Page 3 of The Illusion of Power (Passion and Politics #1)

The corner of my lips quirk as the image of me at the makeshift desk floats through my mind.

I wrote my first program on that computer.

It was a crude but efficient piece of software meant to help Dad keep track of his inventory.

Pride I’d never seen before had shone in my father’s eyes when I showed him how it worked.

“You’re smiling,” my mother says, her head tilting to the side as she assesses me. “Are things getting better with Aubrey?”

“Things with Aubrey are exactly as they were when you called yesterday.” Maybe worse. Every day that passes without us having an actual conversation lodges the knife in my back a little deeper.

Her frown deepens. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“The only thing I can do: wait.”

“Wait?” The word is more of a shriek than a question, coated in disapproval and the type of confusion I’ve come to accept my mother will always have when it comes to me.

“Yes, Mama. Wait.” I rub at my forehead, trying to dispel the ache growing behind my brows.

I am so tired of talking about Aubrey, of being subjected to inquisition after inquisition, while he gets to keep living as if nothing happened.

Besides being officially kicked out of our bedroom and having to hire a new speechwriter, Aubrey’s day-to-day life is unchanged.

He gets to work without interruption, to wear his wedding band without questioning eyes staring at it and making snap judgments about his state of mind and sense of self-worth.

“Things have been hectic around here, what with the campaign and?—”

“The news of the affair,” she adds, cutting my sentence short.

I watch her move through the hall that leads from her bedroom to the kitchen.

Her pursed lips an indication of her waning patience.

“Waiting don’t make a lick of sense to me, Selene, but if that’s how you want to live your life, then I guess there’s nothing I can say to change your mind. ”

“ I don’t make a lick of sense to you.”

Tears gather in the corner of my eyes, and I push them back.

My mother stops walking, coming to rest in front of the wall of family photos she made us take every year on Easter Sunday, with the heat of the Georgia sun bearing down on us.

In every one, my sisters and I are wearing matching outfits, and in every one, they’re smiling big and bright while I grimace because the stockings are itchy and the tag in the dress my mother refused to cut out is rubbing against my skin.

Each image is a confirmation of the validity of my statement.

It’s not my marriage or the way I’m choosing to deal—or not deal—with this affair that doesn’t make sense to my mother.

It’s me. It’s always been me. My career.

My husband. My sensory issues. My autism diagnosis.

All my life, I’ve been one big question mark to her.

“ Baby. ” Her voice is a quiet, regretful whisper that does nothing to soothe the pain of spending my entire life being loved but not understood.

“I have to go, Mama. Please don’t continue to call me every day. I will let you know when there’s a change in my marriage you’ll find satisfactory.”

Before she can respond, I disconnect the call.

As soon as her face disappears from the screen, a wave of shame washes over me because I know I hurt her feelings.

Whatever else she might be, Justine Grant is a sensitive woman who loves her children with all of her heart, and she doesn’t deserve my frustration or anger.

I grab my phone from the wireless charging stand on my desk and send her a quick text, apologizing for my behavior.

Afterwards, I send an apology to Monique as well.

When that’s done, I set my phone down and place my head in my hands, pressing my palms into my eyes to try to curb the sudden urge to cry.

I have people in my life who love me, who are worried about me, and for the past two weeks, all I’ve done is get mad at them for caring, for wanting to know my next move, so they can see me through it.

All of the anger and frustration I’ve aimed their way has been misplaced.

There’s only one person it belongs to, and I’m going to give it to him whether he wants it or not.

“Are you planning on joining us in the living room anytime soon?”

My head snaps up, and I’m greeted by the familiar blend of classic European features and the manufactured ruggedness of a red-blooded American I’ve been looking at for years. Aubrey Taylor is a beautiful man, but he’s nothing like the husband I pictured for myself when I was growing up.

I thought I would have what my mother and father have.

A beautiful, Black family with varying shades of melanin and textured hair.

Babies with brown eyes instead of the cerulean blue Aubrey passed down to AJ.

The color had been a shocking contrast against his brown skin, but at that point, I was used to being surprised by my life with Aubrey.

He’s been surprising me since the first time we met in the library during my first year of undergrad at Stanford.

At first, it was all positives like his patience and understanding, or the way he never treated my quirks like things to be tolerated instead of outright accepted, but now they feel overwhelmingly negative.

This campaign has changed him, altered the way he treats me.

He’s critical, impatient, and… unfaithful.

The last word pulls all the air from my lungs. It leaves me in a weary sigh that Aubrey ignores. His brows lift, and his eyes stretch, a silent reminder of the question I’ve left unanswered. “I’m working,” I lie, gesturing at my computer. “Trying to get the launch rescheduled.”

“Can it wait? I need you out here.”

His question hits me like a blow to the chest, exploding in a cloud of searing pain and annoyance. How can he ask me that? Me. The woman who just rescheduled one of the biggest days of her career to stand beside him while he admitted to betraying me.

