* * *
CJ couldn't stop giggling as she threw clothes, rather recklessly, into her suitcase. I can't believe Leo and I are going to get away with this. Three days with the man all to myself. I may just be in heaven.
"Claude?" Leo called from the bathroom.
"Yes, Gerald?" She also couldn't believe he let her call him this. Whenever Ambassador Marbury (whom Leo disliked more every day, especially since he discovered CJ used to have something of a crush on him) said it, Leo went running for a large blunt object. But somehow, when CJ said it, it made sense to him.
He came to the door connecting the bathroom to the bedroom, looking strangely sheepish. "I, um...I wanted to offer you room in my suitcase. If you need it."
"Well, thanks, Leo, but I really don't think I'll fit in your suitcase."
He groaned. "Very funny. I was just..." he waved into the bathroom. "I noticed you have a lot of...stuff in the bathroom, and I didn't know how much of it you're gonna have to bring on the trip, so..."
She put a hand to her mouth. "You'd do that? I mean, you'd let me take up space in your suitcase?"
He shrugged, but he understood why this was a huge deal to her. Things hadn't been flawless in the two months since their reconciliation, drained and overwrought beside CJ's hospital bed, but Leo was trying. Really he was. He'd kissed her in her office; he'd stayed the night at her apartment; and once they even had dinner with Mallory. That was the lowlight of CJ's month, but it meant a lot to Leo, so she sucked it up and tried not to think about how few years separated her from the woman who could conceivably become her stepdaughter someday. He still wouldn't kiss her in his office, and they'd yet to go on a date that didn't involve the darkest corner of a restaurant he's been going to for years, known for its "discretion." Most nights she wanted to say "fuck discretion" and take Leo out dancing, or to a play, or just...on a walk, you know? Outside. But she understood how scared he was. He wasn't completely over Jenny; he was even more scrutinized than most of the residents of the presidential fishbowl, and sometimes he was insecure about all the years and all the inches between them.
So in lieu of big things -- things she dimly recalled normal couples were supposed to do, though she couldn't remember the last time she had a 'normal' relationship -- CJ made much of small things. He would give her a compliment on a job well done -- a compliment she deserved, that any of the senior staff might've given -- and twist it so there was no mistaking that what he meant was, "Damn, my girlfriend's impressive." He hated the word "girlfriend" but used it anyway because she felt "lover" reduced their relationship to what they did in the bedroom. And the bathroom. And her office. And a storage room in the basement of the White House. Et cetera. He let her call him Gerald. He called Gail his stepdaughter.
He offered her room in his suitcase.
"Thank you," she said, practically dancing around the bed to kiss him on the cheek, "but I can get everything I need into this bag."
He looked skeptically from the bag to the cluttered drawers and cabinets in the bathroom. "Really?"
"Yeah." She stopped. "Something wrong?"
"I don't get -- you don't need all the crap in there?"
She laughed. "Not really."
"Then why do you have it?"
She shrugged lightly and went back to tossing underwear into her bag. "To confuse the piss out of you, I guess."
"Well then, Claude, you have succeeded."
"Fanfuckingtastic," she said decidedly.
And because there was something indescribably appealing about her when she swore, and because he was a little lightheaded from watching her throw her underwear around for the last five minutes, CJ found arms wrapped around her waist from behind and a pair of strong hands dipping below the waistband of her skirt. She was extremely grateful they weren't leaving until tomorrow; at this rate she wouldn't be packed until five minutes before take-off.
* * *
She lay naked in the bed, one hand on Leo's back and the other running up and down his arm. "You know," she commented, eyeing the suitcase that was unceremoniously kicked to the floor, "I'm gonna have to repack all my stuff now."
"Later," he growled, rolling on top of her again and dropping a line of kisses down the side of her neck. She writhed against the sheets, and he was hard against her, and she thought, Fuck the suitcase.
Later, Leo was using her stomach as a pillow, and her knees were drawn up, her feet tapping thoughtfully against the mattress. He asked, "Who's watching my stepdaughter while we're gone?"
