Twenty minutes to midnight.
The hour wasn't necessarily a deal-breaker in the White House – you could find people working all day and all night, Sara not least among them, say, when some important piece of legislation was being passed, and you had to work on a strategy for enough people to vote in favor of it.
But that night was a quiet night, it seemed, to everyone except Sara.
The young woman was currently pacing the oval office; she'd taken off her shoes, medium heels, black, so no one would stand the chance of overhearing her inner deliberations. Sure, the room was supposed to be sufficiently well-built to guard against eavesdroppers, but you never knew, you never knew who had ears and where, and just how far reaching they could be.
For the umpteenth time, Sara reread the brief message on the small origami crane, which she'd found inside the forgotten glove she'd come back for, later in the day.
Rendezvous. Midnight. Garden.
The words were typed, not handwritten, which made her think Michael had gotten all the time he needed this year to get more cautious.
"He can't mean this garden," she thought.
But, racking her head for any such place that had marked their relationship, she could come up with none – and anyway, he couldn't have expected her to just fly to Chicago, without warning anyone.
Insane. Completely insane.
After his incredible apparition in Washington DC, though, Sara was willing to believe almost anything.
Her thumb worked on smoothening the wing of the paper bird in her hand.
Origami, she remembered, was how Michael used to communicate with his brother, when he didn't want anyone else knowing – their secret language, so to speak.
Michael had told her all this, a night that felt a lifetime ago, in a motel room that didn't seem to exist in the same world as this one, where Sara could be barefoot and pacing nervously in the oval office.
"The crane," she remembered him saying, "stands for protection – watching over people. Lincoln was the first one to come up with them," he shrugged. "I just followed suit."
Sara didn't remember exactly what she'd answered – maybe that his brother sounded like a nice man, and she hoped she could meet him some day.
Sara glanced at her watch. Just ten to midnight.
"Goddamn it," she swore under her breath.
It's common knowledge that the president of the United States never goes anywhere without his bodyguards. Sara hadn't made any particular effort to resist that – first, because she was realistic as to how many people in this country might want to kill her, and also because she had always refused to play the part of the rebellious teenager who sneaks out her bedroom window at night, moves below the radar of parental supervision. She had not done it to her father then, and she would not do it now, to her country.
But if there were no exceptions to that close supervision, there were nonetheless flexibilities.
Her bodyguards didn't usually follow her around inside the White House. Sure enough, they were there if she hollered, if she so much as grazed the right button on her phone, but she could walk from her bedroom to the oval without company, which greatly facilitated nightly hours of extra work.
Five minutes were still wanting for the appointed time when Sara slipped out of the oval and into the rose garden, barely thinking to put her shoes back on. Ludicrous. Not because she stood any risk of meeting anyone there that'd want her to explain what she was doing – these were her lodgings, at least for the next three years. If she wanted to take a night stroll in the garden, she bloody hell would.
But that didn't stop her from feeling like a fool, as she treaded outside, the cold air stiffening her whole body – she thought of going back inside for her coat but didn't, just walked further on, surprising herself by cursing Michael in her head.
She was the most powerful woman in the country, and he was playing games with her.
Then, as she spotted Michael, as surreal as he had looked this afternoon, dressed in a guard's uniform, that all-encompassing reality of politics, power plays and domination techniques, became dimmer.
There was a level of reality, that had maybe never existed outside their shared dreams and motel rooms, where they were both only lovers, and where it wasn't completely absurd for him to summon her here, to act as if they were star-crossed teenagers cursed with overprotective parents, the eternal game of tossing rocks at a window and climbing down a bedroom wall.
"Are you mad?" She said as soon as she found her voice.
His blue eyes gleamed like two starlit pieces snatched from the sky. In them, there was an earnest enough gaze that hinted he realized how serious the situation was. Slowly, he walked closer to her, until her chest was throbbing alarmingly.
This was too sudden, too dreamlike and, at the same time, too dangerously real.
"You could have been shot, trying to come in here. You could have been caught and jailed, Michael. And I don't want to hear how you did it, or how many people in my staff I'd have to fire for this –"
"Sara."
"Do not coax me."
He thankfully took her warning as a hint not to step any closer. The distance he maintained between them was respectable, nearly professional, but absurd, incomprehensible.
She realized at once how angry she was at him, for pulling something like this.
"What are you doing here, Michael? What did you think? That we could sneak away like two lovebirds, maybe back into my office, treat the White House like it were just one of our romantic getaway places? Jesus."
"You misunderstand."
