Breaking Through

by A. M. Hartnett

  As he had done to her earlier, Jenna leaned forward and covered his hand with hers. ‘I really am sorry, Simon. I have to admit that when I first heard about your involvement with the Davis thing I thought you were getting what you deserved, but what came after was pretty bad. No one deserves to be dissected like that by the media, which, ironically, is why you asked me here, isn’t it?’

  Simon squeezed her hands. ‘Jenna, if there’s anything you can tell me, anything you heard through the grapevine, I’ll owe you a favour.’

  ‘Honestly, even if I did have some hot slice of gossip on Matthew, I might just keep it to myself. He’s a good man. He’ll be a hell of a leader. He’ll make history.’

  Simon shrugged. ‘At first, and then he’ll trip up like all the rest or have to bend to the will of some while the others howl for his blood.’

  ‘You’re awfully cynical.’

  ‘I’ve seen it time and time again. If Matthew Murray becomes leader of the opposition, it won’t be long before it comes down to doing what he has to do to stay in office.’

  He waited until a third glass was placed in front of her before he leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Anything, Jenna. Some frayed thread I can pick at.’

  Keeping his gaze soft and encouraging, Simon watched Jenna war with herself as to whether she wanted to play along. Outwardly he was as easy as ever, but inside his own head he was flailing, searching for some other way to coax her tongue to wag.

  In the end, he didn’t have to. Jenna pushed her hair behind her ear, took a sip of her wine, and began to talk.

  ‘He’s a good man, but from what I hear, he likes to rough it. I’m not talking about sex – well, probably sex, too. I’m talking about the company he keeps. Murray is squeaky clean, but his boyfriend has a bit of a dark past. Not to sound too old-fashioned, but he comes from the wrong side of the tracks. Trailer trash, a bit of a hillbilly. You never see him and Murray together outside campaign headquarters, and unless you paid attention you would think the boyfriend was just another dedicated volunteer, but everyone knows about them.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not if you believe the gossip. Most of it surrounds the boyfriend, and it’s hard to tell where Murray fits in beyond association. Back when Murray was in high school collecting trophies in everything from track to public speaking, the boyfriend was getting the shit kicked out of him by his father and uncle. He moved out when he was seventeen, and three weeks later the trailer burned to the ground while the two old bastards slept in their beds.’

  Simon hated to ask, but now that the question had surfaced there was no getting it back down. It would just sit on his brain and stagnate. ‘Sexual abuse?’

  ‘The opposite, I hear. They were gun-loving rednecks who apparently turned on him when they found out he liked boys. He left because they kicked him out. He slept in someone’s shed for a few nights until he got caught, and then he spent a few nights in jail. He had an alibi for that night, he was never charged with anything and by the book he’s innocent, but people up in Miramichi say there’s more to the story than we know. Some say Murray and the boyfriend were involved in high school, but the official story is that they never travelled in the same circles and didn’t connect on any level until Murray came back from university.’

  ‘So … he’s fucking the hometown outcast. Does anyone care?’

  ‘Not really. The people in his riding that got wind of it think it’s kind of romantic.’

  Simon leaned forward and covered his mouth with his hand as he considered Jenna’s tale. He wasn’t in the business of solving crimes, and trotting out a story like this would probably make Matthew Murray more interesting in the eyes of the public.

  ‘The boyfriend, what’s his name?’

  Jenna smiled and shook her head. ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘Come on, Jenna. It’ll come out eventually.’

  ‘But not from me. If you want to ruin a man’s life and put someone like Roe into a position of power at the federal level, you’re going to find yourself doing it alone. I don’t think you’ll find very many people willing to talk trash about Matthew Murray, not in Sussex and probably not in Miramichi.’

  He offered to drive her home, but she insisted on staying to finish her wine.

  ‘I’ll call a cab, and when I get back to the hotel maybe I’ll try one of those online dating sites to find myself a playmate for the night,’ she said with a grin, and then shook her head. ‘Or maybe I’ll just call my husband and see what he’s up to tonight.’

