Primary Season

By Amelia Parks

Louisa hates Aaron. She really hates him. Or at least it would be simpler if she did.

 

In 2012, it's hard enough being a Christian in politics, let alone Democratic politics, without getting distracted by the hot guy you're forced to work with.

There's a job to do. There's a cause to promote. There's an election to - well, not win, exactly, but at least kill yourself taking part in. There's no time for distractions. There's no time for forbidden love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC Fiction
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781386273936

Book preview

Wednesday, June 8th: 518 days before the General Election

He was jiggling his leg up and down, and it was irritating her. Even from the other side of the office, it was irritating her. So many things about Aaron irritated Louisa. His strut. His habit of humming the same three lines of a song for an entire day. The way the Senator bestowed lavish praise on him for getting in so early every day, like it was some kind of achievement to make it from Capitol Hill to their office on K Street. She got up an hour before he did and still arrived later, after eight, sometimes. Granted, that was mostly the fault of her daily stop at Paul for a coffee, but even so. There was coffee at the campaign office—how would they ever function without it?—but Louisa was fussy about hers, had been since she learned to drink café au lait aged eight the year her father was posted to France, the same year that she had fallen in love with pop music, so that even now when she wanted to feel light and happy, coffee and early nineties pop was all it took. Though sometimes, after a day of working with Aaron, it took a lot of both.

Her roommate, Janelle, would come home and turn off New Kids on the Block mid-song, and the smile would die instantly on Louisa’s lips.

This Aaron guy really gets to you, huh?

Yeah.

If only he weren’t so attractive, right?

Louisa would roll her eyes. "If only he didn’t know he was so attractive. That’s his problem. He’s brilliant and he knows it. He’s hot and he knows it. He’s sought after and he knows it."

No. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. He got to her because he was irritating. Like right now, with this leg-jiggling thing. It wasn’t so bad when the others were working at their desks, when they blocked the view from the corner of her right eye across to him. But now, inin the mostly empty office, she sighed several times,more and more loudly, hoping he would get the hint. , but knowing the hope was vain: subtlety was lost on him.

She glanced up from her computer. Aaron.

What? He looked at her, all blue-eyed innocence.

You’re doing it again. The leg thing.

Sorry.

His apology was most unexpected. It may have been the first one she’d ever heard from him.

Although. Ah. Here was the but. I don’t really see why it annoys you so much.

I can see it out of the corner of my eye, and it’s distracting.

Distracting from what?

Maybe she was just imagining the implication that her work was somehow unimportant when compared with his. Maybe, but she doubted it.

Distracting me, Aaron, from the digital strategy that is crucial to any successful primary campaign in the twenty-first century.

He snorted. So my leg-jiggling is preventing you from tweeting.

She hated him. She really hated him.

Except she also sort of did not.

And despite the fact that hatred was frowned upon in some of the circles that she moved in, it really would be simpler if she did hate him, it really would be simpler if the hatred were pure. So she would have to work at stoking it, because the other stuff was too complicated. Too unacceptable. Too inconvenient. And mostly, too predictable.

Have you forgotten, she said, swiveling in her chair to look at him more directly, that social networking used to be your job?

Sure. But then I moved on to bigger and better things.

She sniffed. Your candidate lost. And you came crawling to us for a job because you were addicted to the adrenaline of the campaign.

Objection, he said, smiling, looking at her directly now too. I did not come crawling. I came in with my head held high after Senator Robbins called me and asked if I would consider working for him.

Yeah, well. You say tomato.

You hate that I’ve moved past Twitter, and you’re stuck with it.

"I’m not stuck with it. I would choose my job over yours any day."

Really? That smirk. That smirk drove her crazy. Even though mine is arguably superior?

They both reported to the Communications Director, he as chief speechwriter and she as digital communications manager. That made them equals. But Louisa knew he loved to rile her into an argument. Today she would not give him the satisfaction.

You certainly know all about being superior, she said.

I do.

She rolled her eyes and punched in the next tweet with more vigor than her keyboard required.

Don’t take it out on the computer, he said, standing up to leave, ostensibly for some Very Important Meeting. Or perhaps just to go to the bathroom. But most likely of all, for the dramatic exit that served to emphasize his great rhetorical victory.

Irritating. So irritating.

