Red Blooded

by Caitlin Sinead

  We only get about ten minutes away, not even back to the highway, before the fresh-squeezed orange juice and nerves start to band together to make my bladder squirm.

  “I have to pee,” I say.

  “Can you hold it?” he asks, taking a chance to look away from the road so he can deliver one of his notorious frowns.

  “No,” I say.

  He turns his blinker on and pulls off the main road and into a gas station. “I guess I should fill us up down here, anyway.”

  I get out of the car and head toward the Wawa nearby.

  “Peyton,” he calls to me.

  I swirl around, smiling, but his face is stone. He lowers his head. “Do you have a hoodie or sunglasses and a hat or something?”

  What did I pack when I decided to hastily rush off to my grandparents’ when I found out my aunt was my biological mom and that she and my mom wouldn’t reveal who my biological dad is?

  “Um, no,” I mumble.

  He focuses on the pump, but his jaw tightens. “Don’t attract attention to yourself. I still don’t know how we’d explain this trip so, hopefully, we won’t have to.”

  “I get it.” What does he think I’m going to do, jump up on the Wawa counter and do the polka?

  I shuffle in the door, keeping my head down just in case. There’s a line for the bathroom. A woman in a pink, puffy sweater and a girl in a navy blue dress lean against a bulletin board for community announcements as they wait for their turn. I lean next to them.

  “It’s gonna be a wait,” the pink puffy woman says.

  “Oh, why?” I ask.

  She juts her thumb. “That lady’s been in there seven minutes already. We’ve been timing.”

  The navy blue dress girl nods while concentrating on her feet.

  “Well, I guess we just gotta wait longer?” I say, slipping into my lake talk. We spent so many summers at Smith Mountain Lake that whenever I get into the country parts of Virginia, it just sort of spills forth.

  The pink fuzzy sweater eyes me. She scrunches her mouth up as she brings her fingers to her chin. “You look familiar.”

  “I have one of those faces.” I smile and try to figure out the best expression I can have that looks both natural but also completely unlike me.

  The pink lady nods, happy with my answer. Phew.

  But navy blue dress girl narrows her gaze. “Are you Peyton Arthur?”

  The pink puffy woman turns, mouth agape. “You are,” she says. “Well hot damn, if you aren’t her, you’re a dead ringer.”

  Then she turns to the navy blue dress girl. “That’s the senator’s daughter, right? The senator running for...”

  The navy blue dress girl nods. “Vice President.”

  I don’t like the cold stare in the navy blue girl’s eyes. She stares at me as the pink dress lady rambles on about how the country is on the wrong track because her granddaughter’s play tea set was made in China, until the bathroom door sings open with a screechy squeak. A pale, greenish girl steps out while holding her hand to her belly.

  “Took long enough,” the pink lady bellows.

  “Sorry,” she murmurs and rushes aside.

  “Well,” the pink lady looks at the navy blue girl.

  “Um, you go ahead,” she says, gesturing her arm like she’s welcoming her into a party. Pink lady looks at me and we share the crazy-girl glance together, before she steps in the bathroom.

  I can smile at the pink lady. But the navy blue girl leaves me with palms that I need to run along my jeans more often than is socially polite. She looks at me as though she has lasers hidden behind her pupils and it just takes concentration to turn them on.

  “I’m part of my college’s young Democrats,” she says, a smile itching in her lower cheeks.

  That briefest of gestures gets me to stop my rubbing-my-palms antics. “Yeah?”

  “We all think you’re doing amazing. Especially considering how young you are.” She barrels on, as though she had misspoken. “Not that I’m much older or, it’s just, it must be a lot of pressure at your age...”

  I nod. My muscles no longer hurt. “Yeah, it is.”

  When pink lady comes out, the navy blue girl insists I go to the bathroom before her, which I feel weird about, but getting into a friendly bickering match about bathroom line etiquette with a young Democrat won’t exactly keep with Dylan’s idea of me not drawing attention to myself. So I go in, do my business and come out.