She smiled, like she always did when he called Gail that. "Carol." She paused. "Maybe Danny. Probably Josh. He's got a thing about that fish."
She started giggling and couldn't stop. And because his head was where it was, Leo started to laugh, too, like the game she played with her brothers when they were kids. He looked up at her, because she had the most intoxicating laugh on the planet, and far be it from him to stop her from doing it, but he was curious. "What are we laughing at?"
She collected herself, but little gasps of laughter escaped sometimes in the middle of her words, and that was incredibly sexy, too, and he started to think she'd better say whatever it was pretty damned fast. "I was just...ooh...I was just thinking about...ha! Sorry. About the -- ah -- look on the President's face today when he -- ha ha -- figured out about Sam and Josh. Ahem."
He didn't get that. "Figured out what about Sam and Josh?"
"After the, you know, the rabbits." She brought the chuckles under control, but she couldn't stop smiling.
He was totally lost. "What rabbits?"
"Well, I mean, not the actual rabbits. That's Josh's joke. But, you know, Sam with the firefighters."
He remembered there was a thing, earlier today in the Oval, something about Sam's mother and the California wildfire, and after that the President kicked them all out, but he wasn't sure what that had to do with rabbits, or Josh, or why it was making CJ laugh. "CJ, what are you talking about?"
For the first time, she suspected Leo might not know this. This stunned her; he was the Chief of Staff and, frankly, inhuman in his knowledge of everything that went on inside the White House. But then she remembered that she only knew because she saw the fondling in the bar and the communal cab home, and that they'd really been very good since then. She had a hunch Donna knew, because Donna had been cold to them for nearly a month, but they'd done nothing to put a blinking neon 'Q' over their heads. "N-nothing," she stammered, but her nonchalance was far too thick for Leo not to hear the fear beneath it.
He sat up and faced her. "Claude. What?"
"It's nothing, Gerald. Really."
Every time she said it was nothing, his heart sped up. He took her shoulders in his hands, and even in his agitation he appreciated the soft skin beneath his palms. "CJ, you need to tell me exactly what you're talking about."
She was a dead woman. Josh and Sam owed her big-time for keeping their secret this long, but accidentally outing them to the inimitable Leo McGarry would easily wipe that debt and tip the balance in their favor. Taking a deep breath, she began, "Know the crack Josh makes whenever someone mentions rabbits?"
Leo supplied the dubious punch line: "Multiplying like rabbits."
She nodded. "Yeah. So today when the President asked Sam if his mother was in any danger from the fires, Sam said, `Well, you know wildfires. Always spreading like wildfire.' He and Josh both lost it a little, and President Bartlet figured it out." She hoped he'll put the rest of the pieces together, leaving her wiggle room with the boys: "I didn't tell him, guys, really. He pieced it together himself." She hated herself for that.
"Figured what out, exactly?" he demanded.
"That Josh and Sam are...you know. Josh and Sam."
He snorted. If that's all she means... Though he suspected it wasn't. "They're always Josh and Sam, Claude."
Shit. He's going to pretend he doesn't know what I'm talking about. She was fairly certain that was what he was doing. As tempting as it was to let him continue under this delusion, she knew he'd bring it up later, at a far less suitable time. So she apologized mentally to Sam and Josh and plunged ahead. "No, I mean, that they're Sam and Josh. Get it? The same way you and I are Leo and CJ."
"No." Flatly. Then, more emphatic. "Fuck, no. Christ, CJ--"
"I'm sorry, Leo. I was sure you already knew."
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" He stood and started pacing her bedroom, stark naked and not caring. His voice grated loud and livid against the walls. "Seriously, CJ, I'm going to--"
"No, you're not!" she yelled back. "They've been damned good, Leo."
"They weren't good today." He stopped pacing and turned to face her. Somehow he frightened her much more because he was naked. "Not if the President figured it out. `Cause we know he pays zero attention to this shit. Christ, CJ. This is no good. No damned good. Who knows?"
She shrugged helplessly. He was taking this far worse than expected. "I don't know. I...I think...just you, me, the President, and... and Donna." Her voice dropped on the last name.
