The Guest Room
Monday, May 18th 3AM
Danny woke up slightly disoriented and hard as granite, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the subtle dips in the mattress that had woken him up. He was puzzling over them, wondering whether it was the residual effect of all the alcohol he had consumed, when the faint sound effects tipped him off to what was really going on.
He rolled over and licked the back of her ear, before placing two small kisses on her shoulder blade. CJ moaned and arched her back as he trailed his fingers down her arm and found her hand wedged very firmly between her legs.
"You started the party without me? " he whimpered as she turned her face towards him, blindly searching for his mouth.
"It just kinda happened," she whimpered back, need imprinted on her voice.
"Just kinda happened, huh?"
"You were sleeping like the dead."
"Riiight. Nuh-uh," he said as he held her hand in place.
"You don't want to play?"
"I'll just listen till I can't handle it any more."
"You get crazy when you do that."
"Afraid we'll wake the others?"
"I prefer not to traumatize people in their own home."
"A likely story. Sorry, no touching," he teased when her newly liberated hand shifted to him.
"Really? "
"You forfeited that right when you opted not wake me."
"And you forfeited the right to be woken up when you fell asleep on me last night."
"I did what ?"
He was distracted by the hand to the back of his head which brought his mouth to hers. Which turned out to be a good thing, because if he hadn't swallowed her moans there would have been no doubt down the hall what they were up to.
"Sure I can't help you with that?"
"I'm sure. I'm just going to press up against you and talk dirty in your ear until you beg me to have mercy on you."
CJ snorted.
"Joking apart," he said as he spooned up behind her, "did I really did pass out on you last night?"
"Pretty much."
"I was wasted."
"You were. We should replace the bottle of scotch."
"I'll take care of it. What were we talking about?"
"You don't remember?"
"I may have passed out sooner than you think."
The first casualty of being on the outs was sex. It had taken them the better part of a year to understand that it was the worst kind of bandaid. Instead they undressed in the bathroom or waited to come to bed until the other was asleep. Typically it never lasted more than a day or two, because they were both so tactile that it was more painful to nurse hurt at separate ends of the bed than it was for one or the other to swallow their pride, apologize, and put the disagreement behind them.
This time it had been infinitely longer than that, and CJ found herself feeling ridiculously self-conscious as Danny watched her undress from his place on the bed. Part of her flashed back to the first dinner at Equinox; when she'd seen him for the first time in a long time and the way he'd looked at her had made her look down into her lap and place and replace the napkin more than once.
Now there was another layer to his gaze, and it made her feel bashful even as she ached for his touch.
"Need some help there, CJ?"
She looked up, startled to find him next to her.
His fingers deftly unbuttoned her shirt and slipped underneath it to unclasp her bra. The shirt drifted to the ground, followed closely by her bra, and the warmth of his body leached into her as he splayed his hands against her back and pulled her into him.
"God, it's like the first time all over again CJ."
Danny kissed the palm which had risen to caress his face and then wrapped one of his hands around hers and led her to the bed. He grazed her knuckles with his thumb until she shifted onto her side and propped herself up on an elbow.
He mimicked her stance and then traced the contours of her face with the fingers of his other hand.
"I've missed you. Missed this," he said quietly.
"Me too."
She stopped his fingers at her mouth and kissed each tip slowly.
"It's too bad, you know .." he said after they'd stared at each other longingly for a while.
"What's too bad?"
"That you're so nervous about potentially making a mess in someone else's bed."
"You're not serious .."
"Sorry," Danny said with a shrug. "Once you went off birth control I removed them from my travel bag because I figured we wouldn't need them anymore."
"So much for make up sex," she said with something of a pout.
"Hey .. kissing can be more intimate than sex. We could use it as an opportunity to find out whether you can still orgasm while I kiss you."
"Didn't we test that theory in February?"
"Yes, but -"
"You're never going to let that go, are you?"
"Never."
He placed a kiss on each of her nipples and then trailed kisses across her clavicle, down her breastbone, and onto her abdomen.
"What happened to kissing is more intimate than sex?"
"I got distracted by a thing," he murmured as he assaulted her belly button. "And anyway, this is still kissing. I don't get to kiss you south of the border as often as I would like."
CJ was about to point out the falsehood in his statement when she felt his tongue poke out between his lips and lap at her centre, and the heat pooling in her belly drove the thought from her mind.
"Stop smiling, it tickles" she growled. "God .."
He was merciless. Alternating between using the flat of his tongue and the tip of it for precise strokes that made her want to scream his name. She settled instead for anchoring his head in place; all self-consciousness gone as she parted her legs wider and pushed herself against his mouth when he hummed against her. She reached for a pillow and covered her face as he awakened every nerve in her body and triggered an orgasm that rushed through her like a freight train.
"Hey .." he said as he pulled the pillow off her face and settled his head on it before pulling her towards him. "You okay?"
"Mmhmm .." she purred as she draped an arm over his stomach and nuzzled her cheek against his chest. "You?"
"We proved that I can still make you orgasm while I kiss you, so all is right with the world."
"I don't think that qualifies, Danny."
"I didn't specify where I would need to kiss you, so my record holds."
"I concede."
"Very noble of you."
"I'm a classy broad."
"CJ?" he said after a moment of silence.
"Yeah?"
"Let's not make it a habit of letting things build like this again?"
"Well, it might be worth it just for this."
"I'm serious."
