Work Text
The run-up to Super Tuesday is a fucking shitshow.The Chung leak comes at the perfect time. Yet without any sort of clear frontrunner—Selina and Chung splitting most states, Selina taking Ohio, Chung with Vermont, Thornhill pulling a surprise win in a significant minority—there’s no real answer. None of the candidates has a large enough majority of votes to win the nomination. And so they’re screwed.“Well, shit,” Dan says as he and Amy leave Selina’s suite, Mike trailing behind on his phone. “That was anticlimactic.”“I can’t believe this,” Amy mutters, running a hand through her hair, which she gave up caring about three weeks ago. “We’re going to have to play party ball now. This is the last thing I wanted.”“She’s not going to be good at it,” Dan agrees. “This is fucked, Ames. And it’s not your fault. You did everything right, as much as it pains me to say it—”“High fucking praise, Dan.”“It is. You ran a great primary campaign. If the candidate were anyone else, we’d be twelve beers deep into a six-pack celebrating right now.”“If the candidate were anyone else, we would both be fired by now.”“Oh, most definitely.”They reach her door, and as she starts to turn away to dig through her blazer pocket for her key card, she makes an executive decision. She can see the exhaustion in Dan’s eyes, can tell it’s a reflection of that in her own, and it’s probably not worth it to turn him away right now. “Fuck it,” she says. “You want that drink anyway?”Dan raises both eyebrows. “When do I not?”“You might have a problem,” she says, swiping her key and shoving down the door handle in perfect unison. He follows her in, and beelines for the minibar as Amy kicks off her pumps and joins him there by the window. As Dan opens the blinds to look down into the Columbus Sheraton’s hideous, ice-and-salt-crusted parking lot, Amy joins him by the window, leaving her blazer in a haphazard puddle on the bed.“What are you drinking?” he asks. She rolls her eyes. “Anything,” she says. “I’d drink antifreeze if it took the edge off this day.”With a knowing chuckle, Dan cracks open a bottle of vodka and pours a generous measure into each cup, then sloshes an equal amount of orange juice on top. Amy takes the one he offers her and doesn’t smile; he cocks a brow as he raises his cup. “Madame Campaign Manager,” he says drolly. “Congratulations on not fucking it up.”“Don’t jinx us,” Amy says, clinking hotel glasses and taking a swig from hers. “It’s just Ohio.”“Ohio’s a big deal.”“Let’s be honest. If the Chung leak hadn’t happened, neither of us would be here. We’d be heading back to Washington to lick our wounds and clear out our desks,” Amy says pensively, taking another sip and leaning back against the drawn curtains. “I would like to know where they got that footage, though.”Dan bites his lip. “You’re gonna hate me if I tell you,” he says.She frowns over her glass. If the motherfucker knew something she doesn’t—fuck lording the campaign managership over him any longer, she’ll flay him alive and hang him out over the parking lot herself. “What the fuck? Yeah, I am. I have three people on Chung watch 24/7. The guy can’t pick his nose without me knowing about it. How’d you know about this?”“I have my sources.”“I don’t believe you,” Amy says decisively. “If it was your leak, you’d be telling everyone. You wouldn’t be able to shut up about it.”“Not true. I’m extremely humble.”“And I’m Helen fucking Mirren. The fuck you are, Dan.”Dan sighs, turns to her, his freckles cast into sharp relief in the low light of the hotel room. Amy has to bite down on the inside of her cheek—he’s such a shit. “Look, you want the truth?” he asks. “Bearing in mind that you may or may not have to answer for it in a court of law—”“Shit.”“I’m exaggerating. Kind of.” He inhales sharply through his nose, then continues. “I can’t take credit because I didn’t get it super legally. I got it from Jonah.”“Hepatitis J? You’re fucking joking.”“Maddox’s people were sitting on it in case shit got rough, and he copied it from their hard drives while he was still on their team—”“Shit,” says Amy. “And Jonah just gave it to you?”“It was kind of a quid pro quo thing—”“How long have you had this?”“A while,” he says, and Amy lets out a long sigh, her heart beating fast. “A few weeks. But I didn’t know we were going to have to leak it.”“Well, great,” she mutters, swirling the ice in her plastic cup, listening to the blunt, blocky little sounds it makes. “I’m glad you told me.”“Yeah.” Dan’s looking at her out of the corner of one eye, and she looks back, feeling like she might eat him alive. He looks like he might let her.“Jesus,” she says, shaking her head. “This day really has been a goddamn nightmare.”When she kisses him, it’s all lips and teeth and tongue, pulling him down to meet her mouth with a white-knuckle grip on his blue necktie. She doesn’t spill what’s left of her drink.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“I just need this one thing,” Dan says. Jonah laughs, brittle and hard. “Fuck off,” he says, barely holding it together long enough to get the words out with a straight face. As if this isn’t Dan’s worst nightmare realized, as if this isn’t the wettest of Jonah’s dreams come all at once. The rush is everything—it’s intoxicating, it’s a bump of coke at the start of the night (not that Jonah’s done coke in a while, at least as far as he can remember or testify). “I’m not your bitch boy anymore, Danny.”“Please,” Dan says, in that smarmy, just-left-of-earnest voice that makes him sound like a post-puberty Eddie Haskell. “Jonah. Come on.”Jonah leans against his doorjamb, arms folded, looking down at Dan standing on his front steps. “Give me one reason why I should even listen to what you have to say.”“I need you to go on the morning shows and refute that story about the veep, the one you fucking planted,” Dan says. “Just trust me. Look. Let me come in, I don’t want to be standing out here on the street.”Jonah doesn’t move to let him inside. He widens his stance instead, blocking the doorway. He’s nearly impossible to intimidate, at least physically—that’s always been his strong suit, something he’s relied upon ever since his first introduction to the massive, cutthroat Hunger Games arena of politics. Guys like Dan are plentiful. They’re fucking everywhere, bunch of manicured 5’10” whiners who think that fucking their way through every 40-under-40 list in town makes them a man. The thing Jonah’s never said out loud, the one card he’s always kept hidden against his palm, is that he can read Dan like a memorandum on urban housing. What the guy wants is to be scary—not just a hack speechwriter, bouncing around from boss to boss, but an attack dog, an enforcer, someone to be feared and revered at all costs. Jonah doesn’t needle too hard about this, because he doesn't want to let on to the one advantage he’ll always have—Dan doesn’t scare him, not even close. Absent the presence of real leverage, which is nearly all the time, he relies on sneers and slurs and nasty rhetoric. It’s never quite enough to get Jonah running scared. So he laughs a little, shifting his weight in the doorway, letting Dan simmer and stew on the steps. “Nah,” he says. “If it were Amy standing here, I’d think it over—”“Amy would never come anywhere near your fucking date rape nest, you fucking Sleestak,” Dan spits back. The vein on the side of his neck always bulges a little when he gets like this, really apoplectic, and Jonah would be lying to himself if he said he didn’t love it a little. “Getting worked up there, Danny?”“You know what? Who cares,” Dan says, throwing his hands in the air. “I came here because I thought we could help each other out, but now that I know you’re not interested—” He turns to leave, and Jonah waits until he makes it to the bottom step before he speaks up.“What were you proposing?”