But then, just as he started to relax in one of the seats towards the rear, he heard a high, strong voice cut through the dim chatter in the chamber.
Alicia's voice.
As if pulled by invisible puppeteer's strings, Tanner leaned forward. Sure enough, he saw Alicia, standing tall and defiant behind the podium, her eyes roving out over the assembled senators in the chamber.
"We need this bill," she insisted, blinking. Tanner peered closer, and sure enough, there were tiny tears glimmering at the corners of her eyes. "Please, I beg of you, take a moment and put personal politics aside. There are many little petty fights that are always in play here, but this is a bill that transcends those quarrels. Don't think about your party, or your own personal agenda, or how this bill might not contain a project for your district.
"Instead," she continued, her hands gripping the side of the podium so tightly that her knuckles were almost pure white, "think about what this can do for our future. For our future as a nation, for our children. Schools all across the country cry out desperately for our help, and we have the power to do incalculable good for them. Please, please vote for this bill. Vote for a strong education for our children."
And then, before Tanner could pull back from where he leaned over the gallery, before he could retreat out of sight, Alicia looked up directly at him.
He couldn't take it. Clumsy, ignoring the murmurs of distaste from the other visitors sitting around him, Tanner dragged himself out of his seat. He staggered for the door, needing to get out, to get away.
Behind him, Tanner heard the Senate Majority Leader take the microphone, beginning the process of calling the bill to a vote. He knew that he ought to stick around and make sure that the bill didn't pass, but he couldn't bear to be here for even a second longer.
As soon as he'd locked eyes with Alicia, he'd felt his heart break anew in his chest, and he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what he'd lost.
He loved her.
That realization slammed into him like a sledgehammer to the chest, nearly stopping his heart from beating. The physical force of that realization propelled him up out of his seat, halfway to the exit from the visitors viewing area, before he even realized that he was moving. He managed to get out into the hallway, where he slumped over, his head pressing against the cool stone of the wall.
He loved her. Almost like a blind man exploring an open wound, Tanner mentally explored this realization, sitting like a stone in the middle of his brain. He didn't know how it had appeared, coming out of nowhere, but it sat there, solid as bedrock.
He loved her. This wasn't lust, wasn't just a crush, wasn't like any of his previous relationships. Tanner could practically hear Alicia's voice inside his head, laughing as she called him a dumbass, pointing out that he should have realized this earlier, back before-
-before he fucked it all up, before he lost her forever.
And when Alicia looked up at him, during that frozen moment of time in the Senate chamber, he'd seen in her eyes that she had loved him too, once. Now that he saw it, recognized it in himself, he knew that she'd loved him for longer than he'd realized, back when they were still together, from that moment that their bodies had first come together.
She'd loved him, and then he threw it all away, destroyed that love, stomped on it and reduced it to nothing by betraying her.
Still leaning against the wall, trying to even breathe normally, Tanner nearly jumped a foot in the air as his phone started buzzing. He pulled it out, held it to his ear, just breathing into the receiver.
"Tanner?" Pribus. "Hey, buddy, you there?"
"Yeah," Tanner ground out.
"Amazing! I don't know how you pulled it off, but you're still definitely the best. I'll admit, I had a bit of doubt about your success with this one. I know, I shouldn't have doubted your skills, but I'll confess that I did. And then you go and prove to me that you've still got it, why you deserve to be on my speed dial list." Pribus sounded ecstatic. He babbled on some more, but Tanner tuned out these words.
Finally, perhaps realizing that Tanner wasn't replying to any of his compliments and praise, Pribus stopped. "Hey, son, you okay? You haven't said anything for a while, now. I would have expected that you'd already be out celebrating!"
Tanner opened his mouth, not sure what would come out. "Pribus, I need a break."
