Fight in Campaign Mode

"You're right," she conceded. "I'm being ridiculous. I didn't even thank you for sharing your room with me." Ellis looked up in surprise as he bounced on the bed. "Tonight is just for staff to relax from the drive and prepare for tomorrow, which is packed," she continued.

"Let me take you out. Unless you're worried about fraternizing with me as well?" Ellis looked even more surprised at that about-face, but didn't protest.

"Nah, I just told Mika that because he's a dick." Dawn rolled her eyes and partly entertained revoking her offer. But a half-hour later, they were sharing vegetable hakka noodles and Cantonese chow mein at a little eatery a few minutes' walk from the motel.

"I like to order the exact same thing in Chinese restaurants every time I visit a new place," she told him. "Just to see how it compares. The best place I ever had this combo was at a little hole in the wall in south Mississauga behind a billiards club--"

"Mr. Tee's Gold Chain?" Ellis exclaimed.

"No way!" Dawn laughed.

"I grew up right across the street from there in Port Credit," Ellis told her while spearing some broccoli at the end of a fork full of noodles. "You're right, I haven't had better Chinese food anywhere else. That's where we order from when we don't feel like cooking."

We? Dawn thought, realising this was the first time Ellis even remotely mentioned his personal life.

"You live with someone?" she asked tentatively. "A woman?"

"Yup."

"What... what does she do?" Dawn tried. Ellis looked up, seeming mildly amused.

"She runs a dry cleaners."

"Is she... okay with how much you're away for work? I mean, I'm sure it's a strain on the relationship."

"She's got her life and I've got mine," Ellis managed with as straight a face as he could keep. Dawn furrowed her brow while she chewed a cube of tofu with her noodles.

"So it's not serious?" she asked after swallowing her bite.

"Considering I've known her my entire life, yeah, it kind of is," he replied, inwardly laughing at Dawn's further mystification. "But bearing in mind it would be a crime to have a relationship with my 56-year-old mother..." Dawn rolled her eyes as Ellis guffawed with a mouthful of food.

"Always the asshat, aren't we?" she stated.

"Careful or I'll tell the woman I love I'm sharing a bed with you tonight." He anticipated Dawn's next move just as she opened her mouth again. "And before you say anything about gamer nerds living in their moms' basements--" he felt a sense of satisfaction as she closed her mouth, "--she lives with me. She works because she wants to but I took over the bills a long time ago, right after--I took over the bills when I got my first job."

Dawn noticed Ellis's face change in that moment, and she knew that wasn't the original end of his sentence. He turned a laser focus back onto his food and didn't look up at her again until they paid and left. It was only a 10-minute walk back to the motel, but Dawn felt like the awkward silence spanned an eternity.

He took over the bills after what happened? she questioned herself, acutely aware he didn't mention anything about his father. As soon as they entered the motel lobby, however, she recognised the peaceful hush of their walk was preferable to the alternative that greeted her.

"Dawn, where were you?!" Bukari, the campaign's finance manager, exclaimed as soon as she and Ellis walked in. "Nevermind, I need a sign-off on last week's expenditures."

"We're booked at Q105 and then CHEM-FM only a half-hour apart tomorrow," Rosa told her, "and that's Mika's thing so I don't know if I should reschedule or cancel one."

Dawn took in her staff's questions, a little disappointed she couldn't even slip away for dinner but touched that they'd all been working as soon as their bus got in.

"Do we want standing room only or chairs at the morning town hall?" their intern Jermaine joined the crowd forming around their boss. "Is it formal or casual?"

"Where's the performance report from the Kenora stops?" Dawn's assistant Sahrish asked. Dawn looked at the frazzled faces around her, then took a deep breath.

"Rosa, the radio stations are the last events before we get back on the bus tomorrow. Re-sked CHEM-FM for a half-hour later but cancel if they put up a fuss." She turned to Jermaine. "It's casual just like everything Fred does. Tables with chairs at the back wall but otherwise nothing in front of Fred's front table to leave room for the cameras, tripods, and mic stands.

"Sahrish, check your junk mail; I sent you Kenora from the bus two hours ago. Bukari, show me the spreadsheets now, I've got time."

