Loving the Candidate (Capitol Affairs #2) (6 page)

“Never. Not a word. She acted like she had no clue why my mom was so messed up. All these years of my asking her why my mom would have run away, why she hated them so much, and wanted to leave her life. Nothing. Always nothing. Maybe it was true. Or true as far as Beulah knew. Maybe she didn’t think anything of it.”

“Christ. Your poor mom, having to face all of this. I can’t even imagine. No wonder she did drugs. I’m not saying it was okay, but I understand it better now. Trying to bury the pain, the memories. So sad. I’m surprised Beulah didn’t burn these.”

“She must have forgotten about them. They were buried under so much stuff. Read this one, Alex. My mom wrote that my grandfather and this senator swapped wives for a night. I’m sick over this. How am I going to ever see Beulah the same?”

“You’re definitely going to need to talk to her about this,” he said, reaching for the journal and reading the entry.

“That should be a pleasant conversation. I can’t wait for it. Discussing my grandmother’s sex life should be a real party.” I grabbed his wineglass and took a sip.

“Well, you can’t let it go. You will make even more problems if you don’t say something. Stop drinking so much. It’s not going to help.” He took the wineglass away from me as I tried to get one more sip.

I sat there, and let Alex read about how my mom saw her father take another woman upstairs to one of the bedrooms, as my grandmother ignored it. She heard them up in the room as she tried to sleep. All night long, her father moaned, and carried on with another woman. How upsetting that had to have been for her. It reminded me of the numerous times my mother would bring someone home from a bar or party. The sex would go on all night long in the small trailer I shared with her. The walls were so thin I heard everything. I remember trying to cover my head with a pillow, though it never seemed to help. If it was so upsetting for her growing up, why had she put me through the same thing? I guess it was the circle of life in a way. A circle that stopped with me.

The evening sky darkened, signaling a brewing storm. Though the storm became stronger and the wind picked up, we continued to search through the journals. In the trunk, we discovered Polaroid pictures. Using the reflection in a mirror, Deidre had taken one of herself with tears in her eyes. It broke my heart to look at it. Most of the other pictures were of the beach house parties, crowded with drinking, smiling couples. My grandparents were not one of those smiling couples. I didn’t find any pictures of the two of them together.

We went to bed around midnight. I didn’t sleep much. I kept waking up, worried about what I had read. I wanted to talk to Beulah and get all of this straightened out. How would I approach her? What would our relationship be like after I talked to her about all of this?

During the wee hours of the morning, I tiptoed downstairs. Shuffling through more valuable treasures buried beneath the journals, I found a high school ring. It was far too big for a girl. Stacks of records were buried under a pair of acid-washed jeans. She had been the Sweethearts queen, and the crown she wore that night, tarnished and missing several crystals, sat in the trunk. It was wonderful to find my mother had been more than a strung-out junky who sold her body for drugs. She had been young, clean, and innocent before she turned sixteen. My heart broke for her. I hated my grandfather for doing this to her. I had always idolized the man I’d thought he was. My grandmother shouldn’t have allowed herself to be controlled like that.

I tried to make sense of the craziness as Alex slept through most of the morning, but the entries stopped when she ran away. The night she left for good, she wrote her last entry. She had saved money, planning to travel the world with some friends she met at a party. They’d planned to drive a van around the country and smoke weed and get away from life. She wrote, “I’m finally out of this fucked-up life. No more bullshit, parents, and school. I’m done. I’m never coming back.” I reread every one before Alex got up, trying not to miss anything.

That afternoon before we went home, Alex lugged the trunk upstairs and put it back where I’d found it. We took our time packing up. I packed up as many journals and pictures I could, stuffing them in my suitcase. I now had a part of my mom I could look at and touch when I came to the beach house. Her things would always be there for me when I needed to connect with her.

We hated to get back to the craziness and were unsure of what waited for us when we arrived home. A part of me wished we could stay there forever. I was so lucky to have that beautiful, peaceful house for us to escape to when life got out of control.

