Chapter Twenty-Three
Ransom Towers was distracted. In the House committee meeting on transportation and infrastructure, his mind wandered from the drafting of the Infrastructure Revitalization Act back to that last heated conversation he’d had with Bass on the tennis court.
Where did Bass get off, prying into the private details of his personal life?
Instructing him on what was appropriate or wise?
Of course Ransom knew what the right thing to do was, and of course he had done it all on his own, without having to be expressly told.
It was irritating—insulting, even—that Bass obviously did not trust his judgment enough to see through to the truth of the matter: that nothing untoward had happened between him and Ana in that hotel room in LA, however much Ransom had wanted it to.
Ransom thought of Ana then, how she had sat next to him on the couch in that dimly lit room.
The way she had looked at him—so deeply, so intently—when he spoke, as if she were trying to figure him out as earnestly as he was trying to discern her.
She had seemed so unaffected, so honest and sincere, so plainly herself that it intrigued him, drew him to her.
He was so intently focused on the image of her face in his mind’s eye, so distracted, that he missed the cochair of the committee calling on him. He looked up, dazed, in the middle of the meeting, when another congressman reached over and tapped him on the shoulder.
All week it continued like that. In his staff briefing, he stumbled over his words and made Jacqueline repeat three times the schedule for the day.
He had trouble keeping his thoughts in line or his attention where it should be.
When he lay down to sleep at night and closed his eyes, it was Ana’s face he saw—her bright-green eyes and those soft, slightly pursed lips.
So much of his life was about duty. He so rarely got to do what he actually wanted.
It had almost become foreign to him to follow impulse, to chase desire, because he had denied himself those things for so long.
He’d lost count of all the things he had given up, stopped cataloguing them in his mind, but he felt every day the two greatest losses: without putting up a fight or hesitating in the slightest, he’d abandoned both the career he’d dreamed of since he was a boy and the girl he had loved.
The two defining coordinates of a person’s life—what they did and who they spent it with.
Maybe he had finally reached some sort of internal threshold of how much he could deny himself before he imploded.
And so late Saturday afternoon, after leaving a fundraising luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel, he hadn’t gone back to his town house on the Hill but had gone to the airport, where he chartered a private jet to fly him home.
He’d arrived at Cliffhaven around midnight, the whole house dark and sleeping, and crept off to his room as silently as he could.
“What, do you live here now?” Saoirse asked the next morning when she ran into him in the hall. He made an excuse about some work that had to be done for the party, and she rolled her eyes and continued on her way.
He found Ana in the dining room, eating breakfast. She was wearing overalls and Converse, one leg pulled under her on the chair, and she had her head thrown back, laughing, when he entered the room.
Ransom quickly gleaned the source of her amusement—next to her was Salvador Santos, drinking a cup of coffee, smiling, and looking very pleased with himself, like the cat that got the cream.
Saoirse’s words from their dinner conversation at the Sunset Lounge the other week floated reluctantly back to Ransom, and something sharp and unpleasant tightened in his chest. “The two of you are always sitting next to each other at the breakfast table, whispering together. You’re not sweet on him? ”
“Ransom,” Salvador called out as soon as he saw him. He scooted back his chair and rose to greet him. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Santos,” Ransom said and crossed the room to shake his hand. His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “How are you?”
“I can hardly complain,” Salvador said, glancing back at Ana. “Good food, good company.” He smiled at Ransom. “Come, join us. We were just finishing breakfast and talking about our plans for the day.”
“Yes, Salvador is being boring,” Ana said, taking a bite of her French toast.
“I’m afraid I’ve disappointed Ana,” Salvador said. “I have errands to run in town.”
“On our one day off!” Ana said, exasperated. “Meanwhile, I plan to be as lazy and unproductive as humanly possible.”
“And how does one accomplish that?” Ransom asked.
“Guilty pleasure reads, lots of napping, and eating copious amounts of food with zero nutritional value,” Ana said. “But I plan to start by hanging by the pool. It’s beautiful out.”
Ransom glanced toward the nearest window, where sunlight was streaming in. “It is nice out,” he agreed. “Mind if I join you?”
“The more the merrier,” Ana said. “Besides, it is technically your pool.”
It was a hot day in the dead of summer, the sun blazing in the sky, so bright you had to squint to see, and so Ransom kept his Ray-Bans on as he floated on a tube in the shallow end and waited for Ana.
The water felt pleasant in the heat—lukewarm.
He tried to remember the last time he’d been in this pool.
It’d been years. Theo had been alive, that he could recall.
Yes, Theo had had friends staying over from college, and they’d played a game of chicken in the shallow end, not far from where he was now.
Ransom recalled gripping the knees of a girl he didn’t know as she sat on his shoulders and tried to wrest another girl from her place on Theo’s shoulders.
