Page 70 of The Night Of
Jonathan’s eyes closed, and his hand made a fist over his mouth. “I’m more worried about what comes first.”
“You asked to be one of Steven’s pallbearers?”
Jonathan nodded. He didn’t look at her. She took another sip of her coffee, the delicate swallow overly loud on the bugs Silva and Nguyen had planted in the Oval Office. I could hear Jonathan’s shaking inhales and exhales, the shift of fabric on fabric as his knee bounced. I could almost hear his heart pounding.
We were huddled in Jonathan’s private study down the hall from the Oval, Silva, Keith, Nguyen, and me, staring at the monitor showing a live video feed from a camera they’d hidden in the lamp beside Jonathan’s seat. More cameras were attached to the picture frames on the wall and on the fireplace mantel and hidden in the wood outlining the windows.
“Yesterday, you asked me what my plans were,” Felicity said. “What about you, Jonathan? What are your plans?”
He sighed. Pitched forward, bracing himself on his knees. “I’m not sure,” he confessed. He shook his head. “I never wanted the presidency. I never even wanted to be in politics. This, all of this…” His hand waved around the Oval. “This was Steven’s ambition. His dream.”
“What are your dreams and ambitions?”
Jonathan swallowed. The sound echoed over the microphones.
Felicity smiled, almost coy. “Maybe your dreams aren’t about an office or a position. Maybe they’re about finding someone special. And maybe you’ve found that someone?”
He rubbed his hands together and stared at the carpet. Sweat beaded on my scalp, my temple. Of course—after everything, after we’d hidden our friendship and our flirting and even our disastrous collapse—we’d be outed now that we’d found each other again. I didn’t care about that for myself. But Jonathan did. Immensely.
Keith shifted beside me, his bulky shoulder brushing mine.
“How did you know Steven was the one?” Jonathan asked.
She stared at him, then beyond him, the camera picking up how her gaze shifted over his shoulder, turned to the Rose Garden. “Love works in funny ways sometimes. I just knew. Like I knew the sun would rise and the earth would turn. I knew I loved him with all of my soul, and I knew he’d always love me the same way.”
Jonathan was going to burn a hole in the carpet with his stare. “What—” His throat closed, and his words choked off. “What are you saying today? In your eulogy?”
“I’ll be reading one of Steven’s favorite poems. You know how he loved E.E. Cummings.”
Finally, after studying all the shades of the carpet between his shoes, he looked up. “He did. When we were younger, he used to recite those poems when he got tipsy. He’d call out lines to women we passed walking home from the bars.”
A smile broke over her beautiful face. I thought of a cobra. “He serenaded me at the university with them, too. After we were married, he used to leave lines from poems in my purse for me to find, or tucked between the dishes in our kitchen. He’d even write them on the mirror for me. One time, he used my lipstick to write out a whole verse over my sink.” She laughed, the sound gentle, like tumbling crystal on velvet.
“What was that one poem?” His voice trembled, this time not with agony. I stilled as I heard the first quiver of rage curl through Jonathan. “The one he read to you the night he proposed.”
“That’s the one I’m going to read,” she said. “Not the one from our wedding. Steven loved the more obscure ones. He whispered this verse into my ear the night he proposed:
‘consider O
woman this
my body.
for it has
lain
with empty arms
upon the giddy hills
to dream of you.’”
“I remember. He loved all the different words Cummings would create. How he’d mash up nonsense line after line, but in the end, it would all somehow make sense or be beautiful. I could never see it until he’d explain them to me.” Jonathan shook his head. “He had that nickname for you, pulled from that poem: flowerterrible. Beauty and all its danger. Ecstasy, and the agony it can bring, he used to say.”
“Ah, marriage.” She shook her head, laughing quietly to herself. “We used to bring each other so much ecstasy and agony. And he always loved his nicknames.” The moment stretched, her smile going thin as she stared, as she waited for him to continue the conversation, to continue playing from the script she thought she had given him.
But Jonathan didn’t. “I thought he was leaving a message to you. But he wasn’t leaving it for you, he was leaving it for me.” His stare hardened, turned ice cold, every color and shade of hatred filling his gaze. “Why did you do it?” he whispered. “Why did you kill him?”