"Donna?" He flung his hands in the air. "Great. Just super. The spurned woman. You know the first time the assistants have another night out, this is the first page of the Post."
"Leo! You know they're not like that!"
He sagged, came back and sat down on the end of the bed, staring into the room. "I'm trying to figure out what this is going to do to us, CJ."
"Why?" she snapped. "They're two more than consenting adults, and what they do in their bedroom is their business--" she put up a hand to still his protest. "I know it's more than that, but we picked Mendoza over Harrison because of privacy; we'd be hypocrites to say that guarantee of privacy doesn't apply to Bartlet's own staff. Moreover," she continued, leaning forward and starting to back up her words with sweeping hand gestures, "this administration has aggressively supported gay rights from the beginning, so bailing on our own people the instant we find out they're romantically involved would make us look weak to both the left and the right -- besides being a betrayal of two of my closest friends to which I will not be a party." Then she remembered that this turned Leo on, when she got swept up in defending what she believed in, so she dropped her voice and leaned even closer to him, smiling at his full-body blush and the fine sheen of sweat covering him. "Most of all, Mr McGarry, I cannot allow you to allow this...entanglement to interfere with our getaway plans."
He looked at her over her shoulder, and she looked so beautiful, pupils dilated from her impassioned tirade, lips parted slightly, hair mussed from a bit of thrashing against the pillows. He laughed wryly; couldn't help it. "They are chuckleheads," he remarked.
She laughed inwardly at his choice of words, but confined her response to, "Yes, they are."
"But they'll still be chuckleheads on Friday. Unless they decide to break up before that, which I could live with."
"Leo!"
"From a public relations standpoint." He feigned hurt. "You always suspect the worst of me, Claude."
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. "So we're still getting the hell out of here?"
He rubbed her arms, and she shivered against his back. "We're still getting the hell out of here."
She said, "Thank you," into his neck, which he really wished she wouldn't do, because he was trying to stay mad at Josh and Sam, and he couldn't because suddenly staying mad at Josh and Sam was so much less important than pinning CJ to the bed and making her scream.
CJ never quite got back to her suitcase.
* * *
It wasn't exactly a vacation. And they weren't entirely alone. Toby was with them on the plane to Dallas/Fort Worth, at which point they shipped him off to Austin to, as the President put it, "knock some sense into the Public Utilities Commission." Leo and CJ stayed in Dallas to take a meeting with a software engineer who'd been causing a stir in Congress with his anti-firewall programs.
And now it was almost a vacation. And they were entirely alone.
After a quiet dinner in their hotel room, they took a walk. Outside. They looked at the stars, which neither of them had done in quite some time. They held hands -- in public! And the world did not grind to a halt because of it. CJ thought Leo might actually be relaxing a little.
The next day's meeting with the software engineer was short and simple. He was so awed by meeting the CJ Cregg and the Leo McGarry (which led her to wonder, briefly, if there were clones running around somewhere), that he agreed without resistance to their suggestions about marketing his program. He invited them to dinner, which they politely declined, saying it wouldn't look right. He agreed, though he was clearly disappointed, but he made them promise to look him up the next time they're in Texas. They lied politely and say they'd be sure to do that, and suddenly the evening was completely free. No more obligations until they got on a plane Friday morning. Well, other than the twelve tons of crap they were always lugging around with them that constantly needed to be seen to, but the President didn't expect to see their smiling faces until Friday. By then they'd have plenty to smile about.
She made him take her to a restaurant noted for its steaks, not its discretion. She flirted with the teen-aged waiter, which worried him for a while, but when the kid threw in a gigantic slice of chocolate cake on the house, he realized a little flirting had its advantages. The manager came over to ask if everything was to their liking, which indeed it was. He mentioned a jazz festival in the park, and CJ dragged Leo to that, as well. He pretended, for form's sake, not to be having a good time, but she knew better, and the fact that he kept faking it made her laugh and love him all the more.
