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TITLE: Center of Gravity 
AUTHOR: Ellen Milholland (AbsolutPerfecton@aol.com) 
CATEGORY: CJ/Sam
RATING: I'd put PG-13 for adult themes.
SPOILERS: ITSOTG 
SUMMARY: He finds her sometimes like this.

* 

He finds her sometimes like this.

He finds her on the banks of the Potomac, on nights where clouds
obscure the moonlight, the pitchy darkness invading her eyes and
marring her skin. She stares into the little lapping waves, sitting
with her feet hanging off the edge of the pier. He finds her with
tearstains on her cheeks, or he finds her smoking these long thin
French cigarettes that must cost her an arm and a leg.

He doesn't mind. They make her look glamorous, like something
out of a black and white movie from the forties, even though
he's read every one of the Surgeon General's reports. He likes
the way the smoke curls in the night air, and he likes the way
her lips purse as she takes a long draw, as they touch the tiny
gold insignia on the white paper and leave behind smudges of 
lipstick.

He likes watching her move because she does it so well, because
she's been practicing her entire life for these moments in the
dark. Because she has long legs and ungainly arms that she spent
twelve years in ballet trying to train. So now she moves like
sand in a breeze, and he doesn't even mind when she blows cigarette
smoke at him because in it, he sees her.

Sometimes he brings a bottle with him, usually vodka because
she likes the way it looks like water but isn't. She likes
the unexpected burn down her throat, likes the trompe l'oeil,
likes the water at her feet and the liquor in her mouth.

She tells him sometimes that she hates her life. On these occasions,
she drinks the whole bottle and he must come back and fetch her
car before dawn from the little parking lot. Other times, she
is antsy with nervous, ecstatic, contagious energy. These are the
times she kisses him and does not check to make sure no one's
watching.

Sometimes her kisses are black and sometimes they are cotton candy.
He has come to accept this, and he has learned to bend with her winds
so that he can keep her from breaking, because sometimes she is on
the edge.

So this time he has found her, her suit jacket flung across the hood
of her car alongside her shoes. When he glances through the open
window, he sees fifty manila folders strewn about her backseat,
each one bulging with post-its to mark important facts about arsenic
in New Mexico, the FTAA, Taiwan, Jiang Zemin, the Gaza Strip.

He wants to tell her that when it comes right down to it, none of it
is really as important as whether or not she remembers how to smile,
wants to take the whole pile of post-its and just throw them at her,
hoping they'll knock sense into her. He doesn't, of course, but he
smiles at the idea.

On the floor, there are a thousand Diet Coke bottles, Advil bottles,
bottles of the little blue pills he knows she sometimes takes to stay
awake, but only when the country really needs her. But later,
they make her throw up, and sometimes he holds back her hair and
rubs her neck and doesn't tell anyone, even when he worries. It
is the least he can do because sometimes she lets him cry and
kisses his tears away.

There is a crumpled McDonald's bag in the front passenger seat,
a cheerful Starbucks coffee cup on the dashboard, and three 
quarters and a dime sitting in the cup holder. Her keys are still
in the ignition. Dozens of little blue pills are in the carpet,
dropped there by shaking hands.

Her shoulders are naked, and her skirt is hitched up so that her
knees are bare, too. Her head is thrown back, her hair falling behind
her, her fingers splayed against the dirty pavement.

"Hey," she says as he approaches, not opening her eyes. She judges
his distance by the sound of his footfalls, the sound of expensive
leather against cheap asphalt. She knows it is him because it's
never anyone else. "Got a light?"

"Nice to see you, too, CJ. I'm fine, thanks for asking," he
replies, pulling an expensive silver lighter from his pocket. "And
yeah, here."

She doesn't look at him as she reaches for the box of cigarettes
sitting near her leg. She taps one out, offers the tip to him.

The burst of flame is blinding, but the cool, red glow of the
cigarette helps him follow the movements of her hands in the hazy
April night. She tilts her head to the side to stretch, and he
leans down to kiss the base of her neck.

"Oh, Sam," she says, looking out over the water. "Shouldn't you
be off wooing Ainsley?" Underneath her words, she is asking him
to make her feel young again, but he doesn't know how.

"Probably," he answers with a shrug, sitting down next to her.
"CJ..." he begins warningly.

"I only had two of the pills. I haven't slept in three days."
She knows him well enough to know that she needs to start defending
herself.

"Why aren't you in bed, then?"

"I get lonely." She gestures with the cigarette, punctuating her
statements in all the wrong places. "I was just telling you so
that you didn't, you know, offer me a drink or something."

