Private Politics (The Easy Part) (17 page)

Her mouth fell open in surprise. Maybe she’d thought it was just something he’d said in the heat of the moment and hadn’t meant. It wasn’t and he hadn’t and if talking about it was a way to get her to give up this silly diatribe, then he’d gladly open up his feelings for discussion.

He continued, “I am in love with
you
. I know you. Not everything about you, okay, sure, I admit it, but the things that matter. Don’t insult yourself like that.”

She’d recovered her composure now. “Like what? What do you know about me?”

“I know you understand how people think. You can meet someone, analyze him and figure out the best way to get him on your side in an instant. You can plan an event and devise half a dozen strategies to inform people, to get them to give, each of which requires different working pieces and you’ll pull it off. I know that while you care about clothes, hair, all that stuff, mostly it’s armor to get what you want. Your concern, what really drives you, is other people. You would do anything for the girls you help at YWR. You would do anything for Millie. If you’re unhappy with where you’re at, you’ll change it and you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. I don’t know why you haven’t sooner, because honestly—”

Liam didn’t get a chance to finish his thought because Alyse kissed him. He braced his hands on her waist and anchored her against him. He kissed her back with the force of his feelings, of his belief in her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck. The wool from her coat tickled his ears, but he wasn’t about to let her go. He couldn’t convince her with a kiss, at least he didn’t think he could, but he was sure as hell going to try.

Her head fell back as he kissed down her neck, his lips traveling the spare inches of collarbone exposed by her sweater and unbuttoned jacket. The noise she made in response was gratifying.

“Now,” he said into the notch at the base of her neck, “what were you saying about the woman I love?”

“Only that she played the fool when it suited her.”

“Played. Not was. Made a choice.”

He trailed soft kisses on the underside of her jaw.

“You might have chosen a better place for this,” she whispered.

“It was your choice. I ran out of weapons. This was what was left.”

They leaned forehead-to-forehead and caught their breath.

“Do you believe me?” he asked finally.

“Which part?”

She was so damn coy. “All of it. With you and me, nothing else will do.”

There was no middle ground when it came to them. There were no shades of gray. They were all or nothing.

Chapter Sixteen

Alyse paced up and down the red, gold and crystal elegance of the Grand Foyer in the Kennedy Center. She examined the crowd for Liam and/or Bertie. With each lap, her stride grew faster and her footfalls heavier.

Had she really been doubly stood up? Because if so, that had never happened to her—it might not have happened to anyone—and it stung. She’d touched up her nails and everything.

After Liam’s surprisingly convincing insistence he did love her, she did belong in DC and he did believe in her, if he had stood her up...it pissed her off. Even if Mahler were involved.

She started counting the flags lining the ceiling again but got bored after twenty-three. She snapped her clutch open and glanced at her phone. There were only fifteen minutes before the curtain. They should both really be there by now.

“Babe.”

She turned on her heel into Liam’s chest. Oh. Good. Everything was right with the world again.

“I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” she said.

He’d taken possession of her hands but drifted back a step or two so he could look her up and down. Voice soft and warm he repeated, “Babe. You look...damn.”

“Like the dress?” It was black and slinky and someone had forgotten to put a back on it.

After their stroll in the park and a long lunch in Chinatown, she’d convinced him to let her go back to her apartment to get ready all by her lonesome. The protracted negotiation had been worth it for everything in his eyes right now.

“Yeah. You could say I’m a fan.” He swallowed hard.

Looking him over, she said, “And you look...”

His shoes were scuffed. He’d obviously tried to iron his pants, a task that would have been easier if they hadn’t been pleated. Who the hell had invented pleated pants for men? Was any look less flattering and more aging than that?

Also, the windowpanes on his shirt fought with the stripes on his tie and his sport coat didn’t match any of it.

And she didn’t care.

“...nice,” she said at last. “You look nice.” And he did. He looked disheveled. Sweet. Like a recent college graduate on his way to a first job interview. And also like someone she was unexpectedly glad she was sleeping with.

She needed a bitchy Upper East Side cocktail party to snap the world back into focus.

He smirked and before she could protest that he did, in fact, look nice, he said, “At some point, you’ll have to help me overhaul my closet.”

“Oh, will I?” she said with a sultry smile. “I usually charge by the hour for that.”

He tugged her closer. “Do you accept payment in-kind?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Well—”

He didn’t finish—which was a shame, it had looked like quite a thought—because at that moment, Bertie stepped into the circle of their conversation and sucked up all the oxygen.

“Alyse! How are you? You look absolutely lovely. Can you believe the crowd? All these people can’t be going to hear Mahler. I just don’t believe it. This town can scarcely support an orchestra of any distinction. Regularly performing decent programs of serious music are beyond its poor power. No, they must be here for
Puff
,
the Magic Dragon
or whatever is being put on for free this evening. Oh, this must be the young man your father told me about. I’m Bertie Smyth. A pleasure.”