As her team dispersed and she followed Bukari to his room, she briefly caught site of Ellis standing by the front desk and observing the scene. But he had his impeccable poker face on again and she couldn't tell what he was thinking despite holding his stare until she left the lobby.

It was another two hours of troubleshooting and a brief staff meeting where she went over the following day's plan, before an exhausted Dawn returned to Ellis's room in the dark. He looked up from the book he was reading for just a second to say hi, but didn't seem like he wanted to continue their conversation from dinner.

Dawn let him be and went into the bathroom to change into her night clothes and brush her teeth, after which she quietly smiled to herself when she noticed Ellis checking out her legs from overtop his book. She felt a touch guilty for the cheap thrill because she was committed to Mika, but she didn't know what it was about Ellis that kept her guessing.

He didn't forget his promise to sleep above the covers, but his body was turned toward her. Dawn silently looked at him after he closed his eyes, then fell asleep, herself.

When he heard her slow, even breathing, Ellis opened his eyes again and wistfully gazed at Dawn's lovely face for what felt like hours. He tried, but he was unable to get past the regret that this was the closest he'd ever get to sharing a bed with such an incredible woman.

***********

Monday morning, Ellis couldn't recall the last time he found it so difficult to string two sentences together. He could scarcely force his brain to focus on writing up whatever it was he was supposed to be covering on Fred that day.

They'd returned from the northern press junket two days earlier and Ellis had snoozed for part of the bus ride home to make up for watching Dawn sleep much of the night they'd spent in his motel room.

His head was still aching a touch but the one solace was that he didn't have to look at Mika and Dawn together today. He felt bad for the guy and hoped his family was okay, because it had to have been a serious issue for him to be absent from the office just 9 days before the election.

"You look like you need a break," he worked up the nerve to approach Dawn at her desk later that afternoon. "Wanna go for a coffee?" She must have been stressed out, as she practically leapt out of her desk chair and grabbed her purse.

"How's he doing?" Ellis asked once they were out the door. Dawn looked over at him as though she didn't understand.

"I... I actually don't know," she replied, which immediately switched on Ellis's spider sense. "I've tried to text him but--"

"Wait a second. The election's next week and you haven't heard from your PR director since we saw him drive away in a cab three days ago?"

"You know everyone has to have their phones off in a hospital," she defended her boyfriend, not to mention herself. "I'm worried it might be really bad."

"No, Dawn, what's really bad is that--at best--it didn't occur to him to step outside for five minutes to call you. His boss. Or to call Fred, for that matter! Does Fred even know what's going on?"

"No, and I was going to tell him once I got in touch with Mika," Dawn bit off, her patience waning.

"So as his chief of staff and campaign manager, you don't have a fiduciary duty to let him know one of his main staffers is AWOL?"

"He's not AWOL!" Dawn all but shouted as they neared the coffee shop on the other side of the plaza. "Jesus, Ellis, this is my job, not yours! And this is my boyfriend, whose interests I will look out for while he's tending to a family emergency! The only thing in all of this that's actually your goddamn business is to report on the campaign, and that's it."

"And that's really what it's about, isn't it?" Ellis charged as he stopped walking. "If this were Rosa or Jermaine or Bukari who disappeared without even a text to their boss at this critical point in time, we both know you wouldn't be covering their ass like this."

"You are infuriating." Dawn threw her hands up.

"Because you know I'm right. If you're actually going to let this creep tank all the hard work you've done in your career--"

"I know what I'm doing, Ellis. I've made it this far on my own and I don't need you of all people patronising me and lecturing me on the right thing to do."

"Really? Because you seem to have forgotten what that is."

"You know what? I don't want a coffee anymore," Dawn said, turning on her heel back toward the campaign office. She left Ellis standing in the parking lot, his words stinging her with every step she took to her desk.

Ellis got back 30 minutes later, no coffee in hand, and stalked back into the press room without so much as a glance in her direction. He felt like an idiot with his hands poised over his laptop keyboard for minutes at a time while his mind was elsewhere.

Somehow, he got through his notes and pieced together a bare-bones article with great difficulty over the next two hours, but he barely remembered what he'd written by the time he hit send around 5 p.m. that day. There's no way I can do this anymore, he acknowledged his defeat.

