The Faithful
Weekly Serialized Romance
Friday, April 18, 2008
Chapter Five: Obamania
Available Chapters: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven, Chapter Twelve, Chapter Thirteen
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THE BELTWAY TRIO
Washington D.C.: Barack Obama 75%; Hillary Clinton 24%
Maryland: Barack Obama, 60%; Hillary Clinton, 37%
Virginia: Barack Obama, 64%; Hillary Clinton, 35%
In this little game of musical sex partners, Chloe was clearly the one left standing when the music stopped. The look on her face as Michelle Obama’s assistant Kerri announced the engagement of Caroline and Evan said it all. Her revenge rebound lover Evan hadn‘t told her that the engagement was back on. On the other hand, Reggie, Caroline’s lover, had a politically correct smile on his face and clapped politely for the couple. Kanesha, who rarely looked dumbfounded, did. And my first thought was a selfish one: Hey, Caroline, I thought we were friends; why didn’t you tell me that you and Evan had patched it up? I should have been the first to know.
“I don’t believe it!” Chloe said. But the crestfallen look on her face said that she did. “I don’t believe it,” she repeated more quietly.
On stage at the Chicago Regency Hotel, Barack kissed Caroline’s cheeks and hugged Evan. The crowd cheered enthusiastically. And members of the media rushed forward, anxious for this little human-interest anecdote to include in their Super Tuesday coverage. All the world loves a lover - the publicly acknowledged ones at least.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said, taking Chloe‘s hand and squeezing it. “I’m not standing in the receiving line to kiss her ring.”
A few feet away, Kanesha made some comment to Reggie over her shoulder as she headed in our direction.
“Whatever the game is, he’s in on it,” she said sarcastically to us. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Two great political minds on the same track. We put Love Story, 2008, behind us in the rear view mirror and headed to the lobby bar. Sinking into a comfortable banquette seat, I looked around and realized that we were almost alone. A few stray solitary drinkers appeared to be business travelers not caught up in Obamania, the word the media had coined to describe the adulation of the crowds who showed up to hear Barack (even in the states that Hillary carried.)
I waited until we placed our drinks orders for dirty martinis all around to ask Kanesha: “Did Reggie say anything?”
“No. I said, ‘You don’t look surprised.’ He shrugged. On the way out, I told him, ‘I don’t see the benefit in this for you, but I’m sure there is one.’”
A couple martinis later I was feeling pretty good sitting between adorable Chloe in her pale turquoise slip dress and Kanesha, regal in her black silk evening suit. I leaned back against the plush back of the banquette, listening to the two of them speculate on why Caroline and Evan were apparently engaged again. Rodney Skinner Turner - RST, the campaign‘s most elegant and elite intern - and Michael Westwood, policy wonk, walked into the bar together, spotted us and waved before taking seats nowhere near us.
“I wouldn’t have figured them for friends,” I said.
“Political bedmates,” Chloe said. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward, shaking with laughter. “Political bedmates!” she repeated, laughing even harder.
Political bedmates. Good one. I glanced at Kanesha. Who knew black skin could blush like that?
Our conversation that night veered back and forth from politics to bedmates, the engaged pair. None of our theories explaining their behavior were quite on the mark. Caroline eventually filled me in on the whole story. Here’s how it all went down:
Caroline and Evan had planned to participate in a charade to fool his parents for the evening, send them home happy to Philadelphia - and tell them the truth about the broken engagement sometime in the near future. But funny things happened on the way to the full execution of that plan. One: Caroline felt secure again the moment she put that ring back on her finger. She never did play the “loves me, loves me not” game in her head with Evan.
On that Monday morning, Evan stopped by her apartment early to give her the ring because he was going to D.C. for a business meeting and wouldn’t return until shortly before he was to meet her at campaign headquarters for the voting results wait. He handed it to her; she slipped it into her pocket. Standing in her living room talking to him - she in her fluffy white terry bathrobe, he in his beautifully tailored Italian charcoal gray suit - she realized that she’d missed casual moments like this. She’d missed him.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said, pulling her tight against him in a good-bye hug. Without thinking, she turned her face up for the kiss. There was one. And it was good, beginning with the exploratory licking of her lips with the tip of his tongue. “Well at least the pretense won‘t be onerous,” he said in a husky voice that belied his joking words.
Her heart was pounding as he walked out the door. She took the ring from her pocket, put it on her finger and held it out into the sunlight where the diamond sparkled. Familiar feelings washed over her, the feelings she had disparaged. Emotional safety. Security. The warmth of the familiar seduced her now. Evan was the warm bath; Reggie the brisk shower with the nozzle set to needle spray.
When Reggie called later in the morning, she told him the plan, expecting his disapproval to vibrate beneath noncommittal words. But he surprised her; and that was the second funny thing that happened on the way pulling off a charade. I think that’s a good idea, he said. They’ve come to support Barack; and they should have a good time. The thought that he might be glad if she returned to Evan did flash through her mind. They’d been apart most of the time since their dramatic lovemaking in Iowa. In fact, they’d only really made love twice after that. She didn’t count the hand jobs and oral sex - orgasms on the run, of a slightly higher order than Chloe’s vibrator orgasms. And she hated to admit it to herself, but the sex when they had it wasn’t all that satisfying. Reggie was neither as well endowed as Evan nor as passionately interested in the act of intercourse - leaving her G spot all but ignored. They alternated oral and manual pleasuring of one another. He came first; she came next - and not always on the same day.