  But as I leave, the navy blue girl, who’s there with two of her friends, asks for pictures. I don’t want to be a bitch. Shit. “Sure,” I say, as I stand with them, giving my best, fresh, these-pictures-could-have-been-taken-at-any-time-right? smile.

  As I pull myself away, the pink lady points to me. “She’s going to live in the White House soon,” she calls, and a few heads turn. Only a few. Some people care a lot more about their sandwiches or cigarettes than some lady saying something about the White House. Still, the few heads that do turn are a few too many.

  The navy blue girl suppresses a giggle. “No, the Naval Observatory.” She waits for the crowd to nod, knowingly, realizing the pink lady’s mistake, but how many people know the VP lives in the Naval Observatory? Instead, they gift her with strange looks.

  “Thank you for your support,” I say with a quick smile, before plowing through the door.

  I walk up to Dylan, trying to get to him as fast as I can without looking like I’m running away. He’s leaning against the car, checking something on his phone.

  “We good?” I ask.

  He nods. “Yeah, just let me finish reading this.”

  What? He wants to take time to read something? I pivot and the crowd spills out of the Wawa. They’re pointing at me. They’re armed with cell phones. They’re snapping photos. Images that can easily splinter across the internet.

  Shit. There’s no getting around it. With Twitter, and Facebook, and Tumblr, everyone will know I’m three hours from DC, only twenty minutes from my grandparents. Just like Dylan said, people would think it was weird. It would have to be explained. Why would I randomly need to visit my grandparents? Sure, the whole having trouble with the pressures of the campaign would fly, but it wouldn’t look good either. It would make the campaign and my mom look like they were using me, driving me hard when I was only a young college student. No, there has to be some other reason. A convincing reason. A reason that will make everyone so happy and satisfied, they won’t dig or speculate.

  I look away from the cameras. What would be a good reason to see my grandparents suddenly? Especially with Dylan in tow.

  His steady gaze is on whatever he’s reading.

  It hits me, sharp. With the flood of more people outside of the Wawa, and even more phones attached to Instagram and Pinterest and god knows what else, there isn’t time to think. There’s only time to act.

  I brush against Dylan, fear gurgling in my stomach. What if he doesn’t get it? What if he doesn’t want to play along?

  “Dylan, promise me you’ll keep looking at me as I say this.”

  His eyes dart up. “What?”

  “Just, don’t look anywhere else,” I say, as I approach him, our bodies almost touching. “People recognized me.”

  He jitters, about to look around, but he stops himself. His attention is all on me. “Yeah,” he says, voice low.

  “Remember how you told me that in politics we need to make the story our own. Make it something positive?” I close the gap between us, my body pressing against his. He stiffens, but only at first, then his breaths grow deep.

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “This is me making my own story.”

  My palms glide over his knuckles. I press down on his wrists to help leverage myself up as I stand on my tiptoes. I bring my face closer and closer to his
, until our lips touch. I move, but barely, running my mouth along his. His mouth opens, and together, our breaths connect.

  We stay there, not moving past the lip-touching, until he lowers his head. His hands fly around my hips. He pulls at me, pressing my belly into his pelvis as his lips come down hard. His tongue slips into my mouth, tender and curious. I reach my hands around his neck, pressing my breasts against him. His right hand reaches just under the back of my shirt, and his fingers press against my lower spine as his left hand scoops my neck, ensuring my mouth stays with him. Ensuring our tongues and lips can stay together, caressing and connecting. His thumb rubs against the sensitive part under my ear. I arch my back as he holds me close. I’m ready to relinquish everything to him.

  Just as I’m wanting his hands to skid all over me, just as I’m wanting his mouth to never leave mine again, he draws back. He looks down and swallows. I hold on tighter as his hands glide to my upper arms. We’re both catching our breath as we stare at each other.