"Look," he said, approaching Dawn's desk on his way out, "I don't want to get in your way anymore. I'll still follow the itinerary and make it out to Fred's events, but I'll be working out of my own office from now on. Thanks for everything, and best of luck."

Ellis's eyes remained on hers for what seemed like a century, as if he were trying to memorise her. Then he was out the door without so much as a backward glance.

Between worrying about Mika and arguing with Ellis, Dawn was tempted to hit a bar on her way home that night. She opened her wallet and took out a photo of her, her sister, and their dad back when they still lived on the reservation.

Her father's eyes were sunken and hollow, and Dawn thought for the millionth time how she and her sister had no idea what battles he'd been fighting. She skipped the pub and stopped by a convenience store for a pint of ice cream instead.

Ugh, put your phone away, she scolded herself as she picked it up for likely the hundredth time upon entering the campaign office the next morning. Ellis's words lingered in her head and so the first thing she did was pull Fred aside into a back room, telling him she hadn't heard from Mika since Friday in Timmins.

"Holy shit, and it's Tuesday now," Fred said. "Is he okay?" Dawn shrugged, not knowing what else to tell him except that she'd texted him countless times over the weekend and that Rosa had taken over his duties in the meantime. Then, Bukari burst into the room.

"I'm really sorry for the interruption but this isn't about routine spreadsheets," he said to Dawn. He put his laptop on a table and pulled up the campaign accounts. "I tried to make the final payment for the convention center for our HQ on election night, and it wouldn't go through."

"You have got to be kidding me," Fred said. "Did you try another card? Bank transfer?"

"I tried it all, Fred," Bukari went on. "Then I went into our bank account transactions. Do either of you know what Pheasant Incorporated is? Or Saddle Brown Corp?" he asked, pointing at a few lines on his screen. "There are entries like that under accounts payable and I don't even know what services we've received from them."

Dawn's gut rumbled and she knew deep down this was going to be bad.

Fred told them to follow the trail and that he would check back later. Bukari and Dawn looked up the companies in question, both in the internal campaign documents and on the Internet, then finally resorted to asking around the office. In the meantime, Bukari had done the math.

"Dawn, whoever these vendors are, we've paid them $3 million. On the dot. That nice, round number doesn't sit well with me."

She was on the phone with North York General so she nodded to let Bukari know she'd heard him, but still held up a finger and stepped away. When she was taken off hold, the receptionist told her no one by the name of Eckhardt had been admitted in the last two weeks.

Dawn staggered to the back because her stomach kept rumbling, and she knew her breakfast wasn't sitting well. She threw up in the washroom, then dissolved in tears when she paired the missing campaign funds with Mika's sudden disappearance.

Ellis had been right.

***********

As he spun in his chair in the Examiner newsroom Tuesday afternoon, Ellis realised a change of venue wasn't what he actually needed to concentrate on his job. He needed to get Dawn out of his head, or at least come to terms with the fact she was with another man and he had irrefutably fucked up four years ago.

He sighed and looked at his notes from Fred's noontime event he'd just covered in the Beaches, not being able to construct a coherent sentence that made it seemed like he cared. Then, his phone lit up with a text from Jermaine at Fred's office.

Look, man, I'm not wild about the press but I have to ask why you're not here covering all this shit hitting the fan? Ellis simply replied with several questions marks. The campaign is missing $3 million and we think it has to do with Mika suddenly vanishing.

"The fuck?!" Ellis exclaimed at his phone, perhaps a little too loudly when his colleagues looked over at him. I'm on my way, he texted Jermaine back. Thanks.

He grabbed his laptop and a taxi chit to get him across town faster than the TTC would at this hour, then texted Dawn a few times from the cab. No reply.

She's probably trying to put out fire after fire, he thought, worried for how she was doing. It's just a theory right now; they don't know for sure the funds are missing and they don't know it's connected to Mika.

But when he walked into the campaign office and saw the staff's somber faces, he had to admit he'd been overly optimistic. Then, Fred came out of his office and the two men looked at each other in silence.

"What are you gonna do, man?" Ellis simply asked him. Fred plopped down into a chair and put both hands on his head in a show of exhaustion.

"We still have enough to take us through next week since we're just going to be campaigning around town. But as of now, we have no venue for election night."

"And Mika?"

