fic: young americans [veep, amy/dan]
Title: Young Americans
Fandom: Veep
Characters/Pairings: Amy/Dan, various characters.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,538
Author's Note: I really don't know what happened here. I would warn for general offensiveness, as is par for the course with this show, but instead I'll just apologize to the state of Mississippi and the various politicians whose scandals I stole for the purposes of this fic. This is all magisterequitum's fault.
Summary: Through 1.05. Amy really needs to get out of this godforsaken state.
Mississippi is the living worst.
Like, Amy would literally rather undergo a root canal while trapped in a burning building with Mike and his invisible fucking dog -- and his visible fucking dog, too, if he’s managed to keep that rat-faced thing alive and, really, she isn’t going to give him that much credit -- than spend any length of time in that goddamn state.
So, of course, that’s where the President wants them.
“Why?”
“Well, it has the highest rate of obesity in the entire country. For starters.”
“Did I ask you? Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure you directed that question to the room.”
“Fuck you, Dan.”
Gary clears his throat, uncomfortable.
“Actually,” Mike pipes up, “those numbers are old. It’s West Virginia.”
“Yes, let’s go there.”
“You want to go to West Virginia?”
“Don’t do that. And are you seriously telling me that we have to go all the way to fucking Mississippi to find some -- “ she glances around “-- horizontally-challenged people for a photo op, which, by the way, Selina’s going to hit the roof when she hears she has to do, you understand that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mississippi. The state with the second highest rate of obesity. The second. We can’t even get that right.”
“No, we cannot.”
“Technically, I did get that right.”
“Shut up, Mike.”
As expected, Selina does not take it well.
However, Amy is prepared this time so she’s not the one in the splash zone when hot coffee is sent flying; Gary is. It misses his jacket and splatters his pants (read: groin) and Selina doesn’t even pause her tirade to apologize (not that anyone expected her to, she’s the Vice President for fuck’s sake) and it’s not like Amy feels all that terrible because, hey, she likes this outfit. He whimpers in a corner until she snaps at him (“Jesus, Gary, go clean yourself up. We have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”) but by then she’s mostly calmed down enough to go ask Sue if the President called (spoiler alert: he hasn’t) and that leaves her and Dan alone in the room together.
Her and Dan and his shit eating grin.
She’s beginning to see the value of those anti-suicide windows.
Here is an official list of reasons why Amy hates the state of Mississippi:
1) Their ridiculous fucking liquor laws.
2) Their terrible taste in elected officials, particularly Rep. Fallow who once sat down next to her at a thousand dollar a plate fundraiser, drunk off his ass, and tried to work his hand up under her skirt.
3) Their role in last primary season. Which is to say that Mississippi was the last state they passed through where Selina was referred to as Presidential Candidate Selina Meyer instead of That Congresswoman From Maryland Who Lost Her Ass On Super Tuesday And Then Had A Complete Meltdown In The Middle Of Giving Her Concession Speech. No one working on that campaign escaped Mississippi with their dignity. Or their sanity.
Here is an unofficial list of reasons why Amy hates the state of Mississippi:
1) The last time she was there she woke up naked in a hotel room, on the morning after Super Tuesday, with Dan and a headache not even four aspirin could keep at bay.
That’s it.
That’s the list.
The Night Of/Morning After Super Tuesday:
“It was Oregon.”
“Oregon didn’t even get to vote yet.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone with internet access or a television set saw those ads.”
“It was a pre-emptive strike.”
“It made Rawlings’ comments seem justified and it made her seem like a bitch.”
She had sat up straighter, then. “Um, excuse me?”
“People don’t like assertive women, Amy. You know how this game works.”
“I think you should leave now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He had cracked open another beer instead.
But that had been 3AM.
At 2AM he’d knocked on the door to her hotel room (“Gary gave me the number,” he’d told her, and she’d murmured “fucking Gary” before she stepped back to let him in, fighting it but not, tired but not) with a twelve-pack of beer in one hand and none of the standard apologies. Dan doesn’t apologize unless there is something in it for him. Dan doesn’t do anything unless there’s something in it for him.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he’d said.
“Yeah? Does the congresswoman from Illinois do a lot of business in Jackson?”
“No, but I do.”