“Oh no,” Dan says. “You’re not gonna play it like this. You had your chance—”“Bullshit,” Jonah laughs. “If you needed my assistance so bad two minutes ago, you still need me. Or else this was all some elaborate plot to get inside my house so you can plant some, I don’t know, listening device—”“Why the fuck would I want to hear you talk any more than I already have to?!” Dan explodes.Jonah shrugs. “I’m the future of journalism, bro. You can’t be too careful in this situation. Look, I’m not your mouthpiece or your fucking dancing monkey. If you want me to go on fucking Morning Joe or Ronan Farrow Daily and call bullshit on a completely true story, one that you practically handed me on a silver platter, by the way, you’re going to have to…”He trails off. He’s not sure exactly how he initially intended to finish that sentence. ‘Beg for it,’ maybe, might have been his go-to at one point, but he’s been feeling weird about it ever since the whole thing with Mike. Even though Dan would look truly great on his knees—“Do more than ask,” he finishes awkwardly, and Dan furrows his brow in confusion. There’s something else there, too, something that looks almost like recognition, like a challenge that can’t be refused, a gauntlet toss that he knows Dan has to return. Because that’s the other thing he knows—Dan will do anything, say anything, if it means he moves one step forward. On second thought, Jonah doesn’t have to see him grovel at all.*Dan has Jonah up against his living room wall, Jonah’s cock fucking Dan’s hot grasp as Dan’s muttering “I knew you’d cave, you fucking spineless shit,” against his throat, and Jonah’s wondering where Dan gets off calling him spineless when he lets his head hit the back of the wall and comes with a shuddering moan, and—*“Joining us from Washington is Jonah Ryan, founder of Ryantology and former White House staffer,” says Joe Scarborough via satellite, and Jonah folds his hands in his lap as a stage manager gives him the go signal.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Amy only calls him when her boyfriend is out of town.Being that it’s an election year and Ed runs Selina’s PAC out of the Boston office of Meyer Capital, she’s calling him a lot. Dan can’t complain. Because this is what he does—this is his forte, his sweet spot. He’s never been interested in the long term. His relationships are sprints, not marathons, and he’s only ever half-committed at best, but shit, he’s the Usain fucking Bolt of D.C. dating.Dan can’t complain, because even more to the point, he’s gotten so used to controlling the speed and the tempo of the flings he falls into, out of necessity more than anything else. He doesn’t have to do that with Amy. He knows, on whatever level, that Amy will never want him more than he wants her; that she will always be the first to pull away, keeping him at arm’s length for the sake of both their careers. Within that context, there’s something almost comfortable about the arrangement, the way she’ll shoot him a text an hour after they’ve both left the office or casually drop Ed’s whereabouts into the conversation over conference-room coffee. “Ed’s in L.A., putting together some fundraiser with Amy Pascal and Katherine Bigelow,” she says, stirring a single packet of Equal into her chipped Hughes/Meyer 2012 mug.“Yeah?” He doesn’t overplay his hand. “Have him bring back some In N’ Out.”“Will do,” Amy says archly, and there’s the ding of an arriving email blast on every phone in the room. Dan doesn’t look up from his laptop, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t give Amy the satisfaction of knowing that she’s set him on edge. Manipulative bitch, he thinks, and he loves it.*It’s comfortable because he doesn’t have to worry that she’ll catch feelings for him. It’s uncomfortable because he’s afraid of being the one who catches feelings, of being the one to upset the delicate balance of a workplace secret. It’s complicated. Because Amy is… Amy has underwear that makes Dan’s dick show interest just thinking about it, still. And it’s not even anything special. It’s black and practical, just like her soul. And it’s not the underwear, really, but more of a metaphor for the things they keep hidden in plain sight, the lies they tell themselves and each other out of courtesy and desperation. He’s tired, as he always is, and she knows how to manipulate that. They’re well into the middle of the election cycle and the fatigue of essentially waging two fights on two different fronts—the day-to-day of the administration and the blunders of the campaign trail—have him floating somewhere between drunk and hungover. She seems to like him best like this, stripped of the bravado and the ferocity that overwhelms him at times, courses through his body like an adrenaline rush.She takes him to bed and he lets her take what she wants or needs from him, and in the morning he’ll be gone again, full armor, ready for battle or maybe for war. But when she slides into bed beside him, their bodies apart, her back to his, he shifts closer to her, sliding his arm around her waist. “Ame?” he says sleepily.“Yeah.”He’s not sure what he intends to say. He’s practiced the words I love you before, with the vague intention of saying them to someone, at some point, for real; but they’ve never felt right, don’t seem to fit in his mouth the way they do for other people. He suspects Amy feels the same way. So he says the next best thing: “You’re amazing,” he says, pushing his nose against the nape of her neck and mumbling the words into her hair. “I mean it,” he says, and what he means is Thank you.She probably smirks at his sincerity, but she’s facing away, so he doesn’t see it, and he’ll chalk that one up as a victory anyway.*And when Amy doesn’t want him, Jonah, predictably, always does.Because it always felt like a matter of time, a powder keg in a pool of gasoline, bound to ignite sometime before sundown. Because Jonah spits his poison and vitriol back at him without even a hint of grudging respect, and when they fight it’s as physical as it is verbal. Because Jonah doesn’t want him fatigued and shell-less and vulnerable, but sharp-tongued and mean and itching for a fix. Because Jonah aches to be unmade in the way that Amy unmakes him, telegraphs it in the way he leans into a dressing-down in the office and gets off on the way Dan talks to him in the back of a dimly-lit sports bar. Sometimes he thinks he could make Jonah come by words alone and a firm grip in his heat-mussed hair, fingers dancing idly along where it starts to curl up where it meets the sweat along his hairline. The word love never enters the picture; it’s not even a vague suggestion floating in at the periphery of his mind. He knows Jonah will never mistake his real aggression for affection, but they both find pleasure in the moments where one turns to the other. “You look so good on your knees, makes me wonder why you even need your uncle to get you jobs,” he says, one hand threaded through Jonah’s hair and the other clapped in a possessive grip on the back of his neck. “I ought to take a photo, send it to everyone in D.C., you’d have more offers than you’d know what to do with,” he says, and what he means is Don’t back out on me, you stupid fucking asshole, not while we can still give each other what we need.*He wonders, sometimes, whether what Jonah said about once having nailed Amy was true. Amy flatly denies it, of course, but then, she denies all involvement with Dan in mixed company as well. She was younger then, and her standards were much lower, and everyone knows that dating in D.C. is incestuous in the first place, but it still makes his blood boil and his stomach churn to think about it. He can’t imagine Amy tolerating Jonah’s presence for more than a few cursory minutes in the first place.He thinks about the future, wonders if she’s heading toward marriage with that pencil-necked Quaker dweeb whose bland stories about customer service are only outnumbered by his mostly-identical crewneck sweaters, and he resents the whole charade. There’s an order to their arrangement and it’s not yet in his favor to upset it, but he doesn’t intend to go on sharing forever. That’s not what he does. That’s not what he’ll settle for.For now, though, he can wait. Maybe he doesn’t deserve her yet. Maybe that’s the cruel twist, the trick mirror. Maybe he’s supposed to earn his happiness, by being a good person or having high moral standards, or what-the-fuck-ever. Frankly, Dan hasn’t felt genuinely happy in a long time, not counting the feverish, bliss-fucking 24 hours surrounding Selina’s (and his own) sudden promotion, and he’s not inclined to start making grand, sweeping changes to his own life in search of those lost feelings. “You’re doing an amazing job,” he says. “You do me better than I do me,” he says, and what he means is, Wait for me.