Lay Down Your Head
Classification/Summary: Answer to Jori and Michele's State of
the Union Challenge for (this is killin' me, here) smutty songfic.
Disclaimer: This wouldn't happen on the show unless it got
picked up by cable, making the story way too far off the
canonic mark for anyone to be upset about.
The song is "Lay Down Your Head" by Jeanne Tesori and Brian
Crawley, copyright 1996 & 1998 by That's Music to My Ears,
LTD (ASCAP) and Bayfield Music (BMI), used with admiration
but without permission. The performance I'm hearing in my
head is by Audra McDonald from the album "How Glory Goes,"
Nonesuch 79580-2, copyright 2000 Nonesuch Records and WEA
International.
Anyway.
Thank you, Ryo, for your beta, your patience, and your love
of He Who Is The Hot.
***
Lay down your head and sleep, sleep.
I'll be your pillow, soft and deep.
Leave me your troubles, I will keep
Your days gone by, your days gone by.
She was perceptive. She knew what he thought of her in times
of crisis. He saw her as a little lost creature, someone he
could wrap up and defend in those rare moments of absolute
chivalry, someone who would praise him, encourage him, in
this antique endeavor.
Except that he had appeared on her doorstep, dripping with
rainwater, watching with his mouth open as she answered the
door with a towel around her shoulders and a cup of tea in
her hand. So it had been unclear from the start who was
going to save whom.
Donna shifted a little. Their bodies made an elongated "s"
in her bed. Josh's head was in the valley of her waist, her
legs against his chest, his arms wrapped warm and tight
around her thighs.
She let had him in without a word, her sad, sad mouth
finally remembering how to smile while he shook himself off
like a wet setter. "You disappeared after the speech."
"It was crazy in there. We weren't with the motorcade so we
got swept out with the press," she had answered, handing him
the towel and the tea before padding back into the kitchen
to pour another cup that she could keep for herself this
time. "Put your coat on the back of a chair, not the sofa,
and take your shoes off before you catch pneumonia."
"It's a virus, you don't get pneumonia from cold feet."
His feet were too far away to test for coldness now, but she
warmed her toes between his thighs. He grumbled something in
his sleep and pressed his cheek against her hip. She stroked
his hair, still wet from the rain or perhaps the
perspiration from their activity.
"What wind blew you hither?" she had asked once she got
settled with her own tea and made sure her robe was securely
tied.
"That's nice, Donna. Shakespeare in the middle of a storm."
"You haven't answered my question."
Josh had opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times,
running his hand over the back of his head and making a
disorderly cluster of waves out of his wet hair. "I...we
thought he...we didn't know..." He shook his head. "I asked
CJ to pinch me when he said it - I thought I was dreaming."
"Did she?"
"Damn straight. I think she bruised me."
She had laughed then, the unexpected and unfamiliar sound
filling the room and making Josh smile. It was worth it, to
see his smile. "So you're drunk and you're here to yell at
Rachel's cats?"
"No. Surprisingly, I'm sober."
"I thought you'd all go to the place."
"Nope. I puttered around for a few minutes but I'm wired. I
couldn't work. I needed..."
His eyes were soft, vulnerable, with rain darkening his
eyelashes and highlighting the planes of his face.
"What, Josh?"
It was beyond crazy, watching the rapid rise and fall of his
chest as he struggled for words. She had the power to stop
this, to make it all better with a quip, but she didn't want
to. Instead she had let him step forward, wrap her in his
arms, and press her head to his shoulder with a strong hand.
She had let him hold her because it was something he needed,
something that could give him stability and a sense of
control in a world spinning on an insane axis. It had
started out safe, familial, not anything that could be held
against them. But it had progressed with Josh's hands under
Donna's robe and her leg pressed against his growing
hardness, and now they were asleep in her bed. Definitely
something that could be held against them.
She hated sleeping on her side, found it uncomfortable and
unbalanced. But tonight wasn't for sleeping; she'd have the
rest of her life for that. Tonight was for watching Josh as
blue-silver moonlight touched his face.
His face had been lovely, she remembered, when he had tipped
up her chin and given her a soft kiss. Each kiss had been
different, moving from tentative to comforting to frantic,
and she had felt grateful that rain fell from his hair onto
her face to cover her tears. He'd leapt backwards, one hand
tracing an unknown, tremulous pattern in the air while with
the other he had touched his fingertips to his mouth.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. God, Donna, I'm such an asshole, I
didn't...I can't begin to..."
"Josh." She had needed to stop the flood of words before
they both drowned. Never taking her eyes from his, she had
opened her arms and given herself eagerly to their mutual
downfall.