At first, she called him obsessively, ten, twelve, twenty times a day. You have to stop calling so often, he said, I can’t handle that. His voice was gentle, but firm; and she heard the implied doubt. Was she crazy? No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t called Evan a dozen or more times a day; she hadn’t clung to him.
I love you, Reggie said before hanging up.
I love you too, she said.
But did he really love her? And did she really love him? Had she felt more loved by him before they had sex? She put the questions aside and left the ring on her hand.
On Tuesday night she enjoyed playing her role, adoring fiancée and prospective daughter-in-law; and she knew that Evan was equally happy at her side. People kept telling them what a great couple they made. He whispered in her ear, We do. Out of the corner of her eye, she occasionally saw Reggie gliding through the crowd in his smooth, graceful way, appearing serene. That’s why Caroline didn’t automatically refuse when Jilly Norton, a Chicago magazine feature writer, asked if she could do a “little human interest” story about “the campaign engagement.”
“What do you think?” she asked Evan.
Grinning, he said, “Why not?”
His parents beamed proudly. Jilly hovered expectantly. It was Caroline’s call. And wouldn’t a “little human interest story” be good for the campaign? She nodded her head Yes. Not ten minutes later someone suggested that someone on the campaign staff announce their engagement from the podium. She looked over at Reggie who was looking back at them as if he were warmly wishing the happy couple the very best.
Standing on the stage with Evan, she was suddenly sure that Reggie had known about all of this before she did. Kanesha and Thomas looked confused and Chloe both confused and hurt. She would have to remember to ask Evan if those few office blowjobs might have meant more to Chloe than he’d indicated they had.
And not for the first time, she wondered: Is Chloe better at giving head than I am?
“I love blow jobs. It’s all about the power,” Chloe told me. She was dressed in black, slender wool slacks, low cut V neck cashmere sweater that exposed her silk camisole beneath - all set off by metallic gold stilettos and gold hoop earrings. We were working our asses off on the Wisconsin initiative - from Chicago, of course because we weren’t important enough to send anywhere, even a few hours north to Wisconsin - while the least among us were monitoring the last minute details of the next day’s Tuesday the 12th primaries in Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C., almost sure to be Barack wins. The more important people like Caroline had already shifted their focus to Texas, a battleground state where he was running double digits behind Hillary or “Crazy Eyes“ as Kanesha had taken to calling her. “He told me I’m the best he ever had,” Chloe said.
“Chloe,” I teased with the feigned condescending paternalism she loved to deflate, “All hetero men say that to any woman who will take their dicks in her mouth. You know what they say about blow jobs: Like pizza, there’s only good and better.”
“Do all men say that? Or just gay men?” she challenged. “Maybe straight men are more discerning.”
“They are less discerning, darling. Women don’t give head as well as gay men do. We can afford to be picky. Your team has to take whatever it can get - even if that’s a slice with soggy crust and lame tomato sauce.”
“Nice,” she said. “The pizza metaphor. I see Caroline as the soggy and lame.”
“Ouch,” I said. (Out of loyalty to my friend, I didn’t tell Chloe I imagined her that way too.) “But Evan’s opinion is the one that counts.”
“I don’t believe the engagement is back on!” She smacked a file folder full of newspaper article tear sheets on the desk. “It’s a front, first for his parents, now for that annoying Chicago magazine writer following her around the office.”
Jilly Norton was beyond annoying. That woman was potential trouble, but Caroline didn’t seem to get that. Focused on Wisconsin, she was not paying close enough attention to the reporter in our midst.
“Has she asked you to talk about the happy couple?” I quizzed Chloe, because she had certainly put the questions to me. And I got the impression she wasn‘t looking for the happiest details. “What did you say?”
“No, thank God, she hasn‘t asked! I would have to tell her about the voicemail message I just left for the groom.” Vamping a classic cheesecake pose with one leg forward knee bent, breasts thrust out and a hand behind the head, elbow extended to the side, she licked her shiny red lips and said in a husky voice: “Baby, I can’t stop thinking about your dick. I want that dick in my mouth. Tell me you don’t want the same thing.”
“Jeez, Chloe, you left that message on his voicemail - in that tone of voice?” She nodded affirmatively and fluffed the back of her hair like a sex kitten quite pleased with herself. “He’s probably already called the police and reported a stalker.”
“Oh, ha,” she said. I heard the influence of our baby-faced white boy Michael Westwood again in that phrase. Like cheese fries, his personal sound bites were addictive. “He’ll call within 24 hours.”
She was right. He did.
The next day while we were waiting for the voting results to start coming in from Virginia, Maryland and D.C., Chloe told me the sordid details.
Chloe has never been with a man who could satisfy her as well as she could satisfy herself - and that certainly included Evan. While he was on engagement break, Chloe said they’d fucked three times, once in the office, twice at her place. She hoped that Caroline heard the rhythmic thumping of him banging her into the desk and was jealous. He probably hoped that anyone heard the noise and envied him. Public sex always has a private motive. What couples did out there together, they did for reasons like power and revenge. (Why do you think so many investment bankers and brokers have office sex? She asked Thomas.) On the other hand, she was attracted to him.
