Your Project

Sarah Ren was twenty-four years old and slowly dying in a beige kitchen.

She was chopping carrots to keep from screaming. Chop, tap, chop, tap. The carrots didn't need chopping. The salad already had carrots. She needed the knife in her hand and the noise of the board to cover the sound of her husband reading her his day.

The kitchen was spotless, and the stand mixer she'd begged for sat on the counter, still white, still unused after eight months. Albert's corkboard hung next to the fridge with the dry-cleaning tickets pinned in a straight row. Nothing was out of place. Nothing ever was.

Behind her, Albert worked his tie loose. It made the same soft hiss it made every night at 6:40.

"So the pension fund people are happy with our numbers," he said. "Another quarter million in their portfolio by fiscal. Henderson's on board with the Westridge development. And I played golf with Connors. His boss needs a speechwriter, and I said you might be interested."

"That's nice," Sarah said.

It was not what she meant. What she meant was that she had a political science degree, summa cum laude, two years old and gathering dust in a frame in the hallway. What she meant was that she'd applied for a real job with a real senator who did real things, and she did not want to write golf speeches for Connors's boss.

"You know," Albert said, "I was thinking about that internship you applied for. The Senator Michael thing."

The knife stopped.

"I know you're excited," he went on, "but five weeks on a campaign bus? Overnighters, crappy hotels, sixteen-hour days? You'd be exhausted."

She turned around with the knife still in her hand. She was barefoot, with a dish towel tucked into the waist of her jeans. "I'm sure," she said. "I want the experience."

Albert nodded, kind and mild and completely missing the point. Albert was thirty-two. He'd been missing the point with great consistency for the whole three years of their marriage. In bed he missed it too. Sarah had faked her last four orgasms with him, and she'd timed the last one to the dishwasher's rinse cycle.

"Of course you do," he said. "It's good for you to have a project. Keeps your mind active."

Your project. As if she was knitting a scarf.

She turned back to the board and murdered a bell pepper.

"You know what I was thinking?" Albert said. He reached for the wine. "We should get a dog. If you're gone that much, I'll need the company. A lab, maybe. Or a golden. Something that won't dig up the yard."

A dog. Sarah stared at the pepper. That was the plan, wasn't it? Get a house, get a dog, get a bigger car, get old, die in the beige kitchen. It was what people like them did.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

She wiped her hands on the towel and picked it up. An email from Senator Joseph Michael's campaign. The subject line said Communications Fellowship: Offer Extended.

She read it twice. We are pleased to offer you… Please confirm by 5 PM tomorrow… The tour departs Monday at 6 AM from the Cincinnati field office.

Her cunt got wet.

There was no warning. It simply happened, a hot clench between her legs while she stood at the counter with a pepper seed stuck to her thumb. She'd watched the senator's floor speeches on her laptop at midnight, and she'd watched him take apart a cable host in three sentences without raising his voice, and now she would be on his bus.

Was it normal to get wet over an email? Probably not. Was she going to examine it? Absolutely not.

Sarah had a committee in her head. She'd had it since college. It met constantly, took minutes, and voted on everything from her wedding dress to whether to send back cold soup. The committee had read the email and was drafting a sensible statement about professional opportunity.

Her cunt had not been invited to the committee. It had voted anyway.

"You okay?" Albert asked. "You look weird."

"I got it," Sarah said.

"Got what?"

"The internship. The fellowship. They want me Monday."

Albert's face did several things at once. It settled on proud, which was worse than any of the others.

"Babe, that's great," he said. "Five weeks. Wow. Okay. You'll be home weekends?"

"Fridays to Mondays. The bus leaves at six."

"Six AM." He whistled. "Okay. I'll pack you vitamins. You never eat right when you're stressed." He raised his glass. "To your project."

"It's a fellowship," Sarah said. "It's paid. It's a job, Albert."

"To your job," Albert said, so agreeably that it was worse.

"To my job," Sarah said, and clinked, and drank the whole glass.

She finished the salad. Albert talked about dog breeds and fence heights. The phone sat face-down on the counter, and her panties stayed damp straight through dinner, and she did not mention that to anyone.

***

The bus idled outside the field office at 5:45 on Monday morning. Sarah had set three alarms.

She wore a navy blazer, a cream blouse, charcoal slacks, and low heels. Her hair was in a tight bun. Her makeup said take me seriously and nothing else. Her carry-on held three more identical outfits and a dog-eared copy of The Art of Political Persuasion she'd owned for six years.

A woman with a headset and a clipboard checked her license. "Sarah Ren? Communications fellow?"

"That's me."

"Dana Ostrow, comms director. I'm your boss, God help you." Dana was somewhere past forty and looked like she'd been awake since the previous election. "You report to me. You're in seat four. Coffee's up front. Bathroom's in back. Don't use the bathroom."

"Got it."

"Senator wants to meet you before we roll."

The senator sat at a small table in the back of the bus with his reading glasses low on his nose. He was fifty-eight, silver-haired, in a charcoal suit that cost more than Albert made in a month, and a red tie with a perfect knot. He stood when Dana brought her back. He didn't hurry. He made standing up look like a decision.

"Senator, Sarah Ren. Sarah, Senator Michael."

His grip was warm and firm and held a beat longer than it had to.

"I was told you were sharp," he said. "We'll find out."

