Page 62 of Since Always

He looks again as though he is searching me for something, but shakes his head.

"Well, I guess you were lucky then; to have loved at all," he says and there is a deep sadness when he says it. I don't know if the sadness is about the little sister he loved and lost, or something else.

"I was sorry to hear you and your fiancée ended it," I say. We both know I am lying.

He shrugs. "It wasn't meant to be. Jana was a good girl. Great on paper; smart, beautiful, and successful. But I just didn't want to spend the rest of my life with her."

"Strange," I say. "I would have thought 'good on paper' would have been everything to you."

"Me too," he says, not realizing it was an insult. "But I guess there is more to love than that."

"Imagine that.” I deadpan.

"Everyone thought she was perfect. My dad fucking loves her. I pissed my parents off when I ended it. But I guess at the end of the day you can't decide who you are going to marry based on what everyone else wants, right?"

I say nothing. It doesn't matter what he's saying. This is Mark Reynolds, for God's sake. His profound thoughts on love and marriage don't exactly amount too much.

And yet, here I am, grasping at the strings of hope.

Again, he shifts the conversation abruptly, his entire tone and demeanor changing.

"Hey, so, I wanted to give you the heads up," he says, and I know the catch to this conversation is coming. "I am attaching a rider to the Internet Safety bill."

My jaw clenches, but I try to keep my composure. I cock my eyebrow and say as casually as I can, "I had heard something about that. What is it?"

His smirk is enough to make me want to reach across the table. "Mandatory counseling for minors prior to seeking an abortion."

I pause for a minute, just staring at him, trying to read his face. "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

"Look, you keep talking about how this bill is to protect women and children. Well, I want to protect them too."

"You're going to sink the bill. The party isn't going to go for that. You know that and I know it. This is a bi-partisan bill—something we can get through. What do you have against it that you want to see it fail? Or is it just that I am sponsoring it? Is this personal? It this about us? About Kait?"

"You are encroaching on people's privacy on this one, Owen. I can't make that argument, because the party would lynch me. But allowing IP addresses to be tracked?"

"Only when there are direct threats on lives made."

"First of all: people who say they are going to kill people in the comments of some Vidtalk post are not a threat to anyone, other than the parents they are still mooching off of. Also, that's a pretty slippery slope, don't you think? If we start—"

"I am so sick of slippery slope arguments, I could vomit," I say, my irritation showing. "In everything, there is a line. You have to draw the line somewhere."

He shrugs, setting his glass down and standing, my cue to follow his lead. "I'm attaching the rider, Owen. It's done. I just thought I would let you know, so you weren't blindsided."

"You're a pro-choice candidate. You don't think the party will turn on you for that?"

"I believe it is a pro-choice argument, and I'm willing to make my case on that. They're kids. They don't know enough to make that decision for their entire lives. We're not giving them an actual choice until we've given them all the information."

"They don't get all the information. They get biased information that tries to persuade them against abortion. And the fact is that having to go through the counseling dissuades women from getting the medical attention they need. There is a ton of research to back that up."

"Girls. You said women, but you meant girls. But we can have this debate on the floor. I'm attaching it. I'm just giving you the head's up, like I said."

"Well, wasn't that nice of you?"

"You know, you may think you and I are mortal enemies, but I just see us as two sides of the same coin. We aren't so dissimilar, you and I."

"The hell we aren't."

Our votes that day go late into the night, and I can't shake the bad mood Mark has left me in. I hop on the subway that connects the Capitol building to my office when we finish. I head straight to my office to grab my things and get out of there before anyone tries to stop me. Some of my staffers are still in the office, but I try hard not to make eye contact or look at anything on my desk as I grab my laptop. I am afraid something might catch my eye or ear and I might get sucked into staying. I need this godforsaken day to be over, and I need to be drinking a beer in front of the TV. Stat.

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