Chapter 8: Napoleon's Battle Plan
"You look like hell."
"You don't look so terrific yourself," CJ mumbles through a mouthful of salad as she hovers in the cabin door. "Going for the gangster look?"
I realize that her fork is pointing in the general direction of my jaw, prompting me to prod it experimentally. The by-product of my fight with Sam on Friday finally started to swell and turn an unflattering shade of purple early this afternoon, and apparently its now noticeable enough that people who aren't looking for it can see that I got well and truly clobbered. Testament to the fact that Sam Seaborn is not just a pretty face, I've also made the somewhat unwelcome discovery that he packs a pretty mean punch too. The thing stings like a sonofabitch when I poke it. I wince.
"Don't ask."
I return my attention to the twenty-eight-page position paper on Medicaid that landed on my desk at some point last week. Between preparations for the Convention and the hash I managed to make of my - our - personal life, Donna swears that she could actually hear my desk start to creak under the weight of the paperwork I haven't got round to. A one-hour flight to New York - delayed, incidentally, by more than ninety minutes - would, according to her, be a perfect opportunity for me to catch up on some of it. This specific memo manages to hold my concentration for no more than six lines before I turn back to CJ.
"Hey, Ceej?" I very carefully keep my eyes trained on my shoes. "You wouldn't happen to know if Sam talked to his mom today, would you?"
"Given that I'm neither his therapist nor his girlfriend?"
"If you were his therapist," I point out. "I would no longer be the only mentally unstable one, and it would throw the entire balance of this relationship off kilter. And if you were his girlfriend, I might be forced to do something, you know, violent and painful."
"Sure." She considers this. "You know I could take you, right?"
"In unarmed combat? Didn't doubt it for a second."
"Smart guy."
"Did you come down here for an actual reason, or was it just to cast doubt on my masculinity?"
"Staff meeting in five minutes." I can feel my eyebrows rise into what Toby dubbed my 'I didn't know that' look about three hours after I joined the campaign. According to him, I mostly did it when someone mentioned something I probably was meant to learn in law school. CJ notices and waves her fork around a bit more while she finishes chewing. "It was meant to be at the hotel, but it'll be past eleven by the time we get there, what with one thing and another."
That phrase refers to things like Marine One not showing up on time.
"Five minutes?"
"Probably more like four and a half now you wasted that thirty seconds having me explain it to you."
I leave CJ and her salad to themselves after stealing a couple of pieces of pasta, and spend one of my four and a half minutes tracking down Sam. Unlike the rest of us, in spite of a ninety-minute delay and a weekend that was by no standard relaxing, he doesn't look like hell so much as he still looks like he belongs on the cover of some random glossy magazine. He also, I notice with something of a self-satisfied smirk, manages to retain something of a post-coital glow several hours after the, well, coital part of it. He glances up at me and pulls his glasses off.
"What?"
"Senior staff." I wait while he shuffles a stack of paper into some semblance of order and stands up. "You talk to your mom yet?"
"Sure," Sam nods before starting to head up the plane, very obviously looking at anything but me and managing to be anything but subtle about it.
"You know, Sam, I may have a pretty bad poker face, but you have no poker face."
"I have a great poker face!" he exclaims defensively.
"Well, sure, but not with me, you don't."
"No, maybe not." He concedes the point. "I did, however, call my mother. Really," he adds, seeing the sceptical expression on my face. "It just wasn't what I would refer to as the classic definition of talking so much as I would probably refer to it as me saying 'hey, mom, it's Sam', and her not wasting any time in hanging the phone up on me."
"She hung up on you." I stop a couple of inches short of the President's cabin. "Seriously, she hung up on you?"
"Yup."
"Well, shit."
"I would say that pretty well sums it up, yes."
"Why would she do that?"
"One would imagine she wasn't all that thrilled about getting the details of her only son's love life from Mark Gottfried and the… whatever the hell half-cocked right-wing rag it is she reads, in which case I imagine it's my fault." He pauses and looks thoughtful. "Then of course there's always the possibility that she's a paranoid homophobe who even as we speak is filing the paperwork necessary to disown me, in which case I suppose it would be her fault."
"You two do realize that you'll most likely be able to participate in this meeting better if you're on the other side of the door, right?"
I'm saved from having to come up with a supportive response that isn't a flat-out lie by Toby, who brushes past with his usual grumpy sarcasm, leaving us very little option but to follow him inside. Unless, that is, we have a burning desire for the President of the United States and his senior staff to show a sudden and disturbing interest in what we're talking about. In the past couple of weeks I've started to think that people who believe dating a colleague invariably results in your personal life being dragged into the office might have a point. Because Sam and I spent two years doing a very good job of keeping work and home pretty well separate entities, and then we came out and didn't so much drag our personal life into the office as our co-workers became extremely nosey about things that are, to put it bluntly, none of their damn business. I slide in the door in time to hear Leo ascertaining that nobody blew anybody else up in the hour since we left the White House, and the President asking what's next.
"The press want to know when they'll be getting texts."
"They're not," Sam tells her as he sits down on the end of a table.
"Sure." CJ taps her notebook with a pen and looks confused. "Okay. Why not?"
"Because the text mentions, you know, several times, the name of the President's running mate and…"
"And we're not leaking that," she finishes. "Yeah, you know I'll be sending them all in your direction when they get hostile about this, right?"
"Knock yourself out."
"What's next?"
"Joey's people have been working the phones, she has polling data, and she's putting together a breakdown that she'll be able to go over with us in the morning."
"7am." Leo nods. "Anything else."
"Can I say a word about Josh and Sam?" CJ raises her index finger and proceeds to say a word about Josh and Sam without waiting for actual permission. "So far, it's been the weekend, but we're going to be spending the next three days in the almost constant company of a press gaggle who want to report the news."