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It’s the second year of the administration and they are in New York. POTUS was scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly, but pulled out at the last minute and sent Selina in his place, which is fine, it’s made her feel important and the mood around the office has been slightly less tense than usual this week. The motorcade shuts down the entire east side, and the press office schedules Selina onto a slew of news shows with a Colbert appearance tacked on for good measure in the afternoon, and everyone feels good, important, like they could get used to this.They’ve just wrapped the last of the media blitz. Amy is hunched over her phone, jaw clenched at the contents of the email she’s just received, when she feels a light hand on her back and two fingers dancing up her arm. “What do you need, Dan?” she asks without looking up, shaking him off with a quick jerk of her arm.He laughs. “What do you need?” he counters, all smarmy and obnoxious. “You look like you’re about to Hulk out. There’s a lot of tension in those shoulders.”Amy rolls her eyes, because of course, Dan is constantly as tense as she is, he just hides it better. “It’s nothing. Just, you know, Fucking Kent,” because that’s how they’re all saying his name these days, Fucking Kent, like it’s a title. Mister President, Madame Vice President, Fucking Kent. Government. It’s a great place to spend your life. She gives the spreadsheet attached to the email a second hard look and then stows her phone in her pocket. The idea of dealing with bell curves and distributions right now makes her want to punch herself in the face.Dan, for his part, laughs a little, like he gets it. “That fucking cyborg,” he agrees. “He’s like the Tin Man with a Windows operating system. What does he want?”“It’s nothing,” Amy says, because one, if Dan’s not already BCC’d on the same email, that’s a major win for her, and two, she’s not entirely sure this doesn’t have to do with his weird man-crush on Fucking Kent. “Just, you know, trying to control every aspect of Selina’s media appearances remotely. Too many cooks in the kitchen. I told him to fuck off and let me do my job.”“Let’s get some air,” Dan says. “I’m going to fucking suffocate in this building, the ceilings are way too low.”Amy shrugs, impassive, and follows Dan into the hall. He hits the button for the elevator and they wait, Amy with her arms folded, Dan with his hands on his hips, suit jacket pushed back to accommodate the Barbizon-School-of-Modeling-ass pose. “By the way,” he says as they wait, “Mike’s in charge tonight. I want you to come to a thing with me.”She snorts. Like there’s any way in hell that’s happening. “I’ll pass.”He shakes his head, looks serious. “No,” he says as the elevator door opens. “You should. After you.”“I thought we agreed to leave the past in the past,” Amy snaps as she steps inside, crossing the threshold onto corporate-branded burgundy carpet, which seems unfairly nice, much nicer than the oatmeal elevator carpet she stares at daily in D.C. “Or are you such a fucking workaholic that you’ve completely given up on dating outside the office? I think there’s still a couple interns you haven’t hit on. Or, you know, there’s always Fucking Kent.”“Calm down, Ado Amy,” says Dan. “A guy I used to work with in Albany is heading up an exploratory committee—”“Exploring what, exactly?”“A potential challenge to POTUS from within the party in two years.”“A motherfucking coup d’état, you mean.”“You can call it that,” Dan says. “I think it’s an interesting possibility.”“Dan, do you know how bad it’ll look for two of the Vice President’s senior staff to be meeting with some guy who is currently exploring a challenge to the incumbent ticket?” Amy hisses under her breath. “Do you fully understand how fucking fired we will be?”“It’s not a meeting,” Dan hisses back, and she notices that he’s positioning his back to the security camera in the corner, which is exactly the kind of underhanded strategic move she’s come to expect from him. “It’s a book release party for one of the ex-mayor’s top economic guys. Lot of city government people will be here, lot of Albany people too. I know these people, Ame. They want to meet you.”The elevator door hits the ground floor and opens on a ding. They step out into the building’s lobby, Amy’s heels clicking on the marble floor as she digs reflexively into her pocket for her phone again. As they step outside onto the sidewalk, Dan turns to her.“Look,” he says, and Amy folds her arms and looks away, staring at a column of steam rising from a subway grate down the street. It’s humid out, and the sidewalk is wet, and it’s been raining all day but not at this particular moment. “Look,” he repeats. “It’s an opportunity. I think it’s worthwhile. I thought I’d offer.”Chewing the inside of her cheek, Amy fixes her eyes firmly on the sidewalk. “I’m not saying no,” she says, just loudly enough for Dan to hear. “I’m saying it’s dangerous.”He grins, a little bit vicious and a little bit pleased. Sometimes she’s overwhelmed by how much he resembles some kind of terrifying ocean predator. Not a shark or an orca, something big and dangerous and graceful, but a piranha or barracuda, one of those fish that can strip the flesh off your bones almost before you know you’ve been attacked. They eat piranhas in the Amazon basin, she thinks. “Yeah,” Dan says, shrugging, as if it’s nothing, what he’s asking her to do. He takes a step forward, shifts toward her, and leans forward to lower his voice. His mouth is centimeters away from her ear, his breath ghosting across her skin as he speaks, and it would only take one of them turning slightly to the side to change the game entirely. “It’s dangerous and it’s worthwhile.”Amy doesn’t move. She keeps her gaze fixed straight ahead and inhales calmly, a deep grounding breath that smells like dank city sidewalk and gutter puddles and maybe something like possibility. “Yeah,” she repeats. “Yeah, okay. I’ll go to your fucking party.”If it’s a mistake, they’ll make it together, she thinks, as they turn and walk back into the building.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The pantry at Maddox’s country house is connected to the rest of the house by a smaller anteroom. The pantry doesn’t have a door, but the anteroom does, which is why Jonah has found it to be an incredibly safe spot to hide and do nothing. A few times a day, he’ll fuck off and come hide in the pantry and eat dry cereal and play Candy Crush, which is exactly what he’s doing when Dan shows up.“There’s a fine line, Jonah, between love and hate,” Dan’s saying, and Jonah would be laughing except that he’s not.“You attacked me with a burrito,” he says, pride still smarting.Dan bristles. “And if I could turn back the hands of time, I would.”Jonah shakes his head stubbornly, and watches as Dan heaves a sigh and massages the bridge of his nose, looking itchy and off-kilter, and suddenly feels very powerful, as if he’s not standing in a pantry to avoid another in a long string of humiliating go-fer tasks. He thinks about the weight of Dan’s body against his just weeks before, how easy it would be to reverse their polarity, push Dan against the wall of the tiny closetlike space and shove handful after handful of dry Cheerios in his mouth until he says uncle and apologizes for everything he’s said and done—Dan growls, deep in his throat, and when he leaves Jonah inhales sharply, his mouth suddenly very dry.