Page 20 of The Illusion of Power (Passion and Politics #1)

Aubrey presses his lips together, trying his best to look contrite.

“Selene, you have to understand. Sutton…she,” he pauses and lifts a hand to rub at the back of his neck.

“She grew up with nothing, and she has no one to fall back on. She moved here for this job, and I couldn’t just cut her off completely.

You know how it is when you’re young and fighting to survive.

All it takes is one thing—” He holds up a finger, and his features collapse onto each other in the way they do when he’s trying to appear sincere and spark an emotional response in his audience.

“—one small thing like an unexpected bill or something huge like losing your job and then suddenly your whole life falls apart. I couldn’t have that on my heart.

I couldn’t just send her away knowing that the whole scandal is making it impossible for her to find another job. ”

He shakes his head like the thought of his mistress suffering in any way would absolutely gut him, and for the first time in a while, I’m buying what he’s selling. He looks genuinely distressed, which only adds to the rage simmering inside of me at the moment.

I tilt my head back, allowing it to rest on the cool tile behind me, and look at him through low eyes. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Aubrey.”

Relief spreads across his features like wildfire, and I douse every ember with my next words.

“It’s nice to know you’re capable of that kind of care and consideration.

What I would like to know, however, is where the fuck that concern was for me?

Did you even think about what it would do to me to find out you’re still working with her?

Did you stop and ask yourself how I would feel to stand in front of the world and speak words written by your mistress? Did you even think about me at all?”

“Sel, you have to understand…”

“No, I don’t!” I scream. “I don’t have to understand anything.

I don’t have to filter my pain and embarrassment through the lens of your flawed logic.

Everything you’ve said is based on emotion, Aubrey, it’s rooted in care and concern, you’ve gone to great lengths to extend to a woman you haven’t been with in months, but haven’t tried to give to your wife, who’s been by your side for years! ”

Something about the way his eyes refuse to meet mine sets off my internal alarm bells.

I turn my words over in my head, searching for the thing I said that would have made him go from open and pleading to avoidant.

The only thing that stands out is the comment about how long it’s been since he last slept with Sutton.

When the news of the affair broke, he assured me it had been over for months.

He swore on our son’s grave. That was how he’d gotten me to agree to the press conference.

I sit up, heart pounding with fresh betrayal. “You’re still sleeping with her.”

The answer is in his eyes and on his face before it ever leaves his mouth.

In fact, it never actually leaves his mouth.

He’s too much of a coward to say it, and I’m too fucking weak to hear it.

I draw my knees up and wrap my arms around them, planting my chin on my forearm as the pain washes over me in cold waves that set my teeth on edge.

“When did it start back up?” I ask, wincing as Jordan’s comment about how easily she could slide Sutton into the First Lady role takes on new meaning. “Did it ever stop?”

“Of course, it stopped.” Aubrey scoffs, and the sound burns through me. Suddenly, there’s rage on top of the pain.

“Don’t do that, Aubrey. Don’t act like me asking if you ever stopped fucking the woman you’re still cheating on me with is some affront to your character. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt from me. You haven’t earned it.”

His entire demeanor shifts at that phrase, and I shouldn’t be surprised.

Aubrey is as entitled as they come. The concept of earning anything is foreign to him.

He thinks everything, even the highest office in the land, is his birthright.

His shoulders drop, and the golden lines of his brows pull together into a harsh line of resentment.

“Is that what I have to do, Selene?” he sneers.

“I have to earn it? I have to get down on my fucking knees and beg you for your forgiveness? Do I have to lie and tell you I’m never going to fuck her again?

Is that what it’s going to take for us to get past this?

” My lips part, my tongue heavy with responses to his rhetorical questions, but he continues, stealing my chance for rebuttal.

“You’ve made this entire thing impossible, you know that, right?

Even Jordan, who gets paid a handsome fee to manipulate facts and craft narratives that lead to the forgiveness of the most egregious crimes, couldn’t come up with a sentence perfect enough to make you get the fuck over it ! ”

The sharpness of his tone as he speaks, no, shouts, those last words, makes me jolt, but it doesn’t stop me from holding his gaze. This is the most candid he’s been in weeks, and even though I hate him in this moment, I appreciate the view of his true face.

“Is that what you want, Aubrey? For me to get the fuck over it?”

“What I want is to be President, and nothing, not even your feelings, begins to outweigh that desire because I was born to lead this country, Selene.” He runs his fingers through his hair, shaking his head as he looks down at me.

“I thought you understood. I thought you, of all people, would know sacrifices would be made along this path.”

