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Amy’s waiting for the elevator outside of the BKD office, quietly fuming at herself for mentioning Selina, when Dan comes out the door, still smirking over her fuck-up in the interview. “Good, you’re still here.” he says, a half-laugh in his voice. “Ben says that if you ever manage to extricate yourself from Selina, the offer still stands.” “I know.” Amy replies, with as much dignity as she can muster. “You think I’m not aware of what my involvement could do for your little political start-up?”“It’s hardly a start-up. We’re on fucking K Street, Ames.”His excitement over BKD is, quite possibly, the most sincere she’s seen in him quite a while. It’s almost touching, how proud he is, until she remembers the reason he’s so pleased is that he’s back in a position of political power. Depressingly, Amy merely finds this comforting. “Whatever.” she says crisply. “I am coming, I just have to tell Selina first.” “Don’t even tell her. Just jump ship.”“Honestly, she’d probably have Jaffar’s terrorist connection dump my body in the East River if I just stopped showing up to work.” Dan looks both impressed and vaguely disturbed. “That would be…an overreaction.”“Yeah, well, it’s gotten a lot better now that she’s getting fucked on the regular and the library’s underway.” The words are out of her mouth before she remembers what’s changed between them. Memories flash through her mind’s eye in quick succession, one-two-three: Dan’s mouth sliding over her skin, his groan when she wrapped her fingers around him, his fingertips digging into her hips. Amy concentrates on forcing the blush from her cheeks through mental willpower. A smug expression flits across like Dan’s face, like he knows exactly what she’s thinking, but, weirdly, he’s keeping his distance. He’s still about a foot away, hands in his pockets. She’d never have guessed that sex would make Dan less inclined to invade her personal space.“Anyway.” She laces her hands together primly. “Don’t give away my office, or anything.”He smiles down at her, the same smile she’d seen in the conference room, delighted and warm and hers. Something twists inside her: for a moment it feels like they’re back in that bleak hotel hallway in Carson City, on the verge of something new. “Don’t take too long, Ames.”The elevator doors open (finally) and Amy steps inside, relieved. When she turns around, Dan’s still there, looking at her with that (stupid) smile. Her fingers tingle with the urge to reach out and pull him closer, to turn her face up to his, as she had done the last time they’d said goodbye.“I won’t.” she replies, surprising herself. *The revelation doesn’t come in a lightning bolt of panic. Instead, the awareness settles over Amy slowly, like the moment you realize it’s snowing because your shoulders are already dusted with snowflakes. It’s an average day in early January, a week after the interview.She’s in the office. Selina’s out for lunch with Jaffar, which means Gary’s moping around on the couch waiting for her to come back. Wendy came up with the kids and she and Mike have taken them to Rockefeller Center for the day. Amy, who has no one to take her to lunch, is ostensibly discussing the library with Richard but is in actuality doodling on a notepad and thinking about how to extricate herself from Selina so she can take the BKD offer in such a way that Selina will want to let her go. Libraries are so boring. They don’t require any yelling or last-minute press releases or coordinated media strikes against the opposition, so it’s hard for Amy to really give a fuck.Richard is going on and on about correct construction methods and university zoning codes, how the fuck does he know so much about architecture, he’s probably got another doctorate hidden away somewhere, who the fuck knows what Richard gets up to in his spare time. Marjorie materializes in order to discuss her and Catherine’s library donation, and she and Richard flutter about Catherine and babies for a while. Amy watches them, mostly bored, and suddenly the thought occurs to her, as random and mundane as though she’s considering what to order in for dinner: I’m pregnant. She actually jolts in her seat, like she’s been zapped with an electric shock. What the hell? Where did that come from? She can’t be pregnant. She’s on the pill (um, technically). She’s been kind of tired, lately, but that’s nothing new. She hasn’t even had sex recently, not since…not since…Oh, fuck. Dan’s face flashes across her mind, the last time she had seen him up close, so close she could count the freckles on his nose, Dan stretching up to kiss her in a tangle of sheets. Something presses in on her lungs, some sharp, blinding emotion. Oh god—she is so fucking pregnant. The realization rests somewhere deep in her gut, in her bones—Amy’s never been one for jumping to conclusions, but somehow, she just knows. The certainty of it is numbing. She’s stood up from her chair, clutching her phone, as though she’s going to run right out the door right for a pregnancy test. She’s got half a mind to. There’s nothing urgent going on in this office, that’s for sure. “Amy, you have a very strange look on your face. Can I get you a coffee, or tea, or water? Could you tell me which specific mood you’re in so I can get you the right kind of beverage?”Caffeine isn’t good for babies, hadn’t she heard that somewhere? Oh shit—last night she drank half a bottle of wine and fell asleep on her couch watching Colbert. “Um.” Amy’s voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away, but it is her voice, which is reassuring. “No thanks, Richard.”She sits back down, tries to turn her attention to the library. Richard brings her a glass of water anyway. Amy nobly resists the urge to pour it over his head.*Selina never comes back from her lunch with Jaffar (figures), so Amy takes off early. It’s freezing and damp outside, but the air clears her head. A walk, yes, a walk will do her some good, a nice long walk until her brain freezes and the voice inside her head that keeps chanting you are so fucking fucked shuts up.Then she realizes she’s wearing heels and there are soupy puddles of melting snow everywhere, so she just hails a cab back to her neighborhood. On her way to Walgreens (on principle, Amy hasn’t set foot inside a CVS since Nevada), her phone vibrates. It’s Dan, of course. Amy knows he can’t know, there’s no fucking way that Dan has any idea what is happening to her right now…and yet. Maybe the baby molecules have linked them together in some sort of supernatural parent matrix (oh god, the word parent makes her want to throw up). Then again, maybe it’s just Dan. He’s always had the freakish ability to appear when she’s at her lowest.It’s a picture of Kent’s color-coded binders. Someone’s placed a green (emerald) one in the middle of all the reds (cerise, cherry-red, burgundy…)
Get down here and we can fuck with Kent’s brain together.
