April 28, 2009
“Phineas, have you met my son,SenatorTaylor?”
Dad slaps me on the shoulder. His heavy hand landing with a dull thwack that agitates an old baseball injury. He knows about my torn rotator cuff. He was there, screaming at me about accuracy and control, when the tendons pulled away from the bone in the fourth inning. You would think that knowledge would stop him from pounding on it with those clubs he calls hands or squeezing it when he needs my attention, but it doesn’t. In fact, I’m half convinced he does it on purpose, using the pain to direct my focus to whatever person or thing he wants it on at the moment.
And right now he wants on this man.
Or rather, he wants this man’s attention on me.
Phineas? I think that’s what his name is, squints in my direction. Disdain curling his upper lip and suggesting that he isn’t as familiar with my father as my father is with him.
“And you are?” His voice is as smooth as the whiskey in cup, but his eyes are cutting. Shattered jade with sharp, jagged edges that snag on your skin as they rip through.
Dad’s grip on my shoulder loosens, and I slip out of his hold, extending a hand to the only man I’ve ever seen humble my father. “I’m Aubrey Taylor.”
“SenatorAubrey Taylor,” he replies, flicking his gaze to my father as he mocks him. Then he looks back at me, disgust dripping off his tongue when he says, “I do not shake hands.”
Immediately, I drop my hand, shoving it into my pocket to hide the evidence of my blunder and then cursing myself for being so fucking nervous. One glance over my shoulder reveals that my father has abandoned me. My jaw clenches as I turn back to the stranger who’s still staring at me.
“I apologize for my father’s interruption.”
He dragged me over to the private corner at the edge of the balcony overlooking the D.C.’s skyline, telling me Phineas was the only person at this party I needed to meet. The way he spoke, I thought they were acquainted, but now I know this was just another one of his ham-handed approaches to networking. He’s always complaining about how people pussy foot around each other, waiting for a friend of a friend of a friend to come along and give them a way in when what they should be doing is making it happen for themselves. I’ve told him repeatedly how embarrassing that approach is, but he never listens.
“You are still standing here, so it is now your interruption, is it not?”
“Right, well I guess I’ll just?—”
I hook a thumb over my shoulder, indicating my intention to leave him alone, and he turns his back, moving toward a door I failed to notice when I was making an ass of myself. He grips the handle and glances at me, boredom floating in those freaky green eyes.
“Are you coming, Senator Taylor?”
Shock and intrigue move me forward, and soon I’m following Phineas up a flight of stairs that leads to the roof. We werealready up pretty damn high when we were on the balcony, but the air is different up here. Dense with possibility, but light enough to make you feel like you’re floating.
Phineas strides right up the edge and takes a seat, feet dangling over the city streets from thirty stories up.
“Must I invite you to engage in every interaction we have tonight?”
The impatient lilt to his otherwise docile tone pushes me into action. Soon, my feet are dangling over the edge too, and Phineas is handing me a cigar he produced out of thin air then cut and lit while I was thinking about what it might feel like to jump.
I take a long pull, relishing the flavor of singed earth and sweet wood on my tongue. “My wife would kill me if she knew I was up here.”
“Strict, is she?”
“Doesn’t even begin to describe it,” I admit, huffing circles of smoke that linger in the air, tangling with the ones Phineas makes. Selene has always been…particular, but the last few years have exacerbated things. “She’s worse since the kid was born. He’s four God-damn years old, and she still acts like he needs her for everything. I don’t think I even saw my mother until I was ten.”
“Nannies?”
“Nannies.”
“I do not have the desire to procreate,” he announces, holding his cigar off to the side and rolling it between his fingers gently to dislodge the ash. “But if I did, I would enlist the help of caregivers. Is your wife opposed?”
“Strongly. She grew up poor, so she doesn’t understand how much easier parenting is when you have money. It’s like she’s determined to struggle the same way her parents did, make the same kind of sacrifices they did even though we don’t have to.”
Truthfully, I can’t tell if Phineas is interested in this conversation or simply entertaining the ramblings of madman, but I don’t think it really matters. It’s nice to get this shit off my chest. I can’t say any of it to my mom because she’ll just bring it up to Selene, and if I mention it to my dad, he’ll go off on a tangent about letting a woman control my life.
He pushes a stream of billowing smoke out between his clenched teeth. “What kind of sacrifices?”
“Sleep, time, sex, our careers. I’m serving my first term in the fucking Senate, and she’s making me promise not to even think about a run for the Oval until 2028.” I brush ash from my cigar off my lap and try to squash the anger rolling through me. I’m not successful. “Can you believe that shit? That’s twenty fucking years from now.”
