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“Who, the aide?”
“I guess the senator. They think their best shot at getting this passed is to start with a public education phase, and they want to set up interviews with major newspapers and some of the morning shows on local news in Des Moines and Iowa City, the Quad Cities … They want to put a face on revenge porn in Iowa.”
“Your face.”
“My face.”
“Makes sense to me. You’ve got a beautiful face.”
“My dad would shit a brick if I said yes.”
“Yep.”
“But I was thinking …”
“You were thinking you were gonna say yes.”
I smile a little. I can’t help it—it’s nice to be known. I love that he knows me.
“I want to. What’s the point of suing Nate, spending all this money trying to destroy Nate, if it means I can’t do any of the other stuff I want to do? There’s no point, right?”
“Right.”
He squeezes me tighter. We lie there like that for a while, just breathing. West’s hand warms the base of my spine.
“What do you want, baby?” he asks.
“Right now?”
“No. Down the road. Ten years, twenty years … what do you want?”
I hitch my leg up over his stomach and snuggle closer until I’ve got my face in his neck. I tell his throat, his pulse, “I want to be president.”
His heart beats, steady and strong. I can feel him, alive against my lips.
“I’ve never said that out loud before,” I admit. “Not since I was a little girl and Janelle told me women don’t get to be president, and that even if they did, I would never be the president because just how special did I think I was anyway? And she was right. I get it, how impossible it is. Even then, I got it. So I stopped saying it out loud, and I kind of stopped letting myself think that far ahead. I just think about, you know, law school, getting a job after, working my way into local office.”
“But that’s not where you want to end up.”
“No, I want to end up in the White House. And I know I don’t have a great shot at it, because nobody does. No woman does. And even if every other star in the universe lined up for me, with what happened last year, it’s probably impossible. The way the world is—”
“Caro,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Stop telling me why you can’t have what you want.”
My cheeks are hot. I’m breathing fast, just from admitting such a deep, foolish hope to him. From trusting him with that. “There are a lot of reasons why I can’t have it.”
“Well, yeah. But if you want Pennsylvania Avenue, baby, you should go for it.”
“You think?”
“Fuck yeah, I think. You’re smart and strong and gorgeous and talented. You’re a leader—I always believed that. You need to do your leader thing, and that means you take what happened to you last year and you use it to change the world. Beat people over the head with it if you have to. Talk and talk until the world’s got to listen. And then if you want to be president, what you have on your record is what happened to you and what you did about it. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
His words wash over me like warm water. They wipe me clean, leave me pure and righteous. Because what he said—that’s just exactly what I want to do. Just exactly how I want my future to be.
“It’s so big,” I say. “It scares me.”