Another text pops up as she looks down at her phone. You know you miss it. Amy laughs before she can help herself. For one short, short minute, she allows herself to simply long for Dan, to have him here at her side, warm and solid, bitching in her ear about having to walk in the cold, and joking that Gary probably still has all the pregnancy tests from Selina’s scare years ago in his bag, Amy could have just used one of those. As if they were friends again, even partners, back when Dan had been her first thought in the morning, her first phone call, back when he sought her out first before anyone else, demanding her attention and her time and her presence. She hadn’t even realized it had happened until suddenly it was wrenched away from her. Anyway, that version of Dan doesn’t exist anymore, not really. There had been a glimpse, maybe, during that one night they had apparently made a baby (it had been, not to put too fine a point on it, in-fucking-credible). But that had been weeks ago. They hadn’t been really alone during her interview. Dan might have smiled at her like she was only woman left in the world, but he hadn’t exactly tried to get her away from the office. He hadn’t even asked where she was staying.Besides, Dan only ever wanted things because he wanted them at that moment, not because he ever considered what it would mean to actually have them or what would happen to the things or…people when he changed his mind and decided they were no longer useful. Amy is perfectly aware of this because she has the unique privilege of being discarded by Dan Egan multiple times. So Amy pulls herself together, puts Dan from her mind, and marches into Walgreens alone.* The tests are all positive, and she’s literally got her phone out to look up a clinic in, like, Vermont, when something stills her hand, as if an invisible person has literally pressed its fingers on top of hers.Amy sits back on her heels, her breath catching. Her bathroom is so tiny—she can lean against the bathtub and touch the toilet and the sink at the same time. There is definitely no room for a baby in this bathroom. For an instant she wonders if she should be crying. Is that a normal response to this kind of situation? She’s accidentally knocked up with the baby of a narcissistic robot with a devastating smile. Who, by the way, told her he was sterile. Rage would be a better reaction. (What she really wants is a drink, but she’s pretty sure those are against the rules now.)Amy attempts to conjure rage, but…nothing comes. So she tries to simply banish all thoughts of Dan, but his image persists, as though he’s stretched out on the bathroom floor next to her, as dumbstruck and at a loss as she is—again, as if this were a mess they had gotten into together, back when they got into trouble together and had to get themselves out of it together. She digs her fingers into her thighs and forces some air into her lungs.Dan is not here. Dan is not going to be here. All she can picture him doing is fleeing, which would not exactly help her or the baby. If she decides it to keep it.Is she going to keep it?(Lying underneath the blunt shock, there’s something else, something else getting in the way of rage, something glimmering and bright, trying to spread its wings. Amy doesn’t want to look too closely at it yet.)She suddenly remembers, years ago, when Selina got pregnant and made her buy a pregnancy test and Dan thought for a few hours that she was pregnant.It had been a weird day. In addition to the worry that Selina had inadvertently blown up her political career, she’d had Dan basically on top of her all afternoon, wanting to know what she was going to do about the baby, wanting to know who the father was, wanting to know if she’d told anyone yet and did she happen to know that the cost of daycare in DC was prohibitively expensive and not to worry, he would take good care of Selina as her new chief of staff.He’d been annoyingly at ease with those kids (granted, he’d also been trying to indirectly network with all their parents).She gets up from her bathroom floor, mechanically collects each pregnancy test, throws them away, washes her hands, and takes a good long look at herself in the mirror. Let’s get one thing very clear, Brookheimer, she tells her reflection sternly. It would be lunacy….sheer fucking lunacy…to have Dan Egan’s baby. Their baby. Half-his forever. He would be the father of her child, and that would never change, whether or not he fucked off or stuck around. Amy would be tied to him forever (knowing her luck, the baby’s going to come out looking exactly like Dan, with his fucking eyelashes and freckles). Dan doesn’t want kids. He’s never mentioned it, never mentioned having a family of any kind, hardly ever sees his own family. Amy barely knows anything about them—she can’t even picture them (she can’t even picture Dan as a kid—sometime she suspects that he just sprung from the depths of hell, fully formed). Having a kid would ruin the DC-power-player-lothario persona that he’s spent the last decade carefully constructing. He is not going to want a child.She wants a child.Amy doesn’t exactly know when it happened (okay, yes she does, it started right around the time the election tied and Dan slept with her fucking sister and all the constants in her life got blown up in the span of a few weeks). For so long, she was so completely uninterested in children, and then suddenly there it was, this strange new desire for a child, for a family, even if that family only consisted of her and one other little person. It figures that she would learn this about herself, try to move on with her life, try and leave Dan behind, and then find herself knocked up with his baby anyway. The irony is just fucking suffocating.*Amy goes to bed that night, puts on her pajamas and brushes her teeth, but for all the sleep she gets, she might as well have stayed on the bathroom floor.After a few hours of staring fruitlessly at the ceiling, she gets up and starts pacing, her living room patterned in the blurry stripes of midnight city lights, navy blue and oily yellow.In the dark, she can admit to herself: maybe she was only interested in the idea of a baby, because a baby would mean something else in her life besides chasing after self-interested, power-hungry politicians. A baby meant something more, a new beginning. A baby was something she could do herself. But she’ll never know now—she got what she thought she wanted, after all.