"So," Donna mused, reclining back against the slatted back of her wooden chair, "after all of these years, I finally managed to convince you to bring me to Hawaii."
"Don't expect it to happen again any time soon," Josh warned her, squinting down the beach to the horizon, where the brilliant turquoise of the water met the pristine whiteness of the sand.
"Josh, I had to wait this long to get the first trip. If we keep going at this rate, we'll never get to go anywhere again," Donna laughed, reaching for a bottle of sunscreen. "It's just too bad that I'm not young enough to show off those nice bikinis anymore."
Josh turned from his scrutiny of the scenery to look at his wife. "I don't know about that," he replied after a moment, his eyes sweeping up and down a form that was still lithe, in spite of age.
"Go back to reading your son's book," she retorted happily, her alabaster skin flushing red.
"Hey, Alex," Ted called, rushing down the hall to catch up. "Wait up a minute."
"So, you decided to talk to me again?" she asked lightly, stepping to the side of the hallway and out of the main flow of traffic to wait for him.
Ted rolled his eyes at her as he approached. "I didn't talk to you for five minutes because I was in a state of shock. I can't be held responsible for the fact that you had to leave part way into that time frame, or the fact that I had out of town commitments all this last week."
"Those are just insignificant details," she laughed, falling into step beside him. "How was Maryland?"
"Same as always," he answered. "Anything exciting happen here?"
"Not really. Peters is balking on Social Security again and he's taken down six or seven others this time. But I don't think we had the votes for that one anyway, so there's no sense trying to bargain with them," Alex told him. "We'd only wind up making concessions that wouldn't do us any good in the long run. But you probably already knew all of that," she added. "I can't imagine you going a week without contacting your office."
"Yeah," he admitted. "I kept pretty close tabs on what was going on. And I knew that you'd be in touch if anything happened that we weren't expecting."
"Well, we were lucky in that the floor didn't fall out from beneath our feet and the ceiling didn't cave in on our heads," she noted. The two continued their hurried walk down the hall. After a pause, Alex asked, "Did you manage to get the forty-seventh draft of your speech written?"
"Twenty-first," he corrected absently. "And yeah, I did get it finished. There were a couple of passages that I wanted to change around before I had you read it over again."
"Hopefully you changed more this time than you had changed the time before. I couldn't tell the difference between the nineteenth and twentieth drafts. Actually," she admitted, stepping into his office, "I couldn't really tell the difference between the sixteenth and twentieth drafts either. Anyway, let me know if you want me to have another look at it. Or should I just dig out one of the earlier versions and just use that?"
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"Trust me, this time things have changed."
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"Are these the same things that changed when you failed that midterm?" Josh asked seriously, leaning back in his chair to get a better look at his daughter.
Joan tossed her long blond hair back over her shoulder and met her dad's stare coolly. "I seem to recall someone telling me once that you missed the Dean's List two semesters in a row," she countered evenly, unconcerned with her father's obvious displeasure.
"Look, young lady," Josh responded quickly, "whether I missed the Dean's List or not is irrelevant to the current discussion."
Joan didn't answer, just smiled sweetly back at him. He met her gaze for a moment, and then commented, "I had very good reasons for missing it both times, I'll have you know."
"Thirty-five seconds," Joan reported with a grin. "You couldn't even go a whole minute without defending yourself, Dad."
"That's not the issue," he retorted. "The issue is that you missed the Dean's List because you were out every night until who knows when, doing who knows what, with who knows who!"
"I missed it by like zero-point-two on my GPA and I was only out four nights a week: Monday and Thursday for Debate; Tuesday for Young Democrats; and Saturday for fun."
"Those for fun nights worry me. I know what university students do for fun," Josh responded, wagging his finger at her. But he couldn't stop his lips from turning up in an involuntary smile that he instantly tried to quash.
Joan noted it with a raised eyebrow. "You never seem to have any problems with Noah going out on Saturday nights," she protested. "That's not only favoritism, but also sexual discrimination, and thus prohibited by law."
"It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Noah's a boy," Josh answered calmly. "It has everything to do with the fact that your brother made the Dean's List."
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"Good for him."
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"Yeah, Mark's really making the most out of the leadership vacuum over there," Sarah commented, blowing on her coffee to cool it down.
"Speaking of that," Jeff started, leaning closer to her across the small table, "I've started hearing rumours that the leadership races on the floor are going to get interesting this next term, on both sides of the aisle."
Sarah raised an eyebrow at him and took a careful sip. "What exactly did you hear?" she asked curiously, keeping her voice low.
"Nothing specific," he told her. "But the names that keep being whispered for certain positions aren't what we've been led to expect, inside connections or not."
"Okay," Sarah answered, leaning in. "You've got me interested. Something tells me this has the potential to be juicy."
"You're right," Jeff responded. He paused for a moment, leaving Sarah hanging in anticipation. "Keegan's not going to go for leader," he revealed. "He's leaving it wide open."
"He's what?" Sarah inquired sharply, forgetting to keep her voice low. "Alex has been saying all along that she wasn't going to give it a second look so that Ted could take the position without any serious competition."
"Well, he made some comments during one of his Maryland engagements that have led some smart people to think that he's not looking twice at the leader's position. I read some of his comments," Jeff told her. "And if I didn't know better, I'd think that he was stepping aside and aiming for Whip."
"Are you sure he's looking at the Whip position?"
"About as sure as you can be about anything in this game," Jeff assured her. "The only thing that I can't figure out is motive. We all know that Alex was setting herself up for the Whip position and Keegan was going to move in for floor leader. It was the agreement between the two of them, whether it was discussed or tacit. Why the sudden turnabout on Keegan's part?"
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"I'm pretty sure that I know why."
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"Honestly, CJ," Toby grumbled, ripping the top sheet off of his legal pad and wadding it up, "you don't know why and that's why you won't let it drop." He lined up his shot and tossed the paper ball in the direction of the garbage time. He missed and the paper bounced along the floor a couple of times, landing at CJ's feet.
Bending down, she picked it up. For a moment, she contemplated dropping it into the already overfull can, then she lobbed it back at him. "I do too know why."
Toby neatly caught the paper projectile. Instead of answering, he merely surveyed CJ for a long moment. It was a look that had driven interns and unwary publishing assistants to tears. But it had long since ceased to have any effect on his wife; Toby still hadn't given up trying.
"You know that look doesn't work with me, Tobus," she told him. "And I do know why you're agonizing over that yellow legal pad."
"Please, enlighten me," he invited sarcastically, leaning back in his chair and dropping his pen down onto the offending pad.
"You're writing."
"I think you've just won the award for deductive reasoning," Toby declared, throwing up his hands. "That explains it all!"
CJ rolled her eyes at him. "You're writing some sort of political speech," she amended. "You only use the yellow pads for politics. When you were setting off the fire alarms with your books, you always used the white ones."
"I see that we've progressed from Watson to Holmes," Toby noted dryly. "By all means, carry on. Who, pray tell, is this 'speech' for?"
"What, and risk my winning streak?" CJ asked, faking shock. "I think not."
"That's because you don't know," Toby stated firmly.
"I do too," CJ maintained. "But if you don't know, then I'm not going to tell you."