  Then he looks to the crowd that I realize, belatedly, has been joyously catcalling from the Wawa doors. He leans to the side of me that they can’t see. His warm breath blows against my ear.

  “That was just for show?” he asks.

  I mumble something and try to nod my head. Up. Down.

  “Okay.” He lets me go and climbs into the driver’s seat faster than I thought possible. Especially now. My legs feel like Jell-O, my mind feels like something even less solid than Jell-O. I look up in a haze. He opens the door a sliver. The familiar, gruff, Dylan voice is back. “You coming?”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The ride is quiet. Dylan’s focus on the road is so steady, it’s as though it holds some eternal truth. When I finally stop feeling like Jell-O, about an hour in, I try to make conversation. I ask him if he ever had a pet turtle named Raphael, who his favorite chipmunk is, or if he thought that the “You’re so Vain,” song was really about Warren Beatty. But his answers are single words and grunts. (No. Simon. Grunt.) But what really worries me is that he’s also ignoring his phone. Turning the ringer off every time it buzzes and refocusing on the road, his knuckles turning white against the steering wheel.

  So he didn’t want to be with me because he thought it would hurt his career and the campaign. But he also doesn’t want to kiss me when it will help the campaign?

  We pull into the rally and Dylan tries to drive to the staging area, but the security teams are stern and strict. “Sorry, sir, only authorized vehicles are allowed here.”

  Dylan says. “Peyton here can show you her ID.”

  The officer ducks his head in to have a look. I scramble for my purse and pull out my license.

  “Hmm,” the officer says, reading it over. “She was supposed to be arriving by car service.”

  “Yeah, our plans changed,” Dylan says. “But she’s here, and we need to get backstage because she’s speaking.”

  The officer makes a few calls. Dylan presses his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turns to me, his eyes drained. “This is what happens when you deviate from the plans. We end up having to figure out shit as we go, which is sometimes just how things go. But this time it was for no good reason.”

  “You think me finding out who my biological dad is...” I stop and look away. I don’t want to hear what he has to say.

  He sighs. “That’s not what—”

  The officer strides back. He hands the license to me, reaching over Dylan. “Okay, take a left, and then two rights. You’ll see a loading dock area. Find a place to park and knock on the door that has the big ‘FU’ above it.”

  As we drive away, I laugh.

  “What?” Dylan asks.

  “The big FU,” I say, smiling.

  I can tell he’s trying not to smile, but it breaks anyway, and soon he’s laughing and shaking his head. “Sometimes you’re so poised and other times you have the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy at summer camp.”

  “Why do poise and immature humor have to be mutually exclusive?”

  Once we get to the door, there’s a big hulky security guard waiting for us, but he lets us in.

  We walk through the stony gray hallway.

  “Bain wants to see you,” a guy I don’t know says to Dylan.

  “Where is he?” Dylan asks.

  “509A.”

  “Okay, and where are they doing makeup?” Dylan says, motioning to me.

  The guy shakes his head. “It shouldn’t be a surprise that he wants to see both of you.”

  Dylan looks at me, and then ahead, as he keeps walking.

  Shit. Those images from the Wawa must have gone viral.

  Dylan whispers to me, “Look, things are probably going to be different for us going forward. I doubt Bain is calling us in to say how happy he is.”

  “I’ll tell him it was my idea, because it was. If it’s a mistake, it’s my mistake.”

  He grins. “I don’t think it was a mistake.” His grin fades. “But they’re probably not going to be very happy with me.”

  The creases against his eyes somehow stray even further, roots leading to his hairline. I want to rush to him, hug him and stick my nose in the crook of his neck and tell him we’ll figure it out. In fact, I almost do that, but Bain’s roiling shout stops me.

  “Hey, you crazy lovebirds.” The pulse in his vein throbs like never before. His cheeks grow harder and his glare freezes over. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  Bain gets us into a back room with a few chairs and lots of posters and rallying signs that will be handed out later.

