Parsons knew that if she checked him now, he’d find a way to checkmate her later.
She stood, exhaled, tried to compose herself. He wasn’t the first asshole who would shove her down the steps while pretending to outstretch his hand. In fact, that was Alexander Nobells.
“Message received, Senator.”
“I hope you understand, Cleo,” he said to her back, because she was already headed out. “I’m only suggesting what I think is best.”
She almost turned and asked him: Best for whom? But why bother? She wasn’t going to change a privileged sixty-eight-year-old man. She’d rather save her breath for when she really needed to scream.
She closed the door behind her, then spun and flipped him the middle finger with both hands. When she saw Albie’s eyes widen in shock, she said, “Oh, fuck him.”
And he said, “Wow, that time of the month?”
And then she got right up close to his acne-riddled chin and said: “Fuck you too.”
And she didn’t regret that at all.
Cleo was in an exceptionally bad mood by day’s end, even with the promise of dinner with her son, who had been avoiding her since her return and since the rise of the #pullingaCleo hashtag. As of that morning, more than a hundred videos of women confronting their superiors had been filmed and uploaded, and Arianna was squealing that Cleo had started a revolution. Lawsuits were being threatened all over, naturally, by many of the accused—and Cleo wondered if Nobells would dare to try. She supposed that Senator Parsons wasn’t entirely wrong—that by filming first, thinking later, she had gotten out ahead of Nobells’s right to defend himself but, she thought as she stewed at her desk, boo-fucking-hoo. It wasn’t the most prudent political thought, but she had it all the same. Cleo had learned that when dishonest men were faced with the unavoidable truths of their past, they tended to posture and point fingers (often while screaming in quite hysterical tones), but she also still knew that with Nobells, at the very least, she was right. She also recognized that women risked so much by speaking up that false accusations were rarely a reality, and she hoped that if the women were strong enough to face the men who had made them feel powerless in whatever form that took, they were strong enough to endure the threats.
She hated, of course, that women were threatened in the first place. That it was simply understood that if you took your story public, you would endure not just scrutiny but public shaming and terror too. This was the price women paid to speak their truths. Cleo couldn’t change that. She could only speak hers.
And then there were other prices to pay too: getting stripped of the delegation trip, being whispered about in the hallways when you walked by a huddle of men from the other side of the aisle, listening to Suzanne Sonnenfeld suggest that she had your home address and why don’t people show up and protest. Maybe Cleo should have seen all this coming because she was usually quite prescient, but this time she simply hadn’t.
She had hoped Lucas would be proud of her defiance. She didn’t pretend to understand the teenage boy mind—she hadn’t even understood it back as a teenager; just look at how she dumped the very kind, tenderhearted Matty—but still, that was her aspiration. For her son to beam with pride in the way that Arianna had. Even Timothy, her deputy comms director, seemed impressed.
Lucas, however, quite obviously was not. Thus, this morning on their way to school, before Senator Parsons sent her into a rage spiral, she gently asked him if he would skip dinner at Benjamin and Emily’s tonight and if instead she could pick him up after soccer and they could go to their favorite burger joint, PATTIES. It had been their regular thing since they’d moved to DC—mother-son midweek dinners, when Cleo would turn off her phone for the hour and before Lucas had a whole life of his own, and he wasn’t angry with her, and she wasn’t confronting ghosts of her past that made her angry with herself as well. They’d order three different types of fries (curly, sweet potato, and shoestring) and laugh about how Lucas liked mustard on his, which Cleo couldn’t believe and didn’t know where he’d gotten that from. She did, probably she did know—it must have been from his dad, but then, she didn’t know Doug well enough to be sure about that either.