"I won't disappoint you, Senator."

He nodded once, sat down, and went back to his briefing packet. That was the whole meeting. Sarah walked back up the aisle with her heart pounding.

Her phone buzzed. How's your first day? Missing you already! It was 5:58 AM.

She silenced it.

"Husband?" asked the guy across the aisle. He was in sneakers and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and he looked about as rested as a man who'd slept on a couch. "Bobby Tarrant. Digital. I run the socials and shoot the B-roll."

"Sarah. Comms fellow. And yes."

"He texts at six AM?"

"He sets alarms for it."

Bobby grinned at her. It was a half smile, the kind that knew how much it was getting away with. "That's either really sweet or a hostage situation," he said. "Let me know which."

She turned back to her laptop. She could feel him still looking.

By nine she'd found three shifts in the polling that Dana flagged for the senator's briefing. By eleven she'd drafted two answers on tax reform, and both of them went into the packet. Nobody said thank you. Nobody said good job. They took her work and used it, and it was the best thing that had happened to her in two years.

At two the senator walked up the aisle to the coffee and stopped at seat four.

"The second tax answer," he said. "The one with the machine shop. Yours?"

"Mine."

"I'm using it tonight." He looked at her a moment longer. "You write the way I talk. That's rare."

"I've watched a lot of your speeches."

"How many?"

All of them, Sarah thought. Some of them twice, at midnight, with Albert asleep. "A few," she said.

He nodded and went back to his table. Three rows back, Bobby raised his eyebrows at her over his phone.

At the Dayton town hall she stood at the back and wrote down which lines landed. The senator was good. He listened to every question all the way through. When a retired machinist asked about his pension, the senator asked how many years he'd put in and then said the number back to the room. The room loved it. Sarah's pen flew.

At 9:30 they checked into the hotel. Sarah shared a room with a junior staffer named Melissa, who was thirty-one and had said nine words to her all day.

As Sarah gathered her bags, she caught the senator watching her from the back of the bus. Just a glance. When she met it, he nodded once.

Her pussy clenched. The committee called for a recess.

***

The hotel conference room was too warm and too bright. There was a whiteboard full of circled numbers and a bottle of Scotch on the credenza beside a sleeve of plastic cups.

At 11:47 they'd been at it for three hours. One by one the others left. Dana went first, for a 6 AM radio hit. The policy advisor went next to read up on farm subsidies. The scheduler and the advance lead went out together, arguing about a parking lot.

By 12:15 it was Sarah and the senator.

He poured two fingers of Scotch into two plastic cups and set one in front of her.

"You earned it," he said. "The tax answers were good."

"Thank you, Senator."

He sat at the corner of the table, close but not crowding. "Before we do Toledo, I want to know how you work. What do you notice first when you walk into a room?"

"Patterns," she said. "Things that don't match. If something's out of place, it jumps out at me."

"Sound? Do you need quiet to write?"

"For writing, yes. For numbers, a little noise helps."

He kept asking. How she slept, when she drank coffee, whether she stood up to think. It was the kind of thing a good boss asked. Somewhere in there she stopped taking notes and didn't notice.

"Here's what I do before a big speech," he said. His voice had slowed. Each sentence landed and sat for a moment before the next one came. "I picture a room. A plain room with a door and a chair. The door is closed. The chair is empty. I let my shoulders drop, a little, like this. And I take one breath. Just one. And when I let it out, I'm ready."

Sarah pictured the room. Her shoulders dropped. Her breathing slowed. The room was beige, because of course it was, and the chair was very comfortable to think about.

"Sarah."

She opened her eyes. She hadn't known they were closed.

The senator was sitting back in his chair, a full foot farther away than before, with both hands flat on the table where she could see them.

"I'm going to stop," he said. "And I'm going to tell you what that was, because you deserve to know. That was hypnosis. A light induction. I learned it from a stage hypnotist when I was twenty-six and stuttered so badly I couldn't order a sandwich. I use it on myself before every speech. I don't use it on other people without asking them first, and I didn't ask you. So I stopped."

Sarah stared at him. "I went under?"

"You started to. You're a very good subject. Most people aren't."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's a fact."

"Do you do this to all the interns?"

"You're the first fellow who's gone under in a strategy meeting. Dana fell asleep in a budget meeting once, but I don't think that counts." He capped his pen. "Your job is Dana's. She hired you, and she's the one who decides if you stay. Nothing about this conversation goes anywhere near your job. Get some sleep. We roll at seven."

In the elevator Sarah looked at herself in the mirrored wall. Her cheeks were red and her eyes were bright, and her nipples were poking through her blouse like she'd walked in from the cold. It was 12:30 in the morning, and she looked like she'd been kissed.

Her pulse was going in her throat, in her wrists, and between her legs.

She stood very still. There was a damp spot in her panties. Not a small one.

"Fuck," she said to the elevator.

It was the travel. It was the Scotch she hadn't drunk. It was sixteen hours on a bus. It was not a fifty-eight-year-old man telling her she was a very good subject.

Was it? The committee voted it was the travel. It was a unanimous vote, with one abstention, and the abstention was soaking her panties.

She told herself so all through her shower. She told herself in the dark beside Melissa's snoring. She told herself until almost two.

By then she had decided she was going to ask him to do it again.