*It’s only hours later that he’s back in the pantry, hiding from some terrifying Maddox aide who seems to have put it into everyone’s mind that his name is Jake, not Jonah. When he hears the anteroom door click open and shut, he jumps up, prepared to account for his whereabouts, but it’s only Dan again.“Did you forget something?” Jonah asks, stowing his phone back in his jacket pocket. “Your pride, maybe?”And Dan laughs bitterly at this, his teeth glinting bright white in the low light of the room. “No matter how many hits my pride takes, Jonah, it’ll always be leagues ahead of yours.”Jonah doesn’t respond to this, not because he doesn’t have a response, but because Dan has taken two steps closer to him, in a way that makes him very aware of his space, and this isn’t how he wanted this to happen, not this time. He’s not losing control again, not this time. He doesn’t counter Dan’s movement, chooses instead to hold his ground until they’re inches apart. “Is that so, Danny?” he asks, raising both eyebrows in a bit of facial punctuation. “So why are you here, begging me to rejoin your team? If Selina’s doing so well, you can’t need my uncle’s help that badly.”He can see Dan bite down on the inside of his cheek and knows he hit a nerve. “I hope you know Maddox is polling like shit and won't make it to Super Tuesday,” Dan spits, jabbing one finger into Jonah’s chest in a way that would almost be intimidating if it weren’t so laughable. “This isn't the basket I'd put my eggs in, if I were you. We could give you a safe gig—this was Selina's idea, not mine. Personally, I don't give a shit where you go. But it's your fucking funeral, buddy.”“I knew she sent you here to make nice to me, you fucking errand boy,” Jonah mutters. He shifts almost imperceptibly closer to Dan, wanting to feel him jerk back, pull away, show a moment of weakness, any weakness. He wants to make him uncomfortable and see him recoil in shame like the craven, pudding-spined micropenis of a man that he is. He’s not sure if it’s a trick of the light or altered perception from the adrenaline rush of the game they’re playing, but he’s almost certain that Dan flinches, licks his lips and swallows like a man caught off-guard by something he didn’t know he wanted. *Dan has a way of working his way under your skin, Jonah thinks. He’s got Dan’s arms pinned to the wall above his head as he works his tongue into his mouth, and Dan is flush against him, legs spread inelegantly, outline of his hardness clearly visible through suit pants. Dan kisses like a Bond girl, all eyelashes and teeth, and Jonah thinks he remembers this from their two-week thing a couple years earlier but that was mostly beer and sandwiches and rock shows and sloppy blowjobs in bar bathrooms. He doesn’t think he remembers it like this, fury-fraught and almost electric. He doesn’t think he remembers the part where Dan sinks his teeth into his bottom lip and tilts his head back, letting go at the last possible second and then raising his gaze to lock eyes with Jonah, both chests heaving.There’s the buzz of a phone in a pocket somewhere and they immediately pull apart, hands patting frantically over rumpled clothing, and Jonah grabs at his own phone and answers quickly, leaving Dan slumped against the wall, looking like he’s been to hell and back and breathing like it too.*They don’t make eye contact at all during the rest of the weekend.Nobody really wins this time.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sleep would come easier if he weren’t being chased through it every night. There is a dream, and it haunts him throughout the week, recurs like a song he can’t scrub from his head. Dan wakes up in chills, gasping for cool air and the colder side of his pillow, sometimes battling excruciating cramps in his calves and neck and lower back where he carries his tension like a battle wound. It feels like a fever. It feels like the time he fell sick as a child and spent days in bed curled up into himself, a weak indentation in twin-sized bedsheets, a kind of wracking sweat and shivering that he hasn’t felt since. Not until now. Not until this year.He thought he could handle this. He didn’t think it would be this hard. And the thing is, the day-to-day of the campaign isn’t so hard. He could deal with the challenges as they came if it weren’t for the distinct, gnawing feeling that he’s stacking one bad decision on top of another, waiting for them to topple down upon him. The entire past year has been a series of conscious, deliberate mistakes, and the rest of the office has waited more than long enough to see him fall.There’s nothing worse, Dan thinks, than the realization that he only amounts to the antagonist in someone else’s story. That wasn’t the deal he made with the devil inside himself. It was supposed to be easy: work hard, put in the long hours at the expense of his health, sanity, and personal life, and advance as expected. He didn’t see the spanner in the works. Nobody ever warned him about Amy Brookheimer.In the dream, he starts off on a pier under a hot, foggy sky, tall ships around him like a Revolutionary War painting. He blesses the water in Catholic-school Latin that he only half-consciously remembers in the waking world, then dives in. He is following a call, a siren’s song from a dark-haired woman on a rock in the middle of the ocean. She looks like Lady Liberty; she sounds more like a banshee the closer he gets. He has always hated the water, but he slices through it easily here, arm over arm, stroke after stroke until he’s almost there, almost there—Is it too much for you to handle, Danny? laughs a voice in his ear, and suddenly the water is thick and warm and metallic and bright, bright red. He chokes on a mouthful and can’t see for the blood in his eyes, and the stranger laughs again, harsh like a knife against a whetstone. Sometimes it’s another siren, with needle-sharp teeth glinting unnaturally in the fogged-over light, and sometimes it’s a huntress with a bow, hovering eerily over the water like Diana off her stag. His body feels heavy, his pace slows to a halt, and suddenly he’s not moving at all, muscles seizing and sinking. He can feel the fluid begin to fill his lungs and as he chokes on the blood, all he can hear is laughter.He’s back in Union Station and his clothes are dry, but the blood stays under his fingernails and stains his skin in rivulets, and Jonah is waiting for him.Was it too much for you? Jonah asks, and this is always the part where he wakes up, his body in agony, his mind in disarray.*When it all finally falls to pieces, the doctors tell him to take a leave of absence from work. He double-and-triple-checks his insurance policy, dying for an unfair loophole, a way out of this forced leave, because the moment he checks out is the moment it becomes real. But the federal government, evidently, does not want its employees suing for having lost their minds. They give him two weeks off and a pile of drugs, which he takes dutifully. He has to get out of Washington.