*It’s embarrassingly, traitorously easy for her to imagine what it would be like if she had the baby and Dan stuck around. They’d have a townhouse or a big apartment somewhere (not the suburbs), with some sort of giant command-center office from which they could run D.C. They’d switch pick-up and drop-off for school. Dan would do all the parent volunteering and social school stuff that she hates because he would consider it networking. Probably they’d have to have a nanny until he or she was old enough for sports or music or whatever it ended up liking. And (in her head, in the best version of this little fantasy she’s indulging in), there’s no way Dan wouldn’t love having a little baby-protegé that was scientifically half-him. He’d probably insist on bringing it with him everywhere just to throw off clients. Naturally, Amy would have to be exclusively responsible for the kid’s moral upbringing, to make sure it didn’t inherit too many of Dan’s sociopathic tendencies.And okay, yes, he or she would grow up on multiple campaign trails and probably watch CNN instead of cartoons. Although considering the inanity of the stuff Sophie’s kids imbibe on a regular basis, Amy thinks it might be best to skip the cartoons entirely. As long as the kid had more spunk than Catherine (a child like Catherine is obviously the worst-case scenario) and Dan didn’t turn into Selina around him or her, it wouldn’t be…unthinkable.And…Dan would be there, when things were hard. She and Dan were always best as a team.Jesus fucking Christ, get your shit together, Brookheimer—Amy slumps onto the couch and groans into a pillow—she cannot be this dumb anymore, not now. Still—there’s that clench near her heart again, and Dan’s voice in her ear—we could still be great—she’s never been able to get that out of her fucking head. *She doesn’t call Planned Parenthood. She keeps on not calling. A few days pass. During the day she mindlessly plans for Selina’s library and then goes home and walks around her apartment, thinking.She almost calls Dan, like, fifty times, but she can’t bring herself to do it. It’s hard, though. He’s texting her a lot more now that she’s “unofficially” going back to DC, telling her about their new clients and Kent organizing the office with his slide-ruler and Ames come down here already, we need you here, I want you here. Amy refuses to let herself be taken in. Fantasies at three o’clock in the morning are one thing. Reality is another. Dan might want her around all the time, love teasing her, love working with her, even want to fuck her every day, but he would never—could never—actually commit to a life with her. That option is off the table. It’s always been off the table. *She keeps going over the night in her head, as though to try and pinpoint the exact moment they passed the point of no return. Mostly she remembers both of them acting completely out of their fucking heads, falling out of the elevator, losing scarves and belts in Dan’s hallway. It was like years of trying not to touch him had burst out of her and she had been so, so desperate to have him inside her, to feel him everywhere around her all at once, that everything else just kind of faded away. She remembers hauling him up from between her legs where he was doing something illegal with his tongue and fingers and gasping, “Condom, condom, get a condom.”And Dan had frozen above her, his eyes wide and dark, his mouth wet, and breathed “I’m out.” “You’re…what?” Amy’s desire-fogged brain had struggled to process it. “You…how do you not have condoms?!” She had started to push herself up and wriggle away, to put some distance between their bodies so she could think rationally. “Amy, Amy, Ames it’s fine, it’s fine, shh shh shh…” Dan had chanted, like a lunatic, gripping her hips in order to keep her on the bed. “I can’t have kids, it’s fine, I promise you it’s fine, it’s, like, medically-certified, it’s not possible.”Amy had stilled underneath him but her expression must have been suspicious because Dan had groaned, bending his head and resting his cheek on her abdomen. “Ames, come on, trust me.” His voice was so rough; it did something to her blood, to hear him talk like that, to hear him sound so desperate.“You can’t have kids?” she repeated blankly, trying to wrap her mind around the words.Sensing her imminent acceptance, Dan thrust his hips up against hers, smirking when Amy arched her back in return, moaning a little. “No.…”“Well thank fuck for—” she had managed to say before Dan was on her again, and that had been that. In the morning she had woken him early with the news about Tibet, Dan ambushed her in the shower so they could "celebrate" not going to prison, he made coffee, she collected her clothes, they made out until the car came to take her back to her apartment, and she was in the office by 8:10. It had felt really weird, like she had temporarily fallen into some domesticated dimension of her life, but…also really, really good, so good that it had warned her away from repeating the experience. She'd made up some reason to avoid seeing him before he'd gone back to D.C., and he hadn't really pressed her on it (which meant he only repeated the demand twice, instead of refusing to let up until she gave in). She'd thought it was finally over, and instead they landed themselves in a spectacular fucking mess. Some things never change. *One night, still unable to sleep, Amy stays up until four am mapping out different financial eventualities in the event she decides to become a single mother. If there’s one thing she’s picked up from Sophie: kids are fucking expensive.She’d have to do a little more TV work, which she hates, but it wouldn’t be…impossible to do on her own. If worst came to the worst she could always write a book. Dan always used to go on and on about how she wasn’t capitalizing enough on her status as the youngest ever female chief of staff/campaign manager/senior strategist in the executive branch.Plus, her parents are going to be so out-of-their-fucking-minds thrilled she’s actually having a baby, she’ll have free babysitting for life. Of course, that would expose the baby to Sophie’s kids (and, by extension, Sophie) but she could handle that. The mathematical proof that she can do it on her own is reassuring, to say the least. *On Saturday, she drives down to DC to see