The Belle and the Beard

by Kate Canterbary

  I fisted my hands. I couldn't touch her the way I wanted to while she traced the perimeters of her marriage. "On top of what else?"

  "Well, I came here because I got fired. That's another one of my current problems."

  I blinked. "And the other problems?"

  She kept her gaze trained on the forest floor. "I was terminated in an inglorious manner so the majority of my issues revolve around that."

  It was the wrong reaction but I laughed out loud. "What does that mean?"

  "I was fired on television."

  "What do you mean? Like, a reality show?"

  She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. "Some people like to treat American politics like it's reality TV but no, that's not what happened. I was on a cable news program to discuss voter suppression efforts across the South. I didn't get to touch on any of that because, before the segment was due to start, my mic was broadcasting on-air and I didn't know it." She dropped her hands and started walking, saying, "They caught me talking to a staffer at the day's campaign stop. I was complaining to her because my boss gorged on ice cream during a photo op."

  I caught up to her with two strides. "Ice cream?"

  "He's lactose intolerant and yet he can't be a responsible human being and simply take one or two licks from the obligatory cone and smile for the cameras. He has to eat the whole damn thing and then guzzle a milkshake too, and later board the tour bus and digest all that dairy while the rest of us try not to asphyxiate."

  I stopped, a laugh spinning through me, and leaned against a tree for support as I doubled over. I could barely catch my breath as I howled. "You—you said that. On television."

  "Mmhmm. Yes. Then I switched gears and told her how my boss likes to get his daily briefings in his briefs while chain-smoking and gulping black coffee."

  "Oh, shit." I clutched my sides. It was too much.

  She hummed in agreement. "And when she asked whether she ought to continue putting all her energy into running the local campaign office when it seemed like my boss might not make it past the early primary races, I told her not to waste her time, especially not for the lucrative salary of zero dollars. I said he didn't have an ice cream cone's chance in hell but it didn't really matter because the presidential bid was primarily focused on raising his progressive street cred and elevating his status as a power player in the Senate." She tossed her hands up. "I spilled the house secrets live on-air. Before I fully understood what'd happened, the host informed me that the campaign tweeted out a statement and I was no longer on staff." She glanced at me, smirking as I struggled and failed to contain my laughter. "It's kind of amazing you had no idea about any of this. I'm a meme, a punchline, a cautionary tale."

  "I don't watch television." I sobered a bit. "And social media is too noisy for me so I miss all that." I closed my hand around her wrist, drawing her to a stop. "But even if I hadn't missed it, I wouldn't give a fuck."

  "I see we've returned to you manhandling me."

  "Can you back up a few paces and explain what you do? You're on TV and you're briefing a chain-smoker in his underwear and there's enough dirt in your vent session to bring down a presidential candidate? Who the hell are you, Jasper-Anne Cleary?"

  She gave a flippant little shrug, saying, "I'm the special advisor to Senator Tyson Timbrooks of Georgia."

  "And…what does a special advisor do?"

  "During campaign cycles, I drive the strategic agenda. In the off years, I fix problems. Basically, I play a really fucked-up game of chess."

  "Yeah." I studied her for a moment. I never would've guessed any of this but it fit. Jasper was nothing if not unstoppable and I bet she fixed the hell out of those problems, but there was no missing the bitterness in her tone. The hardness. "Yeah, that sounds right."

  "Once upon a time it did. No one in Washington wants to be within fifty feet of me right now. The campaign has blacklisted me everywhere. The only people returning my calls are reporters and TV hosts, and campaigns that want to pump me for free opposition research."

  Now it all made sense. "That's why you're here. Why you're staying in Midge's cottage."

  She reached down to run her fingers over a fern, again missing my eyes. "Only place left to go."

  "What happens next?"