And his dick was an appendage of wonder. Did Caroline realize how special it was in its physical perfection and its ability to leap into action again and yet again? Long and thick with a beautifully shaped head, it thrilled and throbbed to her touch. Chloe loved exerting her power over Evan’s dick; and she wasn’t going to let that go without a fight.
“I want to suck your dick now,” she told him when he responded to her message by calling her cell phone.
“Where are you?”
“In the office.” She paused. “No one’s here.”
“Too risky,” he said.
“She’s gone. Call her at home. Check.”
She told him what she was going to do to him in lusty detail. He said he would call Caroline to make sure she was home. And if she was, he would be there.
“Thirty minutes?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
Thirty-five minutes later inside Kanesha’s locked office, Evan grabbled Chloe, kissed her roughly, squeezed her breasts, pulled them out of her black lace bra and twisted her nipples. That was the foreplay. He unzipped his pants; and his dick sprang forth in all its glory. Breathing heavily, he looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes and pointed to the floor. She got down on her knees, took the head of his dick into her mouth and began to suck as she fondled his balls with one hand and grasped his shaft firmly with the other. By the time she was deeply into her technique, her power over him irrefutable, he was moaning.
She heard someone outside the door but she was quite sure that he did not.
When Chloe describes her sex life, I always think: She would have made a great gay man. I clapped her on the back and steered her toward the larger space where the returns were already coming in. Early on, it was obvious that Barack would take all three contests by broad margins. Cheers all around and the plastic cups of plonk were handed out. Victory was beginning to seem inevitable. Yet our man appeared humble though elated at his victory rally in Madison, Wisconsin where he was already campaigning for the next one.
“Big turnouts, with his support crossing demographic groups,” Caroline said, looking up at Evan with a satisfied smile. She was wearing flat-heeled black riding boots with skinny jeans tucked into them and an oversized cashmere sweatshirt in soft gray - a great look for her. The jeans emphasized her small, high and firm white girl’s booty. “He’s stealing her voters. In Virginia and Maryland he beat her among women.”
“If he keeps winning, she’ll get desperate and ugly,” Kanesha said. She was wearing jeans; and her larger black girl’s booty looked fine in them too. “We have yet to be hit by the full force of the Clinton machine in slime mode.”
“The ‘Kitchen Sink Fusillade” approach,” Michael corrected her. “It’s where they grab everything they can find and throw as hard as they can. Very effective - especially against a sane, reasoned person like Barack. Some of that stuff is bound to draw blood.”
“You don’t think they’ve already done that in South Carolina?” Evan asked, his arm draped around Caroline’s shoulders. He looked damned good in his jeans too - worn the way only a rich man can, with buttery soft expensive loafers, no socks (even in cold Chicago) and a white shirt, cuffs turned back. “I thought that was nasty.”
“Nasty, but personal,” Kanesha said, shaking her head firmly. “The Big Dog got off the leash in South Carolina. That was not a planned strategy. That was his peevish misbehavior - and it hurt her, especially within the black community.”
“Who’d have ever guessed that Bill Clinton would be called a racist?” Michael said, grinning like a maniacal Irish elf.
Kanesha was still having furtive hot sex with Michael, the pale white guy I would have considered her least likely sex partner. But she’d begun to look at Harvard law grad RST with the desirable light brown skin the way women look at a man they’ve placed in their gun sights; and she was looking at him now with that deferential But what do you think, Big Man? expression. (The man had Upscale Baby Daddy stamped on his forehead. What took her so long?) RST, however, was still looking at Caroline. Her resumed engagement had only shown him that change was possible. I caught him sneaking glances at her little booty and was pretty sure Kanesha’s wouldn’t do it for him. (Booty men usually have a strong preference for small and tight or big and tight.)
Everyone in the room seemed to have a theory on what the Clinton organization would throw at us when they were ready to fight with knives, Hillary‘s specialty. She lacked oratory grace, but she had street fighting skills. We anticipated dirty ads hitting TV screens a day before Super Tuesday.
One young volunteer, a pretty black girl from the South Side, went so far as to say: “If there is an attempt on Barack’s life, it won’t be some right wing nut job; it will be a Clinton operative.”
Older, wiser and actually drawing a salary, Kanesha looked ready to admonish her when Barack and Michelle, holding hands, bounded on stage in Madison. A hush feel over the room. All eyes turned reverently to one screen or another. In a corner Jilly Norton scribbled in a small fat notebook. Why had we forgotten she was there?
In his Madison speech, Barack leaped right over Hillary and took on John McCain:
“John McCain is an American hero. We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past. “
A few hours later I read The New York Times accounts of the primary victories and his speech. In noting that Barack had won across demographic lines and that his campaign had more money than hers, Adam Nagourney wrote:
“The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president. Mr. Obama in his victory speech in Madison, Wis., acted almost as if the primaries were behind him….and it [then ensuing McCain response] reduced Mrs. Clinton, at least for one night, to the role of bystander.”
Oh, yeah - dirty tricks ahead, no doubt.
But Obamania continued to grow. The crowds were enormous wherever Barack spoke; and he had a bigger Secret Service contingent than Hillary did. Record-breaking donations poured in. We were riding the wave - and beginning to get nervous about the size and sheer brute force of that mother beneath us.
