A/N: Hello! Testing a new story out because I've been tossing the idea around for a few weeks now. You know, instead of writing the things I should be writing...typical ;-)

Let me know what you think. Hope you enjoy it!

[2014 – State Department]

"By mystery," she pauses, squinting her eyes at Matt and throwing her head forward, "Do you mean born out of wedlock," she pauses a beat, flicking her eyebrows up, "Or sired by aliens?" She's amused by her own self, but she also is annoyed that she even has to entertain Matt's statement of calling Stephanie her "mystery daughter." Maybe she shouldn't feel so defensive because she knows, deep down, that this is only the beginning of picking her family apart—she's only been in office for months now. But, if it's already come to this, how much worse will it get?

"Well," Matt answers cautiously, "We need to rule out either of those speculations."

She swallows and waits a moment before replying, "Knock yourself out." She takes a deep breath then moves her gaze around the table, making eye contact with her staff members before glancing down at her papers.

"Can we talk about matters of national security now?" She asks, purposely skirting around Matt's comment. She'll get around to answering it more head-on later, but right now, she needs to wait and talk to Henry—to Stevie, too.

[1989 – University of Virginia]

"Thank you," she says to the mailroom worker before scurrying off, not even getting out the door before ripping the envelope open. She's been waiting for this reply for weeks now—ever since her interview in early September.

Yanking the paper out, she skims over "Dear Ms. Adams" and moves on to the juicier part. Her eyes stop on the word "unfortunately," and she has to stop walking. Someone bumps into the back of her arm and knocks her sideways just slightly as she stares at the paper, her eyes unable to move off that word.

Through blurred vision, she reads the rest, "Unfortunately you have not been selected for the internship at this time."

Her hands are shaking as she re-reads the sentence four more times, mouthing it the third time to make sure she was reading it right. You're a shoo-in, Ms. Adams, one of her professors told her, the CIA would be lucky to have you.

She shoves the paper down and catches her breath, using her lungs for the first time since she'd opened the letter. Breathing in sharply, she runs her fingers along the top of her hair, accidentally pulling some of it out of the headband. With her teased hair now sticking up, she walks back to her dorm and reads the paper again, and again, and again, and finally lays her face down in her pillow and cries.

This was the career she'd chosen.

This was what she worked so hard for.

If they didn't want her with her 4.0 GPA and her major in political science with the minor in mathematics and her debate team extracurriculars and all the volunteer work she's ever done, then what else could she possibly do to get them to look her way?

When she picks her face back up from her pillow, she notes that it's dark outside, and ultimately dark in this room. She looks over at her desk and notices a piece of paper with Elizabeth written on the front. Shimmying down to the end of her bed, she contorts her body to reach down for the paper, unfolding it and reading:

"I'm not coming back tonight…room's all yours, babe! I'll be at the Kappa Sig Halloween party if you want to join but I know that's not really your thing. –Jessica"

She flops the paper back down onto the desk and blows out a breath, pushing her frizzy hair out from her forehead and sitting back on her heels. She looks around the room for a moment, unsure what she's looking for exactly. Her walls feel empty now that she's taken down the pictures of her and her boyfriend—her ex-boyfriend, Steve. She'd told Jessica to get rid of them back when she couldn't bear to look at them any longer—she still has no idea what she did, but Elizabeth hadn't found them yet, so she did her job well.

After her look around the room, she stares at the note on her desk again, the paper from the CIA resting beside her at the end of her bed. She feels like pushing it off the edge like her aunt's cat always pushed plates off the countertops, but she can't find the energy to do it.

Her eyes find Jessica's note again. She takes a deep breath, Kappa Sig? she thinks to herself, What the hell are you thinking, Jessica?

But the idea of being around a lot of people—and alcohol—interests her. How often does she do anything like this, anyway?

She thinks for a few more moments before slowly pushing herself off the bed, climbing down to the floor. She turns around and looks at the mirror hanging on the back of their door, startled by the way she looks so disheveled. "Dumped by the CIA and your boyfriend all in the span of six months, Elizabeth. Way to go." She murmurs to herself, turning around and digging through her closet.