Fallen now, a vine wrapped around a rose, they lay in a
whirlwind of mussed sheets and tangled limbs. She could
still feel him inside her, still remember every inch of his
flesh as he joined himself to her, like phantom pain turned
somehow joyous. He'd never let go of her hands, always
keeping his fingers threaded through hers, even when he had
shouted her name to the heavens as his essence filled her.
Shouted her name, and the forbidden words, and then repeated
them so softly that she had been certain it was a
lust-induced hallucination.
But he'd asked her to tell him the same thing, when his
fingers were dancing over her oversensitized flesh, when she
held his head to her breast and let him feel the hummingbird
wings of her heartbeat. "Please, Donna," he had entreated,
and she let the words slide out of her as easily as he had
slid into her. And when she had come, once, twice, a third
time, she told him again.
He was at rest, finally, finally, after their breathing had
slowed and their faces had flushed with embarrassment and
remembered yearning, and he'd made some mumbled promises
he'd never be able to keep, but she knew he'd believed them
when he said them.
She felt the tickle of his eyelashes against her waist.
Looking down, she saw his eyes, large and luminous and
afraid. "It's okay, Josh. Go back to sleep."
Whatever he saw in her expression seemed to reassure him. He
said something into her flesh, something that made her smile
while tears fell like an unexpected summer storm.
***
Lay down your head and dream, dream.
You're so much gentler than you seem.
Is there a chance you might redeem
My days gone by, my days gone by?
Screw pretext.
They'd long since given up on trying to justify this, and CJ
didn't have time in her schedule for anything that wasn't
straightforward. Anything that wasn't exactly what it was.
They didn't need drinks or conversation or subliminal
signals, not after a friendship that had spanned a
continent, fifteen years, a marriage, a divorce, and a
presidential campaign. It had also spanned his private
breakdown, the one no one knew about but her, the one where
he woke up every night for three months covered in sweat,
screaming that it was blood.
Not after that. They could just look at one another at the
end of a particularly Godawful day - and they had plenty of
those, especially now - and end up in a sweating, panting
pile of body parts.
No, there was more to it than that, CJ, thought as Toby
nuzzled her breast in post-coital semiconsciousness. For a
man who lived and died by the words he wrote for the rest of
the world, Toby had a peculiar inability to express himself
except with his ungainly body. She'd seen him rip into a
speech that Sam had spent days perfecting, watching Sam
withdraw like a whipped puppy, but the moment Toby touched
Sam's arm to indicate something he liked, Sam's morose
expression would be replaced with sudden, sunny joy.
Personally, she'd have kicked his ass for that kind of
treatment, but in some part of Sam's complicated psyche he
seemed to need frequent dressings-down, perhaps to
compensate for the youthful privilege that he wore like an
albatross around his neck.
And what did she, Claudia Jean Cregg, White House Press
Secretary and the Penultimate Person to Know, need?
She'd made it clear to Toby. Touch me here. Harder. Harder.
I won't break.
Even after fifteen years and God knew how many frantic
nights, his tenderness came as surprise. Sometimes she
suspected that she was barking sexual orders at him to see
if he'd finally snap. But he never did. More of a gentleman
in bed than out of it, he always bore his weight on his own
arms, always kept his beard from leaving marks on her neck
or thighs, always managed, by sheer force of intractable
will, to have her crying out to him or God or both before
he'd allow his own release.
It had driven her especially crazy tonight. "Just once,
Toby, couldya just be a caveman?" she'd asked, still panting
from one of the orgasms that had rippled through her while
he waited and watched with those dark, unreadable eyes.
"I'm too nice?" he'd asked, trying without success to hide
his smile in his beard while thrusting deep into her.
"You're telling me I'm too nice?"
"Yeah, I know, it probably never happens."
"Not too much, no." He'd rested his forehead on her
collarbone, sighing, and watched himself slipping in and out
of her, something that had always seemed to fascinate him.
Thinking about that always made her eyes fill.
She turned her head and rubbed her damp cheek against the
pillow. Her back ached from where she'd strained upwards,
taunting him, trying to get him to lose control. All for
nothing. Well, not nothing, because Toby reached around and
rubbed the tight muscles, his touch expert and soothing.
"You're tense," he whispered into the long curve of her
neck.
"It was a tense kind of day." She hooked a thumb under his
jaw, making him come up for a kiss that tasted like scotch
and cigars and despair and everything else that made him
Toby.
His eyes were topaz in the muted light. "I'm sorry you're
tense, CJ," he murmured. "I'm sorry about all of it, I
really am."
"We've been over this and over this..."
"Yeah. I know. But it doesn't make it suck any less."
She smiled and kissed him again, this time with her heart in
it. "He's running, Toby. He's going to finish this job.
That's more important than the order of being told, or even
who told us." It wasn't entirely true; some part of her
would always resent the hell out of hearing it from Leo when
everyone else had been granted an audience with the
President.
