My skin always betrayed my emotions, flushing at the drop of a hat, and my father reached up and gave my hair a ruffle like I was five rather than a fully grown man who was at work.
“Senator Adams, you can’t tease my security detail,” Lennon said, her voice light with a joke that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You should wait until Agent Adams is off shift before you make jokes like that.”
My father’s hands slid away from me as he held his hands up good naturedly. “You’re right, Ms. Holloway, I was so excited to see Zeke that I forgot he was on duty.”
“It happens,” Lennon said with an easy shrug, the silk shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders slipping down slightly as she looked at me again with something akin to sympathy in her eyes and it grated on my already frayed nerves. I didn’t want her to think I was pitiful. That was the last thing I wanted her to think. “My mother is the same way.”
“Speaking of your mother,” Senator Cambria cut in. “What do you think about…”
Later, once Lennon had freed herself from their political twenty questions, we stepped out onto the balcony and into the surprisingly cool night air. So far July had been blazingly hot, so the drop in temperature was a welcome reprieve.
“I should have made the connection that you were Senator Adams’s son on that first day,” Lennon said as she stared out over the glittering Chicago skyline.
“It’s a pretty common surname,” I offered. “And it’s not like we look alike since I’m adopted.”
Lennon looked over at me, a surprised expression once again lifting her dainty features.
“You look like your mother though,” she pointed out.
A smile tugged at my lips. “Technically wearerelated. She was my biological mother’s sister. She died giving birth to me.”
“Oh,” she said on an exhale as if realizing she’d stepped into touchy territory. “I’m so sorry.”
I just shrugged. “I didn’t know her and they didn’t have any other family, so even though Yukiko and Willis were older with nearly grown children, they took me in.”
I was grateful to my parents for giving me the life I had, but sometimes when the pressure of being a senator’s son grew to be too much I wondered what life would have been like growing up in the countryside of Japan with my biological mother.
How much different would my life have been?
Slanting a glance over at the omega next to me, I caught a whiff of fermented cherries in the air before it was gone with a flash.
It tickled my senses, causing the instincts that were usually dulled by the oral suppressants we were required to take every morning to stir as I realized the scent was coming from Lennon.
Shaking off the pleasant shudder that her perfume sent down my spine, I hurried to change the subject.
“I met you once, you know, when I was still in high school.”
“Did you? I mean your father said we met, but I barely remember it,” Lennon commented softly as she took a sip of the champagne that had been clutched in her hand like an accessory the entire night.
I nodded. “It was at one of your grandfather’s Christmas parties.”
Farrow Holloway’s Christmas parties were legendary on the hill and my parents who had long been some of his staunchest allies in his party were always invited. I’d never been allowed togo until my freshman year of high school and at that point it was no longer cool or interesting to me.
It had been a drag trying to find ways to entertain myself while avoiding my parents and my dad’s colleagues who wanted tooohandahhover how tall I’d grown and how my voice had changed.
When I’d ducked out onto the front porch of Number One Observatory circle—the vice president’s residence—I’d found her there without a coat and blowing her breath onto her frost-bitten red fingers.
I was pretty sure she was three or so years younger than I was—so at fourteen she’d just been an awkward pre-teen, still figuring out her elbows and knees. Like a baby deer learning how to walk.
We hadn’t spoken then. Just stood together on the porch in the resilient but awkward silence that only teenagers could share.
When I’d seen her again years later during the coverage of President Holloway’s first election, she’d changed into a beautiful young woman who my eyes were inexplicably drawn to. At that point it had been a simple attraction. A crush in passing based off of seeing her face on television.
…I never thought I’d get the chance to be in the same room as her again, let alone be a part of her security detail.
“Did we talk?” Lennon asked, making it clear I’d piqued her curiosity.
I chuckled at her. “No. We stood there for, like ten minutes before you bolted inside.”