Caroline went to Madison on Monday before the Wisconsin primary; and Reggie and Kanesha were already there. For maybe a minute Chloe, Michael, RST and I took our eyes off the campaign balls we thought we’d left suspended in mid-air in the office to go out for beers and that thick pan pizza Chicagoans dearly love. We speculated openly about the odds that Caroline and Reggie would have sex. I left Kanesha a text message: Is the bus rocking yet? And I suspected that Chloe was sending Evan text messages that were far more exciting. Kicking back, drinking beer in the late afternoon, we felt fine. Then Kanesha called. I put her on cell phone speaker and held the phone out. The others leaned into it.
“Crazy Eyes is giving a speech tonight comparing Barack to George Bush in terms of his experience for the White House,” she said tersely. “She’s going to say something like, ‘You see how well that worked out.’”
The speech had already been leaked to the media, of course. Kanesha certainly didn’t have her hands on a purloined copy. Over the weekend Hillary had called Barack’s message of hope “naïve” and blamed the Wisconsin campaign for a negative flier about her NAFTA position - like she actually had one NAFTA position.
“It’s heating up,” Kanesha said. “If she loses Wisconsin, she’ll go against her advisors telling her the public likes her better when she is sympathetic - a fighter but not a down-and-dirty one.”
“Long range, her crazy negativity could help us,” Michael said. “If she keeps vacillating back and forth between nice and nasty, some reporter will suggest she has a bipolar personality.“ But he added, “It all depends, of course, on what she throws at us.”
“Listen to this line from the speech,” Kanesha said.
This is what she read to us:
“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security. We can’t let that happen again.”
The collective groan was loud enough to silence nearby diners who looked at us questioningly. When it was clear we weren’t suffering from food poisoning, they went back to their lives. I looked at them and thought: Some of you are probably Hillary supporters. And I realized I didn’t like them if they were.
At some point the campaign gets so personal that you would stop speaking to your mother for not being on the right side. It was like that for me now. How f’ing dares that bitch say those things about my man?
“And no, the bus isn’t rocking,” Kanesha said before she hung up.
The desk in Kanesha’s locked office - to which several people had keys - was rockin’ that night. I asked myself: Why doesn’t Chloe take Evan to her place? It’s not like she’s homeless or even living in a dump. Her cool little one bedroom was a middle-class urban dweller’s dream with decent space, city views and a doorman lobby. She said the cost of it was worth forgoing a car in the city; and she was right. Like me, Chloe was a fan of public transportation. And she could always get a ride. I ascribed her fondness for office sex with Evan to a desire to stick it to Caroline - even when she wasn’t in town. Yes, they are friends, but female friendship is competitive.
I was wrapping up in the wee hours of Tuesday when I noticed an overlooked phone message on the desk. Call me about Jilly Norton. It was a 212 area code, Manhattan. And that was it. The message and the phone number. No caller’s name; no indication that the message was even mine (and it probably wasn’t.) Planning to make the call at a decent hour, I slipped the piece of pink paper into my pocket. But I was curious now. I typed Jilly’s name into the Google search engine and pulled up pages of hits.
Jilly Norton was a freelance writer, not a reporter for Chicago magazine. The New York Times magazine was among her credits. Fuck! Something was not adding up. Why hadn’t one of us run her down before letting her into the office? I’ll tell you why. We are so arrogant that we think we have Chicago magazine in our back pocket. They wouldn’t tear down Oprah and they weren’t going to take on Barack either. Talk about your bush league mistake.
As I was working my way through Jilly’s freelance career - not brilliant, but solid - the phone rang. Caroline.
“There’s a possibility that Jilly Norton is either doing research for a New York Times writer or possibly writing something for the Times on their own,” she said. “I don’t think Chicago magazine is in the picture.”
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“Maybe. We’ve given her virtually free access. Who knows what she has seen or heard at the office.”
“Yeah,” I said, listening for the faint sounds of a desk banging down the hall. “But you sound more worried than ‘who knows.’”
“She asked me to meet her as soon as I get in from Madison tomorrow. It wasn’t a request.” She paused. “There’s no real story in campaign workers hooking up, is there? That has to happen all the time.”
“Say you can’t.” I was beginning to see the story: sex in the office, on the campaign bus, on a jet loaned to the campaign. Now that’s a story with embarrassment potential. Omigod, she wouldn’t do that, would she? “Arrange a time when Evan can go along.”
“She said she has a ‘gotcha moment’ for me.”
“Okay, I’ll go with you.” Gotcha moment? Caroline and Reggie on the bus? The jet? The office? Or, Chloe and Evan in the office? I had a sudden and meanly suspicious thought: Is that why Chloe wanted to do it in the office--to embarrass Caroline on a wider scale? “Don’t say anything to Evan.”
What did Jilly have? And did she want to trade it for something even better?
To Be Continued Next Week!
Copyright © 2008 by Carla Dickens. All rights reserved. Please do not re-publish the entirety of this chapter or novel without the prior written consent of E-Reads.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction that takes place during the Democratic Primary and Presidential Campaign of 2008. With the exception of casual references to certain living public persons, places, and events, and of speeches, news commentaries or statements that are public record, all characters, names and places used in The Faithful are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The work contains adult themes, language and content and describes sexual situations.
