Trail of Desire: A First-Time Narrative (1.06)
Part I
What a waste sleep would be when the most incredible woman you ever met lay soundly under your gaze. Her breathing is so peaceful, so beautiful, so demure that fear occasionally grips you with irrational panic. It tells you that Olivia is not breathing at all. Almost immediately, a hiccup in her breathing pattern or a twitch of her mouth, seen under the silvery blue of midnight, compels you back from the edge of reason. Her aliveness is fact.
You relax into gratitude now as you gently run a finger down the curve of her supple back. And before, when she was magnificently alive with pleasure underneath you. On top of you. In front of you. In the seat of your lap, her movements assuredly meeting your firm, eager dick with her slick. The way she held you against her breast as if you were hers. That was the last position you experienced her in, the one you liked best because you were eye to eye—with her. Soul to soul with Olivia. As if both your mind and body were inside of her, and she inside of you. This upgraded experience of your one minute in the hallway just days ago makes your chest ache. Too many parts of your body are alive with consuming desire.
You squeeze your eyes tight until you conjure your wife, Mellie, and the fake miscarriage story she told the day before. It relaxes your cock from the Olivia-shaped track it pursues. Strangely, you harbor no guilt for the sin you have committed. You know it is wrong, but it feels too right for regret. You lie down on your side, facing her as she faces you. Your eyes are open; hers are not, but you stare longingly, lovingly, wishing you had the power to raise those blinds.
The careless whispers in the dark, in between the times your bodies were entangled, you treasure these as you refuse sleep. She makes you laugh with your whole body. What a privilege to experience her like this. To know that however you regarded her before, you had not seen the half of her. Your fervently selfish wish is to know what she feels about tonight, about you—Fitz. The name that stayed on her lips like a breathy aria. How sweet the sound. The nearness of her is a sweet consolation you should never again be without.
Deserve is not the question because you do not deserve her, but that has never kept wanting at bay. Greedy, indulgent, and downright dangerous to even think that way—presidential campaign or not—and yet you cannot be convinced to cease and desist after tonight. Was this some delayed teenage dream or mid-life crisis? How unfair both ideas were, and how absolutely they failed to describe the feeling of your attachment. Your soul needs her. Your mind and body stir in whatever direction her rivers flow. You felt in her movements against your body, saw in the openness of her gaze that for her, too, this would be more than one night only. You are impatient with the need to know from her lips that this is true, that the two of you are in this together.
But you wait.
She sleeps.
You should sleep.
Being with her has a soporific effect that you have been fighting, knowing that in a few hours, everything will change even though you will not. You don't want to miss a moment of being with her. This night will multiply into other nights and days to come. Your life feels like it depends on them. You take her in and everything else in the room. The scattered garments on the floor, ceramic pieces of the lamp you knocked over, the tangled sheets with the smell of the last five hours, and the beautiful woman wrapped in them: an invaluable expressionist painting your mind captures, just in case.
The sheen on her eyelids sparkles in the moonlight. The deep ocean of her truth lies beneath them. You swim in that one-minute memory of their waters: her eyes are such an enticing shade of brown. The intimacy and unadulterated veracity you found there blankets you in safety as you lose the battle.
"That was real… she's…real," you mutter as sleep takes you under.
7 Hours Ago
The quiet of the bus makes your thoughts seem louder than they are. You wonder if Cyrus, sitting beside you, can hear them. There is anguish in your heart for him—the Governor. You have never lost a child that you wanted, but you empathize with the pain he must be holding. A pain you knew nothing about as you outlined plans for fixing his marriage. You could not have known, but still you feel a well of sympathy. What good is it if you sit here with your loud thoughts when you can just go and tell him?
"I was sorry to hear about your loss. For you."
You say after you have gathered the nerve to go sit next to him. After you've gathered the nerve to open your mouth. Even after the barely-there smile he projects at you serves as the only invitation to sit down.
You are sorry for him. You know how much he loves being a father. You have seen him with other people's children in six states now. The babies especially love him, and he loves them. When he played the guitar and sang for those children at that hospital, you felt something frightening that you made every attempt to bury, but it rose, refusing to drown in your denial. You wonder how excited he was to have a third child before he and Mellie were crushed with tragedy.
Mellie. Mellie, how awful this day must be for her.
"Is Mellie OK?" you add. Not as an afterthought. You have already expressed your sympathy to her after she publicly revealed such awful news in that pokey little pie place.
You are not prepared, however, for the series of statements out of the Governor's mouth. Ones that let you know to raise Mellie in your estimations. Lying about a miscarriage to boost her husband's appeal to women? You would never advise such base manipulation, but you respect her toolbox. Savagery runs through her veins. A politician she is not because a far more shrewdly ambitious animal lay beneath her veneer.
"She's a real catch, my wife. I'm a lucky man," he says after the revelation.
In any other context, such words would be romantic, but the statement falls out of the Governor's mouth wrapped in sarcasm and decorated by a thinly veiled bow of disdain.
