So of course she went and ruined whatever ease had just passed between them. “Look, I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I’m confused about you being here.”
He looked confused at her confusion. “Um, you sent me a note on Facebook?”
To which Cleo was even more confused. “I . . . I mean, I don’t really use Facebook. My son set up my account.” She stopped then and realized exactly what had happened. Lucas, her morose, grouchy teenager, was actually the sidekick in her romantic comedy. “Oh. Oh, OK, no, I see. He must have . . .” She waved her hand and wished very much that she had a martini in it.
Matty took out his phone and offered it to her, the message on display. Indeed, she had invited him for drinks at about eight p.m. So he was less of a stalker than she’d thought.
“My kid,” she explained. “He’s out on his own date . . . with MaryAnne’s daughter. And I think he probably felt sorry for me.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m just happy to see you.” (So, so nice.) “Though that must be weird.”
“Having a kid?”
“Out with MaryAnne’s daughter,” he clarified, and Cleo winced. She was so goddamn off her game.
“Oh yes, well, trying to adhere to the adage that if you tell a teenager not to do something, they’ll just want to do it more. If I say he can’t speak with her, they’d probably run off and elope. If they could.”
Matty contemplated this, sipped his drink. “I don’t think I was ever the type of teenager who had to be told not to do something.”
“Yes, you were always very sweet.” He was the one who winced now, and then the bartender brought Cleo her blessed martini. “I meant it as a compliment,” Cleo said, after drinking an oversize swallow quite gratefully.
Matty shared his story quickly, in less time than it took her to drain her glass. He’d been married just out of college but only for two years. “A starter marriage,” he said with a casual shrug that belied what Cleo could see was still a bruise that smarted. “In fact, she also said I was too nice.” Since then, it had mostly been about his work as he rose through the ranks at Microsoft, and he now had an expansive loft just around the corner from the hotel, with a view of the Puget Sound and flat-screens in too many rooms.
Cleo didn’t know why it surprised her to hear that he was so successful—probably because she thought of herself as someone who read people well. You had to be to juggle so many different personalities within your constituency. Matty hadn’t been anything special in high school, no gem to be fashioned out of coal, no brilliant mind, no honor roll. But maybe he had layers she hadn’t seen, or she had been so wrapped up in her tunnel vision, in her specific definition of success, that she’d missed it. Cleo her whole life had been taught by her parents that intelligence and drive were really what you needed to get by. Her dad had been an engineering major, then a helicopter pilot in the army reserves before moving to Boeing. Grit, grit, grit. Even in her artsy mother: you don’t become a member of the Pacific Northwest Ballet at eighteen on luck. Hard work, effort, grit, that’s what got her mom there. Cleo glanced at Matty now, content and gracious and certainly accomplished, and wondered what else she placed a high price on that was less valuable than she thought. Whoever said you had to be the smartest person in the room? (Well, in fact, Cleo had said that. But figuratively speaking.)
Cleo sucked the alcohol out of an olive and glanced at Matty again. He really was so very handsome, and she really had dumped him very cruelly their senior year. He reached over, squeezed her shoulder.
“Cleo McDougal.” He laughed. “You’re a fucking senator.”
“It’s going great right now, as you have probably heard.”
Matty laughed even bigger at this; then his smile fell.
“OK, with the exception of what MaryAnne did. I mean, what she actually wrote about your law professor . . .” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. That really was high school shit, too low of a blow.”
“It’s OK.” Cleo shrugged.
“It’s not really.”
Cleo bobbed her head. It wasn’t really. “Occupational hazard. Public takedowns. You start to get used to it.”
“Do you . . . Is there . . . I mean.” Matty started to redden. Same kid, two decades later. “Are you seeing someone?”
“Also an occupational hazard, Matty.” This wasn’t entirely true. Plenty of senators had full personal lives. Just not Cleo McDougal.
“So who takes care of you?”
Cleo’s head jutted back, just like it would have at seventeen. “No one takes care of me. I take care of myself!”
Matty’s hand found its way to her arm. “No, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—when shit gets rough, who do you lean on?”
Cleo started to answer but found she couldn’t, because there wasn’t a good answer to offer. Matty’s eyes met hers, and she thought she saw something that looked more like pity than any form of judgment. She took her right hand, placed it over his, still on her arm. The heft of his grasp was grounding.
“Is it weird that you’ve stayed here? In Seattle?” she said finally, sliding her hand back around the stem of her martini glass, his curving around the neck of his beer. “With all the same people?”
“Oh, my life is on a different track.” He made a face. “That sounded condescending. I just mean that I don’t see them a lot. It’s not like a constant dinner party with MaryAnne and her crew.”
Cleo hadn’t been to a dinner party other than a mandated work dinner party in a long time. Emily Godwin, her sole mom friend in DC, was often kind enough to invite her to such things. Every few months she’d try to nudge her out, to come over for dinner. But Cleo was almost always too busy and besides, she knew that these were couple-y things, and her singleness threw off the table setting and dynamic as well.
“I go on a lot of dates,” Matty was saying. “Meet a lot of women. I think everyone I know has tried to set me up.”
“Ah, the beauty of being a single man at thirty-seven as opposed to a single woman at the same age,” Cleo mused, then ordered another drink. She was having more fun than she expected, and Cleo almost never had time for fun.
He laughed, though she wasn’t sure why. “Sure. But it also probably has to do with the fact that I am, as you have noted, too nice, an easy fix-up, and you . . . are . . . not?”
Cleo didn’t appreciate this intonation because she absolutely hated that female politicians were expected to be placid and nice, as if being demanding and being a bit of a hard-ass weren’t compatible with the job, when, in fact, they were much more compatible than being sweet. But before she could chide him, he said, “I think that’s why I admire you so much. Your edge. I think I kind of regret being such a pushover. I mean, you were pretty firm with me when we broke up.”
“Oh, I am sorry for being so cold back then.” Cleo softened. She could be a bit of a hard-ass. “I regret things too, of course.” Two hundred and thirty-three things.
“But not that, not us,” Matty said, laughing again. “No, we never would have worked. You had your sights set on something bigger. I had my nose in a coding book.”