The Bodyguard Affair

chapter 1

Andi

three years ago

There's something liberating about sitting in a crowded bar, elbow to elbow with drunken strangers, casually writing a piping hot love scene.

Until tonight, I've avoided writing in public, mainly because I'm an easily distracted individual, an unintentional eavesdropper. When the women next to you are having a "serious sit-down" with a third friend who is "almost certainly" being catfished by a bald man in a trailer park in Manitoba, one can't just tune it out. Then there's Taylor Swift's newest single about her big breakup with Joe blaring over the speakers, her poetic, lyrical genius filling me with life and withering imposter syndrome simultaneously. Or the man in a toque joking that I'm "hard at work on the next bestseller," a well-meaning quip that's both depressing and as likely as a short, mild Ottawa winter (hint: highly improbable, practically statistically negligible). Even the piece of lint on the sleeve of my sweater can induce a brain fart.

Then there's the ever-present risk of someone glancing at my tablet, seeing my latest penis euphemism, and being so scandalized, they choke to death on a mouthful of bar nuts. A touch dramatic? Maybe. But one has to consider these things. Ottawa is a reserved, buttoned-up city.

To be fair, the patrons at this bar are too busy drinking and socializing to care about the stone-faced woman sitting in the corner, wrapped in her emotional support cardigan, lost in her quest to make fictional people fall in love. That, or they can't decipher my tiny size 8 font.

Distractions aside, being in public offers a wealth of inspiration, like the women secretly playing footsie under the table next to mine while on dates with unsuspecting men. The petite lady who can barely keep her hands off her man as he twirls her around on the strobe-lit dance floor.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this sooner. With the intensity of my new day job, getting words down in the privacy of my apartment is becoming a rarity. That's why I'm taking advantage of the time until my best friend, Laine, shows up.

The crowd melts around me as my fingers dance across the keyboard, barely keeping pace with my brain. With each keystroke, I slip deeper into my starry daydream of a fictional world. It's an enchanting place where men aren't trash and there are gentle, sugary forehead kisses aplenty. Where every touch is laced with a tenderness that makes you feel weightless. In my little world, love doesn't fizzle, it endures. It scoops you up and holds you tight in its warm embrace, making good on its promise to never let go. It makes you feel like everything will be okay, even if it won't. I'm so lost in my own head, I barely register when someone tugs my hand.

"I should have known I'd find you hiding in the corner," Laine shouts over the pulse of the music, eyeing my tablet screen with her heavily lined hawk eyes before I can slam it shut. "What are you doing?"

"My to-do list for work," I say quickly, cheeks aflame with the heat of my blatant lie as she hands me a gin and tonic. Here's the straight-up truth: I haven't told anyone about my writing since I started a couple months ago. Not even my best friend, who knows everything about me, down to my monthly cycle. Maybe it's superstitious and silly, but if I tell people, it's no longer mine. It's no longer a magical, sacred project I can escape into, tend to in my quiet moments. It feels too new, too raw. Sharing it with people, particularly Laine, who will demand to read it, opens it up to scrutiny and critique that I don't have the mental fortitude for-yet. In fact, I'd rather hurl myself into the rapids of the Ottawa River than live with the knowledge that, somewhere out there, a human being has read my words and may have thoughts (good or bad).

While I love Laine, I already know she would judge me. Hard. Anytime I pick up a romance novel around her, she rolls her eyes and suggests something with a gold Pulitzer Prize stamp on the cover. If you looked on her bookshelves, you'd only find classics, war and terror academia books, and poetry.

So, for now, I write for me.

"Come dance!" Laine barely waits for me to shove my tablet in my bag before dragging me onto the congested dance floor. "Love the one-piece. Very Audrey Hepburn meets Catwoman," she decides, twirling me around. It's a far cry from skintight, high-gloss pleather, but Laine has a tendency to give aggressively ego-boosting compliments. The jumpsuit in question is black chiffon with a flirty keyhole back, not that it's visible under my cardigan. But as a woman working in politics, nothing feels better than abandoning the tyranny of tummy-control pantyhose.