"Hey, of course! What are you thinking? Mexico? Maybe Vietnam? You know, the RNC has a private jet that we keep sitting around, all fueled up and ready to go, but I'm pretty sure that it's sitting idle at the moment. I've heard some great things about Spain, really cheap right now, and the girls are to die for-"
"Not a vacation," Tanner cut him off. "I'm taking a break from working for you. From doing these jobs."
"These jobs?"
"Politics. Fixing things. Chasing the party's goals, just crushing whatever innovation people want because it doesn't sit with your own greedy ideals," Tanner spat out, anger bubbling through his veins. He straightened up from where he'd been slumping against the wall, his voice climbing in volume. A couple other visitors, exiting from the Senate chamber and wearing disappointed expressions (apparently, they'd been rooting for the education bill to pass) glared at him but he just stared back until they dropped their gazes.
"Tanner, we have other goals to help-"
"No," he cut the other man off. "No more fixing things to go our way. No more forcing people to vote the way we want."
Pribus took a deep breath. "You know that the other side does this, too, don't you? This isn't just us. Everyone does this."
"But that doesn't make it right," Tanner said, so softly that he wasn't sure if Pribus even heard him.
Pribus stopped talking after that, however, and the silence stretched on, the phone's connection crackling a little as the heavy stone surroundings blocked some of the signal. At least, Tanner thought dimly to himself, the man didn't wheedle away at him, trying to convince him to change his mind.
Finally, Pribus cleared his throat, spoke up again. "Can I ask why?"
Tanner took a deep breath, let it out. "Because I just realized what this is costing me."
On the other end of the line, Pribus started to say something else, but Tanner hung up on him, not even listening. Dropping his phone back in his pocket, he turned and headed out of the Capitol, back to his apartment to pack.
He didn't know where he was going, but he couldn't stay here. Not with the memories of Alicia, the realization that he'd lost the best thing that had ever happened to him, all around him.
He'd go to the airport, decide there, he said to himself. He'd get on the first flight out of there, no matter where it might be headed. Alaska, maybe, or Washington or Oregon. Someplace far away, someplace that wouldn't ever bring him near Colorado, or Alicia, ever again.
He had enough money in his bank account to last him a while. He'd maybe find a new job, or just do nothing. He'd always wanted to work at a small business somewhere - he was shit at using his hands for anything coordinated, but perhaps he could serve as a manager. Or perhaps he ought to go into sales.
He was, after all, good with people. Black humor surfaced briefly in his mind. Even if people didn't want to be convinced, he seemed to always know the right buttons to push in order to manipulate them.
It destroyed relationships, friendships, but he got what he wanted.
Unless what he wanted was Alicia, to have that love back. Even still, his heart ached, burning for her, a burn that he somehow knew would never go away.
Tanner left the Capitol, headed home, started dumping clothes into his suitcase. He needed to leave.
Chapter Twenty-Three
*
"No, not even close. Come on, you can't be serious with this shit." Tanner threw the printed paper with the proposed speech he'd been reading down onto the desk of the gubernatorial candidate's head speechwriter. "Are you even trying?"
The speechwriter, a young man with a sparse resume that proudly touted a C average in coll
ege as his crowning achievement, blinked up at him. "What's wrong with it?"
"What's wrong-" Tanner cut himself off, fighting to swallow his anger. He'd been struggling with anger more recently, as of late. Stages of grief, he thought blackly to himself.
Instead, he turned the paper around so that the speechwriter could see, stabbing down with one finger at a particularly awful passage. Just to drive home the issues with this section of the speech, Tanner had circled the paragraph twice and then scrawled "NO" over it with a thick tipped red marker.
"This," he spat out through gritted teeth. "You're stating that the governor's going to embrace coal power. That's wrong."
The speechwriter peered down at the paragraph, as if he didn't even remember his own writing, and then returned a weakly watered down version of Tanner's frown back up at him. "No, the governor told me to put that part in."
"What? Why the hell would he want that in there, when one of the biggest planks in his platform is environmental stewardship?"
"It's not just coal, it's clean coal," the speechwriter said, as if this explained everything.