When they had been on separate staffs, working for different candidates, he had been less irritating. Or rather, no, that wasn’t it: he’d been just as smug, just as arrogant, just as able to afford the apartment on Capitol Hill. But being irritated by him, being spurred on to out-snark him, was part of her job description back then. It was fuel to her energy, to her creative tweeting. Now it was just a nuisance.

If she’d known that as a result of Senator Peterson’s early defeat—right after the first debate in May—Aaron would be working with her, she might have tried a little less hard to beat him. If she’d known that she would be forced to breathe the same air as Aaron, to bite her lip furiously a hundred times a day to keep, no doubt, from sounding like his mother—can’t you keep all four legs of your chair on the floor? Could you chew that gum a little less loudly? Please watch your language—if she had known all those things, she might have pulled all-nighters slightly fewer times, spent Friday nights at the movies instead of curled up with a briefing book and an oversized tub of Ben and Jerry’s.

And then there was the way the other girls in the office hailed him as some kind of hero on his first day.

There’s no way those eyes are even real, she’d say. "No one has eyes that blue. It must be tinted contact lenses." It could even be the threadbare blue carpet  reflecting into his face somehow, for all she cared.

And he’s smart, they’d continue, paying no attention to her. And he’s funny. We’ll have fun on the campaign trail.

Louisa knew what kind of fun they were referring to, and this too caused her to roll her eyes.

Plus, the guys would chime in, he’s pretty good with the words. His tweets were always—

They’d stop speaking when her eyes threw daggers at them, but the damage was done.

Hail, Aaron Rosenberg. We welcome you as our king. She would not be part of that club. Not until she saw evidence of his alleged brilliance. And even then...there were plenty of brilliant people in DC. People who did not have fake blue eyes. People who did not get to where they had gotten to because they were the son of a prominent congressman.

Aaron was back now, and still jiggling his leg.  He was talking into the phone in a low voice, too low a voice for her to be able to make out the words, and this irritated her too. She liked to think that mostly she was irritated that he was taking a personal call in work time, but that was nonsense too. The boundary between work and the rest of life—if there was anything else in life—had become so blurred as to be non-existent. No, she was irritated because she wanted to hear him, although she didn’t know why.

No, he said, and this she heard clearly enough over her now very quiet typing. This is my weekend with her. There are too few of those as it is.

His leg was still jiggling, and there was an incongruity between that and the soft voice he was using. He was not a man who oftenspoke softly.

The call ended. He lowered his head and leaned it on the white Ikea table She watched him from her side of the office. She had never known him to be so quiet.

Chapter Two

Wednesday, June 8th: 518 days before the General Election

––––––––

He looked up and caught her watching. What?

There was something in his tone she had never heard before. Something melancholic. Something hopeless, even. Something almost human.

What? he asked again, more tetchily this time.

Nothing. She forced a smile. She’d never felt under any obligation to do that around him before.  You enjoy watching me suffer, don’t you?

As it happens, yes. Yes, I do. She shook her head..

You need to know, he said, that sometimes there’s more to someone than is immediately obvious.

Do I?What did that even mean?

Yes. His eyes seemed to drill into her. But we’ve worked together a month, and I don’t know what you go home to every day. I don’t know what your hobbies are. If you have hobbies. Maybe you don’t. Maybe for you there is only politics, just like me. Maybe the first thing you do in the morning is open Politico on your iPad."

She gasped. Hadn’t meant to. Shouldn’t have. Surprised herself with her own reaction. After alk, he hadn’t uncovered some great insight. Probably half the population of DC started their day the same way.

He smiled. Not a smirk. His eyes smiled with him and she caught herself wondering if this might not be the real Aaron Rosenberg, if the mask had briefly slipped, if the Aaron Rosenberg who showed up at work and rose in her nostrils like pungent English mustard might not be someone taking on the role of the politician, the role of the arrogant know-all, a fun role to play but not a role that any reasonable person would want to have in real life. But he was not reasonable; she had momentarily forgotten this.

It’s okay, he said. We all do it. We wouldn’t be in these crazy jobs if we weren’t political junkies. But we exist beyond these four walls. We have other lives too. And none of us really have a clue about each other’s. That’s what I mean.

Okay.

