“Where are we headed?” He asked.
“It is a surprise,” Caroline said, seizing the opportunity of darkened interior of the car to lean on his shoulder while keeping her hand firmly interlocked with his.
The details of the evening and eventual end at the apartment were relayed to Alex with clinically precise minute by minute itinerary of how the evening progressed. The security chief was determined to impress Alex with his attention to detail to make up for the embarrassment of the previous failings. Alex was trapped in the unfortunate place of receiving a rundown of Caroline’s date he wished he didn’t know about without knowing how to turn them down. If he had any illusions about what the Senator had intended, it was clear to him the result was the same. He was the man looking from the outside in. He was the man left to wonder about the what-ifs. Would his fate have been different if he had fame and fortune? Would he have been courted instead of desperately hoping for Caroline to fall in love with him?
The other doubt that had cleared from Alex’s mind was the moment he had shared with Caroline hadn’t meant anything to her. It explained the reason why she was acting as if nothing had happened. She had acted as if she hadn’t kissed him and squeezed him in places where he still felt an excruciating pain. In a dramatic turn of events, he had been shown hope, came close to tasting it and was left to fend for himself all in the span of few short days.
To add insult to injury, on their return to Washington, D.C., Alex was given the silent treatment from his Casey. The woman, who would have grabbed the first opportunity to meet each time either of them came back from a trip away from the gravitational center of politics, was now lukewarm about it.
Devoid of the usual excitement and unimpressed by his forthrightness about how much he missed her. He had planned and counted on an aggressive marathon of animalistic sex. Instead, Alex Cochran was left to sit in the silence of his modest apartment wondering whether he was leading a meaningless life. Absent the attachment he hoped he had with Caroline, not being able to count on Casey, he wondered whether his status had permanently been downgraded to that of a service dog.
~~~