His very calm fueled her anger. She was all the angrier that he got to act cool and composed, that he had all the information in hand while he left her with nothing but sentiment –
For a second, for the fire that ran in her veins and sent her brain into a wild haze, and for the cold intensity of his blue stare, she hated him.
It was enough for her to put a check on her own feelings.
"This isn't about us," he explained.
The words sounded nonsensical to her.
"I had to find a way to give you this, without anyone knowing." He produced a thick black notebook from his inner pocket.
Though he extended it to her, she kept her hands chained to her side, stunned.
Did he really think that she would just take it, that her fingers would brush his, that they would touch like it meant nothing?
"There's helpful information in it," he said. "About a lot of people in Washington. It's –"
"I don't care what it is."
He fell silent at the sharpness in her tone.
"You have no right to be here, Michael. You have no right to come here, to make me see you, to leave me no choice – to act like this would do nothing to us."
"Sara –"
"Shut up."
Though her cheeks had turned crimson, she could no longer feel the coldness of night. Nails like ice shards digging into the flesh of her palms.
The thought that if she reached out for him, right now, she could touch him, made everything else seem futile.
What enraged her most was that he might actually believe this – believe he had come here as nothing but a patriot, a masked lover of justice, devoted to his country and to his president.
There would have been other ways for him to give her this. Michael was a clever, clever man. If he could find a way inside the White House at night without anyone knowing, he could find a way to pass her some notebook that didn't require them meeting face to face.
Though he might deny it, she understood perfectly why they were both standing here, right now.
And she felt she had every right to be angry at him for it –
Not only for his denial, but for his bringing them together when she could not grab his neck and kiss him, lose herself in the warmth of his body, here, in the moonlit presidential garden. When she would have to go back inside that office and cope with her reawakened senses –
Over a year of separation had been enough to cheat her body, to make herself forget they both lived in the same world, in the same universe.
Now, there was nothing to do but stare at him and show him the lake of fire he'd called back to life, the burning torrent that strove to bridge the few steps of absurd distance between them.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The weight of the words let her knew he meant it.
Sharp breaths struggled through her clenched teeth, as she held eye-contact with the man who had burst into her life with the impact of a force of nature, but had somehow not altered its course.
Sara didn't believe in fate, yet it felt impossible to imagine anything at all might have steered her away from the presidency.
And right now, this moment –
Standing face to face with Michael, after all this time, and to be talking about anything other than the raging desires that devoured them both…
For the first time in Sara's life, the thought of fate took on a whole new face.
"We don't have much time," she said. His pragmatism had cut her, and she didn't mean for hers to hurt him back. "If you want to explain yourself, you better be fast."
"Over the past year," Michael said, "I worked on gathering a network of information on the most crucial actors in Washington."
Michael almost added that Lincoln had helped with that – not only through his new job at the restaurant, but old contacts, the sort of people who knew about the dirty little secrets of the cream of society. The jungle-world of politics wasn't as hard to understand as you might think. Much like the construction of a building, Michael thought, it was a matter of who applied pressure on what people, thus keeping the whole structure from collapsing, by making sure each fissure was well-polished and safe from scrutiny.
Nothing that happened in this world was free from consequence. The big corporations that funded campaigns wanted something in return – the unnegotiable absence of gun control, for instance, or Happy Meals in school cafeterias for kids. Then there was the more covert power play – the rule of I'll keep your secret if you keep mine sort of affair, corruption proper. And once that structure was revealed in broad daylight, once all the pressure points were put to the foreground, it became almost easy to predict what anyone was going to do, who was pulling the strings, and who you really needed to get to if you were hoping to make a change.
In his research, Lincoln's network had been very helpful, as had his own industrious investigations. But there was no time for Michael to throw himself on a detailed exposé, and he would sooner not mention Lincoln to her, anyhow.
"This is everything," he said.
She glanced at the notebook, without actually making a gesture to take it.
"Everything?"
"Everything that could be helpful for you in your handling of these people."
Sara arched an eyebrow. "You expect you can teach me anything about people I personally interact with? How long have you been in Washington, Michael? You do know I read the news like you do, and keep myself informed about their history –"
"There are other ways of finding things out about people. Ways a little less accessible."
Ridiculously, Sara thought of the recording of Bagwell's private phone conversations that Michael's brother had gotten them the previous year.
"I hope you're not confessing to a federal crime, Michael."
His lips broke into a grin.
She could have slapped him.
"If you want to have me arrested, Sara, you only have to shout for security."
She put ice into her gaze – whether to punish him for thinking right now was a good time to joke, or to tame the still-rising heat inside her, she was unsure.