  She looked up at the canopy, squinted at the dappled sunlight streaming in. "I meet with an attorney tomorrow morning to review the terms of the divorce and sign the papers so Preston can marry this new gal of his. After that, I keep fixing up the house and hope I'm freed from this exile eventually. I can't see the Beltway gang permanently banning me. That only happened to Nixon. Everyone else bounces back."

  Fuck. I wanted to hug the stuffing out of her. What a fucking horrible time she was having—and I kept criticizing her baking. It was objectively terrible but she needed to catch a break somewhere. I could've faked it for someone suffering through this much personal garbage.

  "Do you want to bounce back?"

  Her head snapped up, her eyes hot. "Of course I do."

  "If you say so." I gestured to the trees ahead as we walked. "How did you get this job in the first place?"

  "I started working for Timbrooks in high school. My senior year U.S. government class required everyone to volunteer with a campaign, and since my family is flat-earth, dinosaurs-are-a-myth conservative, I chose the most progressive candidate in all the races."

  "Nice." I chuckled. "Spite is an undervalued motivation."

  "I worked on his first U.S. Senate bid that year and managed the local campaign office after graduation."

  "Of course you did. Of course you went from intern to manager in—what was it? A month? Two?"

  "Eight months," she replied, giving me her first true laugh of the afternoon. "But that only happened because he was a long-shot, no-name candidate and there was no support from the party."

  "But he won."

  "He did." I could hear the satisfaction in those two words. I could lick that pride right off her. "I worked for the senator through college. Mostly get-out-the-vote initiatives, voter registration drives, setting up small, community-based fundraisers, and organizing phone bank centers. Basic stuff like that."

  "You ran a grassroots senate campaign while you were in college. That's a big deal. I lasted one summer as a bartender. That's what I did in college."

  "It kept my family mad, so yeah, I kept doing it."

  "As good a reason as any," I murmured.

  "When I was finishing my last year at University of Georgia, the senator lost a bunch of his top staffers to other opportunities. It happens like that when an elected official comes in with a fresh new class of staffers. They lose a good chunk of them after three or four years because few people can handle the pace for much longer than a sprint." She pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over her fingers, closed her hands around the fabric. It was adorable. "I was hired as the deputy state director, which basically meant I kept the wheels turning in Timbrooks's office back home in Georgia. Scheduling appearances and coordinating locations, fundraisers and phone banks."

  "Same things you did in college," I said.

  "Yeah but you don't complain about it when you're working for an upstart underdog. You do whatever it takes to get the job done."

  "When did you become the fixer of the problems?"

  "When I started fixing the problems," she replied with that no bullshit, I can kill you with my words tone. "When the chief of staff in D.C. botched the handling of an event and I cleaned up the mess before it became a public-facing mess. I moved to D.C. that year and took over as deputy chief of staff. I've been fixing and cleaning for Timbrooks—and anyone he loans me out to—ever since. The titles have changed but it's all the same. Make the problems go away. Even better if they're gone before anyone notices them. Invent ways to avoid problems—or pass them off to someone else. Do whatever it takes."

  I stopped in front of the maple I'd come here to see. Studying the stressed-out tree was a good diversion from the stressed-out
woman beside me and the cold hollowness of her words. It was that fake smile all over again. Did she even know she did it?

  Perhaps the tree wasn't a distraction at all, seeing as I could only focus on Jasper and the discontent radiating out from her. "And how long have you hated your job?"

  10

  Jasper

  "I do not hate my job!"

  "You're positive? Because this whole time you've been talking, you made it sound like a day at the gallows."

  That was inaccurate. It simply was not accurate.

  "I always thought I'd get Timbrooks into the gig—whether that was a cabinet post or maybe a vice presidential pick—and then I'd peel off for something else. Something higher profile, you know, something that felt less like duct tape and bubblegum to keep the train rolling along."

  "But that didn't happen. The gig didn't come along," Linden said.

  I shook my head. "I figured it would after this election." Then, "I do not hate my job," I repeated.

  "Uh-huh," Linden muttered as he plucked a small, leatherbound notebook from his back pocket.

