A/N: Hello all! Here's a little update. Thanks to everyone who's been supporting this story by leaving their sweet comments, I really appreciate them as always.
Hope you enjoy!
February 4, 2024 | Elizabeth
She leans one hand against the dresser as the other slides the sock up to her ankle, switching feet and doing the same for the other. Her feet push into her tennis shoes without untying them, her heel crushing the back of her shoe because she's too damn tired to bend down and pull it up. These old tennis shoes have been through a lot with her, and this is nothing new for them—her heel crushing the backs isn't the first time this has happened.
When she starts walking, she looks down as she realizes she's shuffling her feet. Wow, she thinks, I'm really tired.
She feels Henry's eyes on her somewhere behind her, but she tries to shrug the thought off of him looking at her again. He's looked at her so much this morning already, and looked at her too much last night. They looked at each other too much last night. Everything was too much last night. Maybe everything, in general, was too much.
A little voice comes from somewhere in their living quarters, and she picks up her feet a little easier and a little quicker, power-walking out of the hallway that leads from their bedroom and turning the corner to the living room to find Emmie rushing through the front door. "Gamma!" She exclaims, and Elizabeth already has outstretched arms as Stevie is just coming through the door and closing it behind her.
She squeezes the little girl tight to her chest, breathing in the sweet scent of Johnson's baby shampoo while she shuts her eyes. "There's my sweet girl," she coos, her hands moving to cradle the girl's head.
Though she feels Emmie squirming, she holds on just a little longer, already hating that her granddaughter is raring to get out of her arms so soon.
But she finally lets go, knowing that no one wants to be held down, but not before pressing a kiss to her head. Emmie, like a fish being thrown back into the water, is rushing off to the toy chest that has made its way into the living room (and had made its way in as soon as Emmie was old enough to play—Elizabeth and Henry quickly exchanged a "it's for our granddaughter, who cares if it goes against the White House aesthetic?" conversation, and it's been there since before she could take her first steps).
"She's always got better things to do than give hugs these days," Stevie says, almost sounding bashful as she puts her coat up on the hanger and walks over to the back of the couch.
Elizabeth watches as her daughter leans her elbows down onto the back of the couch and watches her own daughter. She realizes at some point that she's been holding her brow up, and the slight, complaining ache coming from her forehead is nothing compared to the ache from the rest of her body. In fact, she feels herself swaying from the tiredness and cramping of her hamstrings, so she walks to a chair and sits down. When she folds her hands together, leaning over her lap, she can't help but still look at Stevie. "I remember those days," she finally answers, dragging her gaze away from her daughter to watch, instead, her granddaughter get her favorite toys out: her Lightning McQueen car and her tutu. One cannot be played without the other. Ever.
While watching Emmie, she thinks back to the days when Stevie was that little, and how hard it was adjusting to a life with a child instead of just a life of Henry and Elizabeth. Their married team had gone from one of comfort to one of bickering about diapers and feeding schedules.
She half-threw the diaper down on the couch and half-shoved a four-month-old Stephanie on the couch along with it, getting Henry's attention immediately. "I've been changing diapers all day, Henry," she huffed, tucking her long hair behind her ear as it falls down in front of her face. Her tee, stretched around the neck, was falling down too. She tugged at the back of it when she stood up, giving him a look and wondering he if was going to respond.
"Did you ask me to change any?" He asked, eyeing her as he slowly moved to tend to Stephanie.
Her hands flew to her hips instead of flying in the air like she'd wanted them to do, "I shouldn't have to ask, Henry!" She snapped, "You've been home for four months now, and just because I'm working throughout the week and you're taking care of the baby during the days doesn't mean I should have to take on all the responsibility for the entire weekend." She was almost crying—damn the hormones that still affected her ability to speak properly. "I'm up with her all night every night, Henry, and—"
"Because you don't pump enough for the night, babe." Henry said, his voice trying to be calm and collected as he picked Stephanie up by the legs and took her dirty diaper out from under her.
He didn't make eye contact, though, and Elizabeth noticed that. "Because I'm so exhausted that I can barely pump enough for the days when I'm not here, Henry." She said, even more pointedly than he'd said his reply.
A silence came over them as he put a clean diaper under Stephanie and set her back down, looking much like a professional would. She blinked a few times and folded her arms in front of her stomach, then let out a sigh.