"This isn't news," Toby interrupts. "The Convention is news. This is a sex scandal which to anyone with an iota of intelligence isn't even scandalous."
"I've got thirty boys and girls back there who don't make the distinction, and as far as their editors are concerned, news is what sells newspapers."
"You anticipate questions about prior relationships?" I ask doubtfully. "I mean, you actually think the press are going to want to know?"
"The press are absolutely going to want to know." Leo looks like he's explaining something to a four-year-old. "The two of you, go over this with CJ and Toby, but for God's sake do it somewhere else because your sex life is not something I want to know about."
My sex life isn't something I want him to know about either. There's something just wrong about discussing that in front of your father's best friend. I follow CJ, Toby, and Sam into a smaller cabin and close the door before starting again.
"Why do you…" I stop. "No. Technically, I know why they'll be interested in it, but why do you think that it's going to be a big deal?"
"Josh, where other people have relationships, you seem to have fiery plane crashes. Before this one, anyway," she amends, catching the full flood of Sam's warning glare. "At this point, it's a waste of time hoping that every woman you ever slept with isn't going to come crawling out of the woodwork to tell Larry King that if you had mentioned at any point you were gay, it might have ironed out a few key problems."
"For the nineteenth and final time, I am not gay."
"That doesn't matter on Hard Copy." CJ gives Sam a disbelieving look and he shrugs. "Sorry. You said that after the whole Laurie fiasco."
"I did, and you're right, but don't think you're getting out of this, Spanky."
"What'd I do?"
"You were engaged to a female reporter who thinks that I'm an arrogant jackass," I point out. "That's three things right there before we even start on the hooker."
"Call girl," he corrects automatically.
"Whatever. You - seriously, no matter what people say about me having fiery plane crashes more than actual relationships - you still win hands down when it comes to choosing people you absolutely shouldn't date."
I can't believe that we're having this conversation in front of our colleagues. And I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head around the fact that I couldn't give a damn. It might have something to do with the fact that when you realise this could all be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning, the issue of telling your friends gains a certain degree of perspective, even if one of them does happen to be the White House Press Secretary.
"Even if I did - which, by the way, I don't, and we're getting back to that - but even if I did, I'm not the one who holds the award for the worst break-up ever."
I cringe on the inside.
"Josh?"
"Yeah, I… um. Yeah." I clear my throat. "Much as I hate to say this, and although I'm hoping it was such a bad experience she blanked me from her mind, yeah. Sam might well have a point there."
"Are we…" CJ looks slightly lost. "We're not talking about Mandy, right? Because while that may not have been the worst ever, I gotta say, it must've come close."
"It did, but no, we're not talking about Mandy." Sam wasn't exaggerating when he says that this was the worst break-up ever. "My girlfriend from college. And it's a little embarrassing to admit, but I can't remember her name. So, anyway, we were together for five or six weeks before she walked into my dorm room and found me in bed with… you know what, I'd like to say a couple of things in my own defence. I was nineteen, I was stupid, I was incredibly confused about my sexuality, and it's not like she found us doing anything other than sleeping."
"Of course," Sam adds. "You were also naked and, you know, in bed together, so it's not like it was monumentally out of line for her to infer a few things about what had happened before she found you."
"Overshare." Toby goes slightly green. "This girl, whoever she was, found you in bed with who, exactly?"
"Dan Harris. The captain of the debating team."
"So." CJ unflatteringly summarises what Sam and I have just told her. "We've got a problem with an anonymous woman who you dated at Harvard and who walked in on you in bed with another guy, and we've got a potential problem with the guy…"
"Not the potential problem you highlighted before," I interrupt. "You said that every woman I had ever slept with would come crawling out the woodwork saying that had I mentioned that I was gay it would have cleared up a few key issues, and I'm just thinking that had Dan not known I was attracted to men we would never have gotten to first base, let alone made it into bed."
"When I highlighted that potential problem, I didn't know there had been other men!"
"Two. It's not like I did the Yankee's starting line-up on the Kennedy desk."
"I did not need to hear that." CJ looks skywards. "I could have gone my entire life without hearing you say that."
Toby, whose nauseous hue appeared to have passed, turns another vibrant shade of green. CJ looks as though she's trying to figure out how to forget I ever spoke those words. And Sam, who looks slightly flushed, seems to have been rendered temporarily dumb.
"Moving swiftly onwards." CJ coughs. "And I'm not at all sure I want to know the answer to this next question. Who was the second guy?"
I was hoping I wouldn't have to get into this part. I study my shoes in the hope of gaining divine inspiration or something.
"Matt."
"Matt?" The penny drops. "Matt Skinner?"
"You slept with a Republican?"
"Nine weeks, twenty years ago."
"And you didn't maybe think that this would have, I don't know, ramifications?"
"Not so much, no!" I close my eyes. "We were working on the Hill. He was a kid getting some experience before he started college; I was a kid killing time before I went to Yale. White House Deputy Chief of Staff wasn't even on my road map! Working for the President, that was some distant fantasy. And even if I had thought it would have ramifications… God, Sam and I, that was gonna have ramifications, and it's not like that stopped us!" I turn rapidly to the other half of that 'us' before he starts thinking that he should give me a bruise on the other side of my face to match the one I've already got. "I meant that in the best way possible."
"And Sam, you knew about them?"
"Well, not at the time, no, but… yeah, I know about it now."
"How the hell did you find out about it?"
"He told me." The look on Sam's face tells her that that much should have been obvious. "Let's clear up a couple of things. We were together for three months before anything actually happened between us. No, this wasn't entirely by choice, and yes, it did have a lot to do with that thing that happened with a bunch of neo-Nazis in a Dodge Durango, but I sat and bared my soul the morning after Rosslyn, and it was three months before we slept together - election night, if you were that interested."
