Red Blooded (11 page)

Chapter Twenty

I have to sit up fast and pounce. Dylan’s forearm is pressed against Tristan’s collarbone.

“Dylan, let him go.” I try to make eye contact with Dylan.

When I pull on his arm, he relaxes and steps back. “Are you okay? What did he do to you?”

Tristan wipes his face and tries to regain himself.

“He wasn’t doing anything bad. He was just tickling me.”

“Tickling?” Dylan asks. His eyes linger on me. My tank top dress is a twisted mess. I adjust the straps. His gaze bends slightly. He shakes his head. He steps back, his face a mush of confusion.

I dart a look to Tristan, afraid he’d...I don’t know, punch Dylan or something. Instead, he takes a deep breath and rolls his neck. “You might want to investigate a little more before just up and attacking someone.” The always-cool Tristan adjusts his shirt.

Dylan’s eyes narrow and he raises his fists above his hips.

Tristan holds out his hand. “I understand. You were staying close so you could be there for her. You heard her say no, over and over, and you were trying to help. I get it. I’m not mad. Okay?”

“She was telling you to stop, what was I supposed to think?” Dylan glares at Tristan.

“It was nothing,” I say, anger running through me. “You didn’t have to storm in and hurt one of my best friends. Tristan could rightfully be pissed at you right now, and instead you’re the one pissed at him. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Dylan stops glaring at Tristan, which is good, but instead he looks at me. “He could have...I...” He shakes his head and presses his lips together.

Tristan’s about to say something when one of the sparkly boys shoots his head in the room. “Hey, Tristan, we’re out of Solo cups.”

“There’s some under the sink.”

“We checked, man,” the sparkly guy says.

“Okay, I’ll be right there.” Tristan looks at me. “You coming?”

Dylan rakes his hand through his hair. “No, let me talk to Dylan,” I say.

Tristan nods, looking skeptically at Dylan, before he walks out. I close the door behind him and lean against it, my hands behind my back on the doorknob.

Dylan sighs. “I’m sorry for busting in, but if he hurt you...”

“He didn’t. It’s not even like that. He was tickling me.”

He breathes in, his mouth open. “Look,” I say. “I appreciate that it might not have sounded that way.” I walk slowly toward him because as I get closer his hands unclench. He looks less like he’s about to grab Tristan’s lava lamp and tear it apart. “But the truth is, Tristan would never hurt me.”

Dylan bends his neck, keeping our eyes locked, as I get incrementally closer to him. He shakes and breathes heavily. “I thought he was...”

“He wasn’t,” I say. “Why are you still upset?”

“I got ramped up.”

“Sit down.”

He sits on the bed. I put my hands on his shoulders, satisfied that they loosen under my touch. “You have to calm down.”

I run my hand slowly down his shirt, to his chest. His breathing picks up but everything else about him stays still. I look at my hands, over his chest, feeling the rapid palpitations that match my own.

“Dylan, I...” What do I want to say?

He reaches for me. His hands fall on my hips. Now it’s my breathing picking up as his grip strengthens.

But then he closes his eyes and pushes me gently away. He stands up. “Mind if we call it a night?”

I’m touching him while we’re alone in a bedroom and he can’t wait to jump up and get out of here.

I swallow. “Yeah, sure, let’s go.”

I wave to Tristan from across the party and point my thumb to the door. We walk down the stairs and out into the surprisingly chilly early September air. A shout emanates from the balcony. “Peyton, call me tomorrow, cool?”

Dylan turns around, squinting up at the crowded balcony. Tristan puts a bag of Solo cups by the keg as he smiles.

“Of course,” I shout. One of the sparkly guys puts his arm around Tristan and pulls him into a close, tongue-infused embrace that, even though it’s far away and dark, is kind of a turn on.

I smile and turn around, but Dylan’s gaze stays fixed.

“Careful. If you stare too long, they’ll invite you to join in,” I say.

His gaze wraps me in his pity. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

“What?”

“Seeing him kissing other people?”