*It’s a seventeen-hour train ride from D.C. to Rochester, which seems exorbitant, but even the cheapest flights are booked solid, and it’s only after Dan does the math that he realizes it’s three days before Christmas. He guesses it makes sense. He calls his parents, tells them he’s coming home this year. He doesn’t mention the breakdown. He doesn’t mention the firing. He says nothing out of the ordinary, only that he’ll be there in twenty-four hours. They react as expected, with the perfunctory Oh-how-lovelys and We’ll make up the second guest rooms. They don’t ask questions. He wouldn’t answer if they did.Twenty-three hours later, he’s standing on the front porch of the house he grew up in, staring at his parents and wondering how he could have fallen so far. The “second guest room,” it turns out, is the room that used to be his, which his parents converted after three years of him skipping out on the holidays, feigning work conflicts and the long commute from Washington. He drags his suitcase down the hall and sits stiffly on the bed, rubbing the back of his neck where it’s sore from sleeping on the train. There’s new wallpaper.The living room walls are lined with the requisite pictures of Dan and his brother: Little Leaguers, altar boys, prom dates, graduation photos. He can walk from one end of the room to the other and get the feeling he’s watching a sped-up version of his own childhood. David’s influence is more strongly felt here than his own—there are far more photos from his Penn graduation than Dan’s own from Cornell, and the last few years belong entirely to David’s family, wife and toddlers and old English sheepdog included. The irony of his younger brother being the family’s golden child doesn’t escape Dan. But things always came easier for Dave: the grades, the girls, the team captainships and effortless praise and the house in the Connecticut suburbs. Dan doesn’t envy him; he wants no part of the way “David Egan” became “Dave-and-Sarah” and then “Dave-and-Sarah-and-the-kids” in phone calls and emails from their parents. He thinks he’d probably kill himself if he ever became “Dan-and-Amy-and-the-kids.” (Not that Amy would ever agree to have them, God bless her.) His accomplishments stand on their own; he fills the silences in conversation with stories from his own life. He has nothing to be sorry for.Dan pauses in front of the most recent family portrait, traces his brother’s sharp jawline behind the glass. Maybe he’ll grow a beard. It seems like a logical next step. *“I think I’m going to take a step back from the campaign,” he tells his father on Christmas Eve, shifting a glass heavy with scotch in his hand and tapping it against the arm of the couch as a fire crackles in the hearth. “The office needs me more than the campaign does, if that makes sense—you can’t get a candidate elected if they’re constantly fucking up. Taking one for the team.”His father says nothing, but looks straight through him. On the other side of the room, David nods earnestly. “It can’t be great for your mental health, either,” he says, half-laughing from behind his laptop, and the words send an icy jolt through Dan’s body. Because there’s no way he knows—no way anyone knows, except Amy, and Selina, and Jonah, and everyone else who was with him in London, everyone else who saw his breakdown, who watched him fall to pieces—“It’s not great,” Dan smirks, and takes a sip. Swallows. Lets the burn settle in his throat and move down his gullet like slow-striking lightning. “But that’s politics. Go to therapy when you’re dead.”*There are no visions of sugarplums and nutcrackers in his head that night, but of bloody water with fins swimming circles around him, foggy skies being split with electric bolts and thunder rolling from somewhere far in the distance. The siren isn’t a siren and the huntress isn’t there. It’s only a woman, blonde and pale with china-doll blue eyes, floating above him as he swims, and a disembodied voice that is not her own.Was it too much? asks the voice, and he knows that if he opens his mouth to answer he’ll drown.He follows the pull to Union Station, waits for Jonah, waits to demand an explanation, but he doesn’t come. There’s only the ticking of a clock that is usually silent. He finds a restroom that hasn’t been locked down and turns on the water to scrub the blood from his hands, but only more blood pours from the faucet. He opens his mouth to scream, but no sound leaves his lips, and that’s when he hears the voice from behind him.“Was it worth it?”He turns, and it’s Amy, of course it’s Amy. She looks ethereal in glimmering white, her hair windblown and framing her face, better than he’s ever seen it look. “What are you doing?” Dan asks, cautiously. “What do you want?”Amy takes a step forward. “There’s nothing I want that you have,” she says. “Not anymore.”Dan feels his blood thrum. He wants to move, but cannot; he wants to speak, shout, but his lips move soundlessly. This vision of Amy is taller than normal, and her hand is tracing his jaw, fingers curling around his neck, scraping nails against him like she’s checking for a pulse. She looks him straight in the eye and his words die in the back of his throat when her parted lips press against his. But just as he answers tongue with tongue, he begins to shiver, suddenly freezing cold. Thrown off-balance, Dan is shaky. There’s no struggle, no clawing for dominance. He is sticky with blood that smears against Amy’s unblemished skin and white dress. It’s pride and lust and too many unnamable sins that make him push her against the bloody sink, her torso almost flush against it, their reflections too close to focus in the mirror. Nothing is the way it should be—she doesn’t struggle when Dan takes a handful of cornsilk hair, there’s no mangled stream of curses when he pushes inside her, she just groans and shifts her legs further apart. “Is this what you came for?” he asks, slamming his hips forward. “Is this what you wanted?”Amy hisses, thrust up onto the balls of her feet, the edge of the sink undoubtedly pressing into her stomach. And of course she’s not fighting back, after all, she’s the one who came to him, a vision in heat and ecstasy, and he thinks—When he wakes up, he’s not in bed. He’s back on the dock where he began, but the sky is dark, the air is frigid and wind-whipped instead of hot and humid, and there’s no crackle of static electricity in the air. He’s got car keys dangling from his hand and he realizes in an instant that this is Lake Ontario, that he somehow left his bed, put on his coat, took his mother’s car keys and drove to the lake. He can’t remember getting here.He stands on the dock and screams, listening to his voice echo off the churning water.*When he sneaks back into the house, key clicking softly in the lock, it’s near four in the morning. He prays that no one is awake to hear him come back, but of course, his brother is there in the living room, placing the last few presents beneath the tree. Dan pauses stiffly in the doorway as they lock eyes.“I went for a drive,” he says preemptively, holding up the keys. He doesn’t know where his mother keeps them or where he found them—shit. Maybe on the key board in the mud room. He jingles them softly, like sleigh bells. “Right,” says David, shaking his head. “If you want to finish the milk and cookies, they’re on the table—the kids would really get a kick out of it.”Dan wrinkles his nose at the idea of lukewarm milk and stale sugar cookies, but breaks off a piece of a frosted snowman anyway, popping it into his mouth and swallowing it nearly whole. “How much longer until the bacchanal?” he asks, falling onto the couch. “Should I be here when they come downstairs?”“I think that would be wise,” David says, straightening the name tag on one immaculately-wrapped gift. “Brendan keeps asking when you’re going to make good on taking him to a Yankee game—”“He remembers that? From a year ago? Shit,” Dan says. “Tell him I’ll take him to an Orioles game next time you guys are in town—”“You can tell him that.”Dan shrugs. “Sure. He’s, what, six? It’s a little young. Don’t they get bored?”“He’s seven.”“Same difference.”David stands, dusting his hands off on his flannel pants. “There’s more of a difference than you think,” he says, giving the tree a once-over. The embers from the previous night’s fire still glow beneath the stuffed stockings, casting a barely-perceptible orange glimmer over his features that mingles with the lights on the tree in an impressionistic spray of color. “I’m going back to bed.”“Suit yourself,” Dan says, rubbing his nascent beard with one hand. “Think I’m gonna stay down here. I’m having a hard time sleeping in my old room.”“Too many memories?” David asks, a faint smile on his face.“Something like that.”He leaves, shaking his head as he pads away, and Dan waits until he hears light footsteps on the staircase before he closes his eyes and lets his head hit the back of the couch. The ninety minutes of sleep that follow are blessedly empty and dreamless.