She craned her neck to look at him and saw that he was.
"Okay," she said as she reached up to kiss him.
"Tonight was hard. A lot harder than I thought it was going to be."
"Yes it was."
"Are we good?"
"We are good."
"'kay."
He stifled a yawn as he pulled the covers up around them.
"I have a question for you, and please don't misunderstand what I'm about to say."
"Mmmm?"
CJ took a deep breath and addressed something which had been percolating in her brain for years and which she hadn't had the heart or the courage to bring up in the study.
"You'd been a White House reporter for over six years when I took the job," she said as she ran a hand up and down his arm to let him know this wasn't a sneak attack. "By that night in the oval office it was probably closer to eight. It was hard to believe, from the inside, that there was a world outside the Democratic and Republican parties, elections, primaries, and political scandals, and I know that journalists can only be exposed to various perspectives if they actually leave the bubble. I know we joke that you won your Pulitzer from the fourth row, but I imagine that the breadth of experiences was no less important to you than it was to others. So I was wondering if .. if part of the reason you turned down the editor's job was because you had already decided that you wanted a change of assignment from White House beat to foreign correspondent."
She waited for an answer and suddenly realized that his breathing had evened out.
"Danny?"
"You must have lulled me to sleep."
"I must have."
"You want to know whether I turned down the job because I already knew I was leaving .."
"Yes."
"No. But .." he paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully, "it became very clear on the trip to Portland that things weren't okay between us and that no amount of wishing it so was going to make it so. So when the African assignment came up it made sense to take it. For the reasons you outlined."
He could sense the deep relief in her "okay."
"Danny?"
"Yes?"
"Is there anything else you want to talk about?"
It was on the tip of his tongue to say yes, but the timing felt off and he didn't want to blow the intensity of the moment.
"No."
"We can put this behind us?"
"Yes."
"Good."
"Very good, because I'd like to go back to kissing you now. And to proving my point that kissing can be more intimate than sex."
"You know .."
"What?"
"You may have thrown everything in your travel bag out, but I have committed no such crime against humanity."
"Oh?"
"Turn on the light." She slipped out bed and rooted around in her bag. "Here we go," she said triumphantly a few moments later as she tossed a stack of condoms onto the covers.
"How many of these do you carry around? " he asked in stupefaction as the accordion of connected condom packets cascaded from his fingertips and bounced off the bed back up at him.
"It never hurts to be prepared."
"There's being prepared and there's having stock in Trojan."
"I can think of a few times, when we first moved to California and the spirit moved you repeatedly in the most unlikely of places, that you were grateful I had a stash. I wasn't on the pill yet and I had to learn to plan for the unexpected .. because you certainly weren't planning."
"There was a quite a lot of that," he said with a smirk.
"Yes there was."
"And I'm still grateful."
"Well then .. suit up, mister! Show me how grateful you are."
"How about you help? I've gone a bit soft here."
"We can't have that, can we?"
"No we can't."
"You haven't gone soft at all," she said with a roll of her eyes as she got back into bed.
"Doesn't mean I won't accept help putting this torture device on."
"I'll give you help .."
"Is that a thre - never mind .."
His eyes rolled back in his head when she touched him, but her husky "eyes on me," was all it took to pull him back into the moment.
He hadn't been joking earlier when he'd said that it felt like the first time.
"God, you're so tight," he murmured as he bit very gently on the skin between her neck and her shoulder.
They became a tangle of limbs and soft breathy moans as terms of endearment spilled from their lips into one another's ears. No wild thrusting, no sudden movements or shifts in angle; just an intense rocking as the muscles at her core milked him to the point where he had no control and no choice but to surrender to the pace she set. His name off her lips always brought him over the edge, but this time as he surrendered to her it was "CJ" that echoed round the room; steeped in so much emotion there was no doubt in her mind that he was telling her he loved her.
"We hadn't done that in a while .." he said after they'd recovered.
"Gotta save something for special occasions, right?"
He smiled and kissed the tip of her nose.
"I'm gonna go clean up. Be right back."
"Okay."
She stretched out across the bed when he'd disappeared into the bathroom. Vaguely wondering if she was going to be sore, but not really caring.
Danny reappeared in the room with a look on his face that she didn't quite recognize.
"What is it?" she asked as she watched him walk over to the dresser a few feet from the bed.
He picked up his cell phone and appeared to be scrolling through a text message.
"Is it your mom? "
"It's Skye."
"Is she okay?"
"Rough night."
CJ glanced at the clock before saying, "do you need to call her?"
Danny shot off a quick response and then put the phone down.
"I'll call her later. This is our time now."
She glanced down as he got back into bed.
"You about ready for the next round?"
"Ready, willing, able."
"You know .. if I go on top this time, and you can find it within yourself to release me soon afterwards, maybe we can pull this off without latex."
"I'm sure the Bartlets would be delighted if we conceived in their guest room."
"Not to mention the embarassment it would bring our offspring."
"I guess it could be a claim to fame of sorts, too."
"Hey! I'm waiting for an answer while there's still some turgidity in you, Daniel. It would be a shame to let all of this go to waste."
"It would," he said as he gave himself a few lazy strokes and watched her squirm.
"So?"
"Climb aboard, ma'am."
Author's Note:
For those interested in chronology, the story in my CJ|D timeline which slots in after this is Return to Africa (which will make little sense unless you've read Tie a Yellow Ribbon).