With each hanger, she gets angrier as she scoots it to the side. No, she thinks, no…also no. None of these shirts are party shirts. None of these dresses—mostly debate team dresses—are party appropriate. Contemplating it for a moment, she finally moves over to Jessica's closet, deciding that she would let her borrow something if she were here. They've been roommates since sophomore year after she finally was allowed to leave her crazy freshman year roommate—Jessica was cool.

The first dress she lays her hand on in Jessica's closet is a tight black one, and when she holds it up, she realizes that it's also an off-the-shoulder one. She takes a breath and finally pulls it off the hanger, stripping down to nothing—absolutely nothing—and sliding the dress over her head.

She goes back to the mirror and fixes the shoulders, blowing a shaky breath out as she looks at herself. Her hands smooth her hair over, but she realizes it's futile and takes the ponytail out.

The teasing in her hair kept it all big still, and she smushes it around a bit before she finally gets a look she's satisfied with—big and looking as though she just had sex. That's a good look for this Kappa Sig party, for sure.

After she redoes her makeup a bit darker than she normally would, she waddles in the tightness of her dress to her closet and pulls out her black heels from the back, strapping them on. The last time she'd worn them, she swore that she'd never wear them again, but she couldn't bring herself to donate them once she'd gotten back. "They're perfect for so many things," she'd told Jessica, who promptly answered that she would also think a foot surgery would be perfect by age thirty.

Stumbling only once, she smooths out the dress in the mirror and takes a deep breath, letting it out loudly, "Okay, Elizabeth. Go forget about this day."

Immediately as she gets to the bottom of her stairs, she's regretting the heels. She stops at the front door of her hall, just outside, and she takes them off right there before marching her way down to the Kappa Sig house.

"Name?" Some dude says when she gets to the door—she'd stopped and put her shoes back on a few hundred feet before reaching the house.

"Elizabeth Adams," she says, letting her eyes drop down to the clipboard he was holding. "I-I'm with Jessica Howard," she adds, clearing her throat, "She should be waiting for me. I told her I wasn't sure I was coming."

"Sorry," he says, shaking his head.

She sighs, "Just tell her I'm here."

"I'm not going and looking for her," he says, his face looking disgusted as though she'd asked him to clean his own bathroom. "You're out of luck, blondie."

She feels her blood start to boil as she cocks her jaw to the side, gritting her teeth together and balling her fist over her clutch. She thinks for a moment, eyeing him up and down before he starts to turn away and talk to some other dude (who also looked as though he hadn't brushed his teeth in a while), and she grabs the man by the wrist suddenly and smashes her lips on his before he can do anything to get away.

Her hand leaves his wrist when he doesn't fight it—mostly because she smells the large amounts of cheap whiskey already on his breath—and she slides her hand down to his waistband and over the front of his pants. She pulls away, dragging his bottom lip with her, and she bats her eyes at the man. "Has my luck turned?" She asks, lowering her voice and softening her eyes.

He studies her for a moment as his buddies are behind him oohing, telling him to let her in because they need plans for the night. She pushes her hair up a little and smirks at the boys behind this guy, and finally the guy steps to the side and moves his arm to let her in.

"I'd hoped that would change your mind," Elizabeth says, her voice still seductive as she smirks, walking past him. As soon as she's in the door, she rolls her eyes and relaxes her shoulders from where she'd had them pulled so far back, sticking her breasts up an extra few inches.

She messes with her hair again and looks around, getting bumped into from every direction it feels like. She rubs her arm and wonders where she may find Jessica, and then she thinks she probably doesn't want to think about where she could find Jessica.

Finally, she makes her feet move forward, leading her toward the foyer of the house. She looks around at the ridiculousness, the show of riches, and she scoffs a little to herself before she follows some guys she overhears talking about a keg.

They lead her to a large room with not one, but five kegs, and there's four guys turned upside down on them. The fifth is empty, and everyone is now chanting to some other guy and pressuring him into drinking from it. She watches as the guy keeps shaking her head, and in a spark of boldness, she throws herself forward, "I'll do it," she announces.

They all look at her, even two of the guys already being turned upside down on the kegs, and one of the other guys get dropped. The two heftier boys holding him scramble to grab him, but ultimately, he'd hit his head. She's already regretting her decision, but people are laughing now. "You can't handle it," someone says, and she feels her chest redden.