  ‘Good plan,’ he said as he dropped two twenties on the table. ‘Those twenty-somethings can really tire you out.’

  Her smile widened. ‘When did we start looking at the twenty-somethings as alien creatures?’

  Simon thought of Miranda, who to him was her own solar system that he couldn’t stop orbiting.

  Once in his car with the engine running, he connected his phone to the Bluetooth and used the voice command to call Roe.

  ‘Reeve.’

  ‘Michael,’ Simon greeted his employer with a foul acid on his tongue. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m finally getting somewhere.’

  Not very far, he thought to himself, but that’s one hundred per cent further than I was an hour ago.

  ‘And where might that be?’

  ‘I don’t want to say just yet, and it’s possible it’s nothing, but framed the right way it could force him to withdraw from the race.’

  ‘So you have nothing, and yet you’re calling me because …’

  In the background, Simon heard grinding. A blender or coffee grinder, something that Roe deemed far more important than Simon’s time.

  He hated Roe so much at that moment his teeth hurt.

  ‘You wanted an update,’ he said through his teeth. ‘I’m giving you one.’

  ‘Call me when you have a better one,’ Roe said, and disconnected.

  Simon gripped the wheel to keep from punching a hole in the windshield. For a few seconds he thought about calling Roe back and telling him to fuck himself, but all the lights in his car reminded him that he’d taken out a loan to get the car and telling his boss to fuck himself would hinder his ability to make payments on that car, not to mention the apartment and the never-shrinking credit-card debt.

  He closed his eyes and thought of green tea, thought of the aroma of hot chocolate wafting across the table, and big green eyes looking at him like he was the only person who mattered.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘What’s that look for?’ Simon asked her.

  ‘Just a bad day at work,’ Miranda lied, and shook more chocolate shavings on top of her drink.

  They were back at the café. It had become ‘their’ place, but it was more than just the connection to Simon that endeared the seaside spot to Miranda. It was a perfect escape for her. It was away without being away: the green line of the harbour bridge in the distance and the maw of the waters below divided her from those things that dragged her down.

  In that spot in downtown Dartmouth, Miranda was detached from the job she hated and the house that seemed to get a little smaller and a little more stifling every morning. Here, she could pretend that she was just like any other young woman out for a cosy retreat with her lover, drinking overpriced hot chocolate and munching gourmet cookies.

  ‘Is your boss an asshole?’ he asked, getting a laugh and a nod of agreement from her even though her boss had nothing to do with her mood. ‘Good, because my boss is an asshole. My boss is the biggest asshole, and I’m a bigger asshole for doing his bidding.’

  His rant surprised her. His expression was jovial as he spoke, but there was just enough venom to suggest that his day had been just as shitty as hers. It made her feel selfish as she realised that in the weeks since they’d started this affair she’d not once asked him about his day.

  ‘I know you can’t tell me too much, but what happened?’

  He tapped the rim of his cup and pressed his lips together, cl
early working out what he could tell her and what he wanted to tell her. After a moment, he gave his shoulders a shake and leaned back in his seat.

  ‘Did I tell you that when I started university I thought I’d become a journalist?’ he decided to say. ‘For about ten minutes, until the drinking and the partying got a hold of me, but for a while I had a taste to stick my nose where it wasn’t wanted and right the wrongs by exposing them. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, honestly. It’s like I was planning a future for who I thought I should be rather than who I was, which was kind of a dick. Little did I know that I was making a decision that I’d have to live with one day.’

  Miranda didn’t know what to say. He was talking about a place she wasn’t even sure she’d gotten to yet, what with putting her own future on pause.

  Simon, who was clearly just venting, just went on talking.