Tanner opened his mouth, but closed it again after a minute of searching helplessly for words. "You ought to run for a political appointment yourself," he finally spat out, the worst insult he could conjure up. He snatched the speech draft off of the writer's desk and stormed in to talk to their candidate himself, as the young man sat back and grinned at the apparent compliment.
The governor sat behind his own desk in the campaign office, looking intently at something on his computer with his mouth hanging slightly open. At the sound of Tanner opening his office door and barging in, the man quickly snapped up, clicking furiously at something on his screen as his mouth snapped shut.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?" Tanner asked, trying to keep his disgust out of his voice.
"No, no, not at all," the governor replied. Derrick Scott wasn't anyone's idea of a perfect governor in terms of policy, but he did have a confident speaking voice and strong demeanor, which was enough to keep him appealing to voters. As long as everyone listened to the style of his speeches, and not the lack of substance, Tanner thought that he could manage to squeeze out a win for the man.
Of course, after he spent a few years in office and accomplished absolutely nothing, Tanner had already decided that he wouldn't pick up the phone when they called him back to lead the man's re-election campaign.
"Derrick, what's all this I hear about coal?" Tanner asked, dropping the half-written speech onto the man's desk.
Derrick smiled, although it was more of a nervous gesture than a confident one. His bald head, shaved and polished, gleamed like a cue ball. "Yeah, Keegan, I wanted to talk to you about that. See, I've been talking to some folks over in the energy sector who are looking to provide a whole bunch of Florida jobs, and they say-"
"It's Tanner," Tanner cut in.
Derrick frowned in incomprehension. "What?"
"Tanner. Not Keegan."
His frown deepened. "But that's your name, isn't it? I like to call people by their first names, put them at ease."
"It doesn't put me at ease," Tanner snapped back. He knew that, at least the old Keegan Tanner would never talk back to a candidate like this. The candidate needed to be kept happy, well-fed, and complacent, while he did the real heavy lifting behind the scenes. But as of late, he found himself hating Derrick, hating everything about the man. He had absolutely no morals, and his charisma was as shallow as a kid's backyard wading pool. Next to Alicia, the man was just a cheap sock puppet-
Tanner closed his eyes for a moment, wincing. He didn't want to think about her name. He'd spent the last two months trying to not picture her, not remember her, not realize how much he missed her and wanted her. He could move on. Just needed more time.
"Tanner," he said firmly, opening his eyes after taking a breath. "Call me Tanner."
"Well, if you insist," the governor allowed - another thing that Tanner hated about the man. He backed down at the slightest sign of confrontation. Great for Tanner to get his way in disputes, but Tanner couldn't be at the man's side every second - and it only took a few seconds for a lobbyist to change Derrick Scott's mind.
"Anyway, back to this coal thing," Tanner returned, tapping the speech now sitting on the governor's desk. "Look, you can't put this in there."
"But it's clean coal!" Derrick replied, as if this made it different. "And the energy people are telling me that it will bring jobs-"
"Derrick." Tanner fought the urge to reach up and rub his temples. "There's no such thing as clean coal. It's just buzzword bullshit made up to lie to voters. It's going to bring pollution, not jobs - come on, there's no coal here! This isn't West Virginia!"
"But they said it's clean-"
"Derrick, your whole platform is about stewardship, both for the budget and the environment. Bringing in coal plants will destroy your environmental credibility, and the cost to the state when the President finally implements those carbon taxes he's been threatening for years will destroy your fiscal plank as well. You can't put this in a speech."
Derrick Scott looked put out - no, worse than that, Tanner realized. The damn man was pouting! Like a little child! What was he, eight years old?
Tanner wasn't going to cave on this. He waited, glaring at the candidate and not bothering to hold back the disdain in his eyes.
"Fine," Derrick finally caved, just as Tanner knew that he would. Dear lord, the man was seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of electability. "But listen, maybe instead, we could talk to the energy people and convince them to instead bring some other jobs! They were saying all sorts of fun things about fracking-"
Keegan Tanner, in a rare twist, found himself speechless.