  He flipped through the pages while I stared at him, waiting for more than "Uh-huh."

  When it didn't come, I presented my case. "I had a sweet setup with the Timbrooks campaign. I had the last word on—on everything. The senator offloaded the majority of his priorities and projects to me. How many people can say they have the ear of a sitting senator?"

  "Not many," he mused, still busy with that notebook.

  "Exactly. How many people know what really goes down behind closed doors at the Capitol?"

  "Just a select few."

  "I was the person they called to make things happen."

  "I bet you were damn good at it too." He shoved a pencil behind his ear and gazed up at the tree. "Being good at something doesn't make it good for you."

  "And what do you know about what's good for me?" I exploded.

  "Only what you've told me, Jas." He glanced at me then, his cool stare skating over every furious inch of me. "Are you upset about this because I'm wrong and that wounds your pride worse than getting fired on TV—don't get me started on that, by the way—or are you upset because it's possible I'm right?"

  I stared down at my shoes. I didn't want to talk about myself anymore. The whole mess of it was depressing. Fired, divorced, displaced, and without the use of a toaster oven. I could handle those things on their own but the snowball of it made me want to crawl into a corner. A small, narrow place to slide down the wall and press my forehead to my knees where I could disappear for a moment. Where I could be very, very quiet and hear myself think without all the noise of my family, my work, this world for one minute. Sometimes it seemed like I could hear those thoughts far off in the distance but they never made sense. They couldn't make sense, not when they only came to me as pings in my heart, twists in my belly that seemed to say, It's not supposed to be like this.

  I'd always drowned them in antacids and went on with my day.

  But now, with Linden watching me and only the sound of the woods around us, I couldn't drown any of it.

  "Let me just say this." He stepped closer, swung his arm around my shoulder. "People who love their jobs don't sabotage themselves in such irreversibly brutal ways."

  "But the mic wasn't supposed to be—"

  "Is that really the nail you want to hang this on?" He dragged a hand down my back and brought me in for a loose hug. "You don't have to answer that but what they did to you was bullshit. There's a right way to let people go, especially people who've been around from the start, and that wasn't it. I'm sorry you went through that."

  I turned my face to his bicep and closed my eyes for a moment because I was not crying again. It was one thing to cry over the oven, the one that made the most perfect, even toast, but it was another to cry over termination by tweet.

  It was then, with Linden all around me and that long overdue apology releasing some of the tension in my shoulders, it struck me that he was right.

  Holy shit. I hated my job.

  I hated my job.

  I hated my job.

  I turned that sudden, choking truth over and over in my head as Linden stroked my back. All my exasperations and frustrations, the disappointments over never being promoted to chief of staff and always lingering on the pick-me fringes as special advisor—I'd swallowed all of it down, gulp after gulp, year after year, and now I couldn't swallow any more. Not another bit.

  Except it was the only job I'd ever had and it was the primary source of my identity. "I don't know how to do anything else," I whispered.

  "That's not true," he said, his lips pressed against my hair. "Not true at all."

  "I don't know what to do if I'm not working on a campaign."

  "It will come to you."

  "I don't know who I am without a candidate to manage," I said.

  "You will figure it out."

  I tipped my head back, away from Linden's glorious warmth. "Where is this optimism coming from? Why aren't you telling me that I wasted almost half of my life on a job I hated and I needed you, the burly neighbor man, to explain it to me like you explained bats and water heaters and sticky doors and everything else?"

  "Because years are not wasted. You were alive. You lived those years. You experienced more than a job in that time."

  "But—"

  "No," he interrupted with a firm squeeze to my ass. We were doing that now. Ass squeezing. "Come on. Over here. Look at this old oak tree."

  "The one leaning against that other tree? Isn't it going to fall over? Shouldn't you do something about that?"

  "That tree has been here for three hundred years, give or take a few. It was here before most of the others in this woodland too. The settlers chopped down trees like they were getting high on sap. Deforested most of the South Shore and Cape, but that's not the point."