And Toby knew that. "Leo feels like crap about how it went
down."
"Yeah, well, he can take a number." She shook her head,
feeling the ends of her hair catching in Toby's beard. "I
don't want to talk about this. Not now." She tightened her
embrace, moaning as Toby's hands roamed the length of her
body.
"So what do you want to do?" he asked, and she could see the
way his smile, the mischievous, cunning one, lit up his
entire face.
"Oh, this and that." She stretched, holding on to the
headboard for leverage as she felt all her vertebrae align.
"This?" His finger made a tight circle in the wet curls
between her thighs.
She arched into his hand. Damn the backache, Toby was too
good to waste. "This," she agreed, her voice coming from
somewhere deep and dark and dangerous.
"How about...that?" he asked, soberly regarding her as he
began kissing his way down her torso.
"Oh, definitely...that." Toby's mouth, that could wound in
so many ways in his day-to-day conversation, had an entirely
different function when it was against her, pulling her out
of her thoughts until all she knew was that her blood hadn't
been anywhere near her brain for too long. His scalp was
smooth and warm beneath her fingers as she stroked it. He
hummed something that was a little like opera and a little
like pain, his tongue darting around, not sharp but soft and
smooth and wet.
She heard herself whimpering and didn't care.
He did that thing with his tongue, something she didn't
think was technically possible and was probably illegal in
some southern states, and she screamed his name as the room
whirled and grew dark except for the sparkles behind her
closed eyelids.
"I love it when you do that." He sounded like fifteen
different kinds of smug, smug on a level that even Josh
could only dream about.
Toby folded his arms over CJ's belly and rested his chin
there, watching her wind down. He adjusted his body enough
so that he could plant a noisy kiss in her navel, then
resumed his quiet vigil.
"How you doin' down there?" CJ asked, her voice more than a
little raw.
"I'll take an IOU."
It was his code phrase, something he said rather than admit
that his middle-aged body wasn't going to cooperate the way
it had when they were twentysomething and could make love
until their flesh was the color of sunrise. She found it
peculiarly endearing, like the man himself.
"C'mere, then," she whispered, and he obliged by scaling her
long body until he could lie on his back and put her head on
his chest. She draped her leg over him because she knew he
liked it, and because his body was warm and comforting.
"I suspected that he was sick, Toby."
"Ssh, ssh." He kissed her temple, then tucked her head back
under his chin. "None of that matters. None of it."
"The Grand Jury will..."
"The Grand Jury can kiss my ass, CJ." He held her a little
more tightly, enough to make her feel secure and balanced.
"I'd like to see that."
His heartbeat was slowing, the thumping gentle and regular.
He kissed her again. "CJ?" he asked in a voice thick with
sleep.
"Yeah?"
"I won't let you fall."
***
And oh, his breath is so warm.
Mine is short, and my ears are ringing.
Everywhere, my skin is singing.
There wasn't a mirror in this miserable, dank room in the
bowels of the White House, but there was one window,
probably meant for coal delivery in some bygone era, and she
could see their reflection in it. The colors were wrenched
from the palette by a night that didn't so much fall as
collapse, so instead of gold and ebony she only saw her
light hair brushing her shoulder, and his dark head
contrasted against it.
It would look like something from a bad movie if someone
were to walk into her office right now. It would look like
two staff members in flagrante, too stupid even to close the
door much less lock it. But the funny part - if you
absolutely had to find something funny in the midst of what
she'd learned, along with the rest of the world, in the last
few hours - was that they'd simply fallen asleep in each
other's arms.
Fully dressed, no less, except for Ainsley's right shoe,
which lay just out of reach of her questing toes.
Sam had lurched into her office looking as if death would've
been preferable to whatever state of mind he was in. Ainsley
had opened her mouth to rip him to shreds over the whole MS
disaster, to tell him in no uncertain terms how much legal,
ethical, and moral trouble he was in and that she wanted no
part of it, ever. But before she'd had the chance to say any
of it, he had just stumbled over to her and thrown himself
into her arms.
She'd patted his back, tentatively at first, then rubbing in
circles like she would if he were a cranky baby needing to
be soothed. That image didn't last long, especially when
he'd begun kissing the base of her throat, working his way
upwards to her mouth. "Sam," she'd tried to say, but it came
out as a moan as she found herself inspecting his impossibly
even teeth with her tongue.
"Ainsley," he'd whispered, kissing each eyelid with lips
almost too soft to be entirely masculine. "This is stupid. I
should go."
His hair had been blue-black with rain, drops still clinging
to his finely-boned face, and the pads of his fingers were
slightly shriveled against the firm, soft skin of her
cheeks.
"Don't go, Sam," she had said, her drawl putting three
syllables into his simple, honest name. "It hurts me, too."