I laugh. “Are you serious? Tristan’s almost always kissing someone else. I don’t like him like that, not anymore. “

“But the other night, never have I ever wanted to be with someone who...the campaign...” He trails off. He looks to the side as he rubs his jaw. He gets it. As the realization falls over his face, my body pulsates in waves of hot and cold, chills and warmth run along my skin. I hold my breath.

“You were talking about someone else,” Dylan says quietly.

“Yes,” I whisper.

Dylan blinks but his face stays the same. I’m not sure how to read it. I’m never sure how to read him. I rub my arms. The warmth is gone, now I’m just cold.

He pulls off his sweater. His undershirt is neatly tucked into his jeans. He holds out the sweater and untucks his undershirt with his free hand.

“I don’t need it.”

He continues to push the sweater toward me. “You sure? The only modest thing about that dress is its amount of fabric.” He looks skeptically at my skimpy straps.

“Thanks, dad,” I say dryly. It just came out, and then it feels all weird, because, well, it’s a weird joke but also there’s so much swirling around my dad right now.

“Despite what Vulp News might try to tell America, I’m pretty sure I’m not your dad.” Dylan grins. I grin. And, somehow, it’s better.

He pulls his sweater over me, patting my arms.

“Come on, Squib. Let’s get you home.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The words
mild
and
manageable
only somewhat blunt the word
disorder
when it comes to your kid.

“
So she has trouble hearing?
”
Jen asked the teacher
,
the line between her eyes deepening as she moved her wedding ring along her finger.
I
reached over and took her hand
,
rubbing her tense knuckles with my thumb.

“
Peyton can hear perfectly fine.
There’s nothing wrong with the machinery
,
but she seems to have some difficulty processing auditory information.
”

The line between Jen’s eyes didn’t soften.
I
squeezed her hand.

Peyton’s teacher continued.
“
It’s not a perfect analogy
,
but think of it as dyslexia in the ear.
The sounds are there;
they just get a little jumbled sometimes
,
especially when there’s a lot of other noise.
As I said
,
in her case it’s mild.
She’s very bright and we’ve caught this early
,
so there’s no reason to think it will hold her back.
But she needs to learn how to adapt to the way she processes the world.
”

“
Don’t we all
,”
I
said.

* * *

I walk into the learning resources classroom, the one I volunteered in every week for the last five years. It smells like plastic furniture, stringent cleaning fluids and smashed peanut butter and jelly.

Today, like any other time I come, the kids’ cheeks burst into these eager smiles, as they bound up to me and tell me about how they made a goal in soccer, or caught a bug with nine legs, or killed 117 zombies in a video game.

My answer to all of them, even the one about the freak bug: “How great!”

They’re too busy at first to notice Dylan. But when they do, it goes about like you’d expect. “Who is he? Can he read to us too?” Janey, the one who caught the bug, asks.

“Well, maybe,” I laugh, as I tighten Janey’s ponytail, which has the habit of going a little loose. Dylan’s looking at me with this goofy smile.

“They’re cute, right?” I say.

“Huh?” He seems shaken from something.

“The kids,” I say. “They’re cute.”

“Yeah...yeah, they are.” He lifts his tablet. “Uh, I’m going to catch up on some work. Lisa wants me to focus on a press release on insurance regulations.” He looks around for a good place to sit. Finally, he finds a child-sized chair and carefully tries to find the right angle for him to sit in it without being horribly uncomfortable. By his third try, I’m giggling along with the kids.

His adorable, bashful smile makes my knees weak. “I’m just gonna sit on this table over here,” he says.

“Sounds good.” I laugh as he leans on the table and gives me a thumbs-up.

I ask the kids to pick out a book as I settle into a beanbag in the reading corner. Tom rushes at me with a picture book about a kid with a made-up disease. None of the other kids complain about the choice, which is good, because this is a democracy. Before we begin, Janey asks me to fix her hair tie again. This kid. As I loop it back into her near-black hair, she whispers, “Is that your boyfriend?” Because she’s eight and hasn’t learned to be subtle (though that skill really should be taught in school), the whisper isn’t so quiet. Dylan peers over his tablet.

I emit an extremely awkward laugh and heat tingles in my cheeks. I just hope my blushing isn’t obvious. “No, no, he’s not my boyfriend.” I shake my head way more than I should. Seriously, I think a few brain cells may have departed in that jostling.

