V
Jed drifted awake with customary slowness, and spent a good few minutes squinting in the sun and trying to resolve some niggling confusions. Strange bed. Unfamiliar room. Sleeping in his clothes. What...?
Ah.
As if the very memory that female people he was not related to lived in this house would summon them, Jed grabbed urgently for his shirt from the day before and tugged it on. He buttoned it swiftly and smoothed it out as well as he could, which wasn't very. Being drenched in rain and then unceremoniously dropped hadn't done it a great deal of good.
Feeling suddenly awkward and embarrassed about his presence in this house, he wished he'd dared the rain to make his escape last night. What was he thinking, accepting an invitation to stay with people he'd known for a matter of hours? It was a credit to their generosity, but he never should have stayed.
The thought of intruding on the family's Sunday morning was mortifying, but an abrupt need to use the facilities wouldn't let him hide away until someone remembered him. He padded quickly out into the hallway in his socks, trying to remember which door meant the bathroom. That one. Right.
As he approached it, the door opened, and Abbey emerged. She looked startled for a moment, and then grinned at him, unselfconscious in an overlarge shirt over pyjama bottoms and bare feet. "Hey."
"Uh... morning," he choked, momentarily experiencing a disconnection of brain and speech centres. She headed past him back to her own bedroom and, impending ordination be damned, he watched her go.
Jed Bartlet's mornings, up to this stage in his life, had not, typically, included pretty girls wandering the halls in states of semi-undress. Yes, that was a... definitely a novelty. Not an entirely unwelcome one, admittedly...
He got a hold of himself, and ducked quickly into the bathroom. Cold water splashed on his face helped. A little.
When he left the bathroom a few moments later, Dr. Barrington was crossing the hallway, managing still to look dignified even in a robe. "Good morning, Jed," he nodded, kindly enough although Jed was sure he must be resenting the intrusion.
"Good morning, sir. Uh, thank you, sir, for, for letting me stay here. I should probably be-" He pointed vaguely towards the hall downstairs and the front door, but Dr. Barrington was having none of it.
"You'll be staying for breakfast, young man," he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. "I won't have it be said that the Barringtons aren't good hosts."
"I... don't imagine that anyone could ever say that, Dr. Barrington," he said honestly.
Mrs. Barrington seemed genuinely delighted to have him there, and refused to listen to any noises he made about not needing breakfast. It suffused him with a strange blend of embarrassed gratitude and melancholy. He missed his mother with the sharpest edge in a long time. She'd died the summer before his first year of college, and he was torn between regret that she couldn't have remained for longer and relief that he'd been there at her side when it happened. Not just for his own sake; there'd been black and blue ribs over the priest he'd brought to administer the last rites, and he knew that without him there, his father would never have made any concession to her wishes.
But those were thoughts of home, and such memories were never good ones. Jed pushed them aside in favour of a happier morning born out of the generosity of strangers.
Abbey came down to the table while he was eating; dressed for company now, but he still blushed a little when he saw her, and didn't know why. If she noticed, she only smiled back at him. Despite the basic idiocy of it, his heart double-stepped for a beat.
He liked Abbey. Not for the oddly pleasant way his stomach had seemed to drop, but because he just... liked her. She was nice and smart and funny, and he'd like to be her friend.
And he thought that maybe, just maybe, after the way they'd listened to the rain and the radio and talked about their dreams and she'd laughed and smiled and understood him, that she'd like to be his friend as well.
And he wasn't reading anything into the fact that such a thought made his skin tingle slightly all over. He wasn't reading anything at all.
Dr. Barrington leafed absently through the newspaper as he drank his morning coffee. "I'd like to leave early if we can, dear," he said to his wife. "I was having a most fascinating conversation with Father Clifton last week, and I'd like to catch him before the service begins if I can."
"Father Clifton?" Jed looked up at him, surprised. "That's my church," he explained as the doctor peered at him over his glasses.
"Is it?" Dr. Barrington smiled. "Excellent, then you can come to church with us."
"Sir, I- You're being far too kind to me," Jed objected.
"Anybody who thinks there's such a thing as 'too kind' is obviously an idiot," he said, with a stern cheerfulness that was a world away from the aggressively cold way his own father corrected him. "And besides, it would be desperately remiss of me to not do anything in my power to help a young man who actually wants to go to church."