  ‘I held onto that illusion even when I was scoring low Cs. Once again, I figured that one day I’d just pull my boots up. It was always about tomorrow, and then tomorrow came in a shitstorm. You know the story about Bette and Jacques?’ Miranda nodded, and he rolled his eyes. ‘I got a real taste of journalism then. Tabloid journalism, that is. Bette goes nuts and cuts up my buddy’s face, and the next thing you know, none of us in our group can go down to the corner for a pack of smokes without a reporter coming out of nowhere. I can’t even imagine it happening today with all the blogs and social media. As it was, it was hell with the twenty-four-hour news channels. There was a feature in the Post called “The Poor Rich Boys of Montreal”, about all the DUIs and the women and the drugs.

  ‘Anyway, I think I told you I dropped out, then finished my degree when I got clean.’ He waved his hand in front of his face as if to banish the past. ‘What does a guy like me, at the age of thirty, do with a brand-new journalism degree? He forgets everything he learned in his ethics class and becomes a bloodhound when it comes to other people’s business. He becomes the man who can find out anyone’s secret and who can bury secrets. Then he fucks up, and he ends up working for Michael Roe.’

  ‘I went to his website,’ Miranda admitted. ‘I hate to say a politician looks like a crook, but he looks like a crook.’

  ‘He’s not a crook, I’ll say that much about him, but he gets a gold star in being a prick. He’ll smile in your face as he works out whether you can do anything for him or whether you’ll stand in his way. That’s where I come in. He’s Dracula and I’m fucking Renfield, some nimrod who does his dirty work and ends up in the nuthouse at the end of the day.’

  He grimaced at her, and then sighed and covered his face with his hands. ‘God, I’m sorry. I asked you how you were and then unloaded all over you.’

  Miranda reached out, pulled one of his hands away and squeezed it as he propped his chin on his hand.

  ‘Unload away. I’d rather you vent than watch your head swell up and explode.’

  ‘Still, I feel like such a tool sitting here throwing myself a pity party.’

  He gave her a lopsided, tired smile, and her heart drummed faster. He could go so easily from front-window polished to rumpled and adorable, and when he became the latter she wanted to rumple him up even more.

  He stroked his finger along hers, sending sparks of electricity up her arm. ‘Make me feel better. Tell me about your bad day at work.’

  ‘People are just assholes,’ she told him, and quickly changed the subject by walking into another lie she was sure he’d see right through. ‘By the way, I know you wanted me to come to your place tomorrow, but we’ve got some family coming into town and I should probably make an appearance.’

  The truth was that she didn’t want to leave Eddie alone with Juliet right now, but she wasn’t going to tell Simon that. The only person she told was Juliet’s friend Arch, who had played drums with her once and had become a guardian angel of sorts, going to all of Juliet’s shows to make sure she got home all right. Arch had agreed to come over, but not early enough for Miranda to escape with Simon.

  ‘I’ll try to survive one night without you.’

  ‘Well, you do have some home movies to keep yourself occupied with.’

  Simon grinned. ‘I love how you blush when you say that, just like when I had you watch one with me.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, rolling her eyes as her face grew even hotter. It had been a surreal experience to watch herself eying the camera as she closed her magazine-perfect lips around his dick, and she couldn’t get stop giggling at the thought of it. Since that first performance, there had been a few more just as evocative, and quite a collection was building.

  Raising his teacup to his lips, Simon frowned. ‘Blowing me off like that when I’m dying to see you. What a girl. I suppose I should let you, though I won’t put up with it every night.’

  Miranda tittered. ‘Bully.’

  ‘Bitch,’ he teased, then twisted his head towards the clock on the wall. ‘Time to get a move on.’

  As they headed to his car, parked closer than they had been during that feverish exchange the first night, he chatted away and Miranda worried about why she hadn’t told him how Juliet had abandoned her and Eddie that day, or the tantrum that followed when Juliet returned to the house at the eleventh hour while Miranda paced the living room, certain she would miss work.

  Telling him might have made her feel better. Unloading as he had done, letting loose her anxiety about leaving Eddie overnight with Juliet when she suspected her sister planned to bring the wrong sort of friends over, might have eased some of the anxiety she carried in the centre of her chest.