"I'm sorry," she admitted, closing her eyes and plopping herself on the coffee table behind her. "I'm just so tired, Henry."
"I know." He answered, still calm and collected as he finished the diaper and pulled Stephanie's pajamas back on.
"I'm worried about whether she's getting enough nutrients." Elizabeth admitted finally, a thought she'd been having for the past week. She'd felt so insecure about having to come to that conclusion, but after she noticed Stephanie seemed to stop gaining weight, she wondered if it was because she'd gone back to work and was so stressed now. If not stressed from being up much of the night feeding the baby, the stress of the after-effects of the World Trade Center bombing last year was still pounding her at work.
Henry gently pulled Stephanie to his chest and leaned back on the couch, patting her freshly-diapered rear and quickly—to Elizabeth's envy—getting her to fall back to sleep. She watched as her husband did it so effortlessly, and her chest ached, feeling as though she may never bond with Stephanie like he had. She swallowed thick and stopped the tears from coming to her eyes. When he reached his hand out for hers, though, she couldn't stop them any longer. "I know you are," he whispered, "And I think she's just hit a little growth stunt. She grew so much in the past few weeks, and the doctor said it was normal for this to happen, remember?"
She nodded, but she still felt guilty. "I know," she said, "But I'm just worried."
"Because you're her mom." Henry said quietly, giving her a little smile, "And you're a good mom who cares about her daughter, and you don't want to see her suffer, especially for something you're doing or not doing. I know." Henry explained gently, "We can call the doctor tomorrow if you're worried about it and see what he thinks about it all. Okay?"
She nodded again, still feeling guilty, still with that terrible feeling of never achieving this level of bond with Stephanie, and she agreed, "Okay."
She jumps from her thoughts quite literally when she feels Henry's hands on her shoulders, and she drops her head down slowly into her hands and rubs her forehead. "Hey baby," Henry coos to Stevie.
"Gampa!" Elizabeth hears, and she picks her head up to see Emmie rushing to Henry behind her, all but jumping into his arms as he scoops down to get her.
"There's my princess," Henry says, giving her growling, playful kisses all over her cheek and her head and her ears, and then down to her toes, making her giggle and giggle and giggle.
Elizabeth watches from below, craning her sore neck back to see the scene unfold.
"Gampa! Gampa!" Emmie never says stop, so Henry doesn't. He keeps "biting" her legs and toes and then her fingers, growling the entire time and occasionally blowing raspberries on the skin of her tummy now that her shirt has come up a little in all the commotion. The giggles finally slow down and she seems to be catching her breath, "Put me down, Gampa! Come play with me!"
Henry does as she says, and Elizabeth admires, again, his ability to listen to strong women—even ones who are not reliably potty-trained yet. She watches as he follows her—actually, as Emmie drags him by his hand—to the toybox, and Stevie comes over to sit on the arm of Elizabeth's chair.
Elizabeth smiles a little and takes her eyes away from the playful two over there, wrapping her arm around Stevie's waist and pulling inward so that her daughter slid sideways onto her lap, landing and laying across the chair. With a laugh, Stevie looks at Elizabeth and raises her brow, "What's that for?" She asks.
She smiles, looking down at her daughter and pushing her long, wavy hair away from her face, "Sometimes I just need to hold my little girl. Is it too much to ask?"
Again, she feels Henry's eyes on her, and she catches herself holding her breath. Is she holding her breath because she's nervous? Because she feels awkward about what they'd done to each other last night? Had she been doing that before last night, before the elephant in the room was addressed? Well, really, before Elizabeth was ever brought into the fact that there was a problem in their marriage? The sinking feeling in her stomach gets heavier when she thinks about what they did last night, again, and her face gets a little hot feeling.
Their daughter is here with her daughter, yet Elizabeth and Henry had just done insanely wild things to each other only hours before this. She supposes it's better than Stevie just walking in on them like she had once when she was a young teen, but damn, the timing of it all today made Elizabeth feel a little older than she might have without Stevie and Emmie being here.
Her mind wanders as Stevie cranes her own head to look at Emmie and Henry playing—Henry had Tow Mater out and Emmie was, of course, playing with McQueen. Those times when they tried to be quiet in the house whenever the kids were home were sometimes a doozy, but nothing compared to being walked in on. And unfortunately, both Stevie and Jason had done it once during their lifetimes, and Ali thankfully only had walked in on a make-out session a few times.