As I unpacked back home, Alex repacked to hit the campaign trail for Governor Emerson. The governor wasn’t doing well in the polls, and Alex had decided to help him out as much as possible. And Alex was days from delivering the speech he had worked on for a year, at the Democratic National Convention, I kissed him goodbye and told him I would see him in two weeks in Atlanta.

The press moved on to another story and thankfully stopped hounding us over Stella. My mother’s journals had actually wiped Stella from my mind, but the last few reporters loitering at the end of our driveway brought her crashing back.

I took the opportunity to call my dad in San Diego after Alex left. I had not talked to him since the incident with Stella. My dad was married to a wonderful woman, and I had three half-siblings, two girls and a boy with red hair. When he came into my life, it changed my whole outlook. My relationship with him was so enriching and so simple. It was almost like we were long lost friends, finally connected after so many years apart. The sound of his voice always sent a settled feeling through me. My father was as shocked as I had been. As we talked for hours one night, I read the journals cover-to-cover for him. He’d had no idea.

“Prudence, I’m so sorry. I swear Deidre didn’t talk about this. I didn’t know her that long. We met when she was on the road and we were both strung out on drugs. All I remember is her telling me she hated her parents. Hell, I hated my parents at the time. We were both pretty messed up.”

Unlike my mother, my father had been able to overcome his addiction. Now he was a corporate lawyer living a happy life.

“You know you have to talk to Beulah about this.”

“I know, Alex said the same thing.” It was still strange to me that my dad and Alex were almost the same age. I tried not to think about it.

“You are only going to get her side of it. But Beulah won’t lie to you.”

“I know. I wish she would have told me.”

“Probably she didn’t because it was too painful for her.”

He had a point.

I called my grandmother and told her we had to talk. We got together and spent the entire day, and part of the evening, going through the journals and pictures of my mother’s past.

“Why did you let this go on, Grandma? Why did you let your husband sleep with another woman and join in on it?”

She sat in silence, staring out into the yard.

“You’re married to a senator, Prudence. Ask yourself how many women proposition him every day. You probably don’t even know about them. The day is going to come when you don’t satisfy him anymore. I love you more than I love anyone, and I hate to say this to you, but it is a fact. A senator is power, and women love a powerful man. Add power to Alex’s good looks and you have a real problem. Now that he’s considering running for president, it will get even worse. It’s better to turn the other way and share him if it means you can keep him.”

‘What are you saying? I wouldn’t allow this to go on. This was degrading to you as a woman, Grandma.” My grandmother pushed my buttons and my temper got the best of me.

“Mark my words, honey. If he becomes the president, he will be the most powerful man in the world. He’s going to want to use that power to do what any man would do in his position. He’s gorgeous. He will be bigger than a rock star. Your grandfather wasn’t sought after, and wasn’t good-looking, but women still threw themselves at him. I had two choices. Either accept it, or move on. I loved being a senator’s wife, so I stayed and ignored it.”

“How can you say that to me?” Tears pooled in my eyes. Was this what being Alex’s wife meant? I knew women were all over him, even with me standing next to him. I was not an idiot.

“I’m stating facts. Sometimes being married to a powerful man means you have to let them be in charge and do what they want. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want that lifestyle in any way, yet, I did it for him. I did it to keep him happy. I was willing to have fifty percent of him if it meant I was his wife.”

My head pounded as I glared at my grandmother.

“I don’t care who Alex is, I’m not sharing him with anyone, and he knows it.”

“Well, I hope you’re right. I hope you’re never confronted with your husband and another woman in your bed. You never get over a pain like that. It was the worst thing I’ve ever faced, besides your mother running away and dying. To see the man you live for kissing and touching someone else, is a nightmare. I wasn’t with that woman and him. Deidre walked in and saw me trying to get her out of my bed. I would not lower myself that much, Prudence. Yes, I’m living with this guilt every day that I had something to do with your mom’s behavior. Yes, I contributed to the fact she died of AIDS at forty. It killed me to see her die such a horrible death. Yes, I should not have allowed it to go on. I didn’t know her father had made her sleep with anyone. I would have killed him. I chose to be weak and lose my dignity,” she said, through her tears.

