XII
Despite her relatively frustrated mood, a smile slid naturally enough into place as she spotted her other half across the hallway. "Charlie!" She hustled towards him.
He didn't muster much of a perfunctory smile in return. "Hey." He looked tired, and stressed, and she could feel the last tatters of good cheer beginning to drift away. Charlie was overworking and undersleeping all the time these days, and it somehow made it even worse that she knew it wasn't his fault. Dammit, how were you supposed to even be satisfyingly pissed at anybody if you knew the reason your husband was running himself ragged was to try and take some of the heat off your father?
Things hadn't been easy on her dad in recent months. Oh, it was laughable to say they ever were, but it seemed like every new crisis went on to top the last. The shooting, then the MS hearings, then Mrs. Landingham dying, then reelection, then his health taking a turn for the worst, then that book coming out about his childhood...
After all that, a few coughs and sneezes that a long parade of military doctors and her mother were all prepared to swear blind was just a cold didn't seem like much - but even that worried her. Her dad didn't get colds. They might mock his 'why, when I was your age' ramblings, but there was some truth to it; her dad was such a pain in the ass over being sick her mother would never let him get away with wandering out in the snow if there wasn't. He had to be pretty drained for such a minor bug to attack his system like this.
Great, yet more worries. Zoey indulged a brief pang of longing for those carefree days when her dad was just a governor, and she was still a schoolgirl who could get away with being a whiny brat for a couple of hours when she wanted to.
She realised her husband still hadn't said anything. His forehead was crinkled angrily, as if he was not just zoning out from exhaustion but actively brooding about something. She frowned. "Hey, Charlie, are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he said tersely. The tone of voice said a lot more than the empty words. Yup, he was angry about something. Charlie in a mood was fairly rare, but when he was, it went deep, and getting to the root of it was like drilling for blood out of a stone.
Probably she should be the dutiful wife and patiently try to get to the bottom of it anyway, but screw it, she was five months pregnant, tired, frustrated, and her feet hurt. She could only deal with one cranky family member at a time, and her dad was next on the list. "Is he in?"
"He'll be back in a minute."
Normally, that minute would be a gratefully snatched chance for a few giggles and perhaps some surreptitious kissing and snuggling, but today it just stretched out in awkward silence while they waited for her father to return.
"Leo!"
"Selena." She smiled like a shark, but he knew how the game was played. He smiled warmly in return, took her coat and held out her chair for her. If they were playing the charm offensive, well, he wasn't exactly unarmed in that area.
Josh, on the other hand, would have been hopelessly set adrift. His deputy must have some form of protective charisma - there had to be a reason none of the long list of dangerous women he dated had killed him yet - but when it came to political manoeuvring, he had a one-track mind. Throw in further complications, and the only two routes were hopeless derailment or bulldozing on through in complete obliviousness. Neither of which would hold sway against the Selena McGanns of this world; if you wanted to be anything but coquettishly stonewalled, you had to be prepared to dance.
Well, he could definitely do that. Leo admired the menu, and she leaned across the table towards him. "I hear the lemon chicken here is good."
"Miguel does a wonderful salmon," he informed her.
"Really? Well, I'll trust your judgement," she smiled.
"If only more people would do that, the world would be a better place."
She laughed at that, a pleasant enough sound. She was only flirting with him for the sake of it, he knew; not that she wouldn't consider the arm of the Chief of Staff a useful acquisition, but they'd met on enough previous occasions for her to know he was far too wily to be caught in any snare he didn't want to.
Selena was a rampant political opportunist, of that he had no doubt, but a saboteur? It made no sense. She wanted this bill as badly as they did, and she hated Joe Bridges. Why leak information, even through a third party, that would shatter months of careful deal-brokering at no benefit to her? If Josh's instincts were even halfway right, then there had to be some big piece of the puzzle missing.
They waited on their starters. Selena drank wine, and he tried not to smell it. Lord, he missed accenting a good meal with a carefully selected vintage. That was from back in the days when it had still mattered what he was drinking, and a treacherous temptation; it was funny how sometimes it could be harder to resist the lure of a drink when it wasn't desperation driving you. When he was beating down the crippling pangs of stress he knew exactly why he shouldn't, but the desire for a simple sip could creep up on you.
He wondered for a moment if it was a deliberate cruelty, then dismissed it. Not that Selena would necessarily be above toying with his weaknesses, but to her it was old news. She didn't know - almost nobody knew - of his lapse back into secret drinking less than a year ago. If that ever escaped into general knowledge, he was finished in Washington, and it had been too long since it happened not to take Jed down with him when he went. Not that he wouldn't fight it - if it ever came out, nobody on earth would hear from his lips that the president had so much as even guessed about his lapse.
"I assume your deputy set you on my trail," she said airily, taking another careless sip. He looked innocent.
"I can't call up an old friend and ask them to have dinner?"
Selena chuckled again. "You? Never."
He shrugged easily. "Hey, you know me. Any chance for a good meal." He nodded at the server. "Thank you."
The senator shook her head. "Honest to God, Leo, I don't know how one man puts away the amount of rich food you do and stays so slim."
"It's working in the West Wing," he dismissed lightly. "You've hiked five miles by the time you've had three meetings."