“Time. Money. Energy. Those are the sacrifices I signed on for, Aubrey. Not my dignity, not my pride.”

“Don’t you get that your pride is the problem? Your pride is the reason we can’t move past a minor indiscretion.”

“It wasn’t minor or singular.”

Aubrey frowns. “What?”

“You had an affair on the world’s stage, Aubrey.

That’s major.” Deciding the time for cowering in my pain is over, I stretch my legs back out in front of me and lie back again before continuing with my point.

“And you slept with Sutton multiple times, so there wasn’t an indiscretion, there was a series of indiscretions.

Every time you fucked her, every time you sexted her, every time you thought of her while you jerked off in the shower was an indiscretion, a betrayal you have yet to explain or truly apologize for. ”

He stares at me for a moment, astounded and annoyed by my explanation.

Then he throws his hands up in the air. “Jesus fucking Christ, Selene! You really want to know why I won’t talk to you about the affair?

” Another rhetorical question, but this time I don’t even try to answer because he’s practically salivating with the need to express the hateful things running through his head.

“Because every conversation based on emotion goes like this. You treat our marriage, and my infidelity, like a bug in your software you have to run a diagnostic to find and fix. And you did the same thing when AJ died, studying the crime scene photos like some sort of sociopath.”

When this conversation started, I didn’t think there was anything else Aubrey could say to hurt me, but clearly, I was wrong.

The comment about how I handled AJ’s death strums across the strings of my grief, creating discordant chords I refuse to let him hear.

I steel my spine and school my features into a mask of neutrality as he rants about how disgusted he was when I asked for the photos I only wanted to see so my brain would stop filling in the blanks of an already horrific day with images worse than the reality of what happened in those halls.

At the time, Aubrey had said he understood, but I knew he didn’t. I knew he couldn’t. Still, I never imagined he was disgusted by it, by me.

He goes on and on, his cruel honesty bolstered by the high of that first confession until his complaints come full circle, looping back around to the affair, linking my apparent character flaws to his infidelity.

“You always have to be in control. Even in the bedroom. You know sex is supposed to be fun, right? You’re not supposed to be counting strokes or reaching down to adjust your partner’s head when he’s eating you out.”

The need to defend myself rises in my throat, but I bite it back down. I don’t need to tell Aubrey I’ve never in my life counted strokes or justify the time I got so fed up with him mistaking my labia for my clit that I physically moved his mouth where I needed it.

“So that’s why you cheated? Because we weren’t having fun in the bedroom?”

Aubrey is intent on selling the lie, on laying the blame at my feet, so he nods. “Yes. And I don’t understand why you’re so determined to punish me for something that was bound to happen anyway.”

Despite the burning sensation in my chest and the desperate desire to pick up something heavy and chuck it at his head, I smile. The inappropriate act is accompanied by a snorting giggle that makes Aubrey’s eyes go wide with confusion.

“What’s funny?” he asks.

“I’m sorry.” I cover my mouth, pressing the manic chuckle back between my lips.

“I don’t mean to laugh because you’re right.

” His eyes get even wider now, and I take several calming breaths before I go on.

“About the affair,” I clarify, nodding my head solemnly.

“It was always going to happen. Not because I’m woman enough to ask for what I want in the bedroom, but because small men like you always cheat with little girls who make them feel big. ”

Aubrey balks, and I lick my lips, tasting retribution made sweeter by the patience I exhibited during his tirade.

“Question. How do you think you’ll fare as the leader of the free world when you haven’t come up with a single original idea since you started working with Jordan?

” I tilt my head to the side, arching a brow.

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Like was it even your idea to fuck Sutton or was it just a seed your campaign manager planted? ”

I snap my fingers as another thought lands in my mind.

“Or maybe it was a direct order!” I nod, liking that line of reasoning better.

“That sounds like something she would do. She’d have to be desperate to risk the scandal, which means you must have been in dire need of a confidence boost, someone to make you feel manly because your wife was too busy working for her success to stroke your tiny little ego. ”

I lift my hand, holding my thumb and index finger together to indicate the size of the ego in question, while a faux pout tugs at my lips. Aubrey glowers at me, and for a second, he looks like he wants to strangle me. Instead of being afraid, I find myself wondering.

If he’d actually take the risk with a house full of staffers and Secret Service agents.

If I’d even have it in me to fight back.

If Jordan would swoop in and help him make my murder look like an accident.

If anyone would bat an eye when Sutton fucking Ellsworth went from being an adulterous, former speechwriter to the First Lady of the United States of America.