“For what it’s worth, after that first lunch together—I knew I didn’t want you to leave.” He turns to me and the right side of his mouth quirks into a smile.
“It’s worth something,” I say.
He looks back toward the house; there’s only a spattering of lights visible through the windows, buthe scans nervously for spectators. “I feel bad.” Benito turns back toward the lake and drops his head in his hand. “You came here for a simpler life, and I’ve made it so complicated with my Shakespearean tragedy of a family.”
I lean in so my eyes are level with his. “Are you kidding? Fake dating, trickery, secret schemes? This is a comedy.” He smiles again and I feel victorious. I shift my weight so I’m closer to him, a mere inch between our bodies. “Don’t feel bad,” I say softly. “I want to be here.”
His eyes meet mine and I feel a stir between my legs. It would take nothing more than the slightest of gravitational pulls for my lips to be on his. If only the world would turn a little bit faster.
“Are you ok after everything Don brought up?” Benito asks, failing to take this conversation the direction I want. To a conversation where no words are needed at all. “About your past. About what happened with—”
“I’m fine,” I say, but there’s enough edge in my voice that Benito doesn’t let me off so easy.
“Izzy. . .”
An involuntary groan leaps out of my throat like it’s been hiding there ever since the infuriating aforementioned altercation with Don thecoglione. Benito watches me. He’s waiting to see if there’s more, but there’s not. The five stages of grief for my dead dream have run through me and I now have no choice but to get comfortable with the fact that it’s gone.
I take a deep breath. “All I ever wanted my whole life was to be in Congress. To be a person who can make the world better for the next generation. Every school election, every AP History test, every volunteer opportunity—it was all a chance to prove that my dream was what I was supposed to do.” I crack the knuckles on my right hand as I continue, “But you can never really know for sure if it’s right, you know? You can never really be sure if you’re good at the thing you want to be good at. And there were little victories, little moments that validated that I was on the right path, but I was never certain I was good at it. I never felt worthy of any of the progress I ever made.
“And then I lost. I lost after my first term in a humiliating way, and it was like the other shoe finally dropped. It was like I was waiting for someone to say ‘No, you’re not good at the thing you’ve always wanted to do. You should stop.’ And then a whole district of people did. And I knew for sure it was true. So I stopped.”
I look back to the lake and up at the night sky. I allow myself to feel dwarfed by the infinite wall of stars. My father used to let me look out his telescope while he pointed out the constellations.“There are more planets out there than we can even fathom, Iz,”he used to say.“And yet you were picked for this one.”How insignificant destiny feels now.
Benito turns to me and brushes a hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. He keeps his hand on the side of my face and I lean into it. A light flickers inside the house and he pulls away. “But you did it. You had a dream and it came true. You made it true.”
“Not the whole dream,” I blurt. My skin prickles, my nerves on high alert—I haven’t let myself think about this at all since I lost.
“No?” Benito scans my face. “What else?”
“I wanted—” I think back to the moment my initial election was called in my favor. I saw it all ahead of me: a decade or two in Congress, a run for Senate, and then finally, after years of proving myself, I’d set my sights on the White House. “President,” I say, and the words sound so childish coming out of my mouth. Like something a third-grader says when asked what she wants to be when she grows up, not an actual career goal for an adult woman to actively pursue. “I wanted to be president. That was the dream. That was the whole dream.”
I exhale as Benito takes it in. I can barely stand to meet his eyes. President. It all felt so possible not even a year ago, and now it sounds completely ridiculous. I steady myself on the fence’s railing, still caught off-balance by how quickly life can change. “It sounds so stupid to say it out loud,” I say.
Benito shakes his head. “No.” He reassuringly pats his hand to my shoulder. “It doesn’t. Not at all.”
“It’s ok,” I say. “I know it’s not happening. It’s the one thing I was working toward my entire life, but now that life is over because I failed at the first real test. I’m a failure.”
“No, Izzy,” Benito starts. “You can’t really think one setback defines you. You are so much more than a single failure.”
“Am I, though?” I shake my head. “If you ask anyone to distill Isabella Rhodes into one sentence, what do you think they’ll list? My accomplishments, or my loss and my scandal? That’s why I came here. I had to come here because my name’s become synonymous with weakness at home. I know now I’ll never be president, and I can’t be around the constant reminders of the version of myself who thought that was possible. I can’t live like that. Even if it means I fade into nothingness. That has to be better.”
Benito takes it in. He thought we were so alike in coming back to La Musa after a personal crisis, but while his reasons were saintlike, mine were selfish—a vengeful need to give up on the people I wanted to help because they gave up on me.
“That’s not what I’d say,” he finally says.
“What do you mean?”
“You said that’s how anyone would distill Isabella Rhodes into one sentence, but that’s not what I’d say.” He shifts from one foot to another, glancing back at the house nervously.
I’m scared to know the answer if I ask the question, but I have to hear it. “What would you say, then?”
He takes a step closer to me, filling in all but the last few gasps of air between us. “Isabella Rhodes is. . . brilliant but not in a normal way. She’s brilliant in a sharp, cunning, witty, kind of scary at times way that’s able to make your whole world come into focus, that makes you wonder how you ever lived a second of your life anywhere but in her presence.” He looks back at the house for a moment but seems to make adecision internally. He takes my hand and intertwines my fingers with his.
I cock my head at him. “Huh. I thought you were going to say ‘Isabella Rhodes is very pretty.’”
He pulls me closer so there’s no more gap. Our bodies pressed together like they need each other to breathe. “Oh, she has that covered too. Believe me.”
A flurry of butterflies free themselves from my gut, taking over my entire body with a pleasant fluttering. Benito trades my hand for a strong grip on my waist. He waits for me to protest, and when I don’t, he uses his free hand to gently tilt my chin upward, giving me one last look before leaning in. His lips meet mine with a gentle graze but soon the tempestuous tension that’s been percolating between us gives way to a vigorous need to be one.
