Campaigning for Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One Seltzer
Two strangers drink seltzer in a hotel bar and spend the night together; at dawn Cora opens her welcome packet and finds the candidate's face on the cover.
At midnight I was sitting alone in a hotel bar, and I was too nervous to touch anything stronger than seltzer.
Tomorrow was my first day at the job I had wanted since I was fifteen.
I had booked an eighty-nine-dollar room at the Ingersoll Hotel so I could walk to work.
I had not slept for one minute.
"You look like a person waiting for a verdict," said the man on the next stool.
He was tall, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled.
His jaw was bare and a little pink.
He had a glass of seltzer with lime, and the bartender had already stopped asking him if he wanted a real drink.
"I start a new job in eight hours," I said.
"Do you hate it?"
"I want it so much I might throw up."
He laughed, a short surprised laugh, and a chip showed in his front tooth.
"I'm Will," he said.
"Mari."
It was my mother's pet name for me, and I had never given it to a stranger before.
I did not want to be Cora Dunn tonight, the girl with the packet and the lanyard and the plan.
"Who's the verdict from, Mari?"
"Everyone. Me. A man I've never met who'll decide whether I'm any good."
"I know that feeling," he said.
"What do you do, Will?"
"I work for a lot of people I'm afraid of disappointing."
"That's not a job."
"It's the whole job."
We were quiet, and it was a good quiet.
He asked what I read for fun, and I said road reports.
"Road reports?" he said, with such joy that I told him the rest.
I read everything about roads, bridges and rural bus lines.
I grew up on the shoulder of Interstate 380.
He told me he used to drive a county plow when he was nineteen.
He said the best sound in the world was a snowplow blade scraping clean pavement at four in the morning.
I told him that was the saddest, nerdiest thing I had ever heard.
"You like it," he said.
"I love it," I said, and I did not mean the plow.
At one o'clock the bartender began stacking chairs.
Will turned on his stool until his knee touched mine.
"I haven't done this in a long time," he said.
"Sat in a bar?"
"Wanted to follow someone out of one."
My heart did something stupid and large.
"I'm not drunk," I said. "I'd like that on the record."
"Neither am I. I've had four limes."
"Then take me upstairs, Will."
His room was on the eleventh floor.
In the elevator mirror we stood a foot apart, not touching, both breathing.
The door of 1112 closed behind us and he stopped.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
"Everything," I said, and I took hold of his shirt and pulled him down.
He kissed me.
It was slow for a moment.
Then his hands were in my hair and my back hit the wall by the closet.
I heard myself make a sound I had never made.
I got his shirt open and pushed it off his shoulders.
He was lean and hard and warm, with a long scar on his ribs, and I put my mouth on it.
"Mari," he said, rough.
I liked how it sounded in his throat.
He turned me and unzipped my dress down my spine with two fingers, then kissed each knob of bone as it showed.
I stepped out of the dress and kicked off my shoes.
He lifted me with an arm under my thighs and carried me to the bed.
I was a size twelve and I had never once been carried.
"Look at you," he said, laying me down, and he looked as long as he wanted.
He took off my bra with his teeth and a small smile.
His mouth closed around my nipple, hot, and I arched up and said his false name.
"Will, please."
"Please what?"
"Fuck me."
He pulled off my underwear and slid down the bed.
He put his mouth on my pussy and I forgot the hotel, the job, and the verdict.
He was slow and careful, then not careful at all, with his tongue flat on my clit and two fingers curling inside me.
I fisted the sheet and then his hair, and I came with a cry that bounced off the window.
He didn't stop until I shoved at his shoulders, laughing and shaking.
"My turn," I said.
I pushed him onto his back and got his belt open.
His cock was thick and flushed against his stomach, and when I wrapped my hand around it he swore.
I took him in my mouth to hear him do it again.
He lasted a minute before he pulled me up by the arms.
"Get on me," he said.
I straddled his hips and sank down, one inch at a time, until I had all of him.
We both went still and breathing.
Then I moved, and he gripped my hips and met every roll of them from underneath.
I rode him slowly at first and then hard, with his hands tight on my ass and my forehead against his.
"Cora," I almost said, and caught it, and said "God" instead.
He rolled us over and drove into me, deep and steady, and the headboard knocked the wall.
I wrapped my legs around his waist.
"Come on," he said against my ear. "Again. I want to feel it."
I came again, clenching around him, and he followed with a groan, buried in me, my name that wasn't my name on his lips.
We lay tangled in the wrecked sheets until our hearts slowed down.
Sometime after three we did it again, slower, with the lamp on, and he watched my face the whole time.
I woke at six with grey light on the carpet and his arm across my waist.
I eased out from under it and found my dress.
I dug in my tote for my phone, and my welcome packet slid out onto the floor.
It was a glossy folder with a blue cover.
Welcome to Kittredge for Iowa, it said, and under it was a photo of a bearded man in a flannel shirt, squinting into a cornfield.
I looked at the folder for a long time.
Then I looked at the man asleep in the bed, with his jaw bare, and a chipped tooth, and a long scar on his ribs.
I put two fingers over the lower half of his face in my mind and added a beard.
Nelson Kittredge, candidate for the United States Senate, rolled over and said "Mari?" into the pillow.
I was his intern.
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