"Faith is important," Jed said, quietly but still forcefully.
"It is indeed," Dr. Barrington agreed, with a nod of dignified approval. Abbey smiled at him across the table.
He had a suspicion that the order of importance he ranked those gestures in was not quite the way common sense dictated it should be.
It was funny how she didn't feel more awkward hanging out with a boy she'd met barely twenty-four hours ago - okay, they'd had plenty of time trapped together talking during the storm, but even so. But Jed just felt... comfortable. He thought so like her in all sorts of little ways that it was as if he'd known him a lot longer than she really had.
And he was very cute. Not in a 'to look at' way - well, okay, maybe just a little, but she did have a boyfriend and everything - but in the way he was so over-polite and he blushed all the time. Yet she didn't think it was honestly just shyness... last night, when they'd been talking, and he'd spoken about politics and theology and dreams, any trace of hesitation had melted away, and he'd spoken like he owned the world.
She had a hunch that Mr. Jed Bartlet was going to grow up to become somebody very interesting indeed, and Abbey thought she'd rather like to get to know him well enough to tag along for the ride.
It was strange... his small stature seemed to grow less noticeable as they stepped into the church. It was something in the way he seemed so comfortable with his surroundings; other people were hesitant and careful of their actions in a house of worship, but Jed looked like he was at home there.
Father Clifton came smiling towards them, with a handshake for her father and a nod for her and her mother. "Daniel, Mary, Abigail; lovely to see you." The old priest was an amiable man, without a trace of the self-conscious piety too many men of the church liked to adopt.
"And you, father."
The priest focused on the fourth member of their group, and smiled even wider. "Ah, Jed! I didn't know you knew the Barringtons."
"Uh, yes father, we just met."
"And I'm sure you'll get on famously," he agreed. He laid a fond hand on Jed's shoulder. "We have high hopes for young Jed here, you know. He's going to make a fine, fine man of the cloth some day."
Under the suddenly startled collective gaze of three sets of eyes, Jed smiled awkwardly, and looked down at the ground. "I'll do my best, father," he said, quietly but seriously.
The funny feeling in her stomach, Abbey told herself later during the service, had simply been the swift kick of surprise.
"So... you're really going to be a priest?" Abbey tilted her head on one side to regard him, but he thought there was more honest curiosity there than the usual disbelief.
"Yeah." Jed slipped his hands into his pockets, moving his feet awkwardly. It was always weird, when people first found out you were going to be a priest. They didn't know how to take it.
"Oh." She was silent for a moment. "So, I guess..." she began tentatively "...I'll probably see you at the bookstore sometime?"
"Yeah... probably. I guess."
"Okay."
"Okay." He didn't know why he was grinning like an idiot. But she was smiling back, so he guessed it didn't matter. After a moment, she pointed towards her parents' car.
"I should-"
"Yeah."
"Okay... bye."
"Bye."
He watched her walk back to the car. Just before she reached it, she turned back to give him a quick wave and a grin.
He walked home with the stupid smile pasted to his face.
"Jed!" He was caught off-guard by the roar from his roommates that greeted his arrival.
"Where did you go last night, man?"
"Where did you sleep?"
"We've been calling all the hospitals, we thought you'd been killed or something!"
"Sorry! I just- I didn't-" Jed shrugged in helpless apology. He'd completely forgotten his roommates might be worrying about him - truth to tell, it had never occurred to him that they might notice he was missing.
It never failed to amaze him how quickly they could cease to worry about things.
"Hey, no big deal, buddy," Jason said, patting him absently on the head. "We're just not used to our little trainee priestlet going wandering."
"Where did you stay, man?" Andy asked him.
"Oh, I, um, I met this girl- No!" he shouted quickly, face flaming, as their eyebrows shot up in unison. "She, she, uh, she gave me a ride because of the storm, but it got too bad to come back into town so her parents let me stay at their house for the night."
His roommates refused to be put off by of such minor inconveniences as the truth. "Oh, she gave you a ride did she?" Andy smirked, waggling his eyebrows.
Jed narrowed his eyes. "Shut up, Andy."
"Ooh, think you hit a nerve there, And. Was she pretty?" Jason asked. Jed shook his head in disgust at the pair of them, and walked through into the kitchen.
He poured himself a glass of water, and smiled at his reflection in the window there for a few moments.
Yup, she was pretty, all right.