*He spends the day after Christmas on another train. Three days in upstate New York is about as much as he can take. He sleeps on the Amtrak, his eyes occasionally fluttering open to catch glimpses of bare tree branches and slate-grey sky. When he arrives in Union Station, he tenses his jaw, waiting for the flood, the fire, the trail of ashes, the empty post-apocalyptic halls with only one tall, slender shadow falling on the tile. But the place is as busy as it’s ever been. He takes the metro to Georgetown, walks home from the DuPont Circle station with his suitcase trailing behind him, unlocks his door and steps into a home that is quiet and cold but his.For the first time since London, he checks his email.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When Amy is nine, she dresses up as Sandra Day O’Connor for Career Day at school. When she is ten, she dresses up as Amy Brookheimer, the First Female President. (At thirty-six, she doesn’t have to be reminded of this irony.) When she is eleven, she creates a vision board of the women whose legacies she plans to surpass. When she is fifteen, she carefully cuts out a photo of Margaret Sanger and glue-sticks it to the board.She’s always hated babies. It’s something that she has never been able to get over or even fully understand. Even as a little girl, baby dolls freaked her out—everything about them, the big eyes, strange, floppy bodies, the lack of sharp edges and understanding that she is supposed to connect to these things. Her sister made fun of her; her parents didn’t seem to notice, or else they just kept buying her the damn things out of spite. Everyone tells her she’ll change her mind. She knows she won’t.Because she knows that for a woman in her position, having a baby is the beginning of a long series of compromises. First there’s the issue of maternity leave, then she’s taking a few years off (just until it starts preschool!), and then she’s pushing fifty and working some bullshit job for her husband’s think tank and standing behind him in photos and being trotted out with the kids to wave and smile at the end of debates, and before she knows it, she’s the First Lady of fucking Wisconsin or something. No. She will not be a prop in someone else’s life. She won’t reduce herself to “wife and mother.” She’ll eat ground glass before she allows herself to care about the “Mommy Wars.”It’s not about feminism, she thinks. Because Amy’s not stupid; she’s read her women’s studies books and even blurbed the paperback edition of Lean In (a favor to a friend in publishing, who seemed exceptionally interested in the memoir she didn’t explicitly say she was shopping). But she has no interest in being asked whether women can “have it all.” She doesn’t want “it all,” whatever “it all” is. She wants one very particular thing. She wants to be successful, at whatever cost.*Amy leaves her office door open more often than not these days. Too many people come in and out to bother, and the plain white walls and glow of her computer screen make her feel trapped on the long days. It’s February. Valentine’s Day, she thinks at first, but then checks the calendar; it’s actually the sixteenth. Right. She worked late. Ed skyped her from Detroit. The roses he had delivered are probably in a break room somewhere—she’d thrust them into the hands of some passing intern, waving him off with, “I don’t have time to deal with these. Deal with them for me.” Valentine’s Day had been weird. Chung had jumped three points in the polls. Selina shuffled back to the residence with her shoes in her hand and murder in her eyes, even though Amy knew that none of the coverage had really done enough damage to push her to that point; the Post and the Times and Politico and CNN had all really been surprisingly kind to her, and Jessica Williams had done a segment on Comedy Central about the inherent sexism in the party’s refusal to rally around the first female POTUS in history. Ben started drinking before eight P.M., right there in the Oval, and the rest of the senior staff followed his lead before long. Amy had politely demurred twice before Dan pushed a beer into her hand and smirked, “Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie.”Right, so it’s two days after Valentine’s Day, and it’s pouring snow in D.C. She’s not specifically sure of the nomenclature, but whatever it is, there’s snow outside and it’s just this side of blizzard conditions. It’s Friday night, and everyone else has gone off, trying to catch their late trains or the last shuttle out of National, but Amy is staying. The corridors outside are dark, and she has just her desk lamp on, so only the ambient light comes in through the windows, a kind of orange glow diffused by the snow blanketing the district, filtering through stacks of reports, polls, papers, nightmares. There’s a rap of knuckles on the wall outside her office, and Amy thinks, slightly hazily, of rhetoric and deconstructionism and all of the abstract things she should be doing, rather than staring at the shadows against the wall, before Dan wanders in without invitation. He settles on the couch, stretching out length-wise and crossing his legs. The silence screams for a while before Amy says, without preamble, “I might be pregnant.”It wallops him hard. She can see the change in his face in the dark, how his expectations evaporate in the space of a second, his mind reeling, moving at lightspeed to process what she’s just told him. “You—I mean—are you sure?”She laughs, shortly, unkindly. “Not yet.”“And… holy shit. It’s not mine, is it?”Amy shrugs. She hasn’t thought about how she’s going to phrase this at all. The words leave her in an instant. “I don’t know.”“Jesus.” Dan looks like he’s been hit by a bus. He sits up, propping his elbows on his knees, looking at her intently, as if he’s waiting for a signal. “Okay. What are we going to do?”“We?”“Well, I mean, you’re telling me for a reason, right?” And just like that, he’s back in control, examining the situation from all angles. She can see him thinking. She hates it when he gets like this. “So there are tests. You can do them discreetly, I’m sure there are about a hundred D.C. clinics that specialize in discretion as far as this stuff goes—or, fuck, just wait until the kid comes out, and if he’s three feet long with a wall-eyed fish face, you’ll know he’s not mine—”“Fuck you, Dan.” She picks up a pen from atop the nearest stack of papers and grips it hard. “It’s not going to be a problem. I mean. I’m going to handle it.”He lets out a long, slow breath. “Right.”“It’s just. I thought you would want to know.”Dan’s shaking his head slowly, looking disoriented all over again. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”“It’s going to be fine. We have a campaign to run. I’ll deal with it.”“That’s all I needed to hear from you, Amy.”Amy snaps the lights back on, and the look on her face is the same as always; Dan’s the one who still looks dazed. He gets off the couch, his jacket slung over his arm. “Just keep doing what you do for me,” she tells him. “The blood in the water thing. That’s all I need from you.”“It’s what I’m here for,” shrugs Dan as he walks back into the darkened corridor. Amy frowns, then flips the lights back off.*Amy feels a decade or two older than she normally does when she gets back from the doctor on Sunday. The verdict: not pregnant, never was, but the stress of the campaign was probably responsible for her missing period, as well as the niggling little fact that she sometimes goes entire days without remembering to eat. “You need to take better care of yourself,” her doctor chides her, and she nods and makes hollow, requisite promises that she knows she won’t follow through. She manages to force down an entire salad for lunch. It’s a start.The Friday night snow has turned into grey Sunday afternoon ice and slush, but there are still spots of bright white on the trees outside Dan’s place. She knocks on the door while simultaneously firing off a text. Dan lets her through the door with no questions. They end up on his couch, and he hands her an expensive afghan and offers a cup of tea before she finally gives up the charade. “You can cool it,” she says, wrapping her hands around the black china mug. “I’m not actually—”“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, thank God,” Dan says, not even letting her finish, exhaling a breath that he must have been holding since Friday night. “That would have been a fucking disaster.”