  “Sit down,” he says, waving his hand angrily to the chairs.

  “I’d rather stand,” I say. Dylan stands with me. We wait. Bain paces back and forth, but I know what he looks like when he’s really, really angry, and this isn’t it.

  This is something different. The way he shakes his head, not disdainful but confused. Oh, anger’s there. It’s prickling below his skin and flashing behind his eyes, but there’s something else there too.

  “Do you know how many Tweets and Facebook posts and Tumblr GIFs with animated hearts have gone up about how fucking adorable you two are?”

  I’m not sure if that’s a rhetorical question, so I stay silent. Bain stops pacing and he rubs his forehead with his palm. “If you two were developing feelings for each other, why didn’t you fucking tell me? We could have fucking handled this differently.”

  Dylan’s stone-faced. Right, this is worse for him. It makes him look unprofessional if we just couldn’t help ourselves and had to make out in front of a Wawa.

  “The thing is,” I say. “It was a ploy.”

  Dylan closes his eyes and breathes out.

  “What?” Bain rushes toward me, his face in my face. “You just decided to kiss the guy who’s been following you around, handling your communications, as a ploy? Do you think this is a game?”

  “No,” I say, face hot, body shaking. “I know it’s not a game. That’s why we kissed. I made a mistake. And...”

  Bain cocks his head toward me. His nose is way too close to mine. I can see the texture in the blue of his eyes, dark swaths against light ones. But I’m not backing down. “Look,” I say. “I was having trouble dealing with all this campaign stuff, and I wanted to get away. We went to see my grandparents, but Dylan was worried that...” I look to Dylan, who rubs the back of his neck.

  “I thought it might look like she was under so much pressure from the campaign that she had a breakdown and fled to her grandparents’,” Dylan says.

  “Is that what happened?” Bain presses.

  “Well, not exactly, but...” God, I am teetering on a cliff, tiptoe tips dashing over slippery rocks at the edge of a canyon.

&n
bsp; Bain is so close. I take a few steps back, but my foot snags on a bag on the floor. My body tenses and I’m about to topple. Dylan grabs my hand and steadies me. He holds on. My feet have been solid for a few seconds, so I mumble a thanks and pull away.

  Bain’s eyes shift between us. “So...you decided, once people saw you, that you had to do something. And that something was kiss Dylan?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I, well, we.” I look at Dylan, who nods for me to continue. “We thought that this romance might be a distraction, a positive side story. I took him home to meet my grandparents because I...because I...”

  “Because you love him.” The word love has never sounded so unlovely. I breathe in and look at the floor. Bain steps back, finally relieving me of his coffee breath. “It better be because you love him, because if it’s not, you’re going to look like a slut.”

  Dylan steps forward, fists clenched. “That’s too far, Bain.”

  Bain raises his hand to him. “Down, boy. I wasn’t saying she is a slut, I was saying she’d look like a slut. You, being in communications, should understand the difference. But keep up that protective boyfriend routine because we need to show how much you care about Peyton, and how much she cares about you. You know, to avoid that whole slut thing.”

  Slut, slut, slut. Why does he keep saying that?

  “Why would I be a slut?” I steam forward. “So I had a tame kiss with a guy in August, and now this? If that makes me a slut, then most of the college girls in America are sluts. Aren’t we supposed to be the progressives? The ones who don’t bat their eyes at female sexuality?” I’m more emblazoned as I run on.

  Bain, to my surprise, sighs. His shoulders relax and he puts his hands on his hips. “Look, Peyton, I meant what I said. You’re not a slut. Hell, you could sleep with half your hall at Georgetown this year and I still wouldn’t think you were a slut. But it’s not what I think that matters. It’s what they think.” He swashes his hand out, presumably to capture the great wide world. “And if they think you just kissed your communications guy to distract them as a maniacal ploy, if they think you’re playing them, then don’t be surprised if the internet erupts with the term slut.”