She hadn’t known how to unpack that statement -- it could’ve been the world’s worst come-on or it could’ve been a sign that he was up to something but in three weeks he’ll be working for Hallows and the senator will be talking like it was her idea -- so she hadn’t tried. The beer had tasted like dishwater but it was alcohol and, more importantly, it wasn’t champagne. Champagne was for victory and she wasn’t feeling very victorious. She knocked them back and he started talking about attack ads and campaign missteps, closer to sober than she was, and somewhere between her third and fourth beer she’d ended up sprawled on the bed with him propped up against the headboard.
CNN took a break from scrolling primary results to cut to commercial and she had said, “I don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing right now.”
That was when he had kissed her.
He was still there in the morning.
Relative morning, anyways.
He was still there when she woke up and he was still there when she came out of the shower, an abandoned room service tray on the coffee table next to the remote, a glass of orange juice in front of him. CNN was still on, only they were replaying the concession speech for the fiftieth time and one of the talking heads was calling Selina petty and emotionally unstable.
“It was Oregon,” he said, again.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
(But he did.
She knew that then and she knew that when he told Selina the same damn thing outside of Hallows’ office. Here she threw his clothes at him and told him to get out, there she pulled a face and a gesture that served as the universal sign for gag me. Amy has never been very good at admitting when she’s wrong. Neither has he.
They’ve always been alike in more ways than she is entirely comfortable with.)
Rawlings’ dick ends up all over Twitter two weeks later.
Dan sends her a link to an article with the headline Presidential Hopeful Couldn’t Keep It Up five minutes before the congressman calls a press conference announcing he’s suspending his campaign, accompanied by a note that says it could’ve been worse.
They don’t talk again until that meeting with Hallows.
The Present:
They find out Mississippi is something other than a quick stopover for a press event while they’re on the plane.
“It’s three days,” Sue says.
“Three days?”
“Yes. And then a stopover in Colorado.”
“For what?”
Dan doesn’t even bother to look up from his phone. “Lowest obesity rate.”
“Those are old numbers,” Mike murmurs, slumped over in his chair and reeking of bourbon, which is how he was in the limo at six this morning, and probably how he’ll be in the one that greets them when they touch down in Jackson. It’s sincerely one of the most pathetic things she has ever seen.
“Rough weekend?” Dan inquires, not at all interested in the answer (which, for the record, is a muffled what weekend). “Nice shoes, by the way. Very Helena Bonham Carter at the Globes. Did you get dressed in the dark?”
“Fucking dog took a shit in my shoe,” he replies, like that makes up for the mismatched disaster happening on his feet. As an afterthought, he adds, “Real cute reference though, pretty boy.”
Sue just shakes her head at them and walks off towards where Selina’s having some sort of freak out over her remarks for this afternoon and, sure, she’s Chief of Staff, she should probably go handle this but Mike’s the Communications Director -- he’s the one who wrote the damn thing -- and he can’t be fucked, so neither can she. Plus, her right leg is kind of asleep and Dan is nudging her with his elbow and handing her his Blackberry.
“Is that POTUS’ head photoshopped onto FLOTUS’ body or did the President just decide to crossdress at the correspondent’s dinner?”
“If I told you it was part of his bit, would you believe me?” And, sadly, the answer is yes. Yes she would. “He looks better in it anyways.”
“God, I wish you weren’t right.”
Selina gives a speech outside of the University of Mississippi’s Medical Center, home of the new Obesity, Metabolism, and Nutrition center.
It is not the speech that was written for her, however, because Jonah calls from The West Wing (a fact he repeats quite frequently) with a list of Things The Vice President Cannot Say Because They Might Possibly Be Construed As Offensive, which leads to Dan and Mike squabbling over rewrites thirty minutes before showtime while Gary drones on about Jonah’s lack of respect for the office and Amy tries desperately to pretend that she is anywhere but here.
She only trips over the new language twice.
In this business, they call that a win.
There’s a 5K ‘Fight Against Obesity Fun Run’ on the agenda for tomorrow and Selina’s supposed to be, like, handing out fucking water bottles or some shit, so now they have to have the obligatory ‘what is an appropriate outfit to wear in order to seem normal and in touch with the people while still remaining vice presidential’ conversation because skirt suits and pearls are so not going to cut it here.