She inspected her nails. "All that hustle and bustle," she sighed, projecting the entirely false image of the carefree socialite for all she was worth, "I don't know how you stand it. I much prefer to conduct my business in more... informal surroundings."
He smirked, but refused to be drawn into commenting. She tilted her glass at him, and then set it aside. "And so, to business," she said with a world-weary sigh. Leo straightened up, knowing her mind was much more on the ball than she chose to appear.
"The leak can only have come from three places," he said without further preamble. "You, Tim Wiley, or Alec Goss."
"Four places," she corrected pointedly. "It takes two sides to tango."
He nodded in acknowledgement, but said bluntly "It didn't come from our end."
"Nor did it come from mine," she countered, meeting his gaze with ice cold confidence. "So if this is a witch hunt... the only thing you're getting out of it is a salmon dinner."
That much he'd already figured out for himself. Selena McGann put up a perfectly unreadable mask. The only question was, was it concealing her guilt... or nothing but the truth?
A soft knock of knuckles against the doorframe interrupted his train of thought. Admittedly, the train had been going round in circles for some time, but still. "Ginger, can it wait?" he grated.
"Well, you know, I just couldn't wait to show you my new look."
Okay. Not Ginger. Sam raised his head and blinked bemusedly as Steve smirked at him from the doorway. "You're not Ginger," he observed.
"Thanks, 'cause... I was worried for a moment there."
Sam realised that he'd been tensely hunched over his computer screen for so long that his muscles were aching. He stretched, and was sure he heard something pop in his back. "What are you doing here?"
"I availed myself of this new concept called 'moving around'. It's radical, I know, but I think you should try it sometime."
He glowered at his other half. "This is all your fault, you know," he accused darkly.
"Aww, poor baby. I was blocked before you were. Come have lunch with me."
Sam sighed, and rubbed his eyes tiredly. "Steve, I really can't leave the-"
"So we'll eat in the mess!" he shrugged. "Bring your laptop if you can't bear to leave it. I brought my notes." He waggled a sheaf of papers pointedly. "Come on, you need a change of scene. I know I did."
He was probably right. Sam groaned as he stood up, and Steve smirked at him as he held the door.
"You've taken to making old man noises when you get up, do you know that?"
"Old man noises?"
"Old man noises. I'm thinking we're gonna need to install a stair-lift."
"Hey, somebody - who shall remain nameless - kept me up all last night-" He realised with some alarm that Bonnie was leering pointedly at him. "-Uh, not like that," he added hurriedly.
Steve leaned towards her. "Totally like that," he smirked, and dragged Sam away by the arm before he could attempt to protest.
"Hey!" he grumbled helplessly. Steve smiled softly at him, and pressed a kiss to his temple with no regard for constant the flow of staffers around them in the hallway.
"Lighten up, Sam," he suggested.
"I wish I could," Sam sighed, as he sat down with his meal a few moments later. He ran a tired hand through his hair, then rubbed his beard too for good measure. "I've been working on this speech since-" He broke off, and shook his head.
"Yeah, I know the feeling. This-" Steve bit back whatever swearword he had in mind, still slight in awe of even this more prosaic area of the White House. "- Documentation," he grated, filling it with enough feeling to substitute. He sighed, and absently stole one of Sam's fries as he stared disconsolately at his notes.
Sam pulled out his own crumpled - what was it? - fifteenth draft, and grimaced at it. As dinner party speeches went, it... well, it stank, actually. A few moments later, he became aware of Steve peering over his shoulder.
"It's really not that-"
"It is!" he snapped.
"Well, maybe if you-"
"Do you want to write this?" he growled, frustrated.
"Only if you want to write this."
They both paused, and then exchanged a long look. "Okay." Sam nudged his speech over to Steve.
"Okay." His boyfriend pushed across his notes.
A few moments later, both of them were scribbling away.
The only thing more frustrating than watching the clock was being irritated at himself for doing it. Individual units of time seemed to stretch out unreasonably, and yet every time he checked the clock it was later.
Andy must have had her doctor's appointment by now. She'd had time to get home. Go to the office. Come here.
Unless something had gone wrong. That was an irrational thought, he knew. There was not, at present, any proof there was anything to go wrong. Andy just suspected...
His wife - ex-wife, he corrected, inner proof-reader jumping on the mistake even though he made it every single time - might be pregnant. Or not be pregnant. Such a simple, mundane case of questions and probabilities... one that had never been simple or mundane for them.
Andy hadn't even known, the first time she was pregnant. Not until that dreadful night when by the time they'd found it out, she wasn't. The second time they'd known... but it hadn't ended any differently. The third time... Well, they'd battled for there to be a third time, but the best fertility experts in the state of Maryland hadn't been able to make it happen.
That had been a time of heart-wrenching false alarms, until it reached the point where neither of them could trust themselves to accurately read a test result. This could be another.
Or it could be real... with all the terrifying world of possibilities that brought with it. By now, Andy almost certainly knew, one way or another.
And she hadn't called.
She hadn't called, and he was increasingly sure now she wasn't going to. Whatever she'd been told, she wasn't ready to share it with him here, now, while he was at work.
The question was, did that mean she was pregnant... or that she wasn't?