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Chapter Five
Obamania
Obamania
THE BELTWAY TRIO
Washington D.C.: Barack Obama 75%; Hillary Clinton 24%
Maryland: Barack Obama, 60%; Hillary Clinton, 37%
Virginia: Barack Obama, 64%; Hillary Clinton, 35%
In this little game of musical sex partners, Chloe was clearly the one left standing when the music stopped. The look on her face as Michelle Obama’s assistant Kerri announced the engagement of Caroline and Evan said it all. Her revenge rebound lover Evan hadn‘t told her that the engagement was back on. On the other hand, Reggie, Caroline’s lover, had a politically correct smile on his face and clapped politely for the couple. Kanesha, who rarely looked dumbfounded, did. And my first thought was a selfish one: Hey, Caroline, I thought we were friends; why didn’t you tell me that you and Evan had patched it up? I should have been the first to know.
“I don’t believe it!” Chloe said. But the crestfallen look on her face said that she did. “I don’t believe it,” she repeated more quietly.
On stage at the Chicago Regency Hotel, Barack kissed Caroline’s cheeks and hugged Evan. The crowd cheered enthusiastically. And members of the media rushed forward, anxious for this little human-interest anecdote to include in their Super Tuesday coverage. All the world loves a lover - the publicly acknowledged ones at least.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said, taking Chloe‘s hand and squeezing it. “I’m not standing in the receiving line to kiss her ring.”
A few feet away, Kanesha made some comment to Reggie over her shoulder as she headed in our direction.
“Whatever the game is, he’s in on it,” she said sarcastically to us. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Two great political minds on the same track. We put Love Story, 2008, behind us in the rear view mirror and headed to the lobby bar. Sinking into a comfortable banquette seat, I looked around and realized that we were almost alone. A few stray solitary drinkers appeared to be business travelers not caught up in Obamania, the word the media had coined to describe the adulation of the crowds who showed up to hear Barack (even in the states that Hillary carried.)
I waited until we placed our drinks orders for dirty martinis all around to ask Kanesha: “Did Reggie say anything?”
“No. I said, ‘You don’t look surprised.’ He shrugged. On the way out, I told him, ‘I don’t see the benefit in this for you, but I’m sure there is one.’”
A couple martinis later I was feeling pretty good sitting between adorable Chloe in her pale turquoise slip dress and Kanesha, regal in her black silk evening suit. I leaned back against the plush back of the banquette, listening to the two of them speculate on why Caroline and Evan were apparently engaged again. Rodney Skinner Turner - RST, the campaign‘s most elegant and elite intern - and Michael Westwood, policy wonk, walked into the bar together, spotted us and waved before taking seats nowhere near us.
“I wouldn’t have figured them for friends,” I said.
“Political bedmates,” Chloe said. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward, shaking with laughter. “Political bedmates!” she repeated, laughing even harder.
Political bedmates. Good one. I glanced at Kanesha. Who knew black skin could blush like that?
Our conversation that night veered back and forth from politics to bedmates, the engaged pair. None of our theories explaining their behavior were quite on the mark. Caroline eventually filled me in on the whole story. Here’s how it all went down:
Caroline and Evan had planned to participate in a charade to fool his parents for the evening, send them home happy to Philadelphia - and tell them the truth about the broken engagement sometime in the near future. But funny things happened on the way to the full execution of that plan. One: Caroline felt secure again the moment she put that ring back on her finger. She never did play the “loves me, loves me not” game in her head with Evan.
On that Monday morning, Evan stopped by her apartment early to give her the ring because he was going to D.C. for a business meeting and wouldn’t return until shortly before he was to meet her at campaign headquarters for the voting results wait. He handed it to her; she slipped it into her pocket. Standing in her living room talking to him - she in her fluffy white terry bathrobe, he in his beautifully tailored Italian charcoal gray suit - she realized that she’d missed casual moments like this. She’d missed him.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said, pulling her tight against him in a good-bye hug. Without thinking, she turned her face up for the kiss. There was one. And it was good, beginning with the exploratory licking of her lips with the tip of his tongue. “Well at least the pretense won‘t be onerous,” he said in a husky voice that belied his joking words.
Her heart was pounding as he walked out the door. She took the ring from her pocket, put it on her finger and held it out into the sunlight where the diamond sparkled. Familiar feelings washed over her, the feelings she had disparaged. Emotional safety. Security. The warmth of the familiar seduced her now. Evan was the warm bath; Reggie the brisk shower with the nozzle set to needle spray.
When Reggie called later in the morning, she told him the plan, expecting his disapproval to vibrate beneath noncommittal words. But he surprised her; and that was the second funny thing that happened on the way pulling off a charade. I think that’s a good idea, he said. They’ve come to support Barack; and they should have a good time. The thought that he might be glad if she returned to Evan did flash through her mind. They’d been apart most of the time since their dramatic lovemaking in Iowa. In fact, they’d only really made love twice after that. She didn’t count the hand jobs and oral sex - orgasms on the run, of a slightly higher order than Chloe’s vibrator orgasms. And she hated to admit it to herself, but the sex when they had it wasn’t all that satisfying. Reggie was neither as well endowed as Evan nor as passionately interested in the act of intercourse - leaving her G spot all but ignored. They alternated oral and manual pleasuring of one another. He came first; she came next - and not always on the same day.