CJ and Toby's faces say that they weren't, that much.
"What Sam is attempting to say," I pick up. "Except using far more words and going into much greater detail than actually necessary, is that we were getting into what turned out to be a pretty serious relationship. We did the partner history thing a while ago, although I can't say that when my dad gave me that talk on the birds and the bees I ever envisaged having a partner history conversation with the White House Press Secretary..."
"Okay." Toby raises his palms outward. "Is he… I don't know, do you think he's going to tell people?"
"He's a Republican member of the House of Representatives. He gets no mileage out of revealing that he had a fling with a guy from the other side when he was eighteen, especially not when that guy's already out and spoken for."
"If he was planning on making an issue of this, he would have done it Saturday."
"I think that's probably true," CJ nods. "Okay. You had a fling with Matt Skinner. Any other disastrous relationships I should know about?"
I think about this and then start counting off on my fingers.
"Uh… we've done Dan, Matt, and random girl whose name I can't quite remember. Rachel Goodwin. I was with her for two years; I was a law student, and she was a Chemistry undergrad. She graduated and went to Canada to work for a pharmaceuticals company. I went to work on the Hill. We still liked each other. Then there was this one girl who I slept with once and who never knew my name. I had an on-again, off-again thing with Al - female - Rosenberg for about four and a half years, and yes, she might be one of your people who comes crawling out of the woodwork."
"Commitment issues?" Toby guesses. "Have to say, she wouldn't be completely out of line on that one."
"Anyone else?"
"Mandy. That's it."
"That's it?"
"Mandy and I had a longer history than you guys ever knew about. I was still working for Brennan when we met, and then I broke up with her…"
"Spectacularly," CJ mutters.
"On the night before the election. I was single from us crashing and burning to us," I make random gesticulations between Sam and I, "Getting together. You knew that part."
"Okay. So you have, in the course of your life, slept with…" She calculates it. "Seven - no, eight - people, only two of whom are likely to say anything to the press. You know, for you, that's less trouble than I expected. Sam?"
"I'll have you know that I'm even less trouble than Josh, thank you."
"Who'd you sleep with?"
"Nina Macintosh, in my freshman and sophomore years at Princeton, and who cheated on me. Andrea Jeffries, in my senior year for four months, which kind of fizzled out when we graduated. Lucy Pomerantz, at Duke. We broke up because we were, for want of a better term, completely incompatible, but we were still great friends." He wrinkles his nose. "Incidentally, she set me up with Lisa. Then Laurie, and Mal - except, I didn't sleep with her - and Josh."
"Josh was your first guy?"
"On the levels where you consider that I fell for him when I was twenty-two, that's not such a significant achievement."
Except for the part where I freaked when Sam told me that I was his first guy. It's something of a responsibility, no matter what levels you look at it on.
"Lisa?" Toby speaks up. "This is…"
"This is the Lisa I used to be enagaged to," Sam nods.
"Christ, Sam. She's a blood-sucking fiend."
"In the non-vampire sense. And how many could you possibly have imagined there were, anyway?"
"Hey." CJ's eyes light up. "Lisa Sherbourne-Seaborn?"
"We never got as far as the hyphen, but yeah, her."
"Your ex-fiancee," Toby sounds a lot less thrilled than CJ about this. "Is, first and foremost, a reporter, and second of all, thinks that your boyfriend is an arrogant jackass."
"Yeah, I can see where you might have a problem with that. She also sort of blames Josh for us not getting married, which might actually be a reasonable point considering he showed up in my office all dripping with an idiot grin on his face to drag me off to New Hampshire because he'd found the real thing…"
"You weren't walking out of that office with your career intact!" I know the full story of the ship and the oil and feel the need for this point to be made. "Not your career in corporate law, anyway, and certainly not a partnership at Gage Whitney."
"I would also say," he continues, ignoring me. "That everyone at some point in their lives thinks that Josh is an arrogant jackass, including me and his mother, so in his defence, it's not exactly his fault that she jumped on the bandwagon. She also, however, saw him hug me at the State of the Union, which could possibly be a point that doesn't exactly go in his favor."
I suddenly find three pairs of eyes fixed in my direction.
"You hugged him?" The light in CJ's eyes suddenly seems to be more dangerous. "You hugged him in front of someone? Remind me again, how did you two not get caught before now?"
"I hugged him in front of about three hundred people!" I exclaim. "It was manly and backslapping and gave absolutely no reason for suspicion. I was his best friend, and he had just written a really great speech, and you don't think it would have aroused more suspicion if I hadn't? On the other hand," I agree, slumping a bit, "It's probably a little too much to hope that she won't have remembered it."
"Probably, yeah," she says sarcastically. "That's the lot? For both of you?"
"You're done."
"Surprisingly, your…" She looks at Sam. "Relationships look the most trouble. Unsurprisingly, of his possibly most problematic, you," Her gaze swivels toward me. "Seem to be the one mostly to blame for why it's problematic."
"Hey!" She shrugs. I suppose she's got a point. I'm just not admitting that, at least not to her, so I rapidly change the subject. "What about Laurie?"
"What about her?"
"You don't think she's a potentially problematic relationship?"
"Well, she was when she was happening. Now?" CJ raises one eyebrow. "She's an attorney, and she can't bring up her liaison with Sam without also dragging up the fact that she put herself through law school by being paid for sex. On a personal level? I wouldn't be surprised if you get a call from her at some point. On a media level, she probably has less to gain and more to lose from this than Matt Skinner does. No, Sam's right. I'm done with you."
She gets up to leave, beaten to the door by Toby, and turns back with her hand on the doorjamb.
