Prologue #2
There are still a few campaign staffers working in the office when we make it up the janky elevator.
It’s an old industrial building in East Hollywood, a conscious parallel to the superstar status I’ve acquired since I beat out my incumbent in the primary.
He was gracious when I won two years ago.
He said he’d done all he could do, and it was time for someone younger with more energy to take the reins.
Kate whispers to the staffers and they clear out, so the office is completely empty. “Do you want me to stay?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I’m good, but thank you.
” She smiles quickly then bows out. I check my face in my phone camera.
My makeup from this morning has mostly rubbed off, but I don’t look too exhausted.
I dot a little concealer under my eyes and run the mascara wand through my eyelashes.
Richard, my head of security, catches me fixing my hair and applying a new layer of lip gloss.
“Don’t judge me, Richard,” is what I want to say, but that’s not really our dynamic.
He nods in my direction then posts himself outside the door, leaving the office for me and soon, Levi.
My heart races at the thought of seeing him.
The elevator dings and through the frosted glass I see two heads bob out. One stays outside with Richard while the other reaches for the door. When he swings it open, the unmistakable smell of Tom Ford and two extra-dry martinis wafts through with him.
It takes every bit of energy left in my cells after this extremely long day to not get immediately turned on by the sight of him.
He’s more polished than before, sharp in custom Armani and shiny shoes that click across the cement floors.
When his ocean-blue eyes meet mine, I shiver.
Even after everything, his energy alone makes a river of want swell in my gut. “Hi,” I say.
Levi nods, forcing out a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Hi.”
He walks over to me, and I take a step back instinctively. I haven’t talked to him like this, on a personal level, in months. There’s so much I want to say but so much I know I shouldn’t say, it’s hard to know where to begin. “I don’t know where to start,” I say.
Levi looks at me, surprised. “Pardon?” he asks. Genuinely confused.
“I mean, I feel like there’s so much we have to say to each other,” I say.
Levi’s eyebrows twitch and I realize we are not on the same page. We are not on the same page at all. He didn’t come here to make peace or to hash things out. He didn’t come here for me. “Why are you here?” I ask.
Levi sighs. “Look, this isn’t easy. None of this has been easy—” He fishes his phone out of his front pocket.
“This is coming out tomorrow,” he says, showing me his phone screen, but my eyes struggle to focus.
“Your team will probably hear from the press for comment imminently, but I thought I owed you the courtesy of letting you know personally first.”
My eyes try to fix on the screen but it’s like my brain is protecting me from processing what I am seeing.
It’s texts. It’s our texts. Or more specifically, my texts.
To him. Plastered into an article about my texts to him.
An exclusive. In the fucking Times. I force myself to take a breath. “What in the actual fuck?” I exhale.
“I didn’t leak them,” he says. “But we were made aware of them tonight. And I’m not stopping them from coming out.”
I’m going to vomit. Or have a heart attack. Or disintegrate into dust and blow out the window and into the night. “What the fuck,” I repeat.
“It’s just politics, Isabella,” he says, employing my full government name.
His insistence on never calling me by my preferred nickname Izzy was charming, suave even, at first, but right now the sound of all four syllables makes me gag.
He cocks his head at me, his aggressively beautiful eyes attempting to lock onto mine. “It’s not personal.”
I dodge to avoid eye contact like he’s launching a missile directly at my face.
“Not personal?” I ask, gesturing wildly around my head because I’m pretty sure steam is coming out of my ears, and I want it to dissipate before it sets off the fire sprinklers.
The last thing I need right now is for my office to be flooded with water that’s been sitting in hot, leaded pipes for who knows how many years.
“How is this not personal? You’re leaking my texts, our texts. ”
“Like I said,” he says, so calmly it adds even more fuel to the rage fire burning in my chest, “I didn’t leak them. No one on my team leaked them, it was completely unrelated to my camp—”
“Ugh!” I yell, pushing a stack of Re-Elect Rhodes bumper stickers off the table next to me so dramatically, they rain down to the floor in a flurry of red, white, and blue.
