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,mytexts. To him. Plastered into an article about my texts to him. An exclusive. In the fuckingTimes. 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 prettysure 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 ofRe-Elect Rhodesbumper 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.Presidentialeven. 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 againstme?”
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 onthe 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 aboutthem. 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 forall. 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, lovingLevi 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.”
“Yes,” I say. “I do. But you also know how much I wanted this. There was a time when we shared all the same visions for the future, and you were willing to dispel all of that in favor of beating me.” I think to his platform, the way it cedes power to the wealthier, to the least burdened members of our—mydistrict—instead of supporting those most vulnerable to the perils of a harsh world. The small margin that separated our views wasn’t enough for him to pull ahead in the polls, so that’s when he turned to attacking me personally.
First it wasRed Carpet Rhodes, an allusion to the fame that found me when I was elected even though I didn’t specifically seek it out, and now it’s the texts. It doesn’t matter that it’s a clear violation of privacy, that they were likely “obtained” illegally—now everyone will see me as the one thing they always feared I was in the back of their head—a woman. A woman who, in spite of her ability to circumvent the conventional curse of housewifery and motherhood, is in fact a human being with bones and blood and, most unpalatably, a desire for sex.
Levi loosens his tie slightly, enough for me to see the beads of sweat forming on his neck. Good. This should be hard for him. “It’s not personal,” he tries again.
I look at the article on his phone again, the gray bubbles of my shame staring back at me with the soon-to-be-infamous screenshots of my late-night texts.Sometimes I think of your body on mine and I want to quit Washington and just run away with you;it’s been too long since I’ve touched you; I need you.Horniness has brought down political leaders before; I just never thought late-night martini-fueled messages sent to my bicoastal situationship would be the death of my dream. I keep scrolling.I can’t wait until things are less chaotic here and we can just be. I love you so much.I hold back a sudden, strong desire to vomit, cringing at my delusional past self. “This is personal,” I say. “This is using what we had against me.”
“And what did we have, Isabella?” Levi asks. “Because from what I remember, we couldn’t have this”—he points between the two of us—“because of all of this,” he says, gesturing around my office.
I stare at him. No, glare. I glare at him. He knows how badly I wantedus. We’d danced around each other for years. It wasn’t until the night I told him I was running for Congress that he tearfully told me how proud he was of me, that he was waiting for me, that he knew it would be a bad time for us to start something, but that he loved me and as soon as it was right for me, we could be together.
We then spent our first night together working out years of tension and the subsequent time since has been reduced to late-night sexting. I knew the repercussions if I was using my time between congressional sessions for secret trysts with my specifically not-boyfriend and the world found out and besides, he waswaitingfor me. For him to twist our past to convenience whatever narrative he’s pushing in his head isn’t just a gut-punch, it’s offensive. It’s enraging.
My stomach tightens as I realize the reason we couldn’t be together wasn’t self-sacrifice on his part, it was that he couldn’t be with someone who was doing better than he was. We’d always had the same dream, the only difference between us now was that mine had come true—and he is willing to do whatever it takes for our circumstances to flip. He weighed his own desires against whatever regard he held for me and ultimately decided his own dream was worth destroying mine. He didn’t love me, that much was clear, but he also didn’t think I was worthy of the office I’d worked so hard to get, and that is the real knife in the back.
“Brutus,” I mumble under my breath. “Fucking Brutus,” I say louder, because fuck it, I want him to hear me. “There were better ways to tell me you didn’t want to be with me.” My phone dings with a news alert—I glance at it and see my name in the headline. By morning, my leaked texts will be at the top of everyone’s feeds. Tweeters, Threaders, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and everyone with news outlet push notifications will know that Congresswoman IsabellaRhodes was sending thirsty texts to her opposition mere days before he decided to run against her. They won’t explicitly outline that it was a cause-and-effect situation, but the timeline will heavily imply that he came to the conclusion I was using time that should be spent thinking about my constituents to text my crush.
Levi Cross had no choice but to step in and save them. It doesn’t help that his messages back to me were so banal.Keep focused on the good fight, Isabella,he’d replied to my drunken desperation. From the bubbles on the screen, it looks like he cared more about my job than I did.
By tomorrow, my supporters will be embarrassed for me, and my enemies will be vindicated. Levi will use his campaign event at the local IATSE chapter to denounce the leak publicly. He will say his campaign is taking all steps possible to find the source and a few days later, some mid-level staffer will come forward. The sacrificial lamb will assure everyone he acted alone and leave Levi looking like the hero of the story, the victim of all the unpleasantness of running a campaign.
And then the focus will be back on me. As long as the texts are out there, they’re fair game. Levi will say we were good friends, but he rejected my romantic advances—as is clear in the texts—and he thinks Congresswoman Rhodes is focused on all the wrong things,I mean, clearly, he’ll joke. I’ve always kept it civil toward him because people in our community knew we had been friendly. I didn’t want to sound petty or at all emotionally affected by my bestierunning against me, so I have always insisted we have a mutual respect for one another, and that our goals were the same. It’s almost too perfect, really, how easily my words can be twisted into an endorsement now. If any of my supporters have trepidation about jumping ship from Team Rhodes to Team Cross, they have my own glowing recommendation of Levi to turn to.