her real doctor and yep, she is 100% pregnant. “Congratulations!” says Dr. Kelly, and then she sees Amy’s face. “Should we, ah, talk about options?”Amy feels very strange—like she’s floating around the room watching a thirty-four year old woman in a pink paper gown stare blankly at a diagram of a uterus on the wall. Again, she hears her voice as though underwater: “No.” And then again, stronger: “What…what would I need to do next?”Dr. Kelly gives her a list of pre-natal vitamins and talks about when Amy’ll need to come back in for the next appointment. She puts her hand on Amy’s and tells her to call any time and Amy doesn’t say anything in response, because to speak would release whatever it is she’s keeping clamped down in her stomach.And when Dr. Kelly leaves to let Amy get dressed, she leaves in her wake the dawning realization that this is officially happening: Amy Brookheimer is having a fucking kid, and she’s probably going to have it alone. She leans back on the exam table and closes her eyes. Suddenly she’s feeling completely drained, too exhausted to consider getting dressed and driving to her parents’ house and starting the rest of this new life. It hits her that she has no one to really tell. She doesn’t feel like telling her mother yet (telling her mother means telling Sophie and Amy would rather…not). Telling Selina, the way Selina is now, is a laughable idea. Her closest friend, ever, maybe, had been Dan, and she cannot tell him yet, because she does not want to see the look of horror that she is sure will pass over his face. Amy’s only had this kid inside of her for a few weeks and it is the size of a fucking jellybean, but she’s already feeling the need to shield it from just how terrible its erstwhile father could be. (Protecting the baby meant she was protecting herself.)Then she realizes she doesn’t even know where Dan lives now in DC. This depresses her further in ways she doesn’t exactly feel like interrogating too closely. Who the fuck cares if she doesn’t know where Dan lives? Just because she used to know, just because she can remember his old D.C. apartment in almost perfect detail doesn’t mean she needs to feel this weird disappointment that she doesn’t know what his current place looks like. Amy buries her face in her hands and tries to get a hold of herself, tries to be rational, but her emotions feel too hot, too volatile for her to grasp. This…yearning, this impossible yearning that she’d thought she’d finally gotten over, it’s just because they slept together one time and apparently it was so fucking magical that even Dan’s lazy sperm got its shit together and managed to impregnate her and now her physical body has been tricked into thinking that Dan is special when he is absolutely fucking not. Finally, finally, the anger she had been looking for wells up in her, and Amy clings to it. It clears her head and runs through her veins like caffeine, like electricity, like inspiration. God, she finally gave him what he always wanted, he finally got to fuck her, and now she’s left with his kid and he’s going to fuck off and leave her again, leave them. She should be excited and thrilled because she thought this was never going to happen and it actually has, and she should be able to tell him as though it were good news. And instead she’s panicking and uncertain and alone and he is ruining this, just like he ruins everything. Then a horrible thought occurs to her, right there on the exam table, half-naked and vulnerable: what if he wants the baby, but not her? Amy tries to imagine sharing her and Dan’s offspring with whatever twenty-year old ingenue he eventually settles down with when they’re, like, fifty, and suddenly can’t breathe. She manages to make it to the bathroom across the hall before vomiting up her entire breakfast.Afterward, lying on the cool tile floor and ignoring the nurse knocking on the door, she makes a resolution. She, Amy Brookheimer, is not going to let Dan fucking Egan stomp over her emotions for the rest of her fucking life just because his sperm wasn’t as low-motility as he thought. She supposes he’ll have parental rights if he wants them, which, fine, they can draw up a respectable custody agreement and she’ll never have to see him again. Except for the fact that they have the exact same fucking career and she technically has a standing job offer from his political consultancy that she really wants to accept.“Nope.” Amy mutters to the bathroom tiles.She is going to do whatever the fuck she wants now. She will take the BKD offer (officially), she is going to show up and do what she does best, what she has always done better than Dan, and if Dan doesn’t like it, he can fuck off, thank you very much.“Miss, are you all right?” Now the nurse just sounds annoyed. She’s been knocking and calling for the past five minutes.“Oh my god, yes, I’m fine, for fuck’s sake, stop repeating yourself.” Amy snaps back, and feels a little more like herself again. *More to postpone the moment when she has to return to her parents’ house than for any other reason, Amy goes to the BKD office building on K Street. She sits across the street on a bench, staring at it and trying to imagine what it would be like to work there with Dan while their kid grows inside her. How long can she get away with not telling him? (How long can she get away with not telling anyone?)“Amy,” comes a warm voice at her side. She jumps slightly—Ben’s standing near her, grinning and juggling his coffee mug and a giant soft pretzel. Her relief that it’s not Dan is probably all over her face“What are you doing here?” he asks. “Are you down for the weekend?”“Um yeah, it’s my…dad’s birthday.” Amy lies. Her dad’s birthday is in June. “And you’d thought you come check out the office because home is the worst.” Ben, at least, gets it. “Mind if I join you?”She scoots over, and Ben settles himself next to her. They sit in companionable silence for a few minutes, pigeons flocking at their feet. “It’s been a long year.” Ben comments idly to the pigeons.Amy allows herself a little smirk. “I wasn’t working for Jonah.” “Touché, kid.” He cocks his head to the side. “Although I can’t imagine working for Selina was that much better.” “…Touché.”The last two years seem to stretch into one singular slog of misery. She had run to Nevada out of desperation and anger, returned to Selina more humiliated than she’d thought was ever possible, and found a wrathful, brooding shell of her old boss. Plus Richard. “You wanna stay in the same place for the next ten years?” Ben asks her, candidly. “You know Selina’s only got as long as she can wear those little dresses. Ten, fifteen years at the most.” “I think she’s figured that out.” (That desperate conversation with Selina, somewhere in between the Ohio and Texas congressional delegations casting their election votes.)