I close my eyes, drink, and let the lights blur around me in a red haze. For the first time in a long time since my breakup three months ago, I'm feeling playful, rebellious, and, dare I say, a smidge sexy-until I have to use the bathroom. In a one-piece.

Comfort aside, I hadn't considered the logistics of peeing in a one-piece. So here I am, vulnerable, outfit around my ankles, boobs out, praying whoever just walked in can't see me in all my nude glory through the alarmingly wide crack in the stall door.

And then the worst happens. Because of course it does.

While I'm mid-pee, the door flings open to a pair of startlingly blue eyes. I've never seen eyes this striking-like the artificially colored blue raspberry Kool-Aid my little sister and I used to chug straight from the plastic jug on those swelteringly humid summer days in our top-floor apartment with no AC. The kind that stains your tongue and teeth for a week.

The eyes in question belong to a very startled man.

At least, I'm pretty sure it's a dude. The bathrooms in this bar are unisex, individual stalls.

We let out simultaneous screams, though mine is more like a piercing wail. I flail about on the toilet like an injured flamingo, endeavoring to cover my ugliest bra-thick straps, "not-tonight" beige, probably three years too old to deserve any place in my drawer. It's so bad, I forget to hide my lower half, which is covered by sweet nothing. This exact moment is why I don't often leave my house.

"Shit!" He slaps a palm over both eyes and stumbles backward into the sinks in a blind frazzle. "I am so sorry. The door wasn't locked, I-" I can't hear the rest, because he quite literally dashes out of the bathroom, leaving the stall door swinging wide open.

With a groan, I hobble off the toilet to close the door, jumpsuit at my ankles. The lock was broken all along. Go figure.

Before someone else walks in on me, I wash up and beeline it back to the dance floor in search of Laine. No sign of her freshly permed curls anywhere. A quick scan tells me she's migrated to a booth along the back wall. She's cross-legged, in what appears to be deep conversation with my ex-boyfriend, Hunter, who's come straight from the office, based on his sweater-vest-a staple in his office wardrobe. Tonight's vest is mustard yellow.

I'd nearly forgotten that Hunter was coming tonight. Then again, why wouldn't he? He's Laine's friend, too, and when we split, we made an agreement that we wouldn't let it affect our group dynamic.

The three of us met over a year ago as sun-starved baby interns working for Eric Nichols, the leader of the Democratic People's Party (DPP)-the third party that no one ever expected to win. I used to consider it the best day of my life. The day I started my dream job and met my best friend and my boyfriend.

The three of us got closer when our contracts were extended for the election, and again when the DPP won and transitioned into power. We did everything together. Morning coffee runs, lunches at the office, eyes bloodshot, poring over spreadsheets, take-out containers sprinkled over our desks. Weekends exploring museums, doing Parliament tours, dominating at trivia pub nights, consuming ill-advised late-night poutines with too many toppings. The usual things poli-sci geeks do for fun in the nation's capital. Laine used to joke about being the third wheel, but these days, it feels like I'm the third wheel.

But I don't let myself think about that. Not right now. Tonight is a happy night. We're celebrating Laine's official promotion to permanent staffer with health and dental benefits. She signed the offer letter today after dreaming of being one of the few East Asian women on the Hill since being elected class president in grade five. Give her thirty years and she'll be the next prime minister of Canada. I'm calling it now.

Whatever Laine said must have been funny, because Hunter is dangerously close to falling face-first into her ample cleavage. I catch the subtle way he squeezes her shoulder affectionately, his thumb tracing a smooth circle down her arm-a move he used to do with me. Our eyes meet as I approach, and he flashes her one last frat-boy-president smile before slinking out of the booth to give me my spot back.

"Andi Lenora Zeigler!" He shouts my full name heartily, brows raised, as though my existence on earth delights him. Ever since we broke up, he tries a little too hard to be congenial in public. Excessive arm pats, laughing way too loudly at my jokes. "I never got to congratulate you on the new gig."

"Oh. Thanks. And congrats to you, too. I know communications was your dream," I say, barely hiding my cringe. We sound like coworkers by the watercooler, not exes who dated for nearly a year and shared a dingy apartment above a dim sum place in Chinatown.