None of which explained why he was bringing this up now. She didn’t want to show undue interest—or any interest at all, really; there was no point encouraging him, but she might nonetheless have sought clarification if they hadn’t been interrupted by the senator and his finance director, Cheryl, just walking in from some kind of power lunch on the Hill. Not, Louisa supposed, that Cheryl had done more than pick at a salad.

This letter, Senator Robbins was saying to Cheryl, pulling on the cuffs of this shirtsleeves as he was wont to do when thinking hard. Very upsetting.

Cheryl nodded as if she knew instantly which letter he was referring to, from the hundreds of letters and emails and faxes that were filed and followed up on every day, from the hundreds of letters and emails and faxes they had probably been discussing at their meeting. It was, Louisa supposed, possible that this one had stood out from among the hundreds of others, perhaps because of the gravity of the issue presented, or perhaps because of its atrocious spelling, something that upset the senator more than was thought to be reasonable, though Louisa didn’t have any trouble understanding this.

It was also possible, though, that Cheryl was only pretending to know which letter the senator meant. So much of politics was fakery. Pretending to like people whom you needed on your side. Pretending to follow a conversation which, in fact, completely eluded you. Pretending to feel passionate when you couldn’t care less. Pretending to have read every word of the briefing memo when its pages were now stuck together with red wine and had crumpled under your pillow. Pretending to be invincible or contrite or arrogant or knowledgeable because it suited the moment, the issue, or – more usually—the advancement of your career. 

And the thing is, this isn’t an isolated case, the senator continued.

No, said Cheryl, shaking her head vigorously and wrinkling her brow the requisite amount.

This issue was settled decades ago. What these people are doing is not only illegal. It’s unethical.

Aaron was nodding too. Louisa snorted. How good they had all become at pretending.

Cheryl looked at her over the top of her glasses. What?

Sorry, Louisa said, pretending herself now. Something caught in my throat.

You don’t agree with what these people are doing, do you?

Of course not.

It was an easy trap, the bluffing, and in she fell. It might be a reasonable assumption that in a universe of pretending, those who had the courage to tell the truth—even the truth about their own ignorance—would stand out like exemplary stars.  Not so in DC. They were derided, mocked, cast aside. And she had no intention of being derided, or mocked, or cast aside.

We have to do something, Senator Robbins said, stopping just short of slamming the door to his office.

Louisa waited, but no further conversation was forthcoming. She was going to have to ask straight out. What was that about? she said at last.

Aaron continued typing. This, too, irritated her.

Roe v Wade, Cheryl said in a tired voice. So perhaps she hadn’t been pretending after all. Perhaps Louisa would have to reconsider her stereotype about skinny blonde women whose hair did not frizz and stick out in the stifling humidity of a DC summer, as her own red curls were about to do as soon as she left.

Doctors forcing women to have sonograms before they decide if they want abortions, Cheryl continued. To hear the heartbeat, see the baby, you know?

She put baby in air quotes, another of Aaron’s irritating habits that had spread from person to person like some particularly virulent strain of gastric flu.

The bitter metallic taste of adrenaline rose in Louisa’s throat. Not this issue. Please God, she prayed silently, not this issue. There were so many other important things in politics. Things where her intellect, her conscience, and her faith dovetailed and together led her to embrace the ideals of the Democratic party.

This, she knew, was the thing she had been waiting to go wrong. Ever since she’dd started working for Senator Robbins, more than a year and a half ago now, she’d had the sense of being a fraud, being unworthy, not quite fitting. She’d been, she realized now, waiting to be found out all this time. To be outed as a less-than-true Democrat.

It had been snowing on her first day working for the senator, the kind of freakishly early fall snow that stops everything, lands on branches still covered in leaves, which collapse under their own weight and plummet onto electrical lines, causing power outages, disrupting transportation. But she’d been awake since four a.m., and she’d walked the roads where the bus wasn’t running,  and she’d arrived early, excited,  eager, but  met by grumpiness as the more jaded members of the staff tried to outdo each other with tales of travel woe. She felt not like a highly educated young professional wearing the most expensive suit she’d ever owned, but like a child on Christmas morning whom the adults have asked to calm down and to wake them again three hours later when the sun had risen.