He'd slid downward, ending up on his knees with his face
pressed against her stomach, and when she cupped his face it
was so, so cold. His breath, oddly, had been fever-hot, and
she had wondered if she should call a doctor. The only
doctor she had been able to think of was the First Lady, who
probably wouldn't be a doctor much longer if Ainsley's party
had anything to say about it, and that had made her sad
enough to lean over and let tears slip down her face and
fall into Sam's sodden hair.
The new moisture had gotten his attention. "Ah, don't,
Ainsley, I'm sorry."
"Shut up, Sam."
So they had ended up in her one comfortable chair with her
on his lap, kissing with sweet innocence until Sam's body
succumbed to depression and sleep deprivation and he had
relaxed, leaving her to absorb the chill of his body and
rework it into living warmth.
The man she served was in deep trouble. Her friends were
probably toasting each other right now, placing bets on who
would take Josiah Bartlet for a ride in the next election.
God only knew what Toby was thinking right now, and she
didn't want to imagine the kind of days Josh was going to be
putting in, trying to make the disclosure of this horrible
disease work in the President's favor. She didn't envy CJ
the onerous task of putting a good public face on what
should, really, have been a private sorrow.
And Sam. Poor, sweet, misguided Sam, who'd put his faith in
greatness only to have it crumble at his feet, what would he
do?
She didn't know, but as she felt his body becoming warm and
pliant in her arms, she knew that she wouldn't leave him to
do it alone.
***
Lay down your head and sleep, sleep.
I will be pleased your soul to keep.
Give yourself over to the deep
Of days gone by, of days gone by.
Her weight alone hadn't been enough to make the old bed
creak, but the addition of his body, slim as it was, too
slim for her peace of mind, made the familiar wooden
chirping. She heard him laughing above her even as he kept
up the pace of his thrusts. "It's nice...not to have...to
worry about that..." he groaned, and she kissed him in
response.
It had been so long, so long. As gentle as he was, it was
still uncomfortable, and familiar as he was, it was still a
little foreign. But oh, to feel the concentration in his
limbs as he worked his way in and out of her body, to see
the gleam in his eyes that had never dimmed in all these
years. She would endure fifty times fifty, fifty times a
thousand, just to have him joined to her like this.
"Am I hurting you?" he asked in that tender, concerned
voice, and she didn't have the heart to say yes because then
he would stop, and the world would stop, and her heart would
stop.
"No, no. It's just been a while, you know?"
"Yeah, I know." He changed the angle a little and it didn't
chafe as much, although she still cursed the curious ravages
of time that left her mind in one state and her body in
another. But this new angle was nice, more than nice, and
with relief she began to feel a cushion of moisture between
their bodies.
"Ah, there we go." He smiled down at her, obviously proud of
himself, and she smiled back as she tightened around him. "I
love it when you do that," he whispered, kissing her again
and again.
"I'll keep that in mind." She knew every shudder, every
moan, as familiar to her as her own, and she knew that he
was going somewhere without her and she wanted to be with
him. Never taking her gaze from his face, she trailed one
hand down her body to just above the place where they were
joined.
He stopped, staring open-mouthed at her. "This is new," he
said, not angry, just puzzled and a little lost.
"I've had some practice in the last year or so," was her
reply. "You're fine, I just...I just..." She thought she was
beyond blushing, but evidently that was one function her
aging body decided to leave in place.
His kiss was ferocious, stronger than the ones he'd rained
on her face after she had phoned him and asked him to come
over. "I think I like it," he said softly as her muscles
began to flutter. "Oh, yeah, I like it a lot."
"Good, because I like it too."
It felt so good to laugh with him. They hadn't laughed
together in so long, since before any of this had happened,
and certainly not in those rare instances when they'd made
time for sex. She was still laughing when something else
bubbled up inside of her, making her arch upwards and cry
out his name.
He didn't last, of course he didn't, not after that, and
certainly not after all this time. She was glad when he
shuddered above her, silent and intense, and gave her the
kind of kiss he only bestowed in the few moments between
orgasm and slumber. She couldn't bring herself to resent the
way his body just melted into sleep - especially not after
she'd seen him, worn and pale and frightened, on the evening
news, and had picked up the phone before considering what
dangerous territory she was exploring.
She rearranged him a little, turning him onto his side and
spooning behind him, putting one hand on his belly and the
other in his soft hair. No more combat, no more
recrimination, no more self-inflicted pain. For tonight, for
as long as he needed her, they could be just the way it had
been. And it had been good all those years ago, before fame
and prestige and duty had eaten away at them. It would be
good again, now that they knew they should just be
themselves.
Just Leo and Jenny.
***
END
***
Feedback is almost as hot as Josh. :) - marguerite@swbell.net.
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