Winning was going to be easy. But forgetting Meg? I would never be able to quit her.
9
Meghan
“Hunter is such a dick!” I yelled to Susie.
I was stress baking in my rented studio apartment after the town hall meeting. Earlier in the day, I had bought a bunch of cake-making supplies to bake a raspberry chocolate layer cake in celebration. Instead, I had not only not become mayor, I now had to fight for the position against Hunter and Ida. Therefore, we would not be celebrating with a carefully baked cake. Nope. I was making chocolate-chip cookie dough, and I was eating it raw.
Susie poured me more red wine as I angrily threw handfuls of chocolate chips into the mixing bowl.
“He literally pretended to care about me. All the while, he was manipulating me and planning on how best to stab me in the back.”
“I think he maybe wanted to stab you somewhere else,” my friend joked.
“I don’t think about him that way,” I said primly while furiously refusing to fantasize about how good it had felt the last time.
I mixed in the chocolate chips. My stomach churned in time with the beater. “What if I lose?” I said in a small voice. To lose to Hunter? I wouldn’t survive the humiliation. “I’d have to move. Maybe I need to look at moving now.”
“You’re leaving?” Susie cried. “But you’re my best friend.”
“I cannot live here if Hunter is the mayor,” I said, scraping the sides of the bowl. “I literally would not survive. I couldn’t watch him swagger around in his fancy suit and million-dollar watches—”
“His watch costs a million dollars?” Susie said in disbelief.
“Yup,” I said. “Because if you’re a man and you have a lot of money, you buy a watch and a nice car.”
“Jeez.” Susie leaned back on my bed, which was only a few feet away from the kitchen counter because this was my life. “If I had a million dollars, I wouldn’t spend it on a watch.”
“See,” I said, “that’s what you don’t understand. Hunter has billions. Plural. A million-dollar watch is nothing to him.”
Just like you.It stung.
“So are you finally over Hunter now?” Susie asked me carefully.
I took a fortifying bite of raw cookie dough. “Yes,” I said. “I am over him. I don’t want anything to do with him. It just sucks that I’m going to lose to him.”
“You don’t know that,” Susie assured me, scooping out some of the dough and turning on the oven. “I cannot afford to get sick.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the eggs. They’re farm fresh.”
“It’s the raw flour that does you in,” she told me, rolling out several cookies. “Also, you cannot just give up. Focus on the basics of campaigning. Everyone in town knows you. You’ve been the deputy mayor for years. Hell, with the way Barry never worked, you’ve basically been doing the job of mayor too.”
“No one is going to care,” I said dejectedly. “They think I’m bossy and shrill just because I won’t let them text and drive or throw plastic straws into the street or drink in excess at meetings.” The raw cookie dough swam in my vision. I took another bite. “But they are going to remember how Hunter provided food and alcohol at town halls. Just watch… he’ll spend all this money to basically bribe people. He and his family are probably out there spreading lies right now.”
“You never know,” Susie joked, “Ida could be the next mayor.”
“Lord help us,” I said, waving the spoon at the ceiling.
“I know.” Susie shook her head. “I’ve already reached my limit on being a police officer in a small town. With Ida in charge, I think I would need to quit and become a full-time recluse.”
“If I win, you can be my deputy mayor,” I joked.
Susie looked intrigued. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I told her. “There’s no one else I would want to work with.”
My friend grinned broadly at me.