“No shit,” Amy snaps, and then giggles nervously in spite of herself. “Jesus. We’d make terrible parents. You and your daddy issues and me and my—”“Entire family issues.”“Yeah.” She takes a sip of tea. “My parents might have actually respected at least one of my life choices, though. Remember when Selina made me fake that miscarriage?”“Of course,” Dan says, with an air of duh in his voice, as if it had been as humiliating for him as it was for her. (She doubts it.)“They were heartbroken. I couldn’t tell them the truth, clearly, so I just played it up, and they haven’t gotten off my back ever since. My mom got me a fucking Dr. Spock book last Christmas.” Amy grits her teeth. “Your brother has kids, right?”“Two of ‘em,” Dan nods, his jaw similarly clenched. “Brendan and Maddie. They’re cute for about half an hour, and then—”“Hellspawn?”“Yeah. They’re not so bad now that they can at least hold a conversation, but I still don’t have a lot of patience for discussing plot elements of The Lego Movie over Christmas dinner.”Amy snickers, and Dan replies by clapping his hand on the back of her neck and squeezing, just hard enough for it to still be a turn-on. She surrenders, for that one moment, closes her eyes and slumps down into the couch, finally realizing the magnitude of the bullet she’s just dodged. “We really would be terrible parents,” she says, not opening her eyes. “And Ed?” Dan asks.Amy snorts. “Only marginally better than either of us. He’s not good with decisions. It takes him an hour just to order takeout.”Dan leans over and kisses her.It’s not really a good idea. Especially not today, after the events of the past 72 hours. Dan doesn’t taste like his usual emptiness, and she’s not as in control as she likes to be; this is all him, reaching out and taking what he wants from her, teasing her out in a way she thought he’d forgotten how to do.When he pulls back, Dan reaches out to cup her face in both hands. “Amy, I’m really fucking glad you’re not pregnant. I don’t think you’d be a terrible parent, but I think you’re meant to do more than that—”Amy breathes out. Her chest feels tight, like her ribs will break if she inhales any deeper. Dan pulls her down on top of him, the blanket over her lower half falling to the floor as she adjusts her knees to bracket his hips. She pushes her forehead into the space between his neck and shoulder, clean laughter building in her chest. “You’re just telling me what I want to hear.”She can feel him shrug. “Fuck you,” he says, laughing a little in spite of himself. “But yeah.”They stay like that for a few minutes, the implicit contract—We won’t talk about this again—building between them. Then Amy pushes herself up and picks up her mug from the coffee table, drains what’s left in it before she stands. “Thanks,” she says, grabbing her coat as she heads for the door.Dan doesn’t respond, just shrugs, the smile already fading. “I owed you one,” he says.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
This isn’t anything are probably the three most annoying—no, fucking upsetting—inconsequential words in the English language when used in that order. At least, that’s how Jonah sees it at ten-thirty on a Friday, when he slides onto a stool at his usual bar and orders a pint of Guinness and a shot of Jameson. He’s not an idiot. There are, at the very least, worse words to hear. It’s not you, it’s me. I love you, but I’m not in love with you. You should get tested. But what makes this isn’t anything the worst is that it’s always said with a kind of smug faux-innocence, a holier-than-thou expression that automatically makes the wearer the blameless one. What did you expect? I thought we were on the same page. This isn’t anything.“Thanks,” he mutters, throwing down his credit card as the bartender hands over his beer and elegantly pours the shot. “Keep it open.” He glances around the bar, his eyes alighting on a few faces—well, a few bodies—here and there, but he’s in a rare mood where the song and dance of actually getting laid doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort at all. He glances down at his phone and scrolls through Twitter, which is a super foolproof way to seem aloof and busy in public, which is always a good look.The irony is that he didn’t think it was anything in the first place. There weren’t actual feelings involved. But when someone else says This isn’t anything first, you’ve already lost.“Oh, shit,” comes a voice from behind him, and Jonah glances over his shoulder to see a slightly disheveled, work-rumpled, and exhausted-looking Dan, holding an empty glass and wearing an irritated frown. “God fucking damnit, this is not the time—”“Of all the sports bars in all of Georgetown, you walked into mine.” Jonah spreads his arms wide, charmless but full of fake cheer.“Oh, fuck off, Lurch.”“There’s that Dan Egan charm,” Jonah says, patting the stool next to him. “Drinking alone on a Friday night? That’s some endgame shit right there. What, did your online date stand you up?” He notices a split-second look of anger flash like heat lightning across Dan’s face, and immediately smacks the bar, throws back his head and laughs, bad mood immediately erased. “Holy shit, you did get stood up! What’s her name? I’m gonna send her a fucking Edible Arrangement.”“Fuck you, Jonah,” Dan mutters. He throws back what’s left of his drink, then waves down the bartender. “Another whiskey-soda—”“No, no. I got this,” Jonah says archly. “My buddy here got stood up by his OkCupid date—”“It wasn’t fucking OkCupid.”“So what was it? Tinder? Grindr? Oh my God, are you ‘WestWingBoi69’? I knew that profile looked familiar—”“That doesn’t even work as a burn, you fucking lunk, because first of all, you just outed yourself as a Grindr-trolling asshole, and secondly—”“So just the whiskey-soda?” The bartender’s eyes volley between them with the air of a vaguely interested observer watching a ping-pong match. Jonah nods. “Throw it on my tab,” he says. Dan makes a small noise in the back of his throat, but says nothing and slumps onto the seat beside him, and Jonah smirks back. “Dude, let me just buy you a drink. C’mon. Truce.”“Truce? Are we the fucking Hardy Boys?”“Funny, I always pegged you for more of a Nancy Drew.”Dan flips him off, idly shredding a cocktail napkin with the other hand. Jonah returns to his beer.*Jonah’s not sure at what point he stopped caring what other people thought of him; only that, at one time or another, he made the conscious decision to stop giving a shit. He rewrote his high school memories to reflect that attitude and carried it with him to college, where he adapted the antithesis of the Reagan-era anti-drug policies he grew up with as his personal motto: Just say yes. Whereupon a whole new world suddenly opened up to him, like stepping through the wardrobe to a hedonistic Narnia: sex, drugs, booze, punk shit, hip-hop, dope sweater vests, whatever. He said yes to everything in the way that only a Dartmouth poli-sci major can say yes: fully, with arms open and dick fully erect. And after moving to D.C., the policy just seemed way too much fun to abandon. And after a few weeks of trying to keep it cagey, stay boring in meetings and enter rooms quietly, he gave up entirely, content to be exactly what he is at all times: Jonah Ryan, D.C. power playboy, absolutely crushing every aspect of his life whether everyone else likes it or not.Except he gets the feeling more and more these days that maybe that isn’t quite the truth. Lately, D.C. has been feeling to him like exactly what it is: a series of shitty, low-ceilinged office buildings build on top of a murky swamp in the armpit of the country, filled with depressed, boring, more successful versions of himself. Which is some bleak shit, if he thinks about it too long. Which he tries not to do.