“So then? I know she’s safe, and I know you know her particular brand of fuckery better than anyone out there. But she’s not all there is. Want some pretzel?”Ben feeds pretzel crumbs to the pigeons. Amy thinks back to her first few years in DC, keeping her eyes wide open, discovering she could be good, really good, at this work. She remembers Selina plucking her from a line of interns after a joint-event with a Maryland congresswoman, telling her to come interview for a job, remembers the euphoria during the first few months of Selina’s primary campaign. It had felt meaningful then. “I’ll be here when you’re ready, kid. So will Kent, and Dan.”Amy doesn’t say anything, but some doubt must cross her face because Ben rolls his eyes so hard it looks like he might break his eyebrows. “Oh give me a fucking break. Don’t be coy, Amy. He won’t stop whining about how long it’s taking you to get down here. It’s fucking childish.”“Well, that is an accurate description of Dan.” Amy says, and tries not to burst into hysterical tears.Ben stands, clearly having had enough heartwarming conversation for the next year. “Hey, want to come in and help me look over some polling data? We just got the governor from Colorado on our client list. Dan’s not there.” he says, correctly reading her hesitant expression. (Normally, Amy would be mortified that a professional colleague had deduced so much about her personal life. But since she’s already accidentally texted Ben twenty-six times in a row about a nightcap, it’s not like she has to worry about her dignity around him or whatever.)They spend the afternoon reviewing the exit polls from the most recent local election in Denver and it’s frankly the nicest time she’s had in weeks. *Because she needs to tell someone, and she needs to be 110% certain that someone won’t say anything to anyone, she calls Sue.“Amy. Congratulations.”“Shit, how did you find out?”There’s a dry pause at the other end of the line. “I was congratulating you on the fact that Selina’s library is finally happening. Is there something else I should be congratulating you about?”Amy doesn’t say anything, and Sue just sighs. “Meet me in ten, Amy.”*Montez is in Toronto for a NAFTA summit, so Sue can spare exactly three minutes. They meet in Lafayette Square. The second she looks at Amy she says “Well, it appears that I should have congratulated you on your pregnancy.”It’s entirely possible, Amy reflects, that Sue is an NSA plant. It would explain so much. “I’m not even showing yet.” she protests feebly. “As though that were the only indicator.”“Well great, just great, maybe you can spare me the ordeal of telling Dan.” she snaps.Sue doesn’t blink or look remotely surprised, which is extremely lowering. “I take it this was unexpected.” “Considering the last thing Dan wants is a kid fucking up career phase seven or wherever the fuck he is now, I would say so.”Sue just looks at her. “Why haven’t you told him?”“A lot of reasons.” Amy’s not even sure she can verbalize them all. “…I always kind of pictured the father of my kid being happy about it. As ridiculous as that sounds.” “You pictured this?”“Not Dan’s kid.” A half-lie. “A kid.”“But his kid seems to be the one you’ve got.”“Fuck.” Amy mutters, with feeling.Sue just looks inscrutable. To be fair, it’s her usual expression. “He could surprise you.”They’re quiet. Amy looks across the square at the White House, as untouchable now as it had been when she first came to DC. It feels as distant as though it were in a different universe.She says it out loud, for the very first time. “I’m going to have it…the baby.”“Congratulations,” says Sue again, almost kindly.*Back in her old bedroom she shuts the door, and then for an extra safety measure drags a chair and some boxes in front of it, in case Sophie tries to barge her way in. Amy doesn’t trust anybody in this fucking house to maintain personal boundaries.She takes off her dress and looks at herself critically in the mirror. She’s not very far along, according to the doctor, just about two months, and not showing yet. Are her curves different than before? She doesn’t really feel different yet, either. Maybe hungrier? Amy’s spent most of her life trying to not think about her body. Thinking about it as something that’s carrying another human will take some getting used to.She puts a hand low on her stomach, experimentally. This is dumb, she tells herself. You will not be able to feel anything. The palm of her hand feels a little warmer, nonetheless, like maybe something is glowing or pulsing, buried way, way deep underneath her skin and her muscles and her organs. Amy knows, scientifically, that this baby’s barely a baby, just a little collection of cells with no consciousness yet. Still…“Hi.” she whispers into the silence.*She goes back to New York and quietly begins to look for two-bedroom apartments in DC.Nothing really changes at work. She starts taking advantage of the Ben and Jerry’s that Gary always keeps stashed for Selina but nobody really cares. She switches to decaf coffee and nobody notices. She tries to bring up the subject of her future with Selina, and Selina doesn’t even let her get two sentences in, just talks over her and says they’ll work it out after the ground breaking. At this rate, Amy wants to leave just so she can work somewhere where the people actually give a fuck about her existence.Selina sends her and Richard to New Haven a few days before the ground breaking, and it is a fucking nightmare. Richard talks the entire time about babies and she learns more than she ever wanted to know about Lamaze breathing and umbilical blood and Catherine’s incompetent cervix. She’s so annoyed that she forgets that she’s supposed to be theoretically interested in this sort of information. And libraries are so fucking boring. She’s pleased about securing Selina’s legacy (such as it is), excited to put a bow on the whole nightmare and move on, but the idea of running one bores her to tears. At the