"Who says?" She asks, pushing her hair back and sticking her breasts up again. She stands her ground, and finally the guys who were bullying the other one to do the keg come over to her. She squeaks quietly when they grab her underneath her biceps, and her feet completely leave the ground as they walk her over to the keg. They put her down only to step up on their ladders, and then one of them pulls her up swiftly. "Hey," she murmurs, almost breaking character.

But then they're turning her upside down. She drops her clutch and watches as it falls to the floor, and they're holding her by the thighs. One of their hands is way too far up her dress, but she chooses to ignore that and focus on not getting concussed like the one they dropped.

"Chug, chug, chug, chug!"

The chants begin, and finally, she latches on and starts doing as everyone says.

Moments later, they're putting her down, and she stumbles to pick her clutch up. Lifting it up in the air, the room fills with cheers as she stands in celebration, and then she feels her legs already start to wobble.

One of the other guys they'd had on the keg steps down, too, and raises her other hand. They all cheer, and she looks over at the guy.

He smiles at her, "Good job up there," he mumbles. She's not quite drunk enough to notice that his eyes look like they're swirling, and she wonders if hers are, too.

She smirks at him, "Not bad yourself," she murmurs back, then hears herself slur her speech enough that it alarms her. But not enough to make her stop. "Now who's getting me another drink?" She asks the room.

Someone shoves a small bottle of fireball in her in her hands, and though it was half-drunk, she slops it back and chugs that, too, feeling the burn all the way down into her toes. When she pulls it away from her mouth, she refuses to show that she's disgusted, so she just cheers wildly as the guy next to her stares at her, looking as though he were in awe.

And apparently, he was. "I'm in awe of you right now." He murmurs.

She smiles at him and notices that his hand is still holding her wrist, and that his fingers are sliding down to her hand now. She smirks again and bites her lip, walking away and out of the room, but keeping her eyes on him.

He follows, his legs barely working, and she crosses her feet in front of each other too far and trips a little. He grabs for her, but they both fall against the corner of the wall. "Ouch—" she hisses, starting to rub her shoulder where she hit it, but then she feels his body practically laying on top of hers and squishing it into the wall. "Hello." She mumbles, looking over her shoulder at him.

He doesn't move, and neither does she, but she does turn around. His hands lay against the wall flat on each side of her. "Hello," he replies, and she smells the fireball.

She's unsure if it's her own breath or his, but she watches his lips just in case she can find out that way. "You didn't catch me," she points out, the "d" barely audible in her speech.

He bites his lip, and in another bold, fueled-by-alcohol move, she moves her legs apart a little and wraps her foot around his ankle. He gets the hint and scoots toward her, positioning himself between her legs, and she's already forgotten every single thing she came here to forget.

"I caught you from hitting your head on that wall," he points out, nodding drunkenly to the corner where they'd both just hit.

She doesn't move quickly, but she feels like she's speeding to look at the corner, then she looks at him again and wraps her arms around his neck, "My hero," she coos, batting her eyes at him.

Before she can even make her own move, he's leaning in and closing the gap, and she definitely smells rum, too, not just her own fireball and beer. But that thought flees her mind as quickly as it came whenever she feels his tongue searching desperately in her mouth, and she pushes her own against his, and suddenly they're on the verge of fighting with their tongues.

She opens her mouth to get a better angle, and he pushes his head into hers as the back of her hair is getting smushed against the wall. She grabs for his hair, a little long in the back, something to hold on to, she thinks. Her eyes are closed, and she feels him squish her body a little more, and she's silently informed that he's rock hard.

She gasps a little and pulls her mouth away, the sober, responsible Elizabeth trying to come out for a moment. But when he looks at her, and she feels him pressing against her thigh, she smashes her lips back onto his.

Her hands are climbing up the back of his head and back down, sliding into the collar of his polo shirt. She feels his hands wrapping around her hips now, and he stops at her lower back just as his fingertips pass the barrier between her back and her ass. He pulls away and looks at her, and she breathes heavily a few times before asking, "What?"

"I don't want to assume I can…" he murmurs, his voice trailing off as though he wasn't sure how to say what he was about to say. "I don't know what's off limits."

She swallows thick, her arms resting on top of his shoulders as she fiddles with her thumbs behind his head. She feels his body starting to pull away from hers, and she's drunk enough now that she starts to feel as though she's going to fall over if he doesn't have her pinned between him and this wall. Her eyes move back to his lips, and she drags her tongue over her bottom teeth and then over her bottom lip, thinking the entire time about how his tongue made her wonder what else it could do.