At first, she called him obsessively, ten, twelve, twenty times a day. You have to stop calling so often, he said, I can’t handle that. His voice was gentle, but firm; and she heard the implied doubt. Was she crazy? No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t called Evan a dozen or more times a day; she hadn’t clung to him.
I love you, Reggie said before hanging up.
I love you too, she said.
But did he really love her? And did she really love him? Had she felt more loved by him before they had sex? She put the questions aside and left the ring on her hand.
On Tuesday night she enjoyed playing her role, adoring fiancée and prospective daughter-in-law; and she knew that Evan was equally happy at her side. People kept telling them what a great couple they made. He whispered in her ear, We do. Out of the corner of her eye, she occasionally saw Reggie gliding through the crowd in his smooth, graceful way, appearing serene. That’s why Caroline didn’t automatically refuse when Jilly Norton, a Chicago magazine feature writer, asked if she could do a “little human interest” story about “the campaign engagement.”
“What do you think?” she asked Evan.
Grinning, he said, “Why not?”
His parents beamed proudly. Jilly hovered expectantly. It was Caroline’s call. And wouldn’t a “little human interest story” be good for the campaign? She nodded her head Yes. Not ten minutes later someone suggested that someone on the campaign staff announce their engagement from the podium. She looked over at Reggie who was looking back at them as if he were warmly wishing the happy couple the very best.
Standing on the stage with Evan, she was suddenly sure that Reggie had known about all of this before she did. Kanesha and Thomas looked confused and Chloe both confused and hurt. She would have to remember to ask Evan if those few office blowjobs might have meant more to Chloe than he’d indicated they had.
And not for the first time, she wondered: Is Chloe better at giving head than I am?
“I love blow jobs. It’s all about the power,” Chloe told me. She was dressed in black, slender wool slacks, low cut V neck cashmere sweater that exposed her silk camisole beneath - all set off by metallic gold stilettos and gold hoop earrings. We were working our asses off on the Wisconsin initiative - from Chicago, of course because we weren’t important enough to send anywhere, even a few hours north to Wisconsin - while the least among us were monitoring the last minute details of the next day’s Tuesday the 12th primaries in Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C., almost sure to be Barack wins. The more important people like Caroline had already shifted their focus to Texas, a battleground state where he was running double digits behind Hillary or “Crazy Eyes“ as Kanesha had taken to calling her. “He told me I’m the best he ever had,” Chloe said.
“Chloe,” I teased with the feigned condescending paternalism she loved to deflate, “All hetero men say that to any woman who will take their dicks in her mouth. You know what they say about blow jobs: Like pizza, there’s only good and better.”
“Do all men say that? Or just gay men?” she challenged. “Maybe straight men are more discerning.”
“They are less discerning, darling. Women don’t give head as well as gay men do. We can afford to be picky. Your team has to take whatever it can get - even if that’s a slice with soggy crust and lame tomato sauce.”
“Nice,” she said. “The pizza metaphor. I see Caroline as the soggy and lame.”
“Ouch,” I said. (Out of loyalty to my friend, I didn’t tell Chloe I imagined her that way too.) “But Evan’s opinion is the one that counts.”
“I don’t believe the engagement is back on!” She smacked a file folder full of newspaper article tear sheets on the desk. “It’s a front, first for his parents, now for that annoying Chicago magazine writer following her around the office.”
Jilly Norton was beyond annoying. That woman was potential trouble, but Caroline didn’t seem to get that. Focused on Wisconsin, she was not paying close enough attention to the reporter in our midst.
“Has she asked you to talk about the happy couple?” I quizzed Chloe, because she had certainly put the questions to me. And I got the impression she wasn‘t looking for the happiest details. “What did you say?”
“No, thank God, she hasn‘t asked! I would have to tell her about the voicemail message I just left for the groom.” Vamping a classic cheesecake pose with one leg forward knee bent, breasts thrust out and a hand behind the head, elbow extended to the side, she licked her shiny red lips and said in a husky voice: “Baby, I can’t stop thinking about your dick. I want that dick in my mouth. Tell me you don’t want the same thing.”
“Jeez, Chloe, you left that message on his voicemail - in that tone of voice?” She nodded affirmatively and fluffed the back of her hair like a sex kitten quite pleased with herself. “He’s probably already called the police and reported a stalker.”
“Oh, ha,” she said. I heard the influence of our baby-faced white boy Michael Westwood again in that phrase. Like cheese fries, his personal sound bites were addictive. “He’ll call within 24 hours.”
She was right. He did.
The next day while we were waiting for the voting results to start coming in from Virginia, Maryland and D.C., Chloe told me the sordid details.
Chloe has never been with a man who could satisfy her as well as she could satisfy herself - and that certainly included Evan. While he was on engagement break, Chloe said they’d fucked three times, once in the office, twice at her place. She hoped that Caroline heard the rhythmic thumping of him banging her into the desk and was jealous. He probably hoped that anyone heard the noise and envied him. Public sex always has a private motive. What couples did out there together, they did for reasons like power and revenge. (Why do you think so many investment bankers and brokers have office sex? She asked Thomas.) On the other hand, she was attracted to him.