"We've gone through the police checks and other documents he submitted when we hired him a year ago," Fred shrugged. "And it's possible they could have been doctored. We've called the Fraud Bureau of Toronto Police and they're on their way."

Ellis looked around the office at everyone who was still there, and Fred read his mind. He stepped closer as Ellis still scanned the room and whispered into the younger man's ear.

"I sent her home. She was beside herself and sick to her stomach."

Ellis pushed his hair back, not knowing what to do. Actually, he realised, he knew exactly what to do. He parked his laptop down on a nearby desk, tuned into a local radio station on his phone to keep up with breaking news, and pounded at his keyboard with all the fervor he'd been missing for days.

He dashed off 300 words in a half-hour. Then he sent his article to his editor and prepped some notes for the follow-up he knew he'd be writing the next day as more information broke. Following another cab ride to midtown, Ellis made a quick stop for food and wracked his memory while he walked around the vaguely familiar neighbourhood.

Finally, he came upon the concrete steps where he and Dawn had sat four years prior and knew he'd found the place.

After trying to seem inconspicuous while waiting for a resident to beep themselves into Dawn's building, Ellis leapt forward and caught the door just before it closed. Quickly noting her unit number in the lobby, he rode the elevator up then took a deep breath as he found himself standing in front of her door.

Lucky she still lives here, he thought while knocking and stepping out of view of the peephole. Let's see if this works.

"Um, who is it?" a little voice called from inside.

"I got a veg hakka noodles and Cantonese chow mein here? Extra fortune cookies?" The door clicked open and Ellis got ready.

"That's my usual but I didn't order--" Dawn instantly grimaced upon spotting Ellis and tried to slam the door but he stuck his steel-toed boot in the way.

"I didn't say you ordered it; I just said that's what I've got," he smiled, gradually pushing his way in and handing her the cartons of food. Then, he did a double-take. "Haven't been taking this well, have you?" he said, peering at her red-rimmed eyes and puffy face.

"No shit, Sherlock," she huffed. "How did you know where I live, anyway?"

"I remembered," he said softly. He couldn't help but thinking how perfect she looked in her baggy sweatpants with her hair up and no makeup on. "And I wanted to see the infamous couch I missed out on all those years ago."

Dawn let a smile slip through, but only for a moment before she crumbled into tears again. Without thinking, she put her arms around Ellis and buried her face in his chest. For once, Ellis went with his instinct and wrapped his arms tight around her while she sobbed.

"He played the long game, sweetie," he soothed her. "There's no way you could have known. There's no way Fred even knew."

"God, I ruined everything for Fred," she cried. "He thought it was a bad idea for his staff to date but he made an exception for us because he thought so highly of me."

"And he still does."

"I am in hiding a week before the election and Fred is out $3 million in campaign funds because of me!"

"Look, this has to stop," Ellis said, pulling back. "You didn't embezzle anything. It's bad enough when society finds a way to blame women for not preventing crimes that men do, but it's next-level when women blame themselves. All you did was have the bad luck of being targeted by a con man."

He led her to the table and sat her down, then went into her kitchen on a hunt for plates and forks. Dawn simply eyed him through the doorway, wondering what it was about her that she attracted monsters like Mika but not honest guys who flew under the radar like Ellis.

It's what she thought about through a silent dinner until Ellis slid a fortune cookie over to her and raised his eyebrows. Finally cracking a smile, she opened hers first.

"'It is now, and in this moment, that we must live,'" she read out loud.

"Wise cookie," Ellis said, breaking open his own. "Ooooh, 'a very attractive person has a message for you.' So lay it on me, Littlestone. What's the message?" Dawn looked at him solemnly as she pushed her chair back, took two steps over to Ellis, then tenderly kissed him on the forehead.

Ellis's heart pounded under the warmth of her hand resting lightly on his chest. When he tilted his chin up, she moved to kiss his mouth.

"Wait," he whispered, abruptly pushing back his chair. "You don't have to do this, Dawn. I mean, I was happy to bring over some food and--"

"Oh my god," she exclaimed, straightening up and looking as though she'd been punched in the gut. "If you're going to reject me for the second time, Ellis, I at least deserve to know what's so hideous about me that you won't even give me a chance." Her chin shook like she was on the verge of tears yet again.