Chapter 1 Selene
SELENE
One hundred days.
Twenty-four hundred hours.
One hundred and forty-four thousand minutes.
Eight million, six hundred and forty thousand seconds and counting.
That’s it. The amount of time that’s passed since Aubrey Taylor began his first term as President of the United States.
Everyone knows the first hundred days of a President’s tenure set the stage for the rest of his time in the Oval, but no one thinks—or cares—about what those days feel like for the First Lady.
They don’t notice her slowly unraveling, morphing into the sort of person who breaks her existence down into milliseconds just so she doesn’t get overwhelmed by the thought of her next breath.
They don’t see that her entire life has become numbers.
That my entire life has become numbers.
Twenty-three items on my agenda for the day.
Two days dedicated to my actual career.
Ninety-three full-time staffers who see everything and comment on nothing.
One hundred and thirty-two rooms to sit in and be ignored.
Twenty-eight fireplaces to stare into and contemplate my life choices.
Six floors, two basements, three elevators and eight staircases.
One mind quickly rotting.
One heart slowly dying, waiting for brief flashes of hope that are far too infrequent to sustain me.
“How is this my life?” I mutter, pacing the length of floor that exists outside of the security camera’s field of vision.
There’s only one in the stairway that takes staffers from the second floor to the third without being seen by the public, but that’s all the space needs.
It’s tiny, secluded, and, despite its designation, rarely occupied.
The camera is perched high in the far left corner, focused on the stairs but not the door designed to blend with the wall it’s built into, which means there’s no random Secret Service agent watching me wring my hands and talk to myself while I wait to see if I’ll get to taste hope today.
My phone vibrates, and I pull it out of my pocket, heart pounding as I read the text.
Agent Shaw: 5 and 1. ETA 30 seconds.
More numbers, but these make me smile. I shove my phone back into the pocket of my trousers and run a hand through my hair, enjoying the feel of the blunt ends as they pass through my fingers.
I talked Diane into cutting it into a bob a few days ago, and despite the influx of articles and news segments questioning if the style is too severe for my features and wondering how I’m going to put it in an up-do for formal occasions like the upcoming State Dinner, I’m in love with the decision.
The door opens, and a mountain of muscle in a black suit joins me inside the space.
My breath stalls in my lungs as I watch him maneuver around the door carefully, making sure not to let even an inch of his broad shoulders come into the camera’s line of sight.
He turns to face me, and I see it on his face: confirmation that he’s in love with the change I’ve made too.
Onyx eyes run gentle lines over me, caressing the crown of my head and skating down until they reach the tips of my toes. The examination is equal parts lust and love, and although the intensity of his gaze starts a slow thrum of anticipation in my core, we both know we only have time for love.
Five minutes, to be exact, and we’ve already spent a solid forty-five seconds staring at each other.
He crosses over to me in two strides of his long legs, hands going to my ass and lifting me up. I wrap myself around him, squeezing tight. I’m not afraid of falling. I just need the closeness.
“Beck.”
His name is a desperate, broken whimper that’s accompanied by the gathering of tears in my eyes. I force them away, knowing I don’t have time to fix my makeup before my next meeting.
“Gorgeous.” His tone reassures me that I’m not alone in this longing. It’s in his kiss too, an ache that causes a tightness in my chest when his lips glide against mine in two filthy, yet unsatisfactory, kisses.
One from him.
One from Cal, who couldn’t be here because they can never get away from Aubrey at the same time. Part of me wonders why Agent Shaw even bothers to specify how many men I should expect during these clandestine meetings. Never once has she had cause to say two instead of one.
Beck presses me to the wall, his hands shifting to my waist. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
I miss him all the time. I miss them all the time. I miss us. Who we were to each other in the early days of this forbidden love. Who we could have become if it wasn’t for Aubrey’s malicious intervention.
He’d meant for it to break us.
For a moment, I thought that it had. My heart still clenches painfully every time I relive the day they committed to Aubrey’s detail.