"Thanks, guys," she begins awkwardly. "I know that can't have been the most comfortable experience for either of you."
"Don't suppose it was exactly a walk in the park for you." Sam waves her half-apology off. "Hey, it's something for us to tell your kids. You know, 'did mommy ever tell you about the time she had to talk to me and Uncle Josh about the other people we had…'"
"Sam Seaborn!" CJ cuts him off before he gets to the end of the sentence. "Don't you dare."
He smirks, which Donna swears he's picked up from spending too much time around me, and she starts to make a quick exit before either of us can attempt to prolong the conversation. I check my watch. Ten-twenty. We're meant to be landing in New York in a little over ten minutes. Sam's gone quiet, and I'm starting to doze off in my less-than-relaxing position on the floor when Charlie slips in.
"Hey, Charlie." I struggle to my feet. "What's up?"
"The President wants to see you."
"Both of us?"
"Just you." He nods at Sam. "He said he'd let you get over being interrogated by a formidable woman. He figures Josh has done so many dumb things in the last five years he should be used to it."
"What did I…"
"Secret plan to fight inflation," they say with one voice.
"Sooner or later, you'll have to let that one go."
"Sure," Charlie agrees, ushering me out of the room as I notice the smirk that's back on Sam's face. "Let's give it forty or fifty years, okay? And after that we can move onto Mandy, the Christian Right, lighting a fire in the Mural Room, standing in the bullpen holding Donna's underwear, sitting down in your chair when there was no chair there…"
"Point taken," I mumble, raising my hand to knock on the door. "I'm sure I could think of a few things that you've done."
"Don't hold your breath."
He disappears as I open the door to the President's cabin, noticing with a certain degree of relief that Leo is no longer there. I have the greatest respect for him, and in some regards, greater than I have for the President. In the last five or six years, I've also come to count him as something of a friend. But I have no idea what the President wants to talk about, and as I've said at least three times in the last two days, with all the respect and friendship possible in the world, there's no getting away from the fact that it's not my idea of a good time to get into my love life with the guy who was my dad's best friend and who still is my boss. I mean, I couldn't swear to it that he never changed my diapers… okay, I didn't want to go there. I shut my eyes, count to ten, and when I open them, discover that the President is staring at me with some confusion.
"Good evening, Mr President."
"Have a seat. How's the Medicaid bill looking?"
"It's, uh…" Well, to begin with, I only got about twelve lines into the memo. "I'm going to be getting into it more after the Convention, but it looks good."
"Really? Sam has some problems with it."
"He does?" He does? "He hasn't talked about it with me, sir."
"Well, you guys work a seventy-hour week, and that's when things are going well. I would imagine you want to forget about it when you get home."
"Were you…" I blink. "Were you just trying to ease into that?"
"I need to work on the subtlety?"
"Little bit, yes, sir."
"Seriously, Josh. I never talked about it, really, when it was just the staff who knew, and then the media blitz came out of the blue. How are you two doing?"
"Pretty well, actually." I'm surprised as I realize that's true. "Better than I expected, anyway."
"Have you talked to your mother yet?"
"Only yesterday morning, to tell you the truth." I grin as I remember a few of her more colorful points. "She was great. Not quite so great when it came to me not having let her in on it sooner, but… She asked me to take Sam down there for Thanksgiving. Then she called us at home this morning and ordered him to take me down there. Feels like they're tag-teaming me."
"What about Sam's parents?"
"That's… a little more complicated."
I don't elaborate, and he doesn't ask me to, as the plane turns into descent and the pilot's voice comes over the PA, asking us to fasten our seatbelts and telling us that we'll be touching down in a few moments time. We remain in silence for a minute, staring out of the cabin window at the Manhattan skyline and the lights on the Hudson Bridge. Washington is, and always will be, my city, but there's something amazing about New York. Finally, as the floodlit runway of LaGuardia comes into view, the President breaks the quiet.
"These next few days, things are going to change, you know that."
"Sir?"
"You've managed to avoid directly confronting the press so far, and believe me when I tell you I'd like nothing more than for it to stay that way, but you and Sam are both going to be fending off a hail of reporters and journalists and Bartlet-baiters and photographers for the next few days. Are you going to be okay?"
I consider this. As the wheels hit the tarmac and Air Force One comes to a juddering halt, the President stands up, followed by me. From my vantage point of an extra four or five inches, I look him squarely in the eye.
"I don't know. But I always thought Napoleon had the right idea."
"He did."
Together, we join the rest of the staff and the First Lady, who seems to have been making herself scarce during the flight, in disembarking from the plane. I touch Sam's shoulder as we follow them onto the steps and feel the first blast of air after an hour on a plane, surprisingly cool for the middle of July. The flashes from what looks to be fifty or so cameras on the ground almost blinds me for a second before I relax. Napoleon's plan had a hell of a lot more sense in it than most people give him credit for.
First you show up.
Then you see what happens.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
I'm going to begin by apologising profusely for this having taken so long, and the truth is, it's been sitting on my hard drive since shortly after Christmas waiting for me to do something with it. I found it again this week, made a few minor changes, and figured that the damned thing's been festering for three months, maybe it's time I did something with it. Enjoy it, because likely the next time you'll be hearing from me will be the beginning of July. That's not absolute, because I do have the first half of Chapter 9 written in my head, and I may get that finished sometime around Easter. Just, don't hold your breath. At the time of writing, I have 31 teaching days left at school, metamorphosing far too rapidly into 13 A-level exams, and they have a monopoly on my time right now. Stick with me. I have three months off this summer and I plan to have this story make a lot of headway over that time.
A lot of the credit must go to Aaron Sorkin and the gang at CSC. I hit on Napoleon's battle plan when this chapter was on the long road to nowhere, and for it I'm very much indebted to Casey.