"Yeah, okay. Do you mind?" He gestures towards the box.

"Go ahead."

He smokes sometimes, on nights like these, with the Potomac
opening her mouth to swallow them. So he lights himself one, the
smoke filling his belly, and he turns to look at her.

She looks ragged, and her edges are all blurry against the night
sky. She is humming low in her throat, and he recognizes the tune
as Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, and her eyes are closed again. All
sorts of lines creep dangerously from her mouth and her eyes.
They look like scoring lines, like she's going to crack.

He touches her hair to reassure himself that she's real. She's
shaking from the pills, from the self-disgust, from the lack of
sleep. She's shaking hard enough for her hair to rustle even when
the breeze does not blow.

"CJ, you could be beautiful." He does not say it to hurt her,
but because it is the only truth he knows sometimes.

"Maybe," she answers noncommittally. "I guess. I always look tired
on camera." She lives her life through the camera, determines her
self-worth by the sound of her voice through the television's
speakers. The country must see her only at her best.

She only cries when she is alone in her office, and then, only
quietly, into her hands. Usually, one of her press conferences
is on television in the background, and usually she believes she
was not good enough. Sometimes he is there, and sometimes they have
sex there, like that, with her voice in the background, because
it is easy and slick and distracting. She will come and he will
kiss her mouth, and then she washes her face in the ladies' room,
and he goes back to work, and they don't talk for days.

He takes a moment to wonder why they, two of the country's most
powerful people and the mouths of the White House, wallow in so
much self-pity which is also self-indulgence. He wonders what's
wrong with their lives, why they find themselves in each other's
thoughts, and hands, and beds, why she finds herself in the pills,
and why he feels so helpless.

He wonders why they, brokers in words, often spend hours looking
soulfully and silently at one another, palms touching and thighs
touching and bellies touching.

He wonders at the fact that sometimes their bodies slide together
perfectly, but only in darkness, and he considers the fact that
perhaps in the nighttime they are different people.

"Do people ever ask you about me?" she asks.

"Turning vain on me, CJ?" he says, but only because he cannot
find the phrases to tell her that he thinks some part of her
died that day. That day that the President was shot. The moment
she found out that Josh was, too. It didn't matter that everyone
was mended to as good as new except for her, because all she
could feel was the rend in her heart.

He thinks it's stunning how quickly the world can change.

It was during the firestorm of press briefings and power meetings
that she'd started with the pills, just one or two, just to stay
on top of things. She was juggling eighty different little
multicolored balls, and no one could afford for her to drop a
single one.

So, of course, in the process she ended up dropping them all,
one at a time, until all that was left was a nice voice for the
reporters, a husk of a woman, full of knowledge and very little
else, a distant, haunted gaze.

And he had dutifully collected them, because she was his friend 
and because Josh was his friend. He had handed her all the balls,
taught her balance, became her fulcrum.

Sometimes she teeters, but he has become the center of her
gravity, and that is almost as dangerous.

She has been silent for a long time. "What I mean to say, CJ,
is that they don't have to ask for them to know the answers.
Leo wants you to go with him to AA."

"I don't drink that much."

"Yes, you do." He is past deception.

"Okay, so maybe I do." She flicks ashes off against a wave.
"I could use one now." Her voice is self-mocking.

He touches her back, tracing the ridges of her spine through
her blouse. He worries at the prominence of her clavicle, of her
pelvis, worries that she doesn't eat, figures he can't judge her
seeing as he can't remember the last time he had a normal meal.

"Your hands are warm tonight," she says.

And then she tosses the cigarette butt into the water, and she
turns her eyes towards his, and he's taking a long, feminine drag
off his own. Sometimes, she looks at him like that, and he feels
beautiful and sometimes he feels nauseous.

There are a thousand things left to be said, not the least of
which is how much he needs her, and how he could very possibly
love her if he knew that love didn't have to mean loss, and how
he couldn't resist pulling her closer and closer to his axis.

"You shouldn't have so much caffeine," he says instead 
after a pregnant silence. "It's bad for you."

And so she does the only thing she can think of. She throws
back her head and laughs, her throat raw, and she tells him to
come home with her. They stand as he agrees, and he wraps his arms
around her, and somehow they click together in all the right places.

But the darkness is ignorance, and all he can feel is the strange
pounding of her heart when he places his lips to her throat.

I think I might love you, he wants to say, but instead he says,
"I love that your heart beats," and that is almost enough.

Her mouth is bitter and her cheeks are salty, and he spends
the car ride picking up pills from the carpet and dutifully
replacing them in their bottle.

It's really the least he can do.