“I would have done anything for your grandfather. Would you do anything for Alex? Really think about it before you judge what I did.”

I listened to her tell me how hurt she was by my grandfather and continue to cry over him. I’d never seen her cry, except when my mom died. Beulah was one of the strongest women I knew, besides Victoria. Yes, my grandfather had been the love of her life, and she wanted no one but him. That was why she wasn’t looking for another man, she’d said. But it wasn’t because she was still in love with my grandfather. It is because she didn’t want to go through it another time.

“Not a day goes by I don’t wish I could do things over. I wish I would have talked to her, and would have been closer to her. I wish she had been comfortable talking to me. I’m partially responsible for her drug use, and her death. I should have stopped it. I shouldn’t have put her father before her.”

A sense of my true grandmother came out. She had been an abused woman herself, and it carried over to her daughter. The love she had for my grandfather was something I didn’t understand. It was more of an obsession than love.

It broke my heart to watch her cry and become so upset. This was the woman who had saved me from a horrible life. This woman had sent Alex into my life. If it wasn’t for her, nothing in my life would have played out as it had. Whatever she did or didn’t do with my mother, she did take care of me. I still loved her, no matter what.

After our long discussion, we decided to put all of it to rest and move on. There was no use dwelling on the past since she couldn’t change it, and I had to forgive her for it. The love she had for my grandfather was something I didn’t really understand and yet I did in a way. It made me question my love for Alex. Would I really be able to walk away from him if he did that to me? I saw how easily it could happen. My grandmother had been blind with love. My grandfather obviously hadn’t loved her, to put her through that for so many years, over and over again.

I stood up and walked over to her. She had her head in her hands.

“Grandma.” I put my arms out to hug her. Beulah stood up. We hugged and cried.

“I love you Grandma.”

“I’m so sorry. I love you too. You are like a daughter to me. I don’t want this to change our love for each other.”

I convinced her that it wouldn’t and I would always be close to her.

***

Driving up our winding driveway back home, I was beyond exhausted. I wanted Alex more than anything. He had been gone for over a week and I missed him terribly. I came home, fed Beckett, and turned on Van Halen. I started a fire in our bedroom fireplace and let Alex’s favorite band settle me down, along with a glass of wine. I grabbed one of Alex’s t-shirts out of the dirty clothes hamper and put it on. Knowing that it had been on his body gave me a comforting feeling.

I thought about calling Veena or Thomas, but I was too tired to rehash what happened. I climbed into our bed, and smelled Alex in the sheets and pillows. His scent lingered, and I wrapped myself in the blankets, waiting for him to call. I needed to hear his voice. My body ached to have him next to me. The thought of his hot body, soft hands, and the sound of his heartbeat, helped me drift off to sleep.

Chapter 5

Familiar hands massaged my shoulders as I slept on my stomach. Hot, silky, and soft, they stroked my neck, and caressed my back. I figured I was dreaming, and I let the dream turn me on as if he was with me.

“Hey, baby,” he whispered in my ear and the scent of him grew stronger.

I jumped, startled.

“Alex?” Coming out of a deep sleep, I tried to turn around.

“Yes, it’s your Alex. Stay on your stomach,” he whispered.

He lifted his T-shirt over my head and threw it on the floor next to the bed. His lips touched my ear, as his warm, minty breath sent an ache to my core.

“What are you doing home?” I asked.

“Shhh, I’ll explain later. Right now, I have something more important to take care of. Making you come, over and over. You lie there and let me work my Alex magic. Does Van Halen remind you of me?”

“Yes.” I was unable to say much more. How could he be here in my bed? He was thousands of miles away on the campaign trail. It wasn’t until his warm, wet kisses trailed down my back that I came fully awake.

His lips kissed me from the middle of my shoulder blades and down my spine until he reached my ass. His soft mouth covered my back, making me shudder. He took his time as his full lips brushed my skin. Sliding my thong down with his teeth, he made it past my thighs and down to my ankles before I kicked it off the rest of the way. His breathing grew rapid as I lay there and let him explore my body. The tips of his fingers ran up and down my thighs and calves.