Unfortunately, Selina’s at dinner with some guy from the Department of Health which means they also have to have that conversation without her. Also without Gary, though no tears are shed over that since that means she can raid the minibar without having to hear about unnecessary spending on the government’s tab. Sue is out meeting up with friends who live around here because Sue has an actual social life, which leaves her, Dan, and Mike to squabble over footwear and, wow, is that a combination of people that she is getting tired of.
She gets up to, like, throw some water on her face and just generally to put some space between herself and the two idiots discussing appropriate color palettes on her couch and that’s when she notices the peeling patterned wallpaper over the bathroom sink that looks like something Laura Ashley had a hand in, with all the pastels and the tiny little flowers, and realizes that she’s been here before. Maybe not this room but this hotel and, sure, Amy’s stayed in literally hundreds of hotels but this is the hotel they were staying in when they lost ten out of twelve states on Super Tuesday and this is the hotel where they cut that deal to endorse the guy who would later take Selina on as his running mate and this is the hotel where her and Dan fucked in a cloud of bad judgement and worse beer.
Which is to say: this gives her pause.
And a headache.
“Don’t you have an opinion on this?”
“What because I’m a woman I suddenly love all things fashion?”
“Well you don’t read Cosmo for the sex tips.”
“Yeah and believe me when I say every guy I have ever slept with should be incredibly grateful for that.”
Dan eyes the bed.
Dan eyes the fucking bed.
So, Amy knows herself pretty well by now. She knows her limits and her weaknesses because they’re kind of impossible to miss when you’re in the habit of exploiting those same things in other people. She knows that she dates assholes and she fucks assholes and that most of those assholes are political players because she likes to argue and she likes to know that there’s another contender in the room with her while she’s doing it. She knows that Dan was the rule not the exception to it and that she’s prone to repeating her mistakes, which pretty much makes all of this an exercise in delaying the inevitable.
She knows it and yet she still doesn’t kick him out when Mike calls it a night, she just throws the empty takeout containers and bottles in the trash, acutely aware that when he’s not checking his messages for the billionth time he’s looking at her and, more specifically, her legs.
“I think navy and red was the right way to go,” he says.
“I think it’s boring as shit, but, sure.”
“Says the woman whose favorite colors appear to be gray and brown.”
“It’s fucking Americana. What, are you afraid people are going to forget she’s the Vice President just because she doesn’t have a flag pin stuck to her jacket?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I don’t know, Dan, it’s a pretty low bar.”
They’re really not arguing about the Veep’s wardrobe. They’re arguing to argue. He’s starting shit because he knows she’ll bite and because he gets off on it too and because, most annoyingly of all, the ways in which her and Dan are most alike all come down to just how determined they can be when they decide they want something.
He’s apparently decided he wants her.
She meant what she said about his inability to master traditional foreplay.
Tragically, this is her preferred version of it.
“And you understand there’s no possible way that this can help your career?”
Her ability to have this conversation is severely hindered by his desire to get her shirt off, the fabric muffling her words, and it’s not smooth or graceful the way he manages to catch the neckline of it on one of her earrings and then leaves her to flail, entirely too confused for a grown man who claims to have done this several dozen times. She shoves it away and does it herself and then he’s on her again, like, aggressively so.
She ends up on the desk with her skirt bunched up around her waist, despite there being a perfectly good bed not ten feet away and she thinks this is quite possibly speaking to work-related fantasies that he may or may not have of fucking someone in the Vice President’s office. Or the Oval Office. Which reminds her. “You can’t go down to go up here.”
He smirks against her mouth. “Oh, I can assure you no one’s going down.”
“Shock and fucking awe -- “ she starts, except that last syllable or so disappears in a rough intake of breath as he pushes into her. Her entire body jolts with it and when her nails dig into his shoulders he groans. It feels loud. The desk rattling against the wall feels extremely loud and she doesn’t know who’s presently occupying the room next door but she’s praying that it isn’t Gary because he would probably ask and that is absolutely not on the list of things that she can handle tomorrow morning.
There is something to be said for unfortunate angles here because her forehead keeps bumping his in a way that is neither romantic nor helpful and the rhythm of his hips quickens and turns erratic before she is anywhere near ready for that.