He delivered this monologue without pausing for breath, though he had managed to nod to at least half a dozen people around them who’d done double-takes in his direction. Typical Bertie.

Liam dropped one of her hands. “Liam Nussbaum. Nice to meet you.” He shot her a look she had no trouble decoding.

Smyth?
Bertie
,
your Bertie
,
is Bertram Smyth!

Yes. Yes, he was.

Before things could dissolve into pleasantries and further observations on the state of classical music in the District, and before they were interrupted by well-wishers, she asked, “Any update on...the thing?”

“I spoke to Mr. Hammond and he’s looking over the documents. Stay away from work. Stay near your phone. We’ll probably meet with him tomorrow.”

Bertie’s speech was pitched perfectly so that only she and Liam would be able to hear it. He was a phenomenal whisperer when the occasion required it, but he also wasn’t looking at her as he delivered it; he was waving at someone across the lobby.

If she had known Bertie any less well, this would probably have been disturbing. As it was, she trusted him absolutely. Now that he was involved, she knew there was no way anything serious—at least not anything jail-related—was going to happen to her. No one was better at this stuff than Bertie.

Having dispensed with this business, Bertie turned toward Liam and asked, “What is it that you do, Mr. Nussbaum?”

Bertie’s attention didn’t last long enough for Liam to actually answer the question he’d asked. Instead, he’d turned back to the crowd. A Supreme Court justice or defense contract executive might wander by; maybe an up and coming celebrity chef or a junior senator on the make. Bertie knew and had uses for them all.

Liam, of course, didn’t know this. He looked at Bertie and saw an august and influential lawyer and fundraiser. So for the moment, the poor boy was trying to string together a coherent sentence and failing.

“I, uh, write a blog,” he stuttered. “Poindexter.”

“Really?” At this, Bertie looked at Liam with new approval on his face, or maybe a new field had just opened in his endless, multi-board chess game. “I’ve read it. Trenchant analysis.”

“Thank you,” Liam said. He looked seriously nervous. The hand gripping hers had become tight as a vise and clammy. “You should know, sir, I didn’t write those pieces about liberal bundlers.”

Bertie raised, well, the technical term was probably a shit ton of money for the Democratic Party. Liam’s blog had criticized liberals for doing things the party had long criticized Republicans for, singling out folks like Bertie whose bundling of campaign contributions effectively made a mockery out of campaign finance reform laws. Good for Liam.

“But you agreed with them?” Bertie asked, his eyes brimming with unholy mischief.

“Um, yes.” Even under duress, Liam wouldn’t misrepresent himself, not even to impress one of the big dogs in his party. That was precisely what she adored about him.

“Well, so do I.” Bertie roared with laughter and then patted Liam awkwardly on the shoulder. “So do I, but the laws are what they are. I think Democrats should play by the rules that exist, not the rules that we might want.”

“Hmm.” It was an absolutely equivocal sound.

“How much is the moral high ground worth to you?” Bertie asked. “All the elections we lost in the eighties? The weakened and divided party of the nineties? The mess of the last fifteen years? Wasn’t that sacrifice enough?”

“Democrats’ electoral problems, their ideological problems, result from many causes.” Liam didn’t have her hand in a death-grip any longer. He looked more normal. “I don’t think we can blame all of it on holding ourselves to a standard beyond the letter of the law.”

“Quite so. But elections these days are won and lost by less in many cases.” Bertie turned toward her. “You’ve got quite a live one here.”

He didn’t seem in the least put off by Liam. She hadn’t ever seen Bertie put off. He must care at some level about the outcome, but she’d never seen him talk about politics as anything other than an elaborate game of Risk. Only getting to know Liam had convinced her that there were people who cared about politics who enjoyed the game but who also took it seriously.

Before she could tell him that she knew she had a live one and that was sort of the entire point of their relationship, the lights flicked on and off.

Bertie waved at the lights. “Shall we?”

As they followed him toward the theater, Liam pulled her against him and whispered, “You and I are going to have words.”

“Really? Can I have a preview? Which ones do I have to look forward to?”

The next hour passed pleasantly enough. Or at least loudly.

Liam had been quite annoyed with her when they were first seated, his arms crossed tightly over his stomach and his brow knit into angry lines, but his frustration faded quickly and soon he invaded her space in his loose-limbed way, brushing her hand now and again and making her stomach quiver.

Maybe Bertie’s seats were just too good. Maybe he’d realized he was being irrational. After all, she’d never denied that her old family friend was Bertram Smyth. He’d never asked. Whatever the reason, his natural buoyancy took over and he became absorbed in the performance within minutes.