'I'm a lucky man' loops in your mind as his eyes stay fixed on your face. This moment is strange and not at all what you expected when you sat down. You force meaning to flee as a familiar, verboten feeling simmers away inside you: the thing that makes you want to hug him to your breast. A more appropriate thought comes to you instead.
"I'm sorry." You are. You sense his deep unhappiness.
"Oh God, please don't." He curtails your sentiment instantly. "Don't be nice to me. I'm sitting here complaining to you about my wife, which is sleazy and low. And not fair to you. And the oldest trick in the book."
His self-awareness hits you like a wall of marshmallows. You do not fully grasp this moment or how thoroughly unexpected this conversation is. Surreal, in some ways. But a soft place inside you expands for him as he continues to speak.
"Suddenly, I'm looking down at myself, and I'm…" he continues as he looks up and out to some imagined, distant time. "How did I get here?"
A sliver of the traffic's glow caresses his face as he shares this thought. But it is not a wander down memory lane about how he became the man you are working so hard to make President. He turns to look at you as he continues this existential soliloquy. You are rapt, riding the edge of his waves, equally thrilled and frightened.
"Why didn't I meet you sooner?"
You are stunned to hear this.
You look at him, looking at you. Words do not exist, and they don't matter because you know his question is rhetorical. He is not asking it of you. You look because your heart beats in his direction. Ensnared and invested in his filter-less chamber of confession, you want to know what is next.
"What kind of coward was I to marry her and not wait for you to show up?"
Whether statement or question, you cannot tell. These words are hushed but clear as day. Too soft to punch you in the gut, they sprout petals instead. You can't tell him this even though it's too late to hide the creep of crimson over your well-defined cheeks. Your mouth refuses to close. You are not sure you are breathing.
His mouth closes, but his eyes remain sentinel upon you. You pray the intermittent streaks of highway light did not illuminate how your face betrays you.
You are speechless under his gaze. He meant that shit. Every. Word. Of that, you are certain.
No one has ever declared your long absence in their life to be so seismically altered by your short presence in it. A scarred heart upon which your name has been etched in invisible ink reveals itself only now by confession. A flawed inheritance you doubt you are equipped to handle. But he makes falling into his gaps so tempting.
The silence of disbelief stretches between you for what feels like eons. How do you respond to this declaration? To him, you must respond. Your head is full of excuses. Not for yourself, but for how vulnerable he is being. To help him excuse this outpouring of feeling.
He's married.
He's running for President.
He can't.
You don't want him to.
You both had this exchange just days ago, on the precipice of the most quietly intimate one-minute you have ever experienced.
Unfinished thoughts form in your mouth, but you have to say something to erect a barrier around your spongey heart.
"Governor Grant…"
Though his eyes have withdrawn their intensity from your face, he sees right through you.
"Oh, for God's sake, we are so far beyond the 'Governor Grant' crap."
An exhale. A smile. A mirthless breath of laughter. They all presage anything you can say to that. It is hard to deny the reality of what he says. You have tried denying it since the day the two of you met.
"Just say my name," he says.
He is edging you with his loveliness, and you cannot—will not—allow yourself to imagine diving off the cliff to a free fall of fulfilment.
"That's crossing a line," you defend.
You think his name is too intimate for the looks the two of you have exchanged. Too intimate for his declaration of love on a national platform, and the shock you felt when you knew you were the singular target of words heard by millions. Too intimate for how wet he has made you feel with his gaze, his smell, and the intensity of his nearness in an elevator. That one moment fueled three orgasms that night. All of this flashes through your mind faster than the speed of light, making your answer feel silly. And yet…
"It would be inappropriate."
"Then let's be inappropriate," he says, jettisoning all reason with that charming, lopsided smile of his.
There are people around, and still, he forges a connection with you, despite the danger. As if you are the only two people on this bus.
You are taken aback but not repelled by his rawness, his cheek. You are not his campaign advisor right now. Not since you sat down beside him.
You are someone else. He is speaking to you: woman, person, ball of needs and wants. Olivia.
You try to laugh off this whole moment, turn away from the youthful boy you see in him.
"Say my name," he says.
Soft. Sweet. Inviting. You do not want to RSVP to this party of two. Everything inside you screams his name, but you will not allow it to escape your lips.
Distraction. That is what you need to bring you to a plane of sanity. Your brain responds delusionally, specifically with the 1998 Destiny's Child hit:
Say my name, say my name,
If no one is around you
Say, 'Baby, I love you'
If you ain't running game
This makes things worse. Your heart beats inside its cage; it will not be detained.
His name claws its way out of your brain and onto your tongue.
"Fitz…" you finally allow yourself to say, just above a whisper. Saying it feels plush and pretty, like a pink petal emerging from your mouth.
He lets the sound wash over him. Wordlessly, he responds with a hand placed in the aisle between your bodies. You join him. His hand and yours are entwined together. You like the feel of his fingers between yours. They belong. Neither of you let go for the rest of the ride.
A/N: Thanks for reading. I've always wanted to write about this night. What was going through their minds-on the bus, in the hotel hallway? How were they transformed in the aftermath? `Was there a conversation? I'm tackling all these questions from my perspective. More, soon.