He comes before she does but finishes her off with his fingers before she’s done telling him just how much of a complete and total shit he is.
“You know, as much as I hate myself right now, I can’t help but think it could be worse. We could’ve done this in Paris.”
“Are you saying it could’ve been better?”
“First of all, glad to know your ego is still alive and well. Second of all, even if I were saying that, it doesn’t mean you get to go again.”
This is later.
He is still there in the morning.
They dated for a week in February once.
Of course, this was the Capitol Hill version of dating which more or less amounted to attending the same events and occasionally falling into bed together. It’s not like they took in a ballet or strolled hand-in-hand through the hallways of the Hart Office Building. They were both working for Congresswomen -- Maryland for her, Illinois for him -- who were sitting on the same committee and for a couple of weeks they ran circles around each other.
They met while getting coffee during a breakfast meeting at the Ritz where, after ten minutes of talking to him, she deduced that he was an ambitious asshole and decided that there had to be something more to him than just that. Amy still had some naivete then; she hadn’t been totally corrupted yet. Three days later there was a party, and the week after that a fundraiser with an open bar. Back then, before she had to spend every single event running damage control, she used to drink martinis instead of water with lemon, and she was doing just that when he sidled up to her.
“I think my boss just managed to single handedly sink the energy bill,” he tells her.
She pops an olive into her mouth. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” and she’s going to make a comment about how she’s surprised that bill didn’t die in committee, that they should be proud it got as far as it did, but what comes out is, “I think my boss is running for President.”
She lets him crowd her into the back of a cab later that night.
In retrospect, she should have known better.
At the Fun Run, Dan wears jeans that probably cost more than most of these people make in a month and talks about blending in without a single hint of irony.
He also runs the last half mile alongside someone’s grandmother as a form of, like, fucking encouragement or something, and then gets fawned over by adoring women who think that’s just the sweetest thing ever. The local NBC affiliate even sticks a microphone in his face for him to bullshit into.
It’s gross.
It’s gross and one day Dan is going to get bored of always being behind the scenes and run for political office himself, and he’s going to win because of shit like this.
She sticks her tongue out at him from the sidelines and prays the cameras are too busy with the Vice President to notice.
This is a prayer that she will later come to regret.
Later:
Fox News wants to know why the Vice President wasn’t wearing a flag pin. Fox News wants to know what happened to showing a little patriotism. Fox News wants the American public to know that the Vice President’s office refused to comment on this matter, which is interesting since as far as Amy knows no one from any of the news outlets ever tried to contact said office for a comment.
“You’re fucking kidding me with this,” he says and, yeah, they’re in her hotel room again, except instead of beer bottles spread out across the table it’s a mess of electronics and cords, laptops and phone chargers and the remote control they keep fighting over.
“If you’re reading the blogs, I don’t want to know,” she says and then, into the phone, “Yeah, this is Amy Brookheimer and I’d like to speak to whatever jackass just cleared your news anchor to lie on air.”
It goes on like this for a while.
Dan leaves to cajole Mike into drafting a press release midway through Amy’s fifteen minute long inter-state witch hunt after it’s determined that Fox News did in fact get a ‘no comment’ from some intern who probably didn’t know what he was saying but who will still be professionally dead in Washington by the end of the day, and returns just as she’s hanging up.
“Is he handling it?”
“Yeah, in exchange for not being in the room when Selina finds out what her new nickname is.”
She lets her head loll back against the wall. “Don’t remind me.”
He doesn’t.
He drops to his knees and for the second time in twenty-four hours she loses a pair of pantyhose to him and his impatience, only she doesn’t mind so much here, not with his mouth against her like that and his hands spreading her wider.
“Don’t you dare make that fucking joke,” she says, her toes curling and her mouth hanging open in a way that will later make it impossible to lie and claim she only sort of enjoyed herself (it’s so much fun toying with him like that), and he laughs against the inside of her thigh.
“I have got to get out of this godforsaken state.”
Her phone rings again.
It’s Jonah.
So maybe not.
Fandom: Veep
Characters/Pairings: Amy/Dan, various characters.