  "Am I getting some Lord of the Rings wisdom here? Is that what this speech is about?"

  "Be quiet and let me teach you something." Another ass squeeze since we were very much doing this now, and doing a substantial amount of it. "That tree grew up with the first colonies. It witnessed wars. It gave life to generations of other oaks in this wood and beyond." He pointed out trees at various stages of growth around us. "And for the past several years, it's been dying."

  "Oh my god, are you comparing my career to this tree?"

  "No but it's so fun to see you mad. Real mad, not that fake, forced shit where you're all eyebrows and painful smiles." He pointed to the tree in question, which seemed to be standing only because the branches of another tree gave it a sturdy spot to lean. "For years, that oak has provided a home to nesting robins and chickadees in a hollowed-out knot in the upper trunk. It's hosted lichen, moss, and two species of fungi that live only on decaying trees. Would you say this tree has wasted those years?"

  "Obviously not but the next step in my career cannot be collapsing onto the forest floor and turning into mulch. I need something in upper management."

  "You're going to figure it out, Jas. There's no penalty for changing directions. You're free to start over at any time."

  "Do you have any idea how long it takes to start over? I've spent half my life on this. I can't just—I don't know, how do people find careers? I've been doing this since I was seventeen. This is who I am. This is my plan."

  "You know how people do it? They decide to fuck the plan. Seriously. Fuck the plan. Walk in the woods. Reject anyone's definition of success. Abandon expectations. Listen to your heartbeat. Take no one's shit." He brought his hand to my neck, sliding it around to cup my nape. "And steal every kiss you can."

  He leaned in, captured my lips, and dropped his other hand to my hip. My spine connected with the bark of a tree as I knotted my hands in his shirt, desperate to steady myself. He pushed his thigh between my legs and there was no denying the solid ridge of him behind his zipper. There was no way to miss that.

  He groaned against my lips as he pressed into me. "Jasper."
r />   The thing about these leggings was they hid nothing. Absolutely nothing. When he wedged himself up against me, that erection was right there. And we were in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the day, in the middle of my total life collapse.

  And I arched against him because I didn't want to stop.

  "Say something," he ordered as he moved his lips down my jaw, my neck.

  That beard of his. My god. I didn't know how it could be soft and rough at the same time. Which was why I asked, "Do you use beard oil?"

  He let out a quiet chuckle on my shoulder. "Jesus Christ, Jasper."

  "I'm just wondering," I said as I looped my arms around his neck.

  "You're wondering about beard oil," he murmured. "I must be doing this wrong if you can think about anything."

  Linden hooked my leg around his waist and raked his hand up from my knee to my backside. It was profane, really, the way he touched me. Like he was making it clear how he'd touch me if we weren't out in the open where anyone could see us. Like he wanted to be extremely profane with me and he didn't mind me knowing that.

  "You do, right? You have a whole beard oil system," I said.

  He glanced down at our bodies, his brows pinched. He tipped his chin toward the place where the ridge in his jeans notched against my barely covered center. "If I ever come across this husband of yours, I'm going to have some words with him."

  "Could you not talk about my ex while you're"—I cleared my throat—"you know, doing that?"

  "I wasn't sure you'd noticed. With your concern about beard oil and all." He rubbed his hand along the small of my back, then under my shirt and beneath the waistband of my leggings. He didn't delve any deeper. "Let's not talk about your ex at all, okay?"

  I bobbed my head in agreement. "That would be—"

  Linden didn't let me finish. He stole my lips and rocked his hips against me and that was it. That was the end of the discussion and the start of the most aggressive kiss I'd ever experienced. To call it a kiss was an obscene understatement. It was closer to having sex while fully clothed and I knew that didn't make sense, it didn't make any sense in the least, but that was how it went. It was sex with mouths—but also hands and bodies and scary-big erections. It was everything and I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt everything.