It was nearly one by the time they returned to their room, stumbling from a completely different kind of exhaustion than they were used to. The kind they both remembered from their college days, when the fate of a nation wasn't riding on anything they said or did. And because they were feeling like college kids, they made love for nearly three hours, riding a tide of desire and emotions all the way into the morning.
* * *
Rrrring!
"Mph."
Rrrring!
"MMMPH! Leo? Your phone."
"That's gonna be Toby."
"And I'm gonna kill him."
Rrrring!
"You're not answering."
"Nah. You know what I love about our technologically advanced era?"
"Voicemail?"
Rrrri--
"Voicemail."
Brrrrr!
"And...he didn't leave a message."
"Imagine my shock."
Brrrrr!
"That's your phone."
"Fuck." She fumbled around the night table `til she found the phone and answered it in the middle of the third ring. "Give me one reason I shouldn't kill you, Toby."
"CJ?"
"And it better be a really good one."
"Hey, do you know if Leo's OK? He's not answering his cell." Leo was in the bathroom.
"I imagine he's sleeping. All the cool kids are doing it now."
"All the cool -- CJ, what are you--"
"I'm pulling out my garroting wire here, Toby."
"Right. Listen, I had my meeting with the chair of the PUC yesterday. And he told me that the Vice President told him that the President hasn't completely ruled out deregulating the electric industry."
"The President hasn't completely ruled out--"
"That's not how it's gonna play."
"Ya think?"
"It's down there under the, you know, the chipmunks in wheels."
"Hamsters."
"Whatever."
"I'm just saying, if you're going to subject me to this at 6 in the morning, you should keep your rodents straight."
"Leo needs to know this."
"Leo's--" she started to protest.
"Leo needs to know this. You need to tell him. Right now."
"I would, Toby, if I weren't, right now, on the phone with you."
"So as soon as you hang up the phone--"
"Yes. As soon as I hang up the phone, I will call Leo. Feel better?"
"Much. Thank you."
"You're welcome. See you tomorrow, at which point you will be in so much trouble." Leo came out of the bathroom as she hung up.. "Let's get out of here, Gerald. Let's steal a car -- a cool car --– and make a break for Mexico."
"Steal a car?" He raised his eyebrow. "Hardly seemly in our line of work, Claude."
"This is what I'm saying. We should get a new line of work."
"Grand theft auto is a line of work?"
"It's not the White House," she said bitterly.
He heard that sharp edge and knew their vacation was about to be over. "What's wrong with Toby?"
"Hoynes told Pat Wood we haven't ruled out dereg."
"We haven't ruled out--"
"Yeah, but that's not how it's going to play. I mean, we haven't ruled it out, but we put it down there after, like, powering the country with kinetic rodent energy."
He shook his head, trying not to think of a country powered by kinetic rodent energy, then sat next to her on the bed. "So."
"So."
"I have to go to Austin and straighten out Pat Wood."
"Yes."
"And then I have to go back to Washington and straighten out John Hoynes."
"Yes."
"And you have to go back to Washington and find a positive way to spin the story when I kill John Hoynes."
"OK."
"I don't want to do any of those things." She didn't answer. "I'd much rather stay here with you."
She sighed. "I'd rather have you here. But you have this job to do."
"Yes, yes I do. I have to beat the shit out of the Vice President." He took her hand. "We got two good days out of the deal, anyway."
"We did," she said, brightening a little. Then, rather spontaneously, "I love you."
"I love you, too, Claude," he returned, grinning. "There's no chance either of us is going to get back to sleep, is there?"
"Negative."
"OK. You want the shower first?"
"What is this `first' nonsense?" She pulled him into the bathroom. But as the water heated up, before they climbed in, she put her hand on his chest. "Gerald?"
"Yeah?"
"I meant it Monday. Go easy on Josh and Sam. It's gotta be hard enough on them already without--" She bit that back, but he knew.
"Without me being me?"
"Yeah."
He couldn't believe he was willing to do this for no better reason than that she asked him to. Then he realized maybe there was no better reason. He would go to Austin, and he would go back to Washington, because things hadn't changed that much. But he would go easy on the chuckleheads. Because he was trying. Really he was.
END