right, and here she was, elbows on a rented linen tablecloth, staring at her cold salmon, thinking about how much her toes hurt. Lucas’s perception of her dating life wasn’t quite accurate: there had been failed attempts, three dates in a row with a few men, some making out in cars or their bedrooms (if Lucas had a sitter or was at a sleepover), but something sustainable, something real, well, no, there hadn’t been that. She thought of Matty at the bar in the Sheraton, how she was surprised that she wouldn’t have minded if he’d kissed her. She realized that this was likely because she wouldn’t have minded being kissed, not because it had to be Matty. Was that how lonely, how isolated she’d become?
Something had to change.
Before she could determine just what—other than the obvious, that it would be nice to have steady, reliable sex every once in a while, to have a date to see a movie or binge a Netflix show (Cleo had never binged a Netflix show)—and how exactly to solve it, she spotted Jonathan again, just a few people away from Arianna. He was tall, which was probably what caught her attention—she wasn’t spying, in any case. She’d remind herself of this later, when she sat at her home office desk, a pen in hand, and went to add this incident to her list, that she wasn’t trying to stir up any trouble.
But she saw what she saw: Jonathan slipped his hand onto the small of a woman’s back who was clearly not Emily Godwin. (Who was home watching his three children and probably cooking and cleaning for them too! Cleo felt her pulse accelerate and very much hoped that Emily was not doing Jonathan’s laundry as well.) He leaned in close to the woman—a blonde, of course—and even from across the room, Cleo could see this woman relax into him, a secret passing between them. Her hand reached back, grazing his shoulder at whatever he said, as they tipped their heads together, laughing.
Cleo felt the betrayal as if it were her own. Emily Godwin had been a bit of a saint to her, for no reason other than she recognized that Cleo needed a saint from time to time. Cleo stood up in her chair, threw down her napkin, and started toward Jonathan to give him a piece of her mind, to tell him just what a goddamn saint he had for a wife.
“Senator McDougal!” Before she could get even halfway across the room, a man whose face she recognized before she placed his name—not because she didn’t know his name, rather because his face was simply so ubiquitous—stepped into her path.
“Ah, Bowen, hi.”
They each respectively tilted toward the other, kissing each other’s cheek. Bowen Babson, the anchor of Good Afternoon, USA, pulled back from their hellos and grinned. He, like Cleo, had been a young hotshot, on a rocket through the network, landing his own show two years ago, at thirty. Cleo had always admired this drive and naturally admired his confidence (like attracts like), which occasionally allowed for Cleo to daydream about their potential. He also had a reputation for sleeping around Washington (no judgment) and dating women under twenty-five. (Which again reminded Cleo of Matty and how even her relatively geeky high school boyfriend was dating up these days, and no wonder he hadn’t kissed her!) But Bowen was TV-anchor handsome, wavy dark hair, penetrating green eyes, whip smart, and even, Cleo begrudgingly admitted, fairly funny. He was easy to talk to between segments, he asked fair questions, and he was always, always prepared. It wasn’t difficult to see why he cleaned up on the singles scene. It also wasn’t difficult to see why he should have come with a warning label and why he’d never so much as made a single suggestive remark to her. Cleo wouldn’t have expected him to.
Cleo peered over Bowen’s shoulder, trying to track Jonathan. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
Bowen’s gaze followed hers, his head swiveling toward the back of the room.
“Admiring someone?”
“I’m a senator, Bowen; what makes you think that I’m here in pursuit of romance?”
Jonathan had his back to them now, and Cleo was intent on keeping her focus.
“Sorry,” Bowen said. “You’re right. That was shitty. Though, just for the record, I’d have said the same thing to a man.” He held up his hands. “I’m the furthest thing from a misogynist. I was raised with three sisters. They’d literally