"You look like hell."
"You don't look so terrific yourself," CJ mumbles through a mouthful of salad as she hovers in the cabin door. "Going for the gangster look?"
I realize that her fork is pointing in the general direction of my jaw, prompting me to prod it experimentally. The by-product of my fight with Sam on Friday finally started to swell and turn an unflattering shade of purple early this afternoon, and apparently its now noticeable enough that people who aren't looking for it can see that I got well and truly clobbered. Testament to the fact that Sam Seaborn is not just a pretty face, I've also made the somewhat unwelcome discovery that he packs a pretty mean punch too. The thing stings like a sonofabitch when I poke it. I wince.
"Don't ask."
I return my attention to the twenty-eight-page position paper on Medicaid that landed on my desk at some point last week. Between preparations for the Convention and the hash I managed to make of my - our - personal life, Donna swears that she could actually hear my desk start to creak under the weight of the paperwork I haven't got round to. A one-hour flight to New York - delayed, incidentally, by more than ninety minutes - would, according to her, be a perfect opportunity for me to catch up on some of it. This specific memo manages to hold my concentration for no more than six lines before I turn back to CJ.
"Hey, Ceej?" I very carefully keep my eyes trained on my shoes. "You wouldn't happen to know if Sam talked to his mom today, would you?"
"Given that I'm neither his therapist nor his girlfriend?"
"If you were his therapist," I point out. "I would no longer be the only mentally unstable one, and it would throw the entire balance of this relationship off kilter. And if you were his girlfriend, I might be forced to do something, you know, violent and painful."
"Sure." She considers this. "You know I could take you, right?"
"In unarmed combat? Didn't doubt it for a second."
"Smart guy."
"Did you come down here for an actual reason, or was it just to cast doubt on my masculinity?"
"Staff meeting in five minutes." I can feel my eyebrows rise into what Toby dubbed my 'I didn't know that' look about three hours after I joined the campaign. According to him, I mostly did it when someone mentioned something I probably was meant to learn in law school. CJ notices and waves her fork around a bit more while she finishes chewing. "It was meant to be at the hotel, but it'll be past eleven by the time we get there, what with one thing and another."
That phrase refers to things like Marine One not showing up on time.
"Five minutes?"
"Probably more like four and a half now you wasted that thirty seconds having me explain it to you."
I leave CJ and her salad to themselves after stealing a couple of pieces of pasta, and spend one of my four and a half minutes tracking down Sam. Unlike the rest of us, in spite of a ninety-minute delay and a weekend that was by no standard relaxing, he doesn't look like hell so much as he still looks like he belongs on the cover of some random glossy magazine. He also, I notice with something of a self-satisfied smirk, manages to retain something of a post-coital glow several hours after the, well, coital part of it. He glances up at me and pulls his glasses off.
"What?"
"Senior staff." I wait while he shuffles a stack of paper into some semblance of order and stands up. "You talk to your mom yet?"
"Sure," Sam nods before starting to head up the plane, very obviously looking at anything but me and managing to be anything but subtle about it.
"You know, Sam, I may have a pretty bad poker face, but you have no poker face."
"I have a great poker face!" he exclaims defensively.
"Well, sure, but not with me, you don't."
"No, maybe not." He concedes the point. "I did, however, call my mother. Really," he adds, seeing the sceptical expression on my face. "It just wasn't what I would refer to as the classic definition of talking so much as I would probably refer to it as me saying 'hey, mom, it's Sam', and her not wasting any time in hanging the phone up on me."
"She hung up on you." I stop a couple of inches short of the President's cabin. "Seriously, she hung up on you?"
"Yup."
"Well, shit."
"I would say that pretty well sums it up, yes."
"Why would she do that?"
"One would imagine she wasn't all that thrilled about getting the details of her only son's love life from Mark Gottfried and the… whatever the hell half-cocked right-wing rag it is she reads, in which case I imagine it's my fault." He pauses and looks thoughtful. "Then of course there's always the possibility that she's a paranoid homophobe who even as we speak is filing the paperwork necessary to disown me, in which case I suppose it would be her fault."
"You two do realize that you'll most likely be able to participate in this meeting better if you're on the other side of the door, right?"
I'm saved from having to come up with a supportive response that isn't a flat-out lie by Toby, who brushes past with his usual grumpy sarcasm, leaving us very little option but to follow him inside. Unless, that is, we have a burning desire for the President of the United States and his senior staff to show a sudden and disturbing interest in what we're talking about. In the past couple of weeks I've started to think that people who believe dating a colleague invariably results in your personal life being dragged into the office might have a point. Because Sam and I spent two years doing a very good job of keeping work and home pretty well separate entities, and then we came out and didn't so much drag our personal life into the office as our co-workers became extremely nosey about things that are, to put it bluntly, none of their damn business. I slide in the door in time to hear Leo ascertaining that nobody blew anybody else up in the hour since we left the White House, and the President asking what's next.
"The press want to know when they'll be getting texts."
"They're not," Sam tells her as he sits down on the end of a table.
"Sure." CJ taps her notebook with a pen and looks confused. "Okay. Why not?"
"Because the text mentions, you know, several times, the name of the President's running mate and…"
"And we're not leaking that," she finishes. "Yeah, you know I'll be sending them all in your direction when they get hostile about this, right?"
"Knock yourself out."
"What's next?"
"Joey's people have been working the phones, she has polling data, and she's putting together a breakdown that she'll be able to go over with us in the morning."
"7am." Leo nods. "Anything else."
"Can I say a word about Josh and Sam?" CJ raises her index finger and proceeds to say a word about Josh and Sam without waiting for actual permission. "So far, it's been the weekend, but we're going to be spending the next three days in the almost constant company of a press gaggle who want to report the news."