“Please at least do me the dignity of not repeating that insipid lie.” I sit back on the desk behind me and roll up the sleeves of my UCLA sweatshirt.
The roar of a fire engine speeding down Hollywood Boulevard is the only sound in the room as Levi is silent.
He toys with his cuff links—tiny gold American flags that cost more than my car—while he, presumably, waits for me to calm down.
He’s frustratingly handsome in a suit. It was when we were community organizers that I fell for him, in sweaty T-shirts with his unkempt hair splaying out wildly under his royal blue Dodgers hat, but damn it if I don’t notice how good he looks all cleaned up.
Presidential even. I gag again. “I just don’t understand why you had to do this to—”
“I did not release the texts!” he interrupts, his forehead creasing as he raises his hands in surrender.
“I don’t mean the texts,” I say, standing back up and taking a step toward him.
This is the first time we’ve been alone since he announced his candidacy and my body is, as it turns out, apolitical and still craves being close to him.
“I mean running in my district. I mean running against me.” I take another step closer.
He’s only a couple of inches taller than me.
I forgot about that. On the TV ads when he’s listing all the reasons he’d be a better congressperson for California’s 45th district than me, on his billboards that line the route from home to my office, on his social media ads that clog my feed when I’m trying to unwind from a long congressional session, he looms so much larger. “Why did you have to run against me?”
Levi doesn’t answer at first. I watch as his eyes scan over me, and I can’t decide if he’s feeling the same residual longing under his skin as I am or if he’s sizing me up like prey, weighing the best way to go in for the kill as if I’m not already dead in the water.
Part of me wants to kiss him just to see what he’d do.
Tomorrow there’d probably be 24-hour coverage on how I’m a sexual predator, but at least my pathetic texts would be out of the news.
“I don’t understand when you decided to hate me.
” I shift my eyes into his, widening them and willing my tear ducts to create a watery sheen across their surface.
The puppy dog eyes. No man, even a congressional candidate with Oval Office aspirations, is immune to the freaking puppy dog eyes.
“Isabella—” Levi starts. He sighs heavily.
“I don’t hate you.” He reaches toward me, resting his hand on the side of my arm.
I stiffen my body in response, as much as it wants to melt.
I don’t want him to feel the muscle memory his touch evokes.
He quickly moves his hand away. “Sorry. I—” He tries again, another sigh huffing out of him.
“You of all people should understand why this isn’t about you. It’s about them. It’s about everyone.”
Unfortunately, I know him and his ideals so well that I know exactly what he means despite the broadness of his statement.
There was a time where our shared ideals set my heart on fire.
We both wanted nothing more than to leave the world better than we found it.
To end the suffering of our neighbors. To focus on the collective good.
To actually make good on the promise of liberty and justice for all. For everyone.
The irony of trampling over me on this grand pursuit toward liberating the huddled masses was lost on him, apparently.
“But why did you have to take my district? Why did you have to go after me?” I ask.
This might be the last time I ever speak to Levi, so I might as well stop beating around the bush and ask the question that’s been percolating in my brain ever since he announced his intention to run for my seat in January.
The election’s less than a month away. And thanks to Levi, I’m probably going to lose.
He rubs his lips together, as if he’s struggling to come up with an answer, when I know the truth is he’s weighing how best to devastate me one final time.
I’m not going to like the answer, but let it finally sever the last thin tie that binds the passionate, earnest, loving Levi of our past to the Hugo Boss ad standing in front of me now.
He takes a step closer. “The committee who encouraged me to run noticed some”—he searches for the right words—“vulnerabilities in your candidacy. I wanted to wait another term, I wanted to seek out other solutions. I didn’t want to do this, Isabella, I didn’t want to run against you, but they made it seem like it was now or never. You know how much I want this.”