"You realize how insane this is, right? That you can't just come here anytime you think you have information I could use –"
"It's the last time," he said. "This is only part of what I've been working on this year, it's the last of it. I have to focus on something else now."
He watched as she sucked in her bottom lip slightly. If she wanted to ask what it consisted in – the other half of his plan – she wanted to betray interest in his life even less.
Doubt rattled through his frame.
Or was she only trying to meet his coldness halfway?
What else was he supposed to do? Sneaking in the White House garden was bad enough. To act anything like a secret lover at that moment would be unforgiveable.
But maybe it was also intended as punishment, because a secret lover was all she'd ever seen fit to make him.
And he could be more than that.
The thought that he had done all this only as a way to show off – or that she might think so – disgusted him so deeply, he felt an urgent need to get away from here, this garden, all of Washington.
He had sworn himself he would not touch her, would not so look like he so much as wanted to…
She's the president of the United States, the leader of the free world.
Michael would never forgive himself if passion caught up with his bigger plan, and he wound up treating her with anything short of the utter respect she deserved. That was the least he could do, after summoning her here in the first place.
"You shouldn't have come here tonight," she said.
Her eyes hadn't lowered from his. The weight of the notebook in his hand seemed to exist only in a lesser dimension.
Washington be damned – she was beautiful. The thought sank in naturally, and Michael could think of nothing to do to stop it.
Her long hair was loose, it was rare enough to see it like that on television – her advisors must have said, Cut it short. Long hair was too womanly, too seductive, two things she should tone down as much as possible if she wanted to make it in that world.
Male politicians get away with being charming, but in woman what does it lead back to but the timeless tale of the snake and the apple, and leading mankind to its own fall?
Presidential as she might be, the imagined distance between them was not complete. Michael could still remember sliding his fingers through her red hair that looked like liquid fire in his fist, when he gripped it tighter in the throes of desire, the salty taste of her skin when he kissed it. She aimed for his lips, but he was too eager to hear her, the hoarseness of her moans in the night, her ragged breathing –
Michael broke eye-contact with her, like an invisible hand had gripped him by the neck and forced him away.
Thou shalt not think of seducing the most important woman in the country, thou lowly being.
As she didn't seem intent on taking the notebook from him, he crouched and laid it at her feet. And as he did so, he got a flash of the first image that first tempted him to join her into that jungle, that image of courtly love and timeless devotion.
Lancelot and Guinevere.
"I'll just leave this here." He said, realized he might have only left this here for her to find in the first place, with an origami bird so she would know it came from him.
We didn't have to see each other.
I didn't have to take that burning knife and sink it deeper into both of us, tearing nerve and flesh, causing lasting damage.
"I'm sorry, Sara." He spoke her name softly, like his very tongue might defile it.
A sudden burst of light exploded inside his chest as she caught his hand when he moved to turn away.
"Wait."
He looked shock that she could have broken the distance between them at all – as if he'd convinced himself throughout their interview that invisible fortresses stood between them.
She was close to him now, close enough that he breathed in the familiar smell of her hair and perfume, mingled with more sober aroma he didn't know – was that what the White House smelled like?
Jesus, what an unthinkable situation.
The warmth of her breath on his face, the pink curve of her lip, suddenly in reach.
"Whatever it is you plan to do… promise me you'll be careful," she said, while her eyes, returning the intensity of his flaring gaze, said something else.
"I promise."
He was unsure which one of them first tore away.
It was for the best –
There, in the moonlight, in the icy night, with no witnesses around, he wasn't sure how much longer they could remain together without something between them bursting.
Touching her, which he had viewed an unforgiveable a few minutes before, now seemed inevitable, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the unspoken torrent pouring between them erased what remained of their restraint.
"You'll be careful, too?" He said.
"I'll do my best."
He walked further back into the garden, still facing her – somehow, it didn't feel fair that he should get to walk away from her.
Long after he was gone, Sara remained standing, alone in the night, numb from the cold, dizzy as if she had just come down from a long, rattling ride.
By the time she stooped to pick up the notebook Michael had left on the ground, the thick black cover was cold, and her own fingers paper-white.
The clock on the wall only read thirty past midnight when she slithered back in.
Without considering going all the way to her suite, Sara let herself drop on the couch, where the most powerful people in the country sat turn by turn.
Just yesterday evening, she had sat there and had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin, who suggested she view the accusations as to her birthplace as a compliment. At least, he told her, the public alleged Russia this time, not Africa.
Yet, even with that in mind, Sara couldn't deny that there had never been a night in her presidency stranger than this one.
…
End Notes: What an intense chapter this was for me to get through. Can't wait to know your thoughts. Promise I'll update soon.