"This isn't news," Toby interrupts. "The Convention is news. This is a sex scandal which to anyone with an iota of intelligence isn't even scandalous."
"I've got thirty boys and girls back there who don't make the distinction, and as far as their editors are concerned, news is what sells newspapers."
"You anticipate questions about prior relationships?" I ask doubtfully. "I mean, you actually think the press are going to want to know?"
"The press are absolutely going to want to know." Leo looks like he's explaining something to a four-year-old. "The two of you, go over this with CJ and Toby, but for God's sake do it somewhere else because your sex life is not something I want to know about."
My sex life isn't something I want him to know about either. There's something just wrong about discussing that in front of your father's best friend. I follow CJ, Toby, and Sam into a smaller cabin and close the door before starting again.
"Why do you…" I stop. "No. Technically, I know why they'll be interested in it, but why do you think that it's going to be a big deal?"
"Josh, where other people have relationships, you seem to have fiery plane crashes. Before this one, anyway," she amends, catching the full flood of Sam's warning glare. "At this point, it's a waste of time hoping that every woman you ever slept with isn't going to come crawling out of the woodwork to tell Larry King that if you had mentioned at any point you were gay, it might have ironed out a few key problems."
"For the nineteenth and final time, I am not gay."
"That doesn't matter on Hard Copy." CJ gives Sam a disbelieving look and he shrugs. "Sorry. You said that after the whole Laurie fiasco."
"I did, and you're right, but don't think you're getting out of this, Spanky."
"What'd I do?"
"You were engaged to a female reporter who thinks that I'm an arrogant jackass," I point out. "That's three things right there before we even start on the hooker."
"Call girl," he corrects automatically.
"Whatever. You - seriously, no matter what people say about me having fiery plane crashes more than actual relationships - you still win hands down when it comes to choosing people you absolutely shouldn't date."
I can't believe that we're having this conversation in front of our colleagues. And I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head around the fact that I couldn't give a damn. It might have something to do with the fact that when you realise this could all be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning, the issue of telling your friends gains a certain degree of perspective, even if one of them does happen to be the White House Press Secretary.
"Even if I did - which, by the way, I don't, and we're getting back to that - but even if I did, I'm not the one who holds the award for the worst break-up ever."
I cringe on the inside.
"Josh?"
"Yeah, I… um. Yeah." I clear my throat. "Much as I hate to say this, and although I'm hoping it was such a bad experience she blanked me from her mind, yeah. Sam might well have a point there."
"Are we…" CJ looks slightly lost. "We're not talking about Mandy, right? Because while that may not have been the worst ever, I gotta say, it must've come close."
"It did, but no, we're not talking about Mandy." Sam wasn't exaggerating when he says that this was the worst break-up ever. "My girlfriend from college. And it's a little embarrassing to admit, but I can't remember her name. So, anyway, we were together for five or six weeks before she walked into my dorm room and found me in bed with… you know what, I'd like to say a couple of things in my own defence. I was nineteen, I was stupid, I was incredibly confused about my sexuality, and it's not like she found us doing anything other than sleeping."
"Of course," Sam adds. "You were also naked and, you know, in bed together, so it's not like it was monumentally out of line for her to infer a few things about what had happened before she found you."
"Overshare." Toby goes slightly green. "This girl, whoever she was, found you in bed with who, exactly?"
"Dan Harris. The captain of the debating team."
"So." CJ unflatteringly summarises what Sam and I have just told her. "We've got a problem with an anonymous woman who you dated at Harvard and who walked in on you in bed with another guy, and we've got a potential problem with the guy…"
"Not the potential problem you highlighted before," I interrupt. "You said that every woman I had ever slept with would come crawling out the woodwork saying that had I mentioned that I was gay it would have cleared up a few key issues, and I'm just thinking that had Dan not known I was attracted to men we would never have gotten to first base, let alone made it into bed."
"When I highlighted that potential problem, I didn't know there had been other men!"
"Two. It's not like I did the Yankee's starting line-up on the Kennedy desk."
"I did not need to hear that." CJ looks skywards. "I could have gone my entire life without hearing you say that."
Toby, whose nauseous hue appeared to have passed, turns another vibrant shade of green. CJ looks as though she's trying to figure out how to forget I ever spoke those words. And Sam, who looks slightly flushed, seems to have been rendered temporarily dumb.
"Moving swiftly onwards." CJ coughs. "And I'm not at all sure I want to know the answer to this next question. Who was the second guy?"
I was hoping I wouldn't have to get into this part. I study my shoes in the hope of gaining divine inspiration or something.
"Matt."
"Matt?" The penny drops. "Matt Skinner?"
"You slept with a Republican?"
"Nine weeks, twenty years ago."
"And you didn't maybe think that this would have, I don't know, ramifications?"
"Not so much, no!" I close my eyes. "We were working on the Hill. He was a kid getting some experience before he started college; I was a kid killing time before I went to Yale. White House Deputy Chief of Staff wasn't even on my road map! Working for the President, that was some distant fantasy. And even if I had thought it would have ramifications… God, Sam and I, that was gonna have ramifications, and it's not like that stopped us!" I turn rapidly to the other half of that 'us' before he starts thinking that he should give me a bruise on the other side of my face to match the one I've already got. "I meant that in the best way possible."
"And Sam, you knew about them?"
"Well, not at the time, no, but… yeah, I know about it now."
"How the hell did you find out about it?"
"He told me." The look on Sam's face tells her that that much should have been obvious. "Let's clear up a couple of things. We were together for three months before anything actually happened between us. No, this wasn't entirely by choice, and yes, it did have a lot to do with that thing that happened with a bunch of neo-Nazis in a Dodge Durango, but I sat and bared my soul the morning after Rosslyn, and it was three months before we slept together - election night, if you were that interested."