*“I actually didn’t get stood up,” Dan says abruptly. “I mean—not that I have to explain anything to you, but it wasn’t a date, it was just a work-drinks thing.”Jonah shrugs absently. “Do whatever you gotta do. Game respects game.”“Whatever,” Dan mutters. “I thought I’d be honest with you—”“No need,” says Jonah, maybe a little more bitterly than he needs to. “This isn’t anything, remember?” Dan takes a steadying breath in response. “Yeah,” he says. “Fuck. Dude. I’m not going to apologize. I didn’t do anything.”“Sure.” Jonah traces a geometric pattern into the condensation on the side of his glass, studiously avoiding eye contact. Shit, he’s so off his game tonight. Normally he would have already volleyed a few choice burns and then blown the joint for a bar that didn’t cater to slimy assholes. But he’s already told a few of the guys from work that he’d be here all night, and doesn’t want to miss them if they do decide to roll through—which, if he’s being honest with himself, he doubts they will. Whatever. He just wants to have a fucking drink or several. Dan can do the heavy lifting if he wants to stick around. He’s just gonna stay silent. Ice him out.That resolution lasts approximately thirteen seconds, until Dan sets down his glass and asks conversationally, “You think Amy would ever try to Gone Girl herself?”“Our Amy? Amazing Amy Brookheimer?” Jonah says. “Holy shit, yes. Holy shit. I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t done it already.”Dan laughs. “Selina called her ‘Amazing Amy’ in front of some reporters earlier tonight and didn’t understand why it was funny. ‘My Chief of Staff, Amy Brookheimer, or Amazing Amy, as I like to call her…’ And then when I tried to explain why people were laughing, she lost her shit on me for spoiling the movie.” “So that’s gonna be everywhere tomorrow,” nods Jonah. “Front page of Politico for sure—it’s a slow news week—”“It’s already trending on Twitter.” Dan lets out another laugh, his drink halfway to his mouth, shaking his head. “She should take it as a compliment. That crazy bitch had foresight.”“There’s gonna be cartoons. Holy shit, there’s gonna be cartoons,” Jonah says, smacking the bar with one hand as he throws back his head in laughter. “We should sell t-shirts. Holy shit.”*The thing is, spending any amount of time with Dan feels like a bad decision after the fact. He knows that now, now that they’ve decided that casually hating each other is their default position, but it still never fails to surprise him, how bad it feels. Jonah’s never met another living person who can actually give him a hangover the next day, but apparently that’s just another feature of that good old Dan Egan Charm™. The first time, he didn’t recognize it for what it was. But Dan had yet to reveal his shitty, rotten-apple-core center then, too, and it was a different time, both of them high on new jobs and the new administration. Dan was the new guy, had slid into the VP’s office just a few weeks prior, and when he started pursuing Jonah—aggressively pursuing him, even, replying in private to long email threads and casually running into him at the Caribou Coffee across from the White House in the mornings, even though Jonah knew for a fact that there was a better coffee place much closer to the EEOB. It felt like something. It felt good. They went out a few times, and it was good. Lunch during the day, drinks after work. They ended up at Jonah’s place after a show and at first it felt like nothing, like two guys hanging out, drinking and arguing about the Ravens. Everything was normal until it wasn’t, until Dan, who had been getting closer and closer across so many lines all night, leaned over and muttered, “Shit, I think there’s something in my contact.”“There’s nothing in your contact, dude, you’re just crying because you know I’m right—”“Dude, I think it curled up like a fucking fruit roll-up. Can you just check?”Dan’s breath was warm on Jonah’s face and Jonah closed his eyes for a second, because this was weird, this was unusual, and then he opened his eyes and looked right at Dan. He licked his lips. “You’re dehydrated,” he muttered. “I have some eyedrops in the bathroom, if that helps.”“Yeah,” Dan agreed, but didn’t get up, didn’t even look like he was thinking about it. He reached for his beer on the coffee table and threw back the last bit, never breaking eye contact with Jonah. His face was entirely still, save for his right eyebrow, which he raised, almost imperceptibly. Which seemed like a tell. Which is when Jonah called his bluff, took the shot, pounded the rest of his beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and kissed him.It wasn’t as weird as it should have been. Dan was sinuous and sharp, the burn of his five o’clock shadow was almost confrontational, but his lips were soft and warm and something about it felt right. Jonah opened his mouth obediently when Dan bit down on his lower lip, heard himself make an uncharacteristically needy sound deep in his throat when their tongues met and Dan clapped a possessive hand on the back of his neck. Dan kissed like he did everything else: aggressive but calculated, warm to the touch but strangely cold in affect, and there was something about it that made Jonah want—almost crave—his approval.So it ended. So Dan turned out to be using him. So they went back to just hating each other, until they hit a tipping point, some sort of critical event horizon, and everything got messy.*“I’m gonna go,” says Dan a couple rounds later, throwing a twenty down on the bar and slipping his wallet back into his pocket. “Let’s do it again soon.”Jonah shrugs noncommittally. “You never told me who it was that stood you up,” he says, as Dan pulls on his jacket. “Oh, nobody important,” Dan says. “Kelsey Pearce—she works for Doyle? Apparently ‘something came up.’” Air quotes with one hand as he searches his pockets with the other, pulling out his car keys with a flourish. “I don’t know how much she knows in the first place, but she’s got a great ass.”“Oh, right, that one.” Jonah nods in recognition. “Kardashian Kelsey. Tough break, man. Got a long night with your left hand ahead.”“Yeah.” There’s a moment where Dan seems to be caught off-guard, buffering, and Jonah swears he can see the gears turning in his head. It’s like the moment in the car where someone makes a wrong turn and the GPS is forced to recalculate. “Unless—”The rest of the sentence hangs implicit in the air, and he doesn’t finish it; he doesn’t have to; Jonah knows exactly what he means by that unless and for a moment he’s caught between instinct and logic. It’s not a good idea. It’s never a good idea. But nobody’s ever accused him of making admirable choices.“Ugh,” mutters Jonah, “this is pretty fucking desperate, even for you, Danny.”Dan’s the one who shrugs this time, and it’s so clear that he enjoys this game, the struggle between two magnets with poles prone to reversal at any given moment. “What else do you have going on tonight?” he asks, lowering his voice as he shifts a step closer to Jonah. “It’ll be good.”“It usually is,” Jonah says noncommittally. He can feel Dan’s hand on his upper thigh, which, even in the dark bar, seems forward. He’s going to say yes, because that’s what he does. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”“Close your tab,” Dan says with a slight squeeze of his hand, and that’s the voice, the one he only uses when they’re about to make some probably-unwise, definitely-inelegant decisions. “And meet me outside.”As he leaves, Jonah bites down on the inside of his cheek, and signals for the bartender. This isn’t anything. He’s going to have one hell of a hangover the next day.