Can't Make This Up by Ali Parker

Author:Ali Parker [Parker, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Star Key Press
Published: 2023-07-25T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

ARIANE

Busy in the office, I was dealing with correspondence and other relatively mindless things today. A good thing, since I couldn’t quite get what had happened with Flynn in that changing room out of my head.

The man had an undeniable way with my body, but the mere thought of what might’ve happened if we’d slipped up just once and Bradley had heard us was enough to keep me from trying to seek him out again.

I’d considered it a few times in the days that had passed since, but I just didn’t have the guts. We’d rolled the dice once and won. It seemed like pushing our luck to try to make it happen again.

As I sat behind my desk and combed through hundreds of new emails, I did my best to keep my focus where it had to be, here at work, on my activist efforts. Unfortunately, so many of those efforts coincided with my mother’s political agenda that even trying to keep focused on that made me think of her, which made me think of Bradley, which brought me right back to that dressing room.

It was frustrating as heck, but then I opened the email containing her latest polling numbers and my head finally left the gutter. I didn’t know if it had anything to do with all the bad press I’d been getting these last couple months, but she wasn’t looking so good, and I hated to think she wouldn’t win that congressional seat.

This was her dream, but as I thought it, it occurred to me just how much her dream had cost me. Our entire family actually.

It wasn’t something I let myself think about often, but every once in a while when it popped up in my head, I allowed my mind just a minute to wonder. I opened myself up to the daydreams about how much easier my life could’ve been if our family hadn’t been thrust into the spotlight quite like this.

Everything she had done and everything we had done to support her was to get her into the seat she was running for now. It really had been her lifelong dream and I instantly felt guilty for even thinking about what things might’ve been if she hadn’t been so politically ambitious.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to be successful or to get everything she’d ever wanted. I really did. I wished her every success, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder how my life would’ve been different if I wasn’t stuck on the hamster wheel, running an endless loop of pleasing my mom and her advisors.

Logically, I knew that a family like ours would always have attracted attention. My parents had both come from generations of wealth, and then my mother had expanded that empire and grown their collective wealth exponentially when she’d started with the solar panels just before they’d really become a thing.

It’d positioned her—and us, by extension—in exactly the right place when people’s focus started shifting to green energy soon after.

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