And his dick was an appendage of wonder. Did Caroline realize how special it was in its physical perfection and its ability to leap into action again and yet again? Long and thick with a beautifully shaped head, it thrilled and throbbed to her touch. Chloe loved exerting her power over Evan’s dick; and she wasn’t going to let that go without a fight.
“I want to suck your dick now,” she told him when he responded to her message by calling her cell phone.
“Where are you?”
“In the office.” She paused. “No one’s here.”
“Too risky,” he said.
“She’s gone. Call her at home. Check.”
She told him what she was going to do to him in lusty detail. He said he would call Caroline to make sure she was home. And if she was, he would be there.
“Thirty minutes?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
Thirty-five minutes later inside Kanesha’s locked office, Evan grabbled Chloe, kissed her roughly, squeezed her breasts, pulled them out of her black lace bra and twisted her nipples. That was the foreplay. He unzipped his pants; and his dick sprang forth in all its glory. Breathing heavily, he looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes and pointed to the floor. She got down on her knees, took the head of his dick into her mouth and began to suck as she fondled his balls with one hand and grasped his shaft firmly with the other. By the time she was deeply into her technique, her power over him irrefutable, he was moaning.
She heard someone outside the door but she was quite sure that he did not.
When Chloe describes her sex life, I always think: She would have made a great gay man. I clapped her on the back and steered her toward the larger space where the returns were already coming in. Early on, it was obvious that Barack would take all three contests by broad margins. Cheers all around and the plastic cups of plonk were handed out. Victory was beginning to seem inevitable. Yet our man appeared humble though elated at his victory rally in Madison, Wisconsin where he was already campaigning for the next one.
“Big turnouts, with his support crossing demographic groups,” Caroline said, looking up at Evan with a satisfied smile. She was wearing flat-heeled black riding boots with skinny jeans tucked into them and an oversized cashmere sweatshirt in soft gray - a great look for her. The jeans emphasized her small, high and firm white girl’s booty. “He’s stealing her voters. In Virginia and Maryland he beat her among women.”
“If he keeps winning, she’ll get desperate and ugly,” Kanesha said. She was wearing jeans; and her larger black girl’s booty looked fine in them too. “We have yet to be hit by the full force of the Clinton machine in slime mode.”
“The ‘Kitchen Sink Fusillade” approach,” Michael corrected her. “It’s where they grab everything they can find and throw as hard as they can. Very effective - especially against a sane, reasoned person like Barack. Some of that stuff is bound to draw blood.”
“You don’t think they’ve already done that in South Carolina?” Evan asked, his arm draped around Caroline’s shoulders. He looked damned good in his jeans too - worn the way only a rich man can, with buttery soft expensive loafers, no socks (even in cold Chicago) and a white shirt, cuffs turned back. “I thought that was nasty.”
“Nasty, but personal,” Kanesha said, shaking her head firmly. “The Big Dog got off the leash in South Carolina. That was not a planned strategy. That was his peevish misbehavior - and it hurt her, especially within the black community.”
“Who’d have ever guessed that Bill Clinton would be called a racist?” Michael said, grinning like a maniacal Irish elf.
Kanesha was still having furtive hot sex with Michael, the pale white guy I would have considered her least likely sex partner. But she’d begun to look at Harvard law grad RST with the desirable light brown skin the way women look at a man they’ve placed in their gun sights; and she was looking at him now with that deferential But what do you think, Big Man? expression. (The man had Upscale Baby Daddy stamped on his forehead. What took her so long?) RST, however, was still looking at Caroline. Her resumed engagement had only shown him that change was possible. I caught him sneaking glances at her little booty and was pretty sure Kanesha’s wouldn’t do it for him. (Booty men usually have a strong preference for small and tight or big and tight.)
Everyone in the room seemed to have a theory on what the Clinton organization would throw at us when they were ready to fight with knives, Hillary‘s specialty. She lacked oratory grace, but she had street fighting skills. We anticipated dirty ads hitting TV screens a day before Super Tuesday.
One young volunteer, a pretty black girl from the South Side, went so far as to say: “If there is an attempt on Barack’s life, it won’t be some right wing nut job; it will be a Clinton operative.”
Older, wiser and actually drawing a salary, Kanesha looked ready to admonish her when Barack and Michelle, holding hands, bounded on stage in Madison. A hush feel over the room. All eyes turned reverently to one screen or another. In a corner Jilly Norton scribbled in a small fat notebook. Why had we forgotten she was there?
In his Madison speech, Barack leaped right over Hillary and took on John McCain:
“John McCain is an American hero. We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past. “
A few hours later I read The New York Times accounts of the primary victories and his speech. In noting that Barack had won across demographic lines and that his campaign had more money than hers, Adam Nagourney wrote:
“The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president. Mr. Obama in his victory speech in Madison, Wis., acted almost as if the primaries were behind him….and it [then ensuing McCain response] reduced Mrs. Clinton, at least for one night, to the role of bystander.”
Oh, yeah - dirty tricks ahead, no doubt.
But Obamania continued to grow. The crowds were enormous wherever Barack spoke; and he had a bigger Secret Service contingent than Hillary did. Record-breaking donations poured in. We were riding the wave - and beginning to get nervous about the size and sheer brute force of that mother beneath us.