end of the day she texts Ben: I’m officially in. Telling Selina at the groundbreaking.He doesn’t respond but he must let Dan and Kent know because Dan texts her like two minutes later: Knew you’d come back to me eventually, Brookheimer. Her heart does that clenching thing again; this can’t be good for the baby, for Amy to be so fucking in love with its father. *Selina torpedoes her library (and Amy’s reputation); Amy walks through the office door and there’s fucking Dan Egan sitting on the couch, grinning right at her with his most shit-eating smile, and she’s immediately reminded how precarious a situation this is, how easily it could all blow up in her face. *She doesn’t tell him. She thinks about it. But after champagne they settle down for a preliminary non-campaign campaign meeting and Dan sits next to her and his arm kind of presses against her shoulder and this infuriating wave of desire surges right through her. He smells like he always does, like his aftershave and stupidly expensive hair products and he’s so tall and warm. It reminds her way too much of waking up in his bed with that smell all around her, with Dan all around her.So she doesn’t exactly feel like sharing the news right now. Dan would probably just think she’s trying to get him in bed again (spoiler alert: that’s exactly what he thinks). *What Amy does do is corner Ben later, when they’re getting ready to go out for a celebratory lunch.“What the fuck was that whole Selina’s-only-got-so-much-time-left and it’s-time-to-move-on bullshit you pulled on me the other day? You didn’t think to mention you were taking on her campaign?!”Ben just shrugs in a typically Ben manner, like she was a complete dumbass to take him at his word in the first place. “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the ride while it lasts. Buckle up, Amy.”Oh yeah, this will all be so enjoyable when she’s toting around a seven month old as they head into Super Tuesday. She could plan for a baby around a simple relocation back to DC. She can’t even begin to think about how to have one on a fucking campaign. *Catherine comes by the office a few days later, to bring little Richard to visit Marjorie and bigger Richard. Selina apparently can’t handle being around her own daughter and grandson when there are no cameras around, so she takes off after five minutes with Gary in tow. But everyone else hangs around for a bit to check out the baby, including Ben, Dan, and Kent who are still in town for another day.When Catherine swans into the room (with, like, a fucking metric ton of baby paraphernalia), Amy immediately moves as far away from Dan as is physically possible in order to refrain from giving him any subliminal clues about her new condition. She ends up hovering behind Selina’s desk, like an even more pathetic version of Gary.Dan, of course, barely looks up from his phone.“How are you feeling?!” Mike asks, all gooey excitement. “Are you tired all the time? Wendy and I were so tired.”“You’re never not tired, Mike.” Dan snits, not even looking up from his Twitter feed.“Oh, I feel just fine.” Catherine replies, syrupy and serene. “Whenever he fusses for me, I really feel like I’m spiritually connecting to all mothers in the world.”Amy’s entirely positive she’s not going to sound like that a few days after giving birth. Dan raises his eyes from his phone for five seconds, glances over at little Richard, then goes back to Twitter looking thoroughly unimpressed.Kent starts treating them all to a scientific exposition about the wonders of breast-feeding, and while he’s doing that, Amy stares at baby Richard as he snuggles up to Catherine. Somehow the question just bursts from her.“Is it…how is it? Being a mother?” The words feel stilted on her tongue. God, she’s got to get better at talking about this shit. She arranges her face into what she hopes is an entirely disinterested expression. “It’s really hard, but also really wonderful.” Catherine says, sounding less like a zen robot and more like a genuine human. “Would you like to hold him?”“No.” Amy replies curtly. If she even so much as touches that baby, everyone will immediately figure it out (there’s an eighty-five percent chance Kent already knows). Dan glances up at her and smirks knowingly, like they’re both part of some secret baby-hating fraternity, and suddenly she cannot wait to ruin his life. *Selina’s not-a-campaign campaign quickly takes shape. To make it look as little like a campaign as possible, Amy officially takes the BKD offer, but Ben says she’s best put to use for the moment working as the firm’s “liaison” to Selina. So she’s still in New York, at least until Selina moves back to Maryland, and Dan is in DC, only in and out of the New York office as needed to discuss messaging for the comeback tour. BKD’s got other clients, obviously, and from what she understands he’s starting to prepare some sort of political nuclear strike on Danny Chung.Selina fires Mike and brings in Leon West without telling anyone (except probably Ben), which Amy is less than thrilled about it, and so is Dan, for some weird reason. It definitely sucks having Dan around again. He’s always in a generally good mood, warm and flirtatious and considerate in a completely non-ingratiating way. It’s extremely unnerving. Amy spends half the time feeling deeply suspicious about how happy he is and the other half wanting to jump him. (It definitely sucks having Dan around except in all the ways it doesn’t suck at all.)They’re never alone. When Dan’s in New York they’re usually always around Selina (and therefore Gary) and Ben or Kent. He doesn’t try to get her alone either, and Amy can’t figure out if she’s insulted or relieved or completely unsurprised. Some combination of all three, probably. Sue texts her: you have to tell him eventually, Amy.Amy texts back: tell Montez it’s illegal to put surveillance on a political rival and feels pretty satisfied with herself when Sue doesn’t respond.*Campaigns, even campaigns pretending not to be campaigns in the first place, are no places for secrets.“Dan, you got a sec?”“Uh yeah, what’s up?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
"it’s been a long year
and everyone around me’s disappeared
it’s been a long year
and all this mess around me is finally cleared
so can I have a moment just to say hello?
can you let your anger go?
It’s been a long year
I’m finally ready to be here."
