Dan is not like most humans, if he is in fact human at all. Only when he is exhausted beyond the point of caring does he ever treat Amy with something approaching care. When he is so tired that he can barely hold open a door – that's when he'll hold it for her. When it's nine o'clock at night and he hasn't eaten a real meal since the night before – these are the nights he buys her dinner too, from whatever food cart is closest to the door of the building they're leaving.
Amy holds her tongue in these moments. She half-believes they are slip-ups, momentary cracks in the façade of arrogance and ambition that Dan is constantly constructing. The other half of her pragmatically assumes he anticipates some future reward, even for a kindness as small as paying for her beer when he closes his tab. That would be like Dan. That is so Dan. And so, in these moments, both afraid to break a spell she doesn't trust and half beyond caring herself, Amy chooses not to question and simply to accept that she really fucking deserves whatever minor benevolences come her way anyway.
This exposition brings us to an unremarkable hotel room after a 17-hour day, just past midnight, wherein our heroine collapses on a fluffy coverlet and buries her face in it. She hears the click of the doorknob as it turns, listens as Dan ambles in from the adjoining room and sits heavily in chair next to the bed. She listens as he picks up the remote from the round oak table, then sets it down again without turning the television on. They sit and lay for at least a full minute in exhausted silence until Amy says, voice muffled by bedspread, "I feel dead."
"Inside or outside?" Dan asks wearily.
"Both," says Amy, rolling over onto her back and gazing up at the speckled ceiling. "Spiritually, intellectually…any way in which a person can feel dead, I do."
Dan chuckles. Amy can barely see him at the bottom of her plane of vision – he is leaned forward in the armchair, shirtsleeves rolled back to the elbows, said elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped. He's looking at the floor. Amy rolls back onto her stomach, kicking her flats off and sighing deeply.
A moment or two passes in silence, and then she feels his long fingers gently encircle her ankle.
Amy's breath hitches in her throat and her shoulders tense.
Flatly, Dan says, "Don't talk." His voice still sounds tired – there's no hint of affection, no caress in his tone. He begins a slow, steady pressure on the bottom of her foot, right underneath of her toes.
Amy most definitely does not feel dead in the following minutes. Dan rubs her aching feet slowly in silence while her brain whirrs, confusion warring with surprise and pleasure. His thumb presses into the spot next to the ball of her foot and she sighs involuntarily at the pressure. He pauses for a half-second, then repeats the motion with more force.
When he drops her right foot and switches to her left, she cannot stand the silence any longer. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, hating herself immediately for the vulnerability in her voice. The suspicion with which she meant to imbue the question is nowhere to be found. He doesn't answer.
She closes her eyes against the worn cotton of the bedspread and thinks about the thousands of hours she has spent with this man. She has seen him purple with rage; seen him brilliant, in his fucking element, with Washington elite; seen him wracked with anxiety, weeping; seen the sheen of sweat on his back as he pounds into her - and yet this is the most intimate experience they have shared: a silent foot rub in a three-star hotel.
Dan drags his nails across the top of her foot and she looks over her shoulder at him again. He is still not looking at her. Staring at her feet, his head bowed in the low light from her single standing lamp, she cannot read him. When he finally speaks, she has almost given up expecting him to, and the words startle her.
"You're fucking gorgeous, Amy," he says, then raises his eyes to meet hers. "The next time I take you to bed, don't try so hard."
He tosses her foot down and stands, straightening up and crossing the room swiftly. The adjoining door is closed before Amy can say a word.