Caroline went to Madison on Monday before the Wisconsin primary; and Reggie and Kanesha were already there. For maybe a minute Chloe, Michael, RST and I took our eyes off the campaign balls we thought we’d left suspended in mid-air in the office to go out for beers and that thick pan pizza Chicagoans dearly love. We speculated openly about the odds that Caroline and Reggie would have sex. I left Kanesha a text message: Is the bus rocking yet? And I suspected that Chloe was sending Evan text messages that were far more exciting. Kicking back, drinking beer in the late afternoon, we felt fine. Then Kanesha called. I put her on cell phone speaker and held the phone out. The others leaned into it.
“Crazy Eyes is giving a speech tonight comparing Barack to George Bush in terms of his experience for the White House,” she said tersely. “She’s going to say something like, ‘You see how well that worked out.’”
The speech had already been leaked to the media, of course. Kanesha certainly didn’t have her hands on a purloined copy. Over the weekend Hillary had called Barack’s message of hope “naïve” and blamed the Wisconsin campaign for a negative flier about her NAFTA position - like she actually had one NAFTA position.
“It’s heating up,” Kanesha said. “If she loses Wisconsin, she’ll go against her advisors telling her the public likes her better when she is sympathetic - a fighter but not a down-and-dirty one.”
“Long range, her crazy negativity could help us,” Michael said. “If she keeps vacillating back and forth between nice and nasty, some reporter will suggest she has a bipolar personality.“ But he added, “It all depends, of course, on what she throws at us.”
“Listen to this line from the speech,” Kanesha said.
This is what she read to us:
“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security. We can’t let that happen again.”
The collective groan was loud enough to silence nearby diners who looked at us questioningly. When it was clear we weren’t suffering from food poisoning, they went back to their lives. I looked at them and thought: Some of you are probably Hillary supporters. And I realized I didn’t like them if they were.
At some point the campaign gets so personal that you would stop speaking to your mother for not being on the right side. It was like that for me now. How f’ing dares that bitch say those things about my man?
“And no, the bus isn’t rocking,” Kanesha said before she hung up.
The desk in Kanesha’s locked office - to which several people had keys - was rockin’ that night. I asked myself: Why doesn’t Chloe take Evan to her place? It’s not like she’s homeless or even living in a dump. Her cool little one bedroom was a middle-class urban dweller’s dream with decent space, city views and a doorman lobby. She said the cost of it was worth forgoing a car in the city; and she was right. Like me, Chloe was a fan of public transportation. And she could always get a ride. I ascribed her fondness for office sex with Evan to a desire to stick it to Caroline - even when she wasn’t in town. Yes, they are friends, but female friendship is competitive.
I was wrapping up in the wee hours of Tuesday when I noticed an overlooked phone message on the desk. Call me about Jilly Norton. It was a 212 area code, Manhattan. And that was it. The message and the phone number. No caller’s name; no indication that the message was even mine (and it probably wasn’t.) Planning to make the call at a decent hour, I slipped the piece of pink paper into my pocket. But I was curious now. I typed Jilly’s name into the Google search engine and pulled up pages of hits.
Jilly Norton was a freelance writer, not a reporter for Chicago magazine. The New York Times magazine was among her credits. Fuck! Something was not adding up. Why hadn’t one of us run her down before letting her into the office? I’ll tell you why. We are so arrogant that we think we have Chicago magazine in our back pocket. They wouldn’t tear down Oprah and they weren’t going to take on Barack either. Talk about your bush league mistake.
As I was working my way through Jilly’s freelance career - not brilliant, but solid - the phone rang. Caroline.
“There’s a possibility that Jilly Norton is either doing research for a New York Times writer or possibly writing something for the Times on their own,” she said. “I don’t think Chicago magazine is in the picture.”
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“Maybe. We’ve given her virtually free access. Who knows what she has seen or heard at the office.”
“Yeah,” I said, listening for the faint sounds of a desk banging down the hall. “But you sound more worried than ‘who knows.’”
“She asked me to meet her as soon as I get in from Madison tomorrow. It wasn’t a request.” She paused. “There’s no real story in campaign workers hooking up, is there? That has to happen all the time.”
“Say you can’t.” I was beginning to see the story: sex in the office, on the campaign bus, on a jet loaned to the campaign. Now that’s a story with embarrassment potential. Omigod, she wouldn’t do that, would she? “Arrange a time when Evan can go along.”
“She said she has a ‘gotcha moment’ for me.”
“Okay, I’ll go with you.” Gotcha moment? Caroline and Reggie on the bus? The jet? The office? Or, Chloe and Evan in the office? I had a sudden and meanly suspicious thought: Is that why Chloe wanted to do it in the office--to embarrass Caroline on a wider scale? “Don’t say anything to Evan.”
What did Jilly have? And did she want to trade it for something even better?
To Be Continued Next Week!
Copyright © 2008 by Carla Dickens. All rights reserved. Please do not re-publish the entirety of this chapter or novel without the prior written consent of E-Reads.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction that takes place during the Democratic Primary and Presidential Campaign of 2008. With the exception of casual references to certain living public persons, places, and events, and of speeches, news commentaries or statements that are public record, all characters, names and places used in The Faithful are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The work contains adult themes, language and content and describes sexual situations.
Labels: Barack Obama, Carla Dickens, Romance, Serial, The Faithful
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