Breathe, just breathe.

“So, let’s get into this book!” I read several pages about a little boy who wakes up each morning with different colored eyes. I do the different voices for his mom and dad and even his talking cat.

Just as I’m about to get into the part where the cat explains that being colorful is a grand thing, Janey tugs on my jeans. “He’s still looking at us,” she whispers, this time more quietly. Perhaps a knack for subtlety can be acquired. I glance back at Dylan. He stares at me. He doesn’t look away, at least not immediately. His gooey grin reemerges.

God, I want to kiss that grin.

Heat swells up in my chest as he turns back to his tablet.

Or at least he tries to. Janey asks him something in Spanish and he looks up, eyebrow raised. But he smiles and responds slowly. “
Después de las elecciones.
”

Janey giggles and looks at me all moony. Dylan has this sly smile, before he gets up and strides over. “Need a break? I can take over.”

I push away thoughts of running my fingers along Dylan’s chest, like I did at Tristan’s party. Nothing more will happen. He needs to focus. We both need to focus. And I really need to stop embarrassing myself in front of him.

I calm myself down and sit cross-legged on the floor, allowing the smaller kids to take turns sitting in my lap as Dylan finishes out the story. He does a hilarious, quasi-gruff voice for the cat and after funny lines he makes silly expressions that get the kids, and me, giggling.

“And that’s why you should always welcome surprises,” he finishes, holding the book out and slowly moving it around for the gaping kids to take in the illustrations. He closes it and looks at me. “What next?”

“Well, we could—”

Dylan’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and frowns. “It’s Lisa, I better...” He gets up and motions toward the door.

“Of course,” I say.

Janey still has a silly smile.

“What did you ask him?” I whisper to her as the other kids talk about the end of the book and dare each other to touch a small beetle in the corner. Poor little bug. I’ll intervene as soon as I get the info from Janey.

“I asked if he was going to ask you to be his girlfriend,” she says with a big grin.

I laugh. “I told you he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, not yet.” She giggles.

“Janey...”

One boy is about to spear the beetle with a pen. I save the small creature just in time and try to ignore the hammering in my chest. Maybe Dylan and I need to focus now. But what about later? When I’m no longer the girl Dylan has to manage, maybe I could be a lot more to him?

* * *

As we walk back to the metro, Dylan squints at me and says, “I’ve been thinking...”

“Well, just don’t make it a habit and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

He laughs. “No, seriously, I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to offend you, so I—”

“It’s okay,” I say, rubbing my hands along my jeans. “Ask away.”

“Well...” He looks to the left. “Before your mom was the VP pick you spoke a lot about learning disorders and education reform. But now, you don’t seem as interested. Why not?”

Oh, that. I breathe a little easier. “I’m very interested. It’s just, Lisa and Bain keep shooting me down when I say I want to talk about it. I think there’s a lot we could do to improve our education system, and one of the big things is to work with teachers’ unions and get them to revise their current policies. As you can imagine, though, that’s not exactly something the campaign wants to talk about.”

Dylan nods. “We get a lot of support from teachers’ unions.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And anyway, it’s not like I have any really new ideas. Other people are saying what I think too.”

“But you have a soapbox.”

“One I’m not allowed to use.” I sigh. We get on the escalator, me first. I turn around and, because he’s so much taller than me, we’re still not quite at eye level. But I don’t have to look up quite so much.

“Maybe Bain and Lisa will come around,” he says.

I shrug. “Maybe.”

He taps his fingers on the escalator railing. “In the meantime though, think about what you want to say. Write down your talking points. You never know when an opportunity might come up. Make sure you’re ready for it.”

“I will.” I don’t volunteer that I’ve already gone over exactly what I want to say. When the opportunity presents itself, I’ll be ready.

Chapter Twenty-Two

If you only watched the news channels
,
you’d think all congressional Republicans hated all congressional Democrats.
But if you watch C-Span
,
or visit DC and sit above the senate chamber
,
you’ll see not only a fair share of handshakes across the aisle
,
but hugs
,
shoulder squeezes
,
smiles and even the occasional guffaw when someone shares a really good lawyer joke.

