We walk down a hallway, and then down another hallway, up and around a maze of stairs and doors and into a room lit with a handful of soft, low lamps and studded with sofas, end tables and bookshelves, with a desk at one end. The wall color and furniture have changed since the last time I was here with Grandpa Leo, but I know exactly where I am. My stomach twists and all my doubts rise again. Do I really want to be here in the Residence? Practically throwing myself at the mercy of the dead-eyed, forever glad-handing gods of political life?
“President Colchester has invited you to make yourself at home,” Belvedere says, interrupting my unhappy thoughts. “I would suggest in the living room here or…in his bedroom.” Belvedere’s eyes twinkle. “It’s just through those doors.”
I can’t stop the rush of blood from going to my cheeks. What am I doing? I’m inviting trouble, I’m inviting the inevitable Internet storm once it gets out that I’m here.
“I’m sorry,” Belvedere says, his eyes still sparkling. “I shouldn’t tease. It’s just, we’re all really excited.”
“Excited?” I ask warily.
“About the President having a date with you tonight. We’ve been trying to coax him into moving on for months. It’s time for him to have some sort of companionship, and frankly, he needs to get laid bad.”
I let out a shocked laugh. “You can’t talk about the President that way.”
“The hell I can’t. You haven’t seen him like I have, and I’m telling you with all the male authority I have, he needs a woman.”
I hate myself for asking such a leading question, but I can’t help it. “Surely he doesn’t need a date for that to happen? To be with someone?” Please tell me what I want to hear, please please please.
Belvedere shrugs as he walks towards the entrance to the hallway that will lead him back to the West Wing. “Maybe not, but it hasn’t happened. At least that I know of, and I’m around him constantly.”
“So I’m…the first? Since Jenny?”
Belvedere pauses and looks at me. The smile on his face is less gleeful now and more understanding. “He’s not the kind of guy who does casual sex, and it’s too risky in his position anyway. Add that to his grief over Jenny and his drive for this job…well. We all understand why he’s waited. But we’re also excited that you’re here. He needs someone for him, someone who can be there only for him, and I really hope you can be that someone. Even if it’s just for one night.”
The aide’s words touch me, and underneath all my misgivings, I find the truth. “I think I hope I can be that someone too,” I say, and I mean it.
It takes another hour for Ash to return to the Residence, an hour which I’ve spent exploring and fiddling with my phone and checking my hair in the bathroom every ten minutes. The sitting room is generously decorated in pale creams and minty greens, the antique furniture giving the room a very traditional, very postcard-from-The-White-House feel, making me think that an interior designer did most of the choosing.
But when I get brave enough to crack the bedroom door and look inside, I see only Ash’s hand. Lots of muted grays and deep charcoals, a small array of understated furniture and a rigid adherence to geometry. No soft angles, no unnecessarily decorated furniture. Everything is deeply functional, solidly built, and free of ostentation. A room for a soldier.
My eyes light on the large four-poster bed, and my breath catches. Will I lay on that bed tonight? Will I wake up there tomorrow morning? Or will I be packed off while it’s still dark, sent away under the cover of night to avoid the press?
The thought makes me anxious, and I go back to the bathroom to smooth my hair one more time, staring blankly at the woman in the mirror.
I see a slender neck and a delicate jaw. Breasts that are high and firm, a narrow waist, and slender hips. In the low light coming from the sitting room, the shallow cleft in my chin and the beauty mark on my cheek seem exotic and striking, my lips full and pink, and my eyelashes long and dark. The mass of white hair—which is slowly darkening to gold in the chilly fall weather—currently pinned back into a sleek knot.
She’s jealous of you, you know.
All those years ago, that’s what Ash had said to me. I hadn’t known what he meant, was unable to conceive of any universe where Abilene had anything to be jealous of. It took a few years for me to finally realize what everyone else saw the night of my sixteenth birthday, but even I eventually had to admit that I was no longer the ugly duckling I’d branded myself as. I’m maybe not the sensual, exuberant swan that Abilene was and still is, but I do have a beauty all my own.
To kill time, I wander to the far edge of the sitting room, looking out over the dark veldt of the South Lawn. In the distance, the Washington Monument pierces the midnight air, the squatly elegant dome of the Jefferson Memorial close by. I’ve never seen this particular view at night, and it hits me, really hits me, that I’m standing in the White House waiting a few feet away from the President’s bedroom door. Waiting for exactly what, I don’t know, but I’m so ready. So very ready.
I turn away from the window and walk a perimeter around the room, feeling my high heels press deep into the thick carpet, and I’m stopped by a large framed photograph on the wall, the subjects initially difficult to make out in the dim light. But my pulse speeds up as I realize who’s in the picture.
It’s Ash and Embry, somewhere deep in the mountains of Carpathia, wearing their Army fatigues with guns and helmets and armor. They have their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, and the way they smile at the camera makes it seem like they have some kind of secret, like they’d just gotten away with something. There’s so much friendship in the picture, so much brotherhood and trust, and I remember that it was Embry whom Ash saved that day in a Carpathian ambush, Embry that he faced down an entire squad of enemy shoulders to save. But of course there were more battles after that, four or five more, where Embry and Ash both emerged as heroes—Ash the brilliant tactician and Embry the reckless brawler who flung himself heedlessly into every storm of bullets he encountered. I may have stopped writing to Ash the year I turned seventeen, but it didn’t mean that I stopped searching for his name in the news, which meant that I also searched for Embry’s. My intense feelings for Ash never went away, but they had been joined by new feelings for the handsome, rakish face that joined his in every newscast and online article.