  But as much as she wanted to tell him, it was ten times more important to keep her anxiety from him. He could spread out every one of his flaws before her and it wouldn’t make a difference, but she was convinced that learning just how fucked things were getting with her would make him decide she wasn’t worth the trouble. Right now, she needed this thing between them. She needed to look forward to seeing him after work, and she needed to look forward to the savage thrust against her, into her, at the end of the day.

  As was their custom, he waited on the street until Juliet’s exit. It made Miranda miserable to treat him like some dirty secret, but putting Simon and Juliet into the same room was out of the question at the moment.

  She didn’t speak to her sister, and Juliet didn’t even look at her as she flounced off. A minute later, Simon knocked gently and then came inside as she was checking on Eddie.

  ‘I feel like such a mooch,’ she said with a laugh as she killed all but one of the lights in the living room and led him to her bedroom. ‘I used to come home and make something quick on the stove, but you’ve been feeding me sandwiches and hot chocolate after work.’

  ‘I want you to keep up your strength so you’ll wear me out,’ he joked once they were shucking off clothing onto the floor. He kicked off his trousers and fell back on her bed in nothing but his jockeys, then laughed. ‘Where the hell did you get those?’

  Similarly down to her underwear, Miranda wiggled her ass. ‘Do you not approve of my Supergirl undies? Wait, I’ll show you the rest of it. I rarely get an opportunity to put on the full kit.’

  Simon tucked his hands behind his head and watched her rummage through her bottom drawer, then laughed again as she pulled on a garter belt made of the same red, yellow and blue fabric. Once she’d pulled on the stockings and attached them to the teeth, she twirled around for him with the same flair as when she’d showed off her dress the first night at his apartment.

  Simon gestured for her to come closer. ‘Let me have a closer look before I decide whether I like them.’

  Miranda climbed onto the bed next to him and sat back on her calves as he fingered the wide band of the garters.

  ‘Bad, bad girl, keeping something like this from me,’ he murmured, giving a garter a snap before skimming his hand along her thigh. ‘Do you have anything else to show off?’

  ‘Just these.’

  She leaned over him, her hair falling down to his shoul
ders in a curtain that closed them in as she kissed him. She evaded his attempt to take possession of her mouth and nibbled his upper and bottom lip, then moved across his cheek.

  With a smile, she gave his earlobe a tug and spoke again. ‘Maybe we can skip the food treats next time and just head down to Gentleman’s Choice so you can pick out something for me to show off.’

  Having given up his conquest of her lips, Simon set about laying claim to the logo covering her ass by squeezing the plump spheres.

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ he muttered, ‘but why waste our time with the trip? Give me your size and I’ll order what I want to see you in, and then we can try them all out one by one to see what works?’

  She laughed and pushed up. ‘That’s slick, Simon.’

  ‘What?’ he asked with a look of mock innocence.

  Miranda mirrored his expression. ‘“But Miranda, I need to see you in both the G-string and then the corset while you suck me before I can decide which will get me off the most.’”

  She reached behind her and grasped his wrists, and held onto him as she rocked back and forth over the hard column inside his jockeys. Simon dug his fingers into the meat of her ass and moaned, prompting a smile from her.

  ‘You think you can get off if I keep doing this?’ she asked in a singsong voice. ‘Can I make you come like this?’

  ‘I have no doubt,’ he replied with a shaky laugh, ‘but it wouldn’t be my first choice.’

  Miranda tightened her grip on him and arched her back, then shunted faster. No doubt she’d cream her panties if she kept this up, but she was inspired by watching him surrender to the friction building between them.

  ‘What if I didn’t give you a choice?’ she asked, and sank her nails into his forearm.

  Simon lifted his head, and she had to admit that he was doing a shitty job of hiding the glee she saw in his eyes.

  ‘You want to push me around tonight?’

  ‘I am wearing my big-girl panties.’ She released him to press her hands to his chest and lean over him. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I like the idea of tying you up and using organic torture on you before I graduate to the paddle.’