifs, the long silence before they finally asked, “What do I need to do?”
If politics was a game, I was an MVP. I knew how to strip a problem down to its barest, coldest logic until emotion had nowhere left to hide.
Unfortunately, I’d extended that facet of my personality to my personal life as well. Ever since I’d walked out of Taylor’s house two weeks ago, I’d shut down. I simply couldn’t fight Kendra’s battles and my own at the same time.
There wasn’t enough left in me for both.
Kendra joined us forty-five minutes later, wearing the slightly harried expression of someone who’d just spent half an hour reassuring anxious union reps that she was, in fact, on their side.
She dropped into the chair at the head of the table and looked around the room. “Catch me up.”
David handled the high-level summary, Kendra's fingers steepled in front of her mouth, her expression neutral and unreadable. A solid poker face.
Good. She’d need it.
He wrapped up by saying, “And finally, Sebastian has some new opposition research he wants to walk you through.”
Her gaze shifted to me, her nose scrunched in distaste. “Let me guess, I need to go after him.”
Two weeks ago, I would have eased into this. I would have laid the groundwork, softened the edges, given her room to arrive at the conclusion on her own. But I was out of patience—with Merrick, with the polls, with … well, with fucking everything.
“If you don’t, you may as well concede.”
The word tasted sour in my mouth.
Conceding was exactly what I’d done with Taylor. I’d decided the fight was too hard, that I was never going to win, so I’d walked away before things got any messier, telling myself it was the smart move.
It wasn’t lost on me that now I was sitting here telling Kendra that doing essentially the same thing made her a quitter. Never let it be said that politicos weren’t the worst sort of hypocrites.
She tilted her head. “You realize the moment I start punching, the story becomes about me punching—not about what I’m punching at, right?”
“You won’t have to punch.” I stood, sending the slide I'd shown David and Maya earlier back to the screen and walking her through it the same way I’d walked them through it, letting the evidence build.
Kendra’s poker face held up while I detailed the club membership scandal and the employment case. It finally cracked when I read her the quote attributed to Merrick about his gay female employee.
“And you want me to use this?”
“I want you to win, and this is how. Or you can run a squeaky clean campaign and lose to a man who doesn’t deserve to hold office. The choice is yours, but this is what you hired me to do.”
“What I hired you to do,” she countered, “was help me win without compromising who I am.”
“And I’m telling you that thinking that way is going to cost you the race.”
She didn’t speak for a long time. When she finally did, her voice wasn’t that of a politician carefully weighing the situation. It was the voice of a woman who was sick and tired of mediocre men getting what they didn't deserve.
“How solid is the information?”
“The club applicant will go on the record. One of the former employees will speak about her experience without violating her NDA. It’s above board.”
She looked at David, and he gave her a small nod. He could make the narrative stick.
“Draft the plan,” she said, turning back to me. “But I get veto power over what goes out and when.” She stood and collected her belongings, pausing only to add, “I want to meet them before any of this goes public. I want to sit across from them and hear it for myself.”
The office emptied out in stages. Maya left first around six, poking her head into my office to ask if I needed anything. David stayed later, his voice carrying faintly as he worked the phones in his office down the hall.
I pulled up a blank document and started building the plan I’d promised Kendra. This was the part of my job I loved. Laying out each piece of a strategy like a chess game, anticipating the opposition’s counter-move, building a plan that could hold up under pressure.
When I was deep inside it, there was no room for anything else. The noise in my head went quiet. The mess that was my personal life ceased to exist. There was just the problem and the solution and the clean, satisfying distance between the two.
At least, that was the way it’d always been before.
Now, my thoughts bounced between Kendra possibly not winning this thing, the very real chance that I’d lost Taylor, and Wyatt refusing to leave me the fuck alone.
For the most part, the majority of his texts were of the mildly condescending variety, steeped in that “I know better than you” tone of his, but his voicemails were becoming increasingly pointed, no doubt designed to trigger the part of me that couldn’t resist knowing what was happening behind the scenes.
I forced myself not to play into it.
Taylor, at least, had respected the boundary I’d set. No more texts. No more voicemails. I’d told myself that was what I wanted—space, distance, room to think. But his silence felt like a great yawning void that I was drowning in.
I fucking hated it, but I'd made my bed, and now I had to lie in it.
By eight-thirty, I had the first two phases of the plan drafted and was deep into the debate prep framework when a knock on my door pulled me out of the zone.
David leaned against the jamb, holding a box of pizza. “Thought you could use some food.”
“I ate,” I said, going back to my work.
“A granola bar doesn’t count.” He stepped inside and set the box on the corner of my desk, flipping it open.
The smell of garlic, cheese, and spicy pepperoni hit me immediately, my stomach clenching in a way that reminded me I’d never even finished that damn granola bar.
“Eat,” he ordered, dropping onto the sofa.
It wasn't a suggestion.
I reached for a slice, mostly to stop him from staring at me with that worried look on his face.
He let me get a few bites in before he said, his tone deceptively casual, “So, today was kind of crazy.”
I took another bite and pulled the slice away, watching a thread of mozzarella stretch between my mouth and my hand. “The Kendra stuff?” I asked through my mouthful. “I know I pushed hard, but—”
“I’m not talking about Kendra.” He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankle, and folded his hands over his stomach. “I’m talking about how you came out in one sentence and in the next said you and your boyfriend had broken up.”
I set the pizza down and wiped my hands on a napkin. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is.”