While music had been one of those things her parents had cared about insofar as they cared about anything, it hadn’t ever caught her fancy. She envied Liam the deep connection he had to jazz.

Neither classical music nor bubblegum pop held any kind of fascination for her. She wanted to appreciate them, to understand a bit about them. The expectation had been that she would come up with something interesting to say about music, but she’d never learned to truly love it. When the “it” in question was the heavy almost brutalism of the first movement of the Mahler, connection was impossible.

During the pause between movements, Bertie leaned over. “Such stunning tonality, don’t you think? I always find it so unsettling.”

This was evidently meant as praise.

When Bertie turned to chat with the woman sitting on his other side—some sort of secretary in one of the embassies—Alyse said to Liam behind her hand. “The second half is lighter, I think.”

“Don’t apologize,” he responded, taking her hand and chafing it between his. “It’s great. I don’t do things like this enough.”

During the second—indeed lighter—section of the symphony, she focused her attention not on the musicians, but on Liam. He was so good, so optimistic and so genuine. He was trying to find the deeper meaning, or at least real enjoyment, in the performance. She was someone who wanted to find quippy things to say in order to please parents who cared about it less than she did.

The mismatch between Liam and her was hard to ignore.

What it meant, however, she couldn’t say. She’d thought about it a lot over the past few days. She was no longer convinced she was awful. No, she’d seen some truly awful behavior and hers didn’t rate in comparison.

The worst thing she could say about herself was that she had been dishonest about her own ambition, but she might pay the price for that if her career disappeared before it got started.

There was also the accusation that she was superficial and a bit frivolous. Okay. Unavoidably true, that one. But she’d made a difference at YWR, for a while at least, and earned Millie’s friendship and Liam’s...affection.

Her faults existed alongside her good qualities, just like everyone else’s. “Just like everyone else’s” was surprisingly comforting.

Turning back toward the orchestra and intertwining her fingers with Liam’s, she enjoyed the almost delicate and hopeful final movements.

“See, there’s the catharsis. The resolution,” Bertie explained over the applause.

There it was indeed.

“Will you join me for a drink?” Bertie asked as they followed the crowd out of the theater. “I was thinking—”

“No! We should get home,” Alyse said.

He sent a look between she and Liam and raised a brow, but she stared right back undeterred. She was an adult. She didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.

For the first time since they exited the theater, Liam spoke up. “Let’s go see the river.”

They exchanged good-byes with Bertie and Liam led her out the door and onto the back terrace. Given that it was nippy night, the space was nearly deserted. They crossed in silence to the railing and she folded her hands on it. Liam bracketed in her with his arms, enclosing her in his warmth. For a long time, they watched the water lapping darkly below them and the lights of the city across the Potomac.

It was beautiful and so like Washington. The hulking, gleaming edifice behind them where the performing happened and the almost-secret beauty behind it that no one saw. DC was Narnia. You could step through a door and be almost anywhere.

After several minutes, Liam brushed her hair over her shoulder and rested his chin on her shoulder. “So...that was nice.”

That was just the word of the evening, wasn’t it? Not knowing how he meant it, she inhaled and apologized. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Bertie. I was sort of wrapped up in what was happening with everything. It occurred to me when we were eating this afternoon that you might want to know you were meeting him, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it.”

“Explain what?”

Not being able to see Liam’s face disconcerted her. She couldn’t read his mood on three syllables. She pressed on. “I didn’t realize who Bertie was until I moved here. He’d always just been Uncle Bertie, that friend of the family and college roommate of Daddy’s. Eccentric. Vain. Elitist. That describes so many of the people I knew growing up. Only after I’d been in DC a while did I realize he wasn’t just another rich lawyer...that he was, you know, a rainmaker.
The
rainmaker.”

Liam didn’t say anything to this. He shifted, the beard growth on his face catching against her neck, and didn’t say anything. He must be really mad.

“I’m not like you. I didn’t know about the world or what I wanted until later,” she went on, filling the silence. “My ignorance was terribly naïve. I’m sorry.”

“You think I’m mad at you?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Not at all. Okay, I was very, very briefly annoyed right when he showed up. But why would you have known who he was growing up? He’s important, but it’s very inside ball. You were right about him. He was Uncle Bertie. That’s totally valid. Why would I be appalled?”

He wasn’t mad, but he also wasn’t normal. “What’s wrong then?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just...I’m realizing what your childhood must have been like.”

“Oh. That. Yes, well, I try not to think about it.”

He chuckled and shifted closer to her, until she could feel his tie and, where it was pushed to the side, the buttons of his shirt against her back. He was so warm, like a thermonuclear device. “It was like
Eloise at the Plaza
, wasn’t it?”