“Can it wait?” I repeat the question, testing the words out, weighing them to see if they hold the same level of audacity when they come off my tongue. They don’t. “No, Aubrey, it can’t wait. I can’t wait. I can’t keep pushing my career to the wayside in service of your political aspirations.”

“Political aspirations?” He huffs, stepping deeper into the office. “Is that really how you want to refer to the campaign I’ve given the last four years of my life to?”

Something inside me is breaking. Maybe it’s been broken for a while. Maybe I’ve been broken for a while, and I’m just feeling it now. Right now, as I listen to my husband speak of his Presidential campaign as his own personal sacrifice, dismissing everything I’ve given.

My time.

My energy.

My dignity.

All of my work is done, but I turn back towards my computer, wiggling the mouse to awaken the screen. “We’ve both given a lot to this campaign, Aubrey. I’ve already rescheduled the launch date once. I won’t do it again.”

He rolls his eyes. “No one is asking you to move your precious launch again, Selene.”

“But you are asking me to stop working on it to sit in a meeting no one needs me for.”

“I just said you were needed.”

I lift a brow, sparing him a glance out of the corner of my eye. “Who decided that?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question, Aubrey. Who determined I was needed? You? Jordan? Torrance? Which one of you do I have to thank for wasting more of my time?”

Because when I leave my office to go into the living room and sit in on the rest of this meeting, it will be a waste of my time.

There might be one question meant specifically for me, something small that could be answered in an email to my assistant, but the rest of it will have nothing to do with me.

“The Secret Service agents who were just assigned to us.”

My attention is divided between the email that just landed in my inbox and this pointless conversation with Aubrey, so it takes me a moment to process what he’s just said. When I do, I give him all of it. Every ounce of my scrunched brow, open-mouthed attention.

“The who?”

Aubrey’s lips twitch like he wants to smile but doesn’t want to waste the action on me. He’s happy my interest has been piqued because it means he’s won tonight’s battle of wills and importance. It seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

“The agents from our Secret Service detail.”

“We don’t have a Secret Service detail.”

And with less than ten weeks left until Election Day, I don’t understand why we would get one now.

Once Aubrey got the Democratic Party’s nomination, we were offered a detail, and he’d refused it because Jordan said it didn’t align with the image they were trying to cultivate of him as a man of the people.

They wanted to show voters that Aubrey wanted the Oval to make a change, not to take advantage of the perks that came along with it.

“We do now,” Aubrey says, splitting his gaze between my face and the watch on his wrist. Clearly, he has somewhere else to be. “Come meet them, so we can all move on with our evening.”

Reluctantly, I rise from my desk and make my way to the doorway Aubrey is crowding.

He steps back, making room for me to pass through so we don’t have to touch.

The subtle rejection stings even as it satisfies the part of me that doesn’t want Aubrey’s hands anywhere near me.

I step into the hallway with Aubrey at my back.

He’s several steps behind me, and every inch between our bodies is a reckoning.

A private appraisal of the physical and emotional distance between us, I can’t ignore anymore.

I round the corner that leads to the living room and notice two of the broad-shouldered, black suited men I spotted earlier moving towards me on long legs that seem to be locked in step.

My own stride falters, and I stop short, pausing to appreciate the synchronicity of their movements, the symmetry of their existence.

They don’t look alike—although they both are well over six feet tall and have deep, umber complexions.

One stands an inch or so above his counterpart and probably outweighs him by a good twenty pounds of muscle.

There are specks of gray peppered throughout the temples of his low fade, which suggests that he’s older than his partner with the freshly shaved head, but not by much.

The differences are obvious, making it easy for anyone to view them as two distinct individuals, but still, something about their features insists they were meant to be viewed together.

One’s firm jaw designed to enhance the sharpness of the other’s.

One’s full, sensual mouth created to highlight the lushness of the other’s lips.

One’s pair of onyx eyes crafted to make you contemplate whether the man at his side has ever been told his irises are a unique mixture of copper and brass.

Aubrey cuts the corner mere seconds after I do and runs into me, hitting me with a force that sends me flying.

Even as I lose my balance, my body pitching forward while my brain calculates how hard I’ll hit the floor, I find that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he didn’t slow down at all because it’s just not his way.

When something is in his path, it doesn’t occur to him that the decent and polite thing would be to go around.

He always chooses to go through.

I’m thinking about how absolutely messed up it is that I’m not even an exception to that rule when his hands go to my waist, steadying me with a loose hold that smacks of our estrangement.

There’s no tenderness or familiarity, no lingering touch or question about if I’m okay.

There’s not even an apology. Just a frustrated curse and a roll of his eyes.

I brush him off, looking up to find two sets of eyes on me.

The moment I’m settled in the weight of their gazes, I want nothing more than to go back into my office and hide because those eyes see more in one second than I’ve ever willingly revealed to anyone in an entire lifetime.