- rosi golan, "been a long year"~*~Dan barges into her hotel room two nights later without knocking.“What the fuck, Amy, were you just going to not talk to me again, ever?!”“I was considering it.” Amy retorts, curled on the bed and halfway through a pint of ice cream she swiped at the gas station across from the hotel. “You’re going to have to actually speak to me sometime, you’ve got our fucking kid inside you. Plus, you know, a campaign to run.” Our kid. The phrase slips so easily from his mouth, reverberating around the room, smashing into the walls and windows, like it wants to escape but can’t. For a second, Amy’s whole world feels off-balance.“Stop being so fucking dramatic. I’m not avoiding you. We had a meeting with Selina three hours ago, Jesus.” “You can’t tell me you’re pregnant and then ignore me for two days.” He looks angry, angrier than she’s almost ever seen him. There are two spots of color high on his cheeks, and his hair is kind of mussed, like maybe he’s been drinking or been outside, maybe both. “…How the fuck did you even get in here?” “I just told them the mother of my child was Room 322.” Dan says, all sarcastic and disdainful. “And they handed the key right over.”“You better not have.” she hisses back. “Selina will kill us.” “Oh calm down, nothing’s going to leak before we want it to.” “Boy oh boy, just what I always wanted, a baby daddy who treats his kid like a press narrative to manage.” Amy slams the ice cream aside with more force than she intended. The last few days have been fucking excruciating, one long build-up of dread and her body is still wound tight with it. All she wants is sleep, but now Dan is here, looking down at her like he wants to kill her. Or maybe eat her.“Don’t pretend you’re better than me, Amy. Like you haven’t gone over the same shit in your head. I know you have.”“You have no idea what’s been going through my head.”“Yes, I fucking do.”So this is a fight they’re going to have. Amy pushes herself up on the bed, standing on her knees, and they’re almost nose to nose like this. “You know me? Because we’ve spent so much time together recently?”Dan scoffs. “And whose fault is that?”“…What?”“You were in Nevada!”She can’t believe her ears. “…What?” she repeats again, dumbly. “You ran off to Nevada to fuck that off-brand illiterate cowboy and you dropped off the face of the earth.” He’s practically whining about it, and her anger rises faster, the fucking hypocrisy of Dan, like she doesn’t know exactly how he spent his time in New York, like he doesn’t know what sent her running in the first place… “I'm surprised you noticed I had gone, you were so busy fucking your way to Jane McCabe’s side.”Dan rolls his eyes and groans theatrically. “Come on, you could have come back any time you wanted. You know you could have.”“No I couldn’t have.” Dan looks at her, hard. “Yes, you could have.” The energy in the room has changed; Amy feels Nevada, the entire fucking state, looming up over them, like maybe they’re still back in that makeshift campaign office, snarling at each other over what had broken between them. Infuriatingly, impossibly, Dan’s eyes flick down over her body—automatically, like he can’t help it—and Amy feels her cheeks redden as desire suddenly flares between them, that stubbornly ever-present, bone-deep attraction that will probably be there until one of them dies first. There’s a wild second where she wonders what would happen if she just jumped him right now, if they could indefinitely postpone this conversation. God, it’s so tempting, to not have to think for five minutes—“Come back for what?” Her voice shakes slightly. “To have you rub a failed engagement in my face? To listen to you brag and bitch about your CBS drama whenever you needed a break? One night of that was enough, but thanks for the offer.” Dan waves that aside. “Forget about CBS, okay? Forget about fucking Nevada. The last two years sucked, okay, they were shitty, but we’re here now, we’re back. You said it yourself.”Our kid. It’s still echoing in her ears.“You and I are not a we.” It is paramount that this be established, that he understands the pregnancy, the baby, changes nothing—“Call it whatever the fuck you want, I don’t give a shit about the semantics.” They size each other up for a moment, before Amy says “You know I…I don’t expect anything from you, not a single thing.”His annoyed expression flickers for just an instant. “So? That’s not my problem.”“Yes it is, you colossal dickweed. I am not doing this with you any more.”“Doing what?!”“This, the thing we’re doing right now, our fucked-up whatever-this is.”Dan gets this super-fake expression of bemusement all over his face. “What are you talking—”Amy cuts him off, dangerously. “Don’t you fucking dare.”“Spell it out for me, Ames.” The fucker is actually grinning now, his teeth white in the dimness of the room. (He could devour her.)“No.” She wants to hurt him, to rake her fingers across his face and leave scars, to mark him the way he’s marked her. It was all so much easier when Dan was just a memory, when she could imagine convenient words of rejection and escape into his mouth, but now he’s here, with his jawline and his shoulders and something almost warm in his expression, and she can’t—she can’t bear to have him so close and not fully hers. “You don’t get it, you—” It’s too much. She thrusts her fingers through her hair, covers her face and lets out a muffled scream of fury, falling backward on the bed to bounce up and down against the mattress for a few beats, feeling the rigidity inside seep out of her bones and into the bed.When she opens her eyes, Dan’s moved closer, peering at her stomach with wide eyes.“Jesus Christ, Amy, get it the fuck together. You can’t pull that kind of shit now with a baby in you.”She shuts her eyes again. “Who are you now, Doctor Danny? It’s the size of a…raspberry, it’s fine.”The mattress dips—he’s leaned back next to her. Amy thinks about kicking him away, but she’s worried what will happen if she touches him; the air is still hot between them. “I swear to God I’m going to buy you some muscle relaxants or something to get you through this.”“I can’t have those while pregnant, asshat.”