They'd known that it was bad timing to have started this at 7:45pm on a Saturday. They'd known the kids were home. They'd known that Elizabeth can rarely ever stay quiet when she's had even a glass of wine because, for some reason, the alcohol always has gone straight to her vocal chords and gives them a new power that they don't otherwise always experience.
But there they were, buried under the covers together while their kids were downstairs and watching a movie. Jason was asleep, last they'd checked, because it's awfully hard to hang with the big sisters at age five when they're watching Finding Nemo and you've had a tough week at kindergarten. Ali and Stevie, however, had been so immersed in the movie that Henry and Elizabeth didn't even need to explain where they were going.
They'd been exchanging looks since dinner. Elizabeth would look at him on the couch, their kids sprawled out on blankets in the floor, and Henry would lean a little closer into her. When she'd feel his body heat on her skin, she'd feel it all the way through her body. And she really meant all the way through, too. And then she'd fumble around to try to "find his hand," but then "accidentally" her fingers would make their way to his lap underneath the blanket they were sharing, and he'd give her a glance that looked like he was daring her to get them started.
And she took it as a dare. And she stood up, her index finger linked through his pinky one, and dragged him quietly up the stairs. By the time they shut the door, their lips were locked on each other's and their clothes were being flung to the floor.
Now, he's deep inside her, and she'd squealed twice, so the pillow was now over her mouth. Her eyes, she knew, were looking at Henry with a mix of begging and a mix of a giggling "oops, did I do that?" attitude. But then when she heard the door creak open, her eyes quickly switched from a giggling mess to "shit!"
She sat up quickly and Henry rolled off the top of her, and Stevie was staring at them like a deer in headlights. Elizabeth scrambled to pull the comforter up over her shoulders—there was no saving face now, but she didn't want her daughter to see either of them naked to make the situation even worse than it already had to be. "What is it, honey?" She asked, getting the sobering feeling that her hair, also, was a tousled mess.
When she glanced over to Henry, she got confirmation that it was, indeed, a tousled mess by the way he was staring at her.
"I was just—" Stevie started, but she almost sounded as if she were about to gag. "I was…" she took a deep breath as though everything were coming together, and she blinked a few times at them before gripping onto the doorknob, "I was going to ask if you wanted any popcorn and if you also could get it off the top shelf but now I don't think I'm very hungry but also Alison wants some and Jason is sound asleep so maybe I don't want any but Alison probably does and—"
"I'll get you some popcorn," Henry interrupted her blabbing, and Stevie shut the door.
Elizabeth wondered whose heart was racing harder, and she felt so bad for her daughter having to experience this. She felt dirty and ashamed and like she'd just committed a very bad sin—yet, she still was going to finish this little activity they had started tonight when all the kids were sound asleep in their beds.
Her fingers were playing with the bottom of Stevie's shirt the entire time, and she looks down and takes a deep breath, that hot feeling still residing in her face and possibly even worse now that she thought about that night's later endeavors after that interruption.
"Breakfast is ready, Madam President."
She looks up quickly at one of the assistants, and she'd forgotten for a moment that she even had those. She forgot, for a moment, that she was President of the United States, and not just Stevie's mom or Henry's wife or Emmie's gamma. So she puffs her chest up a little and nods, giving him a smile, "Thank you, Ben." She says as Stevie is sitting up.
"Are you ready for pancakes, Emmie?" Stevie says to her daughter, and Elizabeth is standing up with much help from her arms pushing her up. Her legs feel like noodles, but noodles with feeling. And that damn pain in her ass is shooting pains all the way down from her ass to her foot. This sciatica was almost as bad as when she was pregnant with her three children, and that's saying a lot.
When she gets to the table, Emmie was already gawking at the stack of mini-pancakes on the plate in front of her. Chef Cindy always knew when Emmie was coming to make some little ones for her because, well, the girl loved to see them stacked up like this with syrup dripping down the sides.
A girl after her grandma's heart, for sure.
She sits down and watches for a few moments as Stevie cuts up the cake-stack, and Henry pulls his seat out across the table from Elizabeth and is eyeing her the entire time. Finally, she doesn't ignore his look, and she gives in to looking at him, too.