Every second after that meeting was filled with the kind of grating hurt that I can only compare to what I felt after losing my son.
And then came the letters. Handwritten letters delivered to me by Agent Shaw but penned by the two men who love me most, who couldn’t go a single day letting me believe they’d chosen their careers over me.
The first were written on napkins from a cafe I know they frequent often.
I always like to imagine them rushing out to whosever car they took that day to pen urgent explanations that started with promises of their continued love and went on to detail Aubrey’s threats and warn me about the pictures he had.
Agent Shaw was stone-faced when she delivered the letters to me, and she bore the same expression when I sent her back with two notes of my own thanking them for explaining and agreeing with their suggestion that we take a large step back from each other to allow Aubrey to believe he won.
In a lot of ways, it feels like he has. The only thing he didn’t succeed at was making me live in a false reality where my men chose anything over me.
But knowing that hasn’t actually changed anything.
I’m still tied to him because I don’t know what he’ll do to us if I leave.
I’m still living every day without them.
I’m still in this fucked up place where it feels like my life is happening to me, and I’m angry as hell about it.
That anger manifests itself into nails digging into the skin of Beck’s neck.
“Ouch,” he says, wincing.
My fingers relax immediately. “I’m sorry.”
Explaining where my mind is and why is unnecessary. The anger building inside of me has been simmering for months now, and it has been discussed ad nauseam. Going into it right now would be a massive waste of the few minutes we have left. I lean in, resting my forehead against his.
“How was the trip?”
“Mentally exhausting, as usual. He insisted on running with us every morning. Did you know it takes him twelve minutes to run a mile?”
I snort, the pettiest part of me lighting up at the thought of Aubrey slugging along the trails around Camp David trying to keep up with Beck’s long strides. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. He’s never been a fan of cardio.”
“You should have seen how red his face was by the end of each run. We’d laugh about it for the rest of the day,” he recounts, lips quirking in fleeting amusement.
I move my hands around to cup his dear face, tracing my finger tips over the remnants of the foreign expression. “I miss your smile.”
There’s a weight to the words I didn’t intend to place there.
One that transcends the obvious pain of our lack of proximity and taps into the dark, shameful wall of guilt wrapped around his heart because of what he had to do to save me and Cal.
I know from the brief moments I’ve shared with the man who captured both of our hearts that Beck is struggling with being responsible for the death of Agent Charlie Monroe.
It doesn’t matter that she betrayed her badge and oath. That she led him and Cal to what would have been certain death. It doesn’t matter that every report he wrote and statement he gave after the fact stated it was him or her. All that matters is she’s gone, and he’s responsible.
And that harsh truth has stolen his light.
Which isn’t to say the man was ever a ray of sunshine.
Because he wasn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
He was carrying ghosts with him before. His wife.
His son. But they were benevolent presences.
The love he still holds for them a soft, aching glow that surrounds him, turning him into this mesmerizing and sometimes untouchable entity.
They were there. They still are, but they weren’t haunting him.
Charlie is, though.
She’s a shadow over his features. A rain cloud above his head, stealing the small bits of sun we share in these stolen moments.
I just wish I fully understood why. I mean, of course I can’t imagine it’s easy being responsible for the end of someone’s life, but I know for a fact she isn’t the first person Beck has killed.
And even if that was the case, his actions were justified because she intended to kill him.
That reasoning would be enough to comfort me, but it’s not enough for Beck.
The most frustrating part of all of this is I can’t ask him to explain it because I can’t risk him looking at me the way Aubrey used to when I would ask for clarification on something that felt so obvious to him and every other neurotypical person around.
Beck sighs, and the heat of his breath skates over my lips.
I lean in closer, chasing the warmth, needing the pressure of his mouth more than whatever response he was going to give.
He caves easily, and I open for him the second his tongue emerges from his mouth.
My fingers are in his skin again, but he doesn’t wince this time.
He groans, and I drink the sound down in greedy gulps, feeding him my own moans when he rocks up into me making me feel the erection I can’t take advantage of.