CJ and Toby's faces say that they weren't, that much.
"What Sam is attempting to say," I pick up. "Except using far more words and going into much greater detail than actually necessary, is that we were getting into what turned out to be a pretty serious relationship. We did the partner history thing a while ago, although I can't say that when my dad gave me that talk on the birds and the bees I ever envisaged having a partner history conversation with the White House Press Secretary..."
"Okay." Toby raises his palms outward. "Is he… I don't know, do you think he's going to tell people?"
"He's a Republican member of the House of Representatives. He gets no mileage out of revealing that he had a fling with a guy from the other side when he was eighteen, especially not when that guy's already out and spoken for."
"If he was planning on making an issue of this, he would have done it Saturday."
"I think that's probably true," CJ nods. "Okay. You had a fling with Matt Skinner. Any other disastrous relationships I should know about?"
I think about this and then start counting off on my fingers.
"Uh… we've done Dan, Matt, and random girl whose name I can't quite remember. Rachel Goodwin. I was with her for two years; I was a law student, and she was a Chemistry undergrad. She graduated and went to Canada to work for a pharmaceuticals company. I went to work on the Hill. We still liked each other. Then there was this one girl who I slept with once and who never knew my name. I had an on-again, off-again thing with Al - female - Rosenberg for about four and a half years, and yes, she might be one of your people who comes crawling out of the woodwork."
"Commitment issues?" Toby guesses. "Have to say, she wouldn't be completely out of line on that one."
"Anyone else?"
"Mandy. That's it."
"That's it?"
"Mandy and I had a longer history than you guys ever knew about. I was still working for Brennan when we met, and then I broke up with her…"
"Spectacularly," CJ mutters.
"On the night before the election. I was single from us crashing and burning to us," I make random gesticulations between Sam and I, "Getting together. You knew that part."
"Okay. So you have, in the course of your life, slept with…" She calculates it. "Seven - no, eight - people, only two of whom are likely to say anything to the press. You know, for you, that's less trouble than I expected. Sam?"
"I'll have you know that I'm even less trouble than Josh, thank you."
"Who'd you sleep with?"
"Nina Macintosh, in my freshman and sophomore years at Princeton, and who cheated on me. Andrea Jeffries, in my senior year for four months, which kind of fizzled out when we graduated. Lucy Pomerantz, at Duke. We broke up because we were, for want of a better term, completely incompatible, but we were still great friends." He wrinkles his nose. "Incidentally, she set me up with Lisa. Then Laurie, and Mal - except, I didn't sleep with her - and Josh."
"Josh was your first guy?"
"On the levels where you consider that I fell for him when I was twenty-two, that's not such a significant achievement."
Except for the part where I freaked when Sam told me that I was his first guy. It's something of a responsibility, no matter what levels you look at it on.
"Lisa?" Toby speaks up. "This is…"
"This is the Lisa I used to be enagaged to," Sam nods.
"Christ, Sam. She's a blood-sucking fiend."
"In the non-vampire sense. And how many could you possibly have imagined there were, anyway?"
"Hey." CJ's eyes light up. "Lisa Sherbourne-Seaborn?"
"We never got as far as the hyphen, but yeah, her."
"Your ex-fiancee," Toby sounds a lot less thrilled than CJ about this. "Is, first and foremost, a reporter, and second of all, thinks that your boyfriend is an arrogant jackass."
"Yeah, I can see where you might have a problem with that. She also sort of blames Josh for us not getting married, which might actually be a reasonable point considering he showed up in my office all dripping with an idiot grin on his face to drag me off to New Hampshire because he'd found the real thing…"
"You weren't walking out of that office with your career intact!" I know the full story of the ship and the oil and feel the need for this point to be made. "Not your career in corporate law, anyway, and certainly not a partnership at Gage Whitney."
"I would also say," he continues, ignoring me. "That everyone at some point in their lives thinks that Josh is an arrogant jackass, including me and his mother, so in his defence, it's not exactly his fault that she jumped on the bandwagon. She also, however, saw him hug me at the State of the Union, which could possibly be a point that doesn't exactly go in his favor."
I suddenly find three pairs of eyes fixed in my direction.
"You hugged him?" The light in CJ's eyes suddenly seems to be more dangerous. "You hugged him in front of someone? Remind me again, how did you two not get caught before now?"
"I hugged him in front of about three hundred people!" I exclaim. "It was manly and backslapping and gave absolutely no reason for suspicion. I was his best friend, and he had just written a really great speech, and you don't think it would have aroused more suspicion if I hadn't? On the other hand," I agree, slumping a bit, "It's probably a little too much to hope that she won't have remembered it."
"Probably, yeah," she says sarcastically. "That's the lot? For both of you?"
"You're done."
"Surprisingly, your…" She looks at Sam. "Relationships look the most trouble. Unsurprisingly, of his possibly most problematic, you," Her gaze swivels toward me. "Seem to be the one mostly to blame for why it's problematic."
"Hey!" She shrugs. I suppose she's got a point. I'm just not admitting that, at least not to her, so I rapidly change the subject. "What about Laurie?"
"What about her?"
"You don't think she's a potentially problematic relationship?"
"Well, she was when she was happening. Now?" CJ raises one eyebrow. "She's an attorney, and she can't bring up her liaison with Sam without also dragging up the fact that she put herself through law school by being paid for sex. On a personal level? I wouldn't be surprised if you get a call from her at some point. On a media level, she probably has less to gain and more to lose from this than Matt Skinner does. No, Sam's right. I'm done with you."
She gets up to leave, beaten to the door by Toby, and turns back with her hand on the doorjamb.