In a field crammed with experienced senators and weathered governors and up-and-coming young congressmen—not all of whom had even declared yet —there was no hope that Senator Robbins would win the nomination. It seemed unlikely he would make it much beyond the Nevada primary.  Maybe Super Tuesday if he was particularly fortunate. But still there was something thrilling—it was not an overstatement to use the word thrilling—about running for president, something glamorous, even. Or at least something that sounded glamorous to her friends and her sisters and her parents, to whom she omitted to mention waking up on campaign buses with smudged mascara caked on her cheek, or peanut butter sandwiches that lingered, squelched and squashed, at the bottom of her bag becauseyet again, there had not been time for lunch. The headaches and the eyestrain. The endless, endless meetings.

It turned out that while Louisa was passionate about Campaign Finance Reform – and she always capitalized it in her head—, she was not so passionate about the details of it, the mechanics of it.  She was pretty sure that the people reading her tweets were not either, but still she was required to attend the meetings, to read the small print, to retrieve from her brain the ability to work out equations, and that? That was not glamorous.

It had been much more fun to engage in twitter-sparring with Aaron Rosenberg from the Peterson campaign. She’d met him once or twice, rocking the suit and backpack look at Happy Hour in the Hawk ‘n’  Dove, and they’d eyed each other suspiciously, each of them unwilling to pay any heed to what could be sexual tension but was probably just an odd manifestation of competitiveness. And of course, back when they had been on the two senators’ respective DC staffs, there had been the photocopier incident. Damn photocopier. Always breaking, always at the worst possible moment. She’d stamped her foot in frustration and sighed one of her long, drawn out, impatient sighs. Ever the wannabe hero, Aaron, who’d been sent by Senator Peterson to deliver a message of some sort (even back then, she tried not to pay too much attention), had stepped in. She wasn’t fooled; he had come snooping.

You okay there?

She’d turned to face him and dribbled coffee down her white shirt. Impeccable timing, as always. She probably wouldn’t have dribbled if he hadn’t been so good-looking— dark hair, blue eyes, fashionable black-rimmed glasses that seemed designed to advertise that he was super-smart even if you didn’t know about his summa cum laude from Yale and his law degree from Harvard.

Stupid photocopier, she said, and she couldn’t resist kicking it .

He looked into her eyes as though attempting to seduce her into voting for the wrong guy. Want me to fix that machine?

"Come on, she said, you don’t know how to fix that."

Why not? If I can figure out how to fix social security, I’m sure I can figure out how to fix a Xerox machine.

She wasn’t going to dignify such nonsense with a response, but she badly needed the photocopier to work. She shuffled over, put her coffee down, crossed her arms, and waited.

Aaron crouched by the machine, pulled open the side, and yanked a lever, freeing a mangled memo. He didn’t appear to attempt to read it, but you never could tell with these super-ambitious types.

Here. He brushed her hand as he passed her the paper. Say thank you. He wiped his ink-stained hands on his trousers.

Mmm hmm, she said as he walked away. The view from the back wasn’t bad either.

The Peterson campaign’s big issue—Social Security—undeniably had that pull, that this-affects-you-and-the-people-you-love-right-now pull, that campaign finance reform lacked, though she never tired of explaining that protecting social security was one of the many things that campaign finance reform would make possible.

Louisa wished you could draw tree diagrams on Twitter: campaign finance reform would be at the top, the safeguarding of Social Security one of its many offshoots, clearly demonstrating that her candidate’s issue preceded and won over all the others, that his goals were loftier and more vital than all the others’. That her job as tweeter-in-chief was therefore more noteworthy than Aaron’s. But, Twitter being Twitter, you also had to be funny, and there was no denying—though she did deny it—that Aaron was funnier than she was. His was the sort of short, sharp, acerbic wit that shines best in the space of 140 characters. That, she should probably face, was probably the reason his follower number was steadily pulling further and further ahead of hers. It was also the reason why she smiled when, from time to time, people would mention them in the same tweet, as in the Follow Friday shout-out to people whose tweets were deemed worth reading: #ff @AaronDRosenberg and @louisa_harper, two smart, funny campaign staffers.. She was mildly irritated, though, when the hashtag #CampaignDrama that trended in DC one rainy March afternoon yielded My money’s on @AaronDRosenberg and @louisa_harper waking up in bed together the day after the Election. People’s over-active imaginations had