It strikes her immediately that he's watching her with an odd expression. His eyes are soft and don't always want to make contact with hers, so she feels, too, like she needs to glance away. But she doesn't. She watches as he does, instead. His shoulders are pulled up higher than his usual, and his jaw is cocked to the side—something he does when he worries. She takes a deep breath, trying to not let herself spiral into this notebook of little cues she has saved of Henry, but she's already let herself get too far to stop now.
She picks her fork and knife up, slowly cutting her pancakes as she watches him doing the same, occasionally letting his eyes wander up as if he were checking to see if she were looking. And when he sees her looking, he drops his eyes back down again. She swallows thick, narrowing her eyes at him and wondering what he's thinking. God, she's so jealous of him sometimes—he always knows what she's thinking, why can't she just read his mind like he does hers?
Her eyes drop back down to her pancakes, and she realizes she's cut them in all shapes and sizes. Some are huge chunks, some she's cut into what she would no longer even call "bite-size" pieces. These are bite-size for a mouse.
She sighs a little and then notices another pair of eyes on hers: Stevie's. Her eyes shoot over and look at her daughter, and Stevie is exchanging glances between Henry and Elizabeth, and her eyes are squinted just like Elizabeth knows she does whenever she, too, is trying to figure something out. "What's going on here?" Stevie finally asks, another trait of her own—forwardness.
"What do you mean?" Henry answers almost immediately, making them both sound incredibly guilty.
"Henry," Elizabeth breathes, dropping her head a little into her hand after she lays her knife down. She closes her eyes and sighs, knowing Stevie has caught on. "We're just having a little disagreement."
"A disagreement?" Stevie presses.
"It's between your mom and me." She hears Henry say, and Elizabeth drags her eyes up but doesn't move her head. She looks at him over her glasses and wonders if he's going to be able to dig them both out of this hole.
Stevie shoves a bite in her mouth as Emmie sings to her pancakes, "Well it's affecting the whole feeling of the table, so…" she murmurs, looking down at her own syrup on her plate.
Elizabeth lets out a breath and clenches her eyes shut for a moment, then opens them and sits up straight, her eyes feeling tired again, "Your dad and I had a pretty big fight last night, Stevie, and we're still not quite over it yet." She admits, knowing her daughter is plenty old enough to be told the truth. But the sex—not all the truth. She exchanges a glance with Henry across the table as he angrily shoves a pancake piece into his mouth, and she swallows hard as she watches him stare at her when he chews, "You know how marriage stuff goes."
She adds the last piece to try to brush it off more than it should be brushed off, and to make it sound like it was way further away from that "D word" than it really is. But Stevie buys it and nods, "Yeah," she says, "Dmitri and I have our own shares of fights." She says, sighing a little and moving the subject right along to something about one of the birthday presents Emmie received.
Breakfast turned into them sitting around the table and talking while Emmie finished her pancakes, struggling the entire time with the fork, and then once Stevie rinsed all the syrup off her daughter, she'd asked for "Gampa" to go play with her in "her room." Gampa did as the princess asked, Elizabeth talked with Stevie for a while, and then Stevie brought up a subject that Elizabeth was surprised to hear.
"Dmitri and I are going through…some problems."
She stares at her for a moment, sitting up in the chair a little more and taking her feet off the coffee table and flat onto the floor, bracing for impact, "What?" She asks, otherwise speechless. It was the best she could manage at this time.
"Marriage problems." Stevie clarifies.
Elizabeth folds her hands and swallows hard, "What kind of marriage problems?"
Stevie looks down into her lap, "We just have been fighting all the time," she admits, shaking her head, "We bicker constantly. And I don't even understand why."
For a moment, Elizabeth's chest is caving in on itself. Dmitri is as much a part of this family as anyone, and the thought of possibly losing him hurts her. But then she has another thought, and it sends her back to 1998 a few weeks after a massage that Henry had given her. She, too, had been bickering with Henry constantly, and then finally Isabelle, of all people, asked if she was pregnant one day after Elizabeth had ordered a pizza for breakfast.
And yes, she was, it turned out. And yes, the bickering had subsided once Elizabeth realized that most of their marital problems had stemmed from her starting it for no reason other than she had too many fights to pick.
"Stevie," Elizabeth murmurs, her eyes closed and her head shaking just slightly side to side, "Don't kill me for this, but are you pregnant?"
"What?" Stevie asks, and her eyes immediately shoot open to look at her daughter. She looks pale, she looks like she's going to pass out, and then, suddenly, she looks like she's made a realization. "No…" she says, sounding as though she's trying to start telling herself all the reasons she couldn't be.
