“Do I know the guy?”
“Um . . .” she said, deciding on how to answer that. God, she didn’t want to be having this conversation. “You’ve, um . . . met.”
He reached out and grabbed both of her shoulders in his hands. She stared up into those eyes and saw a wildness she had never seen before. “Look, I’m not going to confront him. I just need to know. Don’t you understand? I’m going crazy here. I love you so f**king much. You’re my whole world, Lizzie. You’re everything to me. I was the idiot who pushed you away, and I swore I was never going to make you feel like that again. If I don’t know who the guy is, you’re going to make me feel like this forever.”
Liz cringed away from the accusation. She didn’t want to make him feel like this. It had been eating at her for long enough. She didn’t want to hurt him too, but she couldn’t tell him. She shook her head, breaking eye contact.
“Really? You won’t tell me?”
When she didn’t answer, he shook his head and then seemed to consider another option.
“You said I met the guy. Where?” he said, his tone going back to commanding.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Lizzie, where did I meet him?” he said, shaking her lightly until she looked up at him. “Where?”
“The colloquium last spring,” she finally whispered out of guilt. Hayden dropped his hands and just stared at her. Oh no. Please don’t figure it out. She could see that his brain was ticking away, putting the pieces together, fitting things into place. He was seeing the solution in front of him but not really believing it. He was a damn good reporter, and he hadn’t gotten that way without being able to see the big picture from a lot of smaller clues.
“But I was late,” he mused aloud. “I didn’t meet anyone at the colloquium.”
Liz swallowed and remained frozen. If he wasn’t seeing it, then she wasn’t going to help him out. She couldn’t tell him. God, she felt sick to her stomach. Whatever alcohol was inside of her was slowly churning away, eating away at her insides, pushing bile up her throat. She covered her mouth and tried to push down the acidic taste.
“Who did I meet there?” he asked, racking his brain.
Liz shook her head. She couldn’t tell him.
Hayden stopped and pointed at her, but he was looking off in the distance. She froze in place with his finger near her face.
“Brady Maxwell. I met Brady Maxwell. But he’s a congressman,” Hayden said softly. “He’s a sitting congressman.”
His eyes found hers and she stopped breathing. She was trapped in that look. He was commanding her attention, and all she wanted to do was run away and hide. She had brought this down on herself.
“Two summers ago, he would have just been running for Congress. He was your first reporting job. I was with you. He’s our politician,” he said, the hurt seeping deeper and deeper into every syllable. “Tell me it’s not him, Lizzie. Tell me it’s not him.”
Liz just stood there. What could she say? She couldn’t corroborate the story, and she couldn’t lie anymore.
“Brady Maxwell,” Hayden said as if he still couldn’t believe it. “You hated him. You disagreed with everything that he said. You wrote some brilliant articles practically calling for his job and still you f**ked him?”
“Hayden . . .”
“Tell me how this happened,” Hayden said. “I just don’t see how you could go from interviewing him, writing those articles, to ending up in his bed.”
Liz bit her lip and glanced away. “I met him at the club we went to after his press conference.”
“You met him, f**ked him, and then wrote those articles?” he asked in disbelief.
“No, no, no. I went back with you that night. But after that, I kept running into him while he was on campaign that summer. We just kind of tumbled into it.”
“You did this all summer and no one caught you?”
“His press secretary and attorney caught us, but otherwise no. I went by a fake name, Sandy Carmichael, so it wouldn’t be traced back to me,” she whispered. When she said it like that it sounded so much worse than what it had been in reality.
“A fake name? Do you realize how insane that sounds?” Hayden spat. “Christ, isn’t he like thirty? You weren’t even legal to drink when you were together.” He fisted his hand into his hair.
“Twenty-seven,” she whispered. “He was twenty-seven.”
“Don’t f**king defend him!” Hayden cried. “The guy manipulated a twenty-year-old college student who wrote a bad article about him to get her on his f**king side.”
“He didn’t manipulate me,” she said, unable to stop herself.
“You’re so deep in that you didn’t even see it. A dick with a little bit of power sees a young girl with a little bit of backbone and takes that away from her in a few easy f**ks.” He shook his head. “He used you.”
Liz fisted her hands at her sides. She couldn’t even think that. No. That wasn’t what happened. Brady had loved her . . . at one point. He hadn’t used her. She had to remind herself of that. Things had been different. It was easy to see it from an outsider’s perspective, to break their relationship down into one line and show her as the victim. But she had never felt like a victim with Brady. Not once.
“No,” she breathed.
“Then explain to me what happened in October. He tried to f**k you, you said no, and then you agreed not to see each other again, which I assume means he told you to f**k off. Sounds like he came for what he wanted, but didn’t get it.”
“Hayden, stop.”
“I see it for what it is,” Hayden said, grasping her shoulders and forcing her to look at him again. His grip tightened and she winced.
“Hayden, let go,” she whimpered.
“Is that why we couldn’t be together before the election? Is that why you resisted me for so long? Fuck, is that why we didn’t even have sex for months?”
She tried to wiggle out of his grasp, but he held her tightly.
“Answer me. You owe me that. Is that the reason? Was it because of Brady?”
Liz cringed at the words. She’d hoped that he would never come to that conclusion. “Hayden, you’re hurting me!”
He pushed away from her and paced the room. He rested his hand on the nightstand and reached down. Liz swallowed hard. She wanted to say something, anything to make it better, but there was nothing to say.