“No, I mean …” I exhaled loudly and leaned back in my chair, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles. “It’s really fucking complicated. Not just the regular kind of complicated.”
David waited for me to explain. He was good at that. He didn’t fill silences with suggestions or reassurances.
“The fight we had,” I said slowly, dropping my head forward. “It was about Wyatt.”
I met David’s concerned gaze and held it, letting him see what I’d avoided confirming the last time we’d spoken like this.
His nostrils widened slightly, and then he gave me a small nod. “Does Taylor know about you guys?”
I picked at the edge of the napkin, tearing it into thin strips. “He knows everything. That’s sort of the problem.” I swept the strips into a pile. “He thinks I’ll never be able to fully commit to him as long as Wyatt is in the picture. That I’ll always put Wyatt’s career first.”
David rubbed his hands along his thighs. “And is he wrong?”
I opened my mouth to say “yes, of course he is,” but before the words could form, my phone screen lit up with an incoming call.
Wyatt’s face filled the screen—a photo I’d taken of him at one of his earliest fundraisers.
He was dressed in a tux, bow tie hanging loose around his neck, and his jacket slung over one shoulder.
He was leaning against a mirrored elevator, looking directly into the camera with a half-smile that had nothing to do with the success of the evening and everything to do with who he was heading upstairs with.
It was undeniably stupid to have such a blatantly personal image as his contact photo, but I’d set it around the time he and Celine had announced their engagement.
It was petty and foolish, and worst of all, hadn’t fazed her in the slightest. I’d meant to change it about a thousand times, but had never quite gotten around to it.
God, what would Taylor have said if he’d ever seen it?
David glanced at my phone, then back at me. “Do you need to get that?”
I silenced the ringer and turned it over. “No.”
He uncrossed his ankles and leaned forward, planting his forearms on his knees. “Have you told him to stop calling?” He notched his chin toward my phone at the same time a quiet ding sounded, alerting me to a voicemail.
“I was kind of hoping ignoring him would do the trick.”
He huffed out a laugh and shook his head. “And that's working so incredibly well.”
I pushed my plate away, my pizza only half eaten, but I couldn't stomach any more.
“I just need to put my head down and get Kendra elected. My love life is the least of my worries right now.” The words rang false, but what else was I going to tell my colleague?
David studied me for long enough that I felt the urge to look away.
“And how’s that working out for you?” he asked quietly. “Because, and I say this as a friend, you look like shit.”
A dry, humorless laugh scraped out of me. “Gee, thanks.”
“I’m serious. You’re not sleeping. You’re barely eating.” He gestured at my plate. “You’re running on caffeine and pure stubbornness, and at some point it’s all going to catch up with you.”
“I’m managing.”
“You’re not, but you’re also not going to listen to me tonight, so—” He pushed to his feet and zipped up his jacket. “Just … don’t stay here all night, okay? Go home. Shower. Sleep in an actual bed.”
“Yes, Mom.”
He flipped me off with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes, then walked out the door.
The office fell silent. Just me, the glow of my laptop, and the remains of a pizza I didn’t have the appetite to finish.
My phone buzzed again.
I told myself not to look. I lasted about twenty seconds.
Wyatt
I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but this is getting old.
I stared at the message, my thumb hovering over the screen. Part of me wanted to type something back. Wanted to manage him the way I’d always managed him, smoothing things over, keeping the peace, making sure Wyatt Hastings never had to sit with discomfort for longer than absolutely necessary.
But I couldn’t be that man. Not anymore.
Because a much larger part of me needed to be someone Taylor could be proud of.
I locked the screen and went back to work.
At eleven o’clock, I put the finishing touches on the plan and emailed it to Kendra, David, Michael, and Maya, then sat in the dark for a few minutes, feeling the strange emptiness that seemed to always follow the completion of something I’d poured myself into.
I grabbed my jacket and walked across the street to my depressing apartment, David’s voice echoing in my head.
You look like shit.
I dropped my bag by the door, plugged my phone into the charger on the kitchen counter, and forced myself to walk away from it.
In the bathroom, I avoided the mirror for as long as I could.
When I finally looked, I saw that the shadows under my eyes had developed their own shadows, and my skin had that chalky, grayish look of someone who was running on fumes.
And the beard I’d been letting grow—first, because Taylor had liked it, and then later, because I’d stopped caring about the details—made me look haggard.
I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out my razor. The scrape of the blade against my skin revealed something closer to a version of myself that I recognized. It wasn’t a fix. I knew that. But my appearance was something I could control, and right now, control was in short supply.
I showered until the water ran cold, standing under the spray with my palms flat against the tile and my head bowed, letting the heat work through the tension I’d been carrying in my neck and shoulders.
When I finally shut the water off, the silence pressed in on me from all sides. I missed talking to Taylor as I got ready for bed. I dried off, pulled on sweats, and walked back to the kitchen to fill up a glass of water.
I bypassed the sink and went straight for my phone. I had the fortitude of a fucking toddler.
Of course, there was yet another message waiting for me.
Wyatt
Pick up your goddamn phone, Sebastian.
This is your final warning.
I deleted it, then gripped the edge of the counter, my knuckles white against the granite, my head hung low. I breathed through the pain, through the frustration, feeling my eyes burn.
After several minutes, I picked my phone back up, scrolled to my contacts, and hit the button before I could talk myself out of it.
“Sebastian?”
A low sob tore out of me. “I miss you.”