Elizabeth breathes in deep, "I only ask because I got the same way," she admits, "Whenever I was pregnant and didn't know it, I swear I would pick fights just to pick them, and then I would blame them all on your dad. I had no idea it was just because I was getting that influx of hormones."
Stevie is staring at her for a few moments before jumping to her feet, "Emmie!" She calls out down the hall, "We need to go, okay?"
She looks up at Stevie and finally stands up, too, and reaches her arms out, cradling her there in her chest as best she can. "For everyone's sake, I hope it is a baby." She whispers, a smile creeping up on her face, "Because I don't want to lose Dmitri from this family."
"Divorce?" Stevie spits out, pulling away from Elizabeth and letting out one hard, loud laugh, "Dmitri and I aren't ever getting divorced. Only death, Mom." She reminds, raising her brow. Then she tilts her head, "You and Dad always taught us that, remember?"
Elizabeth smiles a little, nodding, "I remember." She says, letting out a silent little sigh. "Good luck." She coos, kissing her daughter on the head before patting her shoulder while Henry walks out with a protesting Emmie in a tutu in his arms.
When the door shuts behind the two of them, she feels Henry's eyes on her again, and she turns to face him. She blinks a few times as she watches him, again, look nervous.
Her feet, maybe without even telling them it was okay to do so, move forward and toward him. Her hands reach out for his, and they grip each other's while their arms relax, their fingers down around their hips somewhere as they look into each other's eyes for a few silent moments.
"Only death do us part, Henry." She whispers, "And I don't think murder is a good look for a President of the United States." A smile creeps back onto her face, and she studies his eyes again, "Nor is it for the FGOTUS." The way she says it, of course, makes her laugh, and then causes him to laugh, too.
"Is this a threat?" Henry asks playfully.
"It might be if I weren't the President." She points out, raising her brow.
And then, she pushes onto her toes and presses a kiss to his lips, "When did we stop having sex in the day time?" She asks.
February 4, 2024 | Henry
"What?" The question takes him by such surprise that he has to stand there and replay the way her lips moved in his head for a moment. Did she really just ask what he thinks she asked, so out of the blue?
She tilts her head over a little, staring at him still, "You heard me." She accuses.
"I think I did." Henry says.
"When did we stop having sex during the days?" She asks again, and he blinks—he definitely heard the same thing twice now. "Remember when we used to even when we might get caught?"
"I don't know, babe." He answers, his hands dropping hers and sliding around her back to rest on the curve there. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you ask?"
She shrugs, "I just…I was thinking about those days when we'd risk it just to feel each other." She admits, "And I don't know when I ever stopped letting that happen."
He swallows hard and takes a deep breath, "I should've kept trying for it to happen." He says, "Even when you pushed it away. I should've never stopped."
She shakes her head, "You shouldn't have had to try so hard in the first place, Henry." She whispers, dropping her head and looking down between them. He watches as she hangs her head, and all he wants to do is take her in his arms. Should he?
They just said he never should've stopped.
He pulls her to him and her body rests on his, and she picks her head up and looks at him while her hands lay flat on his stomach and hip. For a moment, he wonders if she's going to push him away with the way she's positioned, if she's going to slink off to the Oval Office and tell him that it's her job, that she has a world to save, or something like that. And she does, after all, have a world to save. She's the most powerful woman in the world, and instead of being proud of that, he's let that stand in the way of them—their marriage, their partnership, their friendship, even.
But instead, she asks him a question: "Will you remind me what daytime sex is like?" Her voice is just a whisper when she asks it, and then she whispers a command, "Slow, because God, I'm tired."
And when he sees the smile on her face, he pushes away his own tiredness and thinks about the enticement of daytime sex with her. As he's about to answer, her phone rings, and their moment is broken.
She swallows thick and slinks from his arms, moving to grab her phone and answer. "Hello?" He hears first, and then, "Jay, I'm really sick today. No, yeah, I'm okay—I just…I think it's a little bit of a stomach flu. No, I'm fine, I don't need the doctor to come up right now. If it's not better by tomorrow I'll have him check it out. No, really, I'm alright. Chef Cindy will take good care of me and Henry will too. Yes, thanks Jay."
When he turns around, he sees her setting the phone down and biting her lip, "Where were we?" She asks quietly, her Bambi eyes batting at him and drawing him closer.