He turned around, ignoring as the gubernatorial candidate kept talking. "Oh, and Derrick," Tanner called over his shoulder.
"Oh, yes? What?"
"The framed picture on the wall behind you reflects your computer screen," Tanner said with a sigh. When he walked into the office, the man had been browsing the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist, several lurid pictures easily viewable in the reflection behind him.
"Oh. Shit. Look, I just clicked a link in my email, I didn't know that it would-"
Tanner slammed the office door behind him, cutting off the rest of the man's protests. He'd probably sink himself with a scandal before he even made it a year in office, he thought blackly to himself.
The whole thing was an exercise in futility. He had just wanted out of Washington, and although he'd told Pribus that he was done working as a fixer, the man wheedled him into taking this position down here, working a short term appointment to get Soon-To-Be-Governor Scott elected. Tanner figured that the extra cash would help offset his heavy drinking bills, and accepted the spot.
More recently, however, as Derrick Scott drove him crazy, Tanner found himself pushing the booze away. Instead, he started spending more and more time in the little hometown gym located a block away, grunting as he pushed his body to its limits, letting the physical exertion of lifting weights and running on the treadmills clear his mind of intrusive thoughts.
But no matter how much he exercised, how many stupid things Derrick Scott said to him, he couldn't keep Alicia fully out of his mind.
More and more, Tanner realized, he'd made the wrong choice, had kept on making wrong choices ever since the woman saw right through him. He should have known, right then, that there was something special about Alicia.
But instead, he assumed that she was plain, that she didn't matter, and that he could replace her in the future with another woman.
Now, however, women held no interest for Tanner. One of the campaign interns came on to him, a sexy blonde barely out of college but already showing off incredible growth in the upper torso, but Tanner barely even noticed. He turned down her offer to go out and get a drink, kept his eyes away from her expansive cleavage, and felt only relief when she finally, pouting and put out,
set her sights on the head speechwriter instead.
What would he end up doing? Tanner couldn't decide, didn't have any answers for the questions in his head. He knew that he still wanted to work in politics - it was his life, his passion - but he couldn't keep doing things like this, helping a sleazeball like Derrick Scott get elected.
He heard some of Alicia's words echoing back to him: "...we need to do something that matters - not for us, but for our future..."
Tanner paused. He wasn't just hearing the words in his head, he realized. Instead, he heard them drifting in his ears! He blinked, looking around and snapping back to the present.
There! Someone had turned on a television in the main area of the campaign building, and, her head and torso displayed on the set of some talk show, was Senator Alicia Stone!
Tanner shoved aside a low-level staffer as he staggered over, his eyes locked on that television screen. "Turn it up!" he barked, not sure who he was addressing. Some flunky must have heard him and held the remote control, however, because the volume on the set rose until he could clearly hear Alicia's words.
"So, Senator Stone," said the host of the show, frowning. The camera panned over to him, and Tanner wanted to curse at the cameraman. Go back to Alicia! "You're introducing your education bill again, despite the strong opposition that it faced last time?"
Finally, the camera returned to Alicia, looking strong and defiant and composed, so good that Tanner wanted to reach out and try and touch her through the screen of the television. "Yes, that's correct," she replied simply.
"You don't fear that the same thing will happen as last time? This bill will go down in flames, and opponents will lambast you for targeting pipe dreams?"
Alicia, however, had a response ready to that. "Is it a pipe dream to want better education for our children, for our future?" she fired back, filled with fire and energy. Tanner watched, wishing that his candidate Derrick Scott could channel even a fraction of that seriousness, that conviction and passion. "I don't believe so. If that's the label that will be put on the rare politicians who step up and do something, instead of just sitting back and continuing to let our country slide, well, it's a label I'll be glad to wear."
Fixer: A Bad Boy Romance Page 15
