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Got it, I thought, pulling the tutu and mug against my chest as if the pig and the silk might keep me warm against the chill of him. You wouldn’t date me if I was the last woman alive. Message received.
“Then why do this?” I asked, my voice a little shaky.
“Because,” he said, “you’ve made me and this administration a laughingstock and the only way to bring back any legitimacy is to put our heads up and pretend like it was a bump in the road.”
“What road?”
“Our road.”
“We don’t have a road! I stood up on a chair and…” I blinked, shook my head, something awful occurring to me. “People are going to think this baby is yours.”
He stared at me as if I’d grown two heads. “They already do,” he said. “And no one, no matter what we say, or whatever letter you write is going to believe otherwise.”
“So how about we don’t do anything. We lie low—”
“The news crew that’s been following me around all day followed me here. They’re camped out on your front lawn.”
“What?” I cried, whirling in my seat to peer through the light green sheers over my window. “Oh, my God,” I whispered. He was right. A camera crew was loitering right in front of the main entrance to my loft building, smashing the bougainvillea Tootie Vogler had planted last year.
This is not good.
“Did they see you come in?” I asked, my voice so high it practically scraped the ceiling.
“They followed me, Zoe.”
“You can leave out the back!” I cried. “Plead the fifth if anyone asks. Just pretend—”
“I’m a public official,” he interrupted. “I can’t lie low, and if this isn’t addressed in some way, the speculation will only grow. And I can’t let that happen,” he said. “I won’t.”
For the first time in the brief twenty-four hours I’d known him, he seemed human. The ice in his blue eyes melted and revealed something vulnerable, as if he had something he cared about and might lose in this whole farce. His job.
“You like your job?” I asked.
He blinked, and after a long moment, he nodded. “I love my job. I have…work I want to do for this city.”
Ah, man, why couldn’t he go on being a jerk? Now I was totally sunk—I couldn’t be responsible for him losing his job.
“So we date?” I asked, still dubious.
He nodded. “We’ll tell people I met you at one of the community center informational meetings. That I fell for your—”
Beauty? Charm? Too-big heart?
“Quirkiness. Your…ah…offbeat sense of humor. We’ll tell them that stunt on the chair was your idea of a joke. Not a good one, but a joke. For a few months, we go on some very public dates. We get our photos taken and then you dump me.”
Dumping him, I liked the sound of that. “What if I was married? Or in a relationship—like you said—”
“I knew you weren’t married,” he said. “But if you were involved in some other more informal relationship, our research might not have—”
“Research?” I interrupted, a cold chill spreading down my arms and across my chest. I stood, a toe shoe falling out of my hands, and I reeled it back in by the ribbon, reluctant to lose any of my armor. “You researched me?”
“Of course.” He sounded as if he researched all of his dates. As if it made perfect sense.
“What exactly do you know?” I asked. “About me.”
“You’re thirty-seven, single.” He arched one of those imperial blond eyebrows. “You were raised by Penny Madison, a single mother who works for the post office. You are—I guess were—a dancer. You recently moved back to Baton Rouge from Houston.” I held my breath, a cold sweat blooming across my back. Was this happening? Did he know? Was my secret in a file somewhere, discussed at a meeting as though it was nothing? A bubble of nausea burned up my throat.
“You teach dance classes to kids and grandparents,” he said, leaving Houston and my secret behind. “And obviously…you’re…ah…pregnant,” he said, gesturing, embarrassed, at my belly, as if I were carrying a Shih Tzu in a dress instead of a baby.
“That’s all?” I asked.
“Is there something more I need to know?” His blue eyes narrowed, sharp as knives.
“No.” I edged around the blue couch to get as far away from him as possible. Unbelievably, I still felt the warmth from his body, like a distant sun. “That’s my life,” I muttered, wondering how something so full could be reduced to a few lines.
It occurred to me I didn’t know anything about him. Not his age, not where he grew up. The lack of knowledge felt lopsided, but it’s not as if it would ever occur to me to have him researched. Vetted.
I didn’t work that way.
I looked at him, the compelling stillness of him, the cool of his eyes and the fine bones of his face. He was like nobility or something, a man removed from the messy realities of the kind of life I lived. Who looked, honestly, pained to be here with me. As if he were barely holding back all the disdain he felt.