She takes a deep breath and drags her gaze up his face, meeting his eyes, and finally she smiles. "Nothing's off limits," she whispers, not audible over the loud music.

"What?" He asks.

She huffs a little, "Nothing's off limits," she says, much louder this time before she pushes his face into hers from behind his head.

He smirks against her lips, then peppers kisses down her left jaw and up toward her ear. He nibbles on the bottom of her ear lobe, and she feels a shudder run down her entire body. "Come back to my place with me," he whispers, his breath hot against her neck.

"Elizabeth?" She hears her name, and she looks over too quickly, almost falling over. This man catches her by her hip, and she widens her eyes.

"Oh," she says, almost forgetting all about the fact that she'd meant to meet up with Jessica somehow in this huge house with all these people. "I was looking for you." She says, her words sounding more like "Ize luh-king fr'you."

Jessica smirks and finishes off her beer, "Party up, babe," she encourages, and Elizabeth simply smiles at her roommate as she walks on past to the keg room.

She watches for a moment and then looks over the man's shoulder, feeling him pressing against her leg again, and it pulls her back to the moment she was having.

"My roommate," she mumbles, her eyes blinking a little too heavily, "She's drunk." Elizabeth adds that because she noticed how Jessica was even more perky than normal—it's like alcohol didn't affect her in the way it did most people, it just made her even more fun.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth is struggling to stand on her own. But her big, strong hero is holding her up, and he's looking at her, too, like he's waiting on some sort of answer.

She furrows her brows and tries to think hard about what he could be waiting on, and her hands can't help but play in his hair, and she's grinding her hips against his when it finally hits her, "Oh!" She screeches a little too loudly, "I'm sure we can find a room here."

"Deal," the man says, and she lets herself be held up by him as they walk together up the stairs, and she can't help but giggle about halfway up over how hard it is to get up there.

He's giggling, too, and it turns her on even more when she hears him. How many men has she heard giggle? Even drunkenly? She looks over at him and bites her lip as she holds on to the railing, his arm holding her up on the other side even though he was having to hold himself up, too, on the railing.

When they get to the top, she yanks him into the nearest room and slams it behind them. A little red flag pops into her head, but not the one that really should've been popping up: "Anything?" She asks, trying her best to do the whole "consent" thing as her hands are already reaching for his belt, but she's waiting for him to answer, too, forcing herself to stand still long enough.

"Anything," he answers, then raises his brow as he reaches for the top of her dress, his fingers threading into the top, "Anything?"

"Anything."

And with that, it was as if someone had shot a gun and started the race. She was hungry, and had she been in her right mind, she would've seen that he was just as hungry. But she wasn't in her right mind, and that's why her dress was already laying on the floor alongside his pants and his boxers and belt, and why he's lifting his shirt over his head and throwing it to the other side of the room.

Her hands are roaming all over his body, down from his chest to his sides, feeling the chiseled muscle in his abdomen leading down to his hips, and then she feels everything below his waist and her legs almost buckle. He's kissing her now, and she's so dizzy she can hardly stand, so when she pushes him backward onto the bed, it's for her own good.

She crawls on top of him and straddles his hips immediately, not letting her lips go too long without touching his. Grinding against him, he's moaning underneath her, and she pulls her lips off his just long enough for him to say, "God, you're amazing."

She flicks her brow up and thinks in her drunken stupor how he hasn't even seen the best yet, and she lets herself roll onto the bed beside his body. She opens her legs and finds herself giggling again, giggling at the cool air, the situation, the way she feels so silly as though she's at the gynecologist and holding her feet in the stirrups. "Open for business." She murmurs, busting out in a full-on laugh.

He laughs, too, and he rolls onto his knees, "Oh yeah?" He asks, positioning himself at her entrance and taking a little too long to do it.

"Yeah," she laughs, but her laugh is stopped midway when she feels him slide into her, and her head digs into the bed as her back arches. Her fingers push into the backs of her legs where she's been holding them up in the air, and she lets out an animal-like moan that she normally would've been afraid to release. However, she's drunk, and the music is much too loud, and this man is too drunk to remember anyway, too. "Oh, God," she mumbles, barely able to get it out from the lack of breath in her lungs.