"Thanks, guys," she begins awkwardly. "I know that can't have been the most comfortable experience for either of you."
"Don't suppose it was exactly a walk in the park for you." Sam waves her half-apology off. "Hey, it's something for us to tell your kids. You know, 'did mommy ever tell you about the time she had to talk to me and Uncle Josh about the other people we had…'"
"Sam Seaborn!" CJ cuts him off before he gets to the end of the sentence. "Don't you dare."
He smirks, which Donna swears he's picked up from spending too much time around me, and she starts to make a quick exit before either of us can attempt to prolong the conversation. I check my watch. Ten-twenty. We're meant to be landing in New York in a little over ten minutes. Sam's gone quiet, and I'm starting to doze off in my less-than-relaxing position on the floor when Charlie slips in.
"Hey, Charlie." I struggle to my feet. "What's up?"
"The President wants to see you."
"Both of us?"
"Just you." He nods at Sam. "He said he'd let you get over being interrogated by a formidable woman. He figures Josh has done so many dumb things in the last five years he should be used to it."
"What did I…"
"Secret plan to fight inflation," they say with one voice.
"Sooner or later, you'll have to let that one go."
"Sure," Charlie agrees, ushering me out of the room as I notice the smirk that's back on Sam's face. "Let's give it forty or fifty years, okay? And after that we can move onto Mandy, the Christian Right, lighting a fire in the Mural Room, standing in the bullpen holding Donna's underwear, sitting down in your chair when there was no chair there…"
"Point taken," I mumble, raising my hand to knock on the door. "I'm sure I could think of a few things that you've done."
"Don't hold your breath."
He disappears as I open the door to the President's cabin, noticing with a certain degree of relief that Leo is no longer there. I have the greatest respect for him, and in some regards, greater than I have for the President. In the last five or six years, I've also come to count him as something of a friend. But I have no idea what the President wants to talk about, and as I've said at least three times in the last two days, with all the respect and friendship possible in the world, there's no getting away from the fact that it's not my idea of a good time to get into my love life with the guy who was my dad's best friend and who still is my boss. I mean, I couldn't swear to it that he never changed my diapers… okay, I didn't want to go there. I shut my eyes, count to ten, and when I open them, discover that the President is staring at me with some confusion.
"Good evening, Mr President."
"Have a seat. How's the Medicaid bill looking?"
"It's, uh…" Well, to begin with, I only got about twelve lines into the memo. "I'm going to be getting into it more after the Convention, but it looks good."
"Really? Sam has some problems with it."
"He does?" He does? "He hasn't talked about it with me, sir."
"Well, you guys work a seventy-hour week, and that's when things are going well. I would imagine you want to forget about it when you get home."
"Were you…" I blink. "Were you just trying to ease into that?"
"I need to work on the subtlety?"
"Little bit, yes, sir."
"Seriously, Josh. I never talked about it, really, when it was just the staff who knew, and then the media blitz came out of the blue. How are you two doing?"
"Pretty well, actually." I'm surprised as I realize that's true. "Better than I expected, anyway."
"Have you talked to your mother yet?"
"Only yesterday morning, to tell you the truth." I grin as I remember a few of her more colorful points. "She was great. Not quite so great when it came to me not having let her in on it sooner, but… She asked me to take Sam down there for Thanksgiving. Then she called us at home this morning and ordered him to take me down there. Feels like they're tag-teaming me."
"What about Sam's parents?"
"That's… a little more complicated."
I don't elaborate, and he doesn't ask me to, as the plane turns into descent and the pilot's voice comes over the PA, asking us to fasten our seatbelts and telling us that we'll be touching down in a few moments time. We remain in silence for a minute, staring out of the cabin window at the Manhattan skyline and the lights on the Hudson Bridge. Washington is, and always will be, my city, but there's something amazing about New York. Finally, as the floodlit runway of LaGuardia comes into view, the President breaks the quiet.
"These next few days, things are going to change, you know that."
"Sir?"
"You've managed to avoid directly confronting the press so far, and believe me when I tell you I'd like nothing more than for it to stay that way, but you and Sam are both going to be fending off a hail of reporters and journalists and Bartlet-baiters and photographers for the next few days. Are you going to be okay?"
I consider this. As the wheels hit the tarmac and Air Force One comes to a juddering halt, the President stands up, followed by me. From my vantage point of an extra four or five inches, I look him squarely in the eye.
"I don't know. But I always thought Napoleon had the right idea."
"He did."
Together, we join the rest of the staff and the First Lady, who seems to have been making herself scarce during the flight, in disembarking from the plane. I touch Sam's shoulder as we follow them onto the steps and feel the first blast of air after an hour on a plane, surprisingly cool for the middle of July. The flashes from what looks to be fifty or so cameras on the ground almost blinds me for a second before I relax. Napoleon's plan had a hell of a lot more sense in it than most people give him credit for.
First you show up.
Then you see what happens.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
I'm going to begin by apologising profusely for this having taken so long, and the truth is, it's been sitting on my hard drive since shortly after Christmas waiting for me to do something with it. I found it again this week, made a few minor changes, and figured that the damned thing's been festering for three months, maybe it's time I did something with it. Enjoy it, because likely the next time you'll be hearing from me will be the beginning of July. That's not absolute, because I do have the first half of Chapter 9 written in my head, and I may get that finished sometime around Easter. Just, don't hold your breath. At the time of writing, I have 31 teaching days left at school, metamorphosing far too rapidly into 13 A-level exams, and they have a monopoly on my time right now. Stick with me. I have three months off this summer and I plan to have this story make a lot of headway over that time.
A lot of the credit must go to Aaron Sorkin and the gang at CSC. I hit on Napoleon's battle plan when this chapter was on the long road to nowhere, and for it I'm very much indebted to Casey.