“Howdy.”
Ransom looked up to see Ana by one of the sun loungers, a T-shirt on over her swimsuit. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she had a book in her hand.
“What’re you reading?” Ransom asked.
“Probably something you wouldn’t approve of,” Ana said. She held up the cover. “The Velvet Promise. It’s a romance novel.”
“Are you not getting in?” he asked.
Ana hesitated a moment, as if she wasn’t sure. “It’s roasting out,” she said finally. “I’ll take a quick dip.”
She pulled her T-shirt off over her head. She had a plain black one-piece on underneath. She was toned and lean and had more of an athletic build—straight with muted curves.
Ransom got out of the tube and held it out for her near the stairs as Ana waded into the shallow end.
“All yours,” he said.
“What a gentleman,” Ana said.
He helped her into it and then hung on to one end as she floated. Together, they drifted slowly across the pool.
“Is that what you normally read?” Ransom asked, nodding toward the book on her sun lounger. “Romance novels?”
“I read all sorts of things,” Ana said.
“So what’s your favorite book?” Ransom asked.
“Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Ana said without hesitation.
“A children’s book?” Ransom asked.
“It’s not just a children’s book,” Ana said.
“It’s the first book I remember reading that I completely lost myself in.
My cousin lent it to me. She was a few years older than me, and she was obsessed with it, and I wanted to be just like her, so I read it too.
And I just—I’d never had an experience like that before.
Reading that book, it was like someone was in my head.
They had written down my thoughts. My fears.
My inhibitions. Everything I was insecure about or wondered about.
I felt . . . understood in a way I hadn’t before.
Like, maybe I wasn’t as weird or strange as I thought I might be.
Maybe there were other people out there who were going through something similar. What about you?” Ana asked.
“The Fountainhead,” Ransom said.
Ana made a buzzer sound, like he had answered incorrectly.
“What?” Ransom asked.
“The Fountainhead is not your favorite book,” Ana said.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not,” Ana said. “This is not a college application or a formal interview where you have to impress me with how smart and well read you are. I want your real, human answer. If you were stranded on a desert island and there was only one book you could have with you that you would have to read over and over again for the rest of your life, what would it be?”
Ransom thought for a moment. “Still The Fountainhead,” he said.
“Unbelievable.”
“I didn’t give you a hard time about your favorite book,” Ransom said.
“Yes, you did. You called it a children’s book.”
“To be fair, it is a children’s book,” Ransom said. “But you chose that book because of how it made you feel, and I respect that. I chose The Fountainhead because of how it makes me think. If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, it would be one full of ideas and moral complexity.”
“Fine,” Ana said, after thinking a moment. “I concede that The Fountainhead is a legitimate choice for your favorite book, and I’m sorry for mocking you.”
“Thank you,” Ransom said.
“You’ve really motored us a long way from where we started,” Ana said, glancing around them. “Are we in the deep end now?”
“Yes,” Ransom said.
“In all seriousness,” Ana said, “please don’t tip me over. I can’t actually swim.”
“What?”
“I can’t swim,” Ana repeated.
“Then what are you doing in the pool?” Ransom asked.
“I normally stay in the shallow end, where I can touch,” Ana said. “Or, you know, hence the raft.”
“That doesn’t seem safe,” Ransom said.
Ana shrugged. “If you don’t leave your comfort zone every once in a while, you never really live.”
“Yes, well, if leaving your comfort zone means potentially drowning, I’d stay put, or at least wear a life preserver.”
Ana laughed.
“Jesus Christ,” Ransom said, steering them back toward the shallow end. He felt immediately relieved as soon as his feet touched the bottom of the pool again. He steered the raft over to the side of the pool.
Ana tried to lift herself out of the raft, but she had sunk so far into it that for a moment, she struggled.
“I’m stuck,” Ana laughed.
Ransom reached in and scooped her up. She was light and small in his arms. He lifted her onto the edge of the pool, where she sat, dangling her legs into the water.
“You’re so miniature,” Ransom said. “I could put you in my pocket and carry you around.”
Ana laughed. “Stop,” she said. “I’m a perfectly normal-sized person.”
She looked at him, and he held her gaze.
He reached up and tucked her wet hair behind her ear.
She didn’t flinch; she didn’t look away.
She looked steadily back at him. He trailed his finger down her neck, traced the curve of her bare shoulder.
It was not remotely the most physically intimate thing he had ever done with a girl, but for some reason, it felt that way.
“Ana,” he said, his voice thick in his throat. “I don’t think I want to just be your friend.”
She looked up at him, and something in her eyes made him believe she felt the same way.
“But we shook on it,” Ana said. “Remember?”
For once, he didn’t care who saw, or what they thought, or the things they might say. He just did the thing that he had so often denied himself—he did exactly what he wanted.
He leaned forward and kissed her.