And no one is more magnanimous
,
more likely to elicit smiles from Democrats
,
Republicans
,
libertarians
,
green party members
,
independents
,
than Sylvia Murray.
I’m not sure Jen would have made it through her first year in the house if it wasn’t for her.

* * *

The knocks come fierce and pound at my door, reverberating in my achy head.

I’d gotten back late, after a long dinner and then drinking games with Annie and Jason. We poured one out for Senator Sylvia Murray, who died yesterday at 83. And by pour one out I mean we dripped a couple drops in the sink. Sylvia wouldn’t have wanted us to be messy or wasteful.

Annie stayed at Jason’s, unsurprisingly. Sometimes I feel like I have a single room. As Dylan walked me back, shuffling his feet, he gave me a sleepy nod before he meandered off, knowing I was ensconced safely in my dorm.

But now a crazy person is beating on my door. I need to call Dylan. I need him to be here.

I shuffle in my bag for my phone, but it’s dead. I plug the cord into my kaput phone and stare at it, waiting for it to come to life. I pull at my lower lip and pace around the room wondering what I could use as a weapon. My hair dryer is pretty bitchin’ but...

Dylan’s booming voice pervades the barrier. “Peyton, open the door, we have to talk.”

Now my heart races for an entirely different reason. I unlock the door and Dylan stands there, tablet in hand.

“That was cute.” He storms in. “You thought you might take a class next semester on genetic diseases?” His eyes flash with anger as he shoves his tablet at me. The headline reads bold and clear: Peyton Arthur Asked Genetics Expert to Help Find Biological Father.

I open my mouth, unsure of how to close it. “That’s not even...I didn’t ask her...” But my words fall flat. While the headline misrepresents things, I can’t deny that I asked questions about my biological dad. I slip down to the floor, slowly. I’m jittery but panic mode hasn’t set in—yet—as I read the rest of the article. A reporter followed us. That’s what the article implies. Because after we left, the reporter zoomed into the professor’s office. He didn’t get much out of her, so he kept trying, day after day. And finally, she broke: “Peyton and I talked about how, genetically, Richard Arthur could very well still be her dad. The so-called science that Vulp News is trying to perpetuate isn’t accurate.”

She wasn’t out to get me, but she gave in to get a reporter off her back. Maybe she even thought she was helping things, clarifying that I could, in fact, genetically still be my dad’s daughter. But it doesn’t help.

I close my eyes and try to force air into my hollow lungs.

“You know this is going to be a thing, right?” he says as he tenses. “Everyone is going to be talking again about how even you don’t trust your mom. I’m trying to do my job here, Peyton. I’m trying to keep you out of the headlines, but you’re not working with me. This is one of the worst things you could have—”

“I know,” I yell, raising my hands.

“Do you? Because it seems like you’re trying to fuck up the election.” His voice is raw and his angry eyes bore into me.

“I would never do that!” My throat strains and hot tears line my eyes. “I want to do whatever I can to help them win.”

“Then why did you do this?”

“I have to know,” I whisper. My legs shake, so I sit down on the floor and close my eyes.

Dylan squats before me. I hug my knees to get away from him. “Know what?” he asks.

I bite my lip and swallow hard. “He wasn’t my dad.”

Dylan’s going to contradict me. He’s going to roll his eyes and be dismissive.

He gets all the way down on the floor with me and sits cross-legged. His fingers stretch and expand, hesitantly, until they find their purpose. They take my hands, wrap them in his warmth. The soft pads of his palms squeeze me.

“Why do you think that?”

“I overheard my mom saying something to Bain. He said, well, he said that she should tell me the real story. He said I’m curious and he thought I might keep looking into it. If I knew, though, then I’d stop. But my mom said no.” Tears flow down my cheeks and over my lips, the salt getting on my tongue.

“What did your mom say?” Dylan asks. I can’t tell if he’s still angry, but there’s definitely an edge to his words.

“She said...” I shake my head so much that strands of red hair fight free from my ponytail. “He’s not my dad. He’s not my dad.”

Dylan’s breath dives out of him. “Shit.”