A/N: Written as a secret santa for Peach. She know's who she is. :-) Happy reading.
Remembrances and Realisations
He spends the day watching her, thinking about her rather than working on the President's latest speech. It's a quiet day, rare for the administration, so he stops to watch her press briefings remembering the gangly woman he met twenty years before. He remembers the way her hair looked in the summer sun, the blonde and ginger highlights shimmering in the sun, one of the few times she dragged him outside. It's not that different now, and she hasn't really changed that much but it's the C.J. of now that he's in love with, not the C.J. of twenty years past.
He's nearly always loved her, he just thought he loved Andie more, tricked himself because it wasn't true: it was always C.J., no matter how long he denied it. Sometimes he wondered where he went wrong and decided there had been thousands of crossroads in his life and were thousands more to come.
He realises that the turning point had been two months previously, when his father had slept on his couch and C.J. came over the next morning as though it was the most natural thing in the world to spend Christmas Day with Toby and Julie than with her own family in Ohio. But that's the thing, it was the most natural thing because he and C.J. had been like this since the campaign: gravitating towards each other even if they wouldn't admit it. Some weeks he stops going home to his empty apartment and stays with C.J., in the spare room, filled with memories of their life before the White House and before he failed marriage. It's been two months since he admitted to himself that he loved her more than his ex-wife, more than anyone, and now he's wondering if she feels the same.