And that wasn't the last time for Elizabeth that night. She and this man, her hero, spent an entire two hours trying things she hadn't ever even thought about, and by the end, she was so exhausted that she just fell on the bed face down. She feels his hand against her jaw, and he's moving her face to look at him. He smiles at her, "Don't fall asleep like that," he murmurs, and she wonders briefly if his alcohol is wearing off, but she's still feeling enough of hers to nod and do as he says. She rolls a little onto her side.

"Make sure I don't drown in my own vomit?" She asks, now realizing her own alcohol has worn off enough, too, to make her aware that she needs to think about aspirating on her own vomit.

"Sexiest thing we've said to each other all night," he teases, and she smiles as she tries to look at him again. It's so dark in this room, and it was so dark in the other rooms, too, that she's not even sure she's gotten a good look at him.

But she knows, as she bats her eyes slower and slower, that he's her big, strong hero who saved her from falling into the wall and saved her from her own thoughts tonight. He saved her from being alone with it all, and as she falls asleep, she lays naked in this random bed and feels him pull the blankets up over her.

The splitting, pounding feeling in her head wakes her up first, but then when she tries to open her eyes, the sudden burst of sunlight through the window and into her eyes makes her squint and close them back. She moans a little at the sudden movement making her feel like she's going to throw up, and she stays extra still.

Her eyes flutter open a little more and she stares at the ceiling. Where am I? she thinks, opening one eye a little further than the other.

The memories from last night start flooding back into her head. She remembers a keg, and she remembers chugging a fireball, and she remembers this man who helped her up the stairs. The panic settles in when she realizes she's in a random bed, and she remembers stripping down in front of him—him stripping her, actually, as she stripped him—and then she doesn't remember what happened after that, but the soreness in her legs tells her that she doesn't need to remember to know what she did.

She looks over her arm and hopes to find no one there, hopes that all of it was just some weird, alcohol-induced nightmare, but she sees that man sleeping next to her. His arm is covering his eyes, and he lets out a little snore. She gasps, almost chokes, and then scrambles too quickly to move out of the bed. She rushes to the trash can in the corner and throws up before checking over her shoulder to see if he woke. When she finds that he's still snoring, she hunts for her dress and finds it thrown almost underneath the foot of the bed.

Gathering it up, she slides it onto her body and doesn't even look for her shoes. She has blisters already this morning anyway.

Carefully, she unlatches the door and slides out of the room, huffing a little when she shuts it without causing him to stir. My God, Elizabeth, she thinks to herself, tiptoeing down the stairs and rushing past liquor bottles and empty beer cans to the door, what the hell were you thinking?

Weeks passed by and Elizabeth had done everything she could to forget that night—the way she drank to forget her own pain, the way she slept with a man she didn't even know, and the way she didn't ever think to at least catch his name. Every single day that she walked to class past the Kappa Sig house, she cringed to herself, and she thought about that man and wondered where he was today.

Everyone had gone home for Thanksgiving, and it left the campus almost completely empty. But this was Elizabeth's third year here, and it was her third year staying and going to the common area to tune into the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade all alone. This year, her hall didn't have anyone who stayed for Thanksgiving, and she literally had it all to herself.

When Jessica came back the weekend after the holiday, Elizabeth had found herself on her knees in the bathroom, and Jessica came in fussing at her. "Elizabeth!" She says, "Are you sick?"

"What gives you the idea, Jess?" Elizabeth mutters, rolling off her knees and sitting on her hip, leaning her back against the bathtub. "I've been sick since a few days before Thanksgiving."

She feels a wave of nausea roll through her again, and she clutches at her stomach. She doesn't inform Jessica that she also was days late for her period, she just stares into the toilet bowl and refuses to blink—afraid that even that much movement will make her throw up, or gag, again.

Jessica doesn't reply, but Elizabeth hears her walking in through the bathroom door. She opens the cabinet underneath the sink and rustles around a bit before tossing something at Elizabeth, "Here," she says, and Elizabeth grabs for it and looks down, furrowing her brow. It's a long thing wrapped up in plastic, and she looks at Jessica for clarity. "It's a pregnancy test. Sounds like you need it more than I do today."