“Then I’ll steal Gary’s whatever-the-fuck herbal shit he keeps for Selina.”Amy laughs before she can help herself. “God yeah, whatever Selina was on, get me some of that.” “Whatever it takes.” A half-smile in his voice now.There’s a few moments of silence, where they both stare at the ceiling. “I didn’t think you’d be here.” Amy finally says, very quietly. “I didn’t think you’d want to be here.”Dan looks confused and annoyed at the same time. “Where the fuck else would I be?”“Not here.” she repeats, furiously.“Jesus, Ames.” Dan says, and he shuts his eyes for a second. “For anyone else I wouldn’t.” “Is that supposed to reassure me?”“Uh, yeah.” snaps Dan crossly, like she’s the dumbest person alive.Amy reaches out and punches him in the shoulder. “Let’s get one thing very clear, Danny-boy. I am not going to play some dead-eyed baby mama politico wifey in whatever twisted media narrative you’ve already got playing in your head that will make this look better.”“Do you see me proposing right now? If I proposed you’d fucking know it.” “I am so unbelievably dead fucking serious. If that’s all you’re interested in, if you don’t really want it…then you should leave. Leave right the fuck now.”“Amy,” Dan says, and turns to prop himself up on his elbow. He’s smirking now, smug and knowing, looking more like himself. It warms something inside Amy, in spite of everything. “They’re all already going to think it’s mine, anyway. Everybody always thought we were fucking. We might as well have been.”“Oh my god, you’re making this worse.” she mutters.“Besides,” Dan continues airily, and flops over onto his back. “There’s no way I’m giving up my one shot at passing on my political genius.” “That’s actually the grossest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”“Hey, there’s no point sticking around just to fuck the kid up.”“I have no intention of—“ Amy begins, hotly, but then stops. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but--what would a child make of all this? Of power games and phone calls at all hours of the night and a different city every week and workaholic parents who can’t figure out their own shit? What would be enough to make it…enough? “What?” Dan asks, looking at her more seriously.“Nothing.”“What?” he demands, looking completely aggravated. “Nothing.” she repeats. “Just…get over yourself, okay? You’re literally the least important person in this room right now. And in this hotel. The whole state.”Dan makes a face, like the possibility of such a thing has never occurred to him. More silence blooms between them. Dan gazes fixedly at her, and in turn Amy gazes at the ceiling. Looking at him hurts her eyes.“Uh, you wanna watch tv?” Dan proposes after what seems like an hour, but in reality is probably only ten minutes. When Amy sends him a wide-eyed glance of pure disdain, he hastily amends his suggestion: “Look, we can fight more tomorrow. Can we just…let’s just watch tv, and…try and relax. I can’t have you passing out from some stupid stress-related complaint now, because that’s going to make you, and by extension me, look bad.”“I don’t want to tell Selina yet—““We’ll talk tomorrow about when to tell Selina. Eat your damn ice cream.”Amy briefly considers throwing him out and telling him that no one makes decisions for her. It seems like a lot of work. She's got nine months of arguing ahead of her that she needs to conserve energy for.“Fine.” she grumbles, and retrieves her now-melted ice cream. Dan crawls over to lie next to her against the pillows and they bicker over what to watch before settling in for MSNBC.It doesn’t feel weird or forced or wrong, which is possibly the most fucked up, twisted part of all about this whole mess. Here they are, in a hotel room in Nebraska, watching tv on the bed after a fight, Dan’s hip pressed against her thigh and it’s probably the most normal-feeling thing that’s happened to Amy in the past month. She can’t believe she’s decided to bring a kid into all this.Twenty minutes later, she brings up the obvious. “It’d be easier if you left, you know. We wouldn’t have to figure out all the shit that we’re going to have to figure out.” Like what happens if Selina loses or when he wants to fuck someone else for information or if he gets another TV offer or—Dan doesn’t even look at her as he snaps, “Quit trying to get me to back out, I don’t give a fuck about making your life easier.” Amy reflects bitterly that this is undeniably true.Thirteen minutes later, Dan reaches over and tugs at the bottom of her sweater. “Wanna do it?”She immediately slaps his hand away, hard. “Oh my god, no. You think everything is okay now?! Everything is not fucking okay!”“You are fucking impossible—I told you I’m still here because it’s you, what the fuck did you think that meant?!”“Please, talk to me when it’s month nine and I’m the size of a whale and Selina’s poll numbers are back in the toilet. And only if you haven’t fucked your way through the campaign interns, and my sister for round two.” “You seriously want to still fight about—wait, are you saying we could fuck when you’re that pregnant?”“If you’re actually going to do this, you can do your own damn research. Or ask Kent. Actually I dare you to ask Kent.” Dan (miraculously) goes quiet on his side of the bed and Amy pretends to care about the television is saying about Doyle’s East Asia trip. Eventually it dawns on her what he’s thinking. “…are you imagining sex when I’m nine months pregnant, you degenerate?”Dan grins wickedly and looks her up and down, all dark eyes and that stupid five o’clock shadow he’s definitely keeping to fuck with her hormones. “Obviously. You wanna know what I’m picturing? It’s very creative.”Goddammit.“If you’re very, very lucky and somehow don’t fuck this up royally…you can show me in nine months.”“Ha, there’s no way you’d hold out nine months. I’ve heard pregnancy hormones are insane.” “Ah, now I see why you’re really sticking around. For the possibility of crazy pregnancy sex. My prince.”“That’s only, like, eighty percent of the reason, Ames.” And before she can respond, he leans over and presses a quick kiss to her shoulder.“Fuckweasel,” snaps Amy, and shoves him back. Still, she lets Dan keep a hand on her knee for the rest of the show.