The crease between his brows deepens in a dramatic show of sympathy. "Don't worry, you'll join us soon. Once you do your time as household staff." He says it so quickly, I'm too caught off guard to respond. Household staff, aka my new role as the prime minister's wife's assistant, isn't exactly considered prestigious or desirable.

I wait for him to fully disappear toward the bar before squeezing in next to Laine, who uncharacteristically averts her gaze to her lap the moment I make eye contact. I contemplate telling her what Hunter just said, but then I remember the one rule: Never put Laine in the middle. She'd never take sides anyway. Instead, she'd come up with endless explanations:

You know Hunter, he doesn't have a filter!

He didn't mean it like that, Andi. He has a good heart. The best. Did you know he volunteers with Big Brothers Big Sisters?

"Some guy just walked into my stall while I was peeing," I announce instead, keeping my head low.

Laine's brows shoot up to her hairline. "You didn't lock the door?"

"I thought I did, but it was broken. And that's not even the worst part. The guy saw everything because I had to take this whole thing off." I motion to my onesie.

"Full bush?" she asks, because apparently that's an important detail.

"Not full. But overdue for a wax." Not that I'm planning on getting one. No one's venturing downtown anytime soon. No point in subjecting myself to socially sanctioned torture just to impress a man.

Laine erupts in booming, witchy laughter, following it up with a smack on the thigh. She does that when something particularly amuses her (which is most things). Her tendency to feel every morsel of emotion with her whole body is one of the things I love most about her. Her intensity is what makes her excellent at her job. When she's finally collected herself, she turns and pops her head over the back of the booth like a gopher peeking out of its burrow, scanning for predators. "Who was it?"

"I don't know. I was too mortified to get a good look at him." Aside from his eyes.

She slaps the back of the booth like she's at a high-energy sporting event. "Andi, is that him?"

I duck my head even lower, chin to chest, making a triple chin. Highly attractive. "Not looking."

"Code red. Code red. He's coming over. And he's kind of . . . hot. Not really your type, but-"

I shrink inward, averting my hard stare to the ring of condensation pooled on the sticky table. I will not make accidental eye contact with whoever just saw me nude, hunched over on the toilet. I refuse.

"Uh, hey." It's definitely him. It's the same deep, rough-around-the-edges voice that yelled Shit! in the bathroom. There's a weight to it, a grit that stops you in your tracks.

I don't look up. If I can't see him, he can't see me.

After three of the longest seconds of my life, my theory proves false.

"Andi? He's still here," Laine informs with a sharp poke in the ribs.

Death, please take me.

I begrudgingly lift my eyes, raking them over a pair of dark-wash jeans, a gray Henley T-shirt covering arms more muscular than I've ever seen up close, a prominent Adam's apple poking through a dark, neatly trimmed beard. His face is boyishly cute, with a slightly bulbous nose and ears that stick out a little from beneath overgrown waves the color of dark roast coffee. And then there's those blue eyes, crinkling at the corners, twinkling even in the dim bar lighting.

Laine is 100 percent right. He is not my type. And by "not my type," I mean aesthetically superior to me in every way, face and body.

Before I can slither under the table and disappear forevermore, those eyes latch on to mine. He raises his hand, fingers hesitating in midair, like he hasn't decided if he's committing to a wave or a handshake. Apparently, he decides on neither, shoving both hands into the pockets of his jeans.

"Uh, hi?" I say.

"Hi." He stops, the apples of his cheeks turning a touch pink above his beard. "Sorry. I already said 'hi.' Um, I think we, uh, just met in the bathroom?" He jerks his thumb back in the direction of the bathrooms, squinting adorably at me with one eye.

"Yup. We sure did," I yelp.

"I wanted to apologize and make sure you were okay."

"Oh, uh, thanks? I'm okay." As okay as one can be mere minutes after a stranger inadvertently saw their naked body.

I expect him to do us both a solid and leave, but he lingers. "It won't happen again," he assures me with a dip of his chin.