POWER #4
Chapter One
I tossed myself into the night, away from the shell of the White House. I felt my tears riding hot and heavy down my chest. The president’s voice seemed to echo in my head. His words: “I knew better than to fucking hire a new girl, 29 years old when everyone else was better qualified,” were ringing and ringing in my ears. God, those words. They broke me in that moment. Everything I had thought I’d worked for had been taken from me. The president had reduced me to his sexual object—the woman who would ultimately ruin him.
Why had I told him, anyway? I had wanted things to be beautiful between us, and yet this was what I ultimately got. I got mistrustful glances and angry retorts; I was spurned from his bed and shaken out into the cold world. I wrapped my coat around my shoulders and hailed a taxi, knowing I looked like a crazy woman. The yellow car coursed up and I swept into it, shivering wildly. I told him Rachel’s address, knowing that my own address was completely out of the question. I couldn’t allow Jason to see me cry. I couldn’t allow him to eat his Doritos and watch the true emotion wretch from my body.
The taxi pulled me through Washington once more. I paid him quickly, my eyes nearly closing as the stress took hold of my brain, and then I climbed the steps with forceful footfalls. I tapped at the door and Rachel opened it swiftly, her eyes wide. She didn’t expect me home so soon, if at all. Her words were on her lips in a moment. “What happened?” she whispered.
I knelt my head to her shoulder and began to weep. My body was quaking. Rachel brought her hands to my shoulders and rubbed at my spine, at my very bones. I could feel her small fingers attempting to loosen the strain and tension in my back.
Finally, she drew me to the couch. She leapt up and poured us both a glass of wine quickly, noting that I was continually staring at the floor before me listlessly. I accepted the wine and guzzled it back, trying to retreat from my feelings. But they stayed. They stayed.
“Are you ready to talk about it?” she whispered then, across from me in the chair by the window. The moonlight glistened against her red hair.
I smacked my lips slowly—what a satisfying sound. “You know. It didn’t exactly go according to plan.” I felt a laugh escape from me now, forcing Rachel into a worried smile.
“Sure. Nothing ever does,” Rachel whispered. The silence hung between us for a moment. “So you told him?”
I nodded calmly. “It was a beautiful evening. One of the better we’ve ever spent together. I started to feel, you know, like we were linked in some way—like we were meant to be together. That perhaps it could even work out; that I could hold onto my career and still be with him. What a silly thought, no?”
Rachel just furrowed her eyebrows then. She didn’t say anything, allowing me to push through the story.
I cleared my throat. “Anyway. I told him about Jason. Sure, I didn’t tell him so well. The story was sloppy and ill-conceived. It sort of came out of nowhere. But I told him, all the same. And he kicked me out of the bedroom. He essentially told me he should have never hired an inexperienced girl like me.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “He said that?” She knew that this attack on my career was greater than anything else; but she also understood that I was so assuredly f
alling in love with this man.
“And then he kicked me out,” I nodded. “He told me to leave. I’m not surprised if I’m fired. But I can’t be sure.” I sighed, taking another sip. The wine was bitter, and it fit my mood. Everything seemed to be folding together into this grand, bitter scheme.
But Rachel placed her hand on my knee from across the coffee table. Her thin wrist twisted a bit as she did it. “You’re going to get through this, Amanda. Come on. You’re a fighter. That’s how you got into this position. Not for any other reason. Not because you’re beautiful, because anyone can see that. But because you have balls and brains.” Rachel’s face was so grim. Her mouth was a flat line between her fine cheeks. In that moment, she noted that I was out of wine, and she refilled us both, bringing us into the next stage of this drunken reality: away from sad drunk and more toward angry drunk.
“You know what we should do?” she asked me, midway through her second drink. The evil gleamed in her eyes. “We should tell his wife.” She nodded succinctly.
I tossed my head back, shaking it. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Camille? No. No, no.”
“But think about it?” Rachel asked, flashing her palms toward me in a curious move. “He won’t be expecting it. She’s not the public, certainly, and she won’t want this to get out. But it will offer the perfect retribution for all he’s put you through. He’ll have this hellacious woman figure in his life, and he certainly will rue the day he ever misaligned your career like that.” She smiled in that grim way once more. “It’s beautiful.”
I laughed, but I wasn’t so sure. “What about going to the media?” I asked, playing along with her words. “I could tell them that I was the president’s little plaything for a while, that I have secrets to the ways in which he handles other countries and world leaders.” I thought for a moment. “You know, it’s actually kind of true.” I winked at her.
Rachel laughed, nearly spinning her wind with the joyousness of it. “You’re wicked, my girl. Wicked. We could ruin him. We two in this room. We have more dirt on the president than anyone in the world.”
Rachel reached toward the cell phone on the coffee table then. I paused from my laughter, my eyebrows high. “What are you doing?” I whispered.
Rachel shrugged. “We have to start somewhere, don’t we? The Times? Someone will be awake, typing away in these late hours.”
But I shook my head, a grim expression exhibiting itself on my face. “Not tonight, Rachel. A couple of drunk ladies calling into the New York Times? I don’t think that would work so well.” I winked at her, but really, my heart was quaking in my chest. In these moments, I hated the president with a sure passion. However, I knew that deep inside my soul, I actually cared for him a great deal. Even loved him, although I hated to admit this to myself. Threatening Xavier from afar was making me feel ever better (and the wine wasn’t hurting, either).
However, ruining Xavier’s life also meant something else. It meant that I was exposing myself as his “bimbo”—something that Jason was attempting to do, all this time. And that meant that I couldn’t ever tell anyone. I couldn’t allow my identity to be revealed. I couldn’t allow all that I had worked for to be burned at the stake, so to speak, only for my anger and jealousy. I was much stronger than that.
Thusly, a few hours later—near sunup, when Rachel went to bed—I laid in my guest bedroom and listened to the cars as they whizzed by the apartment complex. I thought about the life I’d always wanted: the powerful one at the top. I thought about how lonely that one was: that if I ever found anyone to share it with, that would truly be a beautiful thing. But my need for that life still obliterated everything, almost even my deep passion for the president. And thus, all my decisions had to keep my career in mind. If that ultimately meant that I needed to leave the campaign in order to resist the president and get away from his lying, scheming self—the man who had pushed me back out into the dangerous world, even after I had told him all that had happened to me (the blackmail, etc.), then so be it.
Chapter Two
The next morning, I stretched myself from bed, unsure if I should go back into work. I could remember the scorn from the president’s lips so well in my ears, and I didn’t want to return to that mockery. I didn’t want to go see those eyes—those eyes that had provided such comfort, such humor in the previous days—and know that they ultimately hated me now. It was too much to face.
However, the White House had become my home, in many ways. As I tapped from the guest bedroom in Rachel’s house, I noted the cold slickness of the floor; I wrapped my sweater around my shoulders. I didn’t feel like myself, as I did in the White House. Instead, I felt like a foreigner. I could hear Rachel getting ready for work in her larger bathroom, and I knew that I needed to head out the door as well. What was I going to do at home all day—in Rachel’s home? Read romance novels? Watch talk television? Dream ever about reaching the heights of my career, without really pursuing it in a realistic sense?