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,538
Author's Note: I really don't know what happened here. I would warn for general offensiveness, as is par for the course with this show, but instead I'll just apologize to the state of Mississippi and the various politicians whose scandals I stole for the purposes of this fic. This is all magisterequitum's fault.
Summary: Through 1.05. Amy really needs to get out of this godforsaken state.
Mississippi is the living worst.
Like, Amy would literally rather undergo a root canal while trapped in a burning building with Mike and his invisible fucking dog -- and his visible fucking dog, too, if he’s managed to keep that rat-faced thing alive and, really, she isn’t going to give him that much credit -- than spend any length of time in that goddamn state.
So, of course, that’s where the President wants them.
“Why?”
“Well, it has the highest rate of obesity in the entire country. For starters.”
“Did I ask you? Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure you directed that question to the room.”
“Fuck you, Dan.”
Gary clears his throat, uncomfortable.
“Actually,” Mike pipes up, “those numbers are old. It’s West Virginia.”
“Yes, let’s go there.”
“You want to go to West Virginia?”
“Don’t do that. And are you seriously telling me that we have to go all the way to fucking Mississippi to find some -- “ she glances around “-- horizontally-challenged people for a photo op, which, by the way, Selina’s going to hit the roof when she hears she has to do, you understand that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mississippi. The state with the second highest rate of obesity. The second. We can’t even get that right.”
“No, we cannot.”
“Technically, I did get that right.”
“Shut up, Mike.”
As expected, Selina does not take it well.
However, Amy is prepared this time so she’s not the one in the splash zone when hot coffee is sent flying; Gary is. It misses his jacket and splatters his pants (read: groin) and Selina doesn’t even pause her tirade to apologize (not that anyone expected her to, she’s the Vice President for fuck’s sake) and it’s not like Amy feels all that terrible because, hey, she likes this outfit. He whimpers in a corner until she snaps at him (“Jesus, Gary, go clean yourself up. We have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”) but by then she’s mostly calmed down enough to go ask Sue if the President called (spoiler alert: he hasn’t) and that leaves her and Dan alone in the room together.
Her and Dan and his shit eating grin.
She’s beginning to see the value of those anti-suicide windows.
Here is an official list of reasons why Amy hates the state of Mississippi:
1) Their ridiculous fucking liquor laws.
2) Their terrible taste in elected officials, particularly Rep. Fallow who once sat down next to her at a thousand dollar a plate fundraiser, drunk off his ass, and tried to work his hand up under her skirt.
3) Their role in last primary season. Which is to say that Mississippi was the last state they passed through where Selina was referred to as Presidential Candidate Selina Meyer instead of That Congresswoman From Maryland Who Lost Her Ass On Super Tuesday And Then Had A Complete Meltdown In The Middle Of Giving Her Concession Speech. No one working on that campaign escaped Mississippi with their dignity. Or their sanity.
Here is an unofficial list of reasons why Amy hates the state of Mississippi:
1) The last time she was there she woke up naked in a hotel room, on the morning after Super Tuesday, with Dan and a headache not even four aspirin could keep at bay.
That’s it.
That’s the list.
The Night Of/Morning After Super Tuesday:
“It was Oregon.”
“Oregon didn’t even get to vote yet.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone with internet access or a television set saw those ads.”
“It was a pre-emptive strike.”
“It made Rawlings’ comments seem justified and it made her seem like a bitch.”
She had sat up straighter, then. “Um, excuse me?”
“People don’t like assertive women, Amy. You know how this game works.”
“I think you should leave now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He had cracked open another beer instead.
But that had been 3AM.
At 2AM he’d knocked on the door to her hotel room (“Gary gave me the number,” he’d told her, and she’d murmured “fucking Gary” before she stepped back to let him in, fighting it but not, tired but not) with a twelve-pack of beer in one hand and none of the standard apologies. Dan doesn’t apologize unless there is something in it for him. Dan doesn’t do anything unless there’s something in it for him.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he’d said.
“Yeah? Does the congresswoman from Illinois do a lot of business in Jackson?”
“No, but I do.”
She hadn’t known how to unpack that statement -- it could’ve been the world’s worst come-on or it could’ve been a sign that he was up to something but in three weeks he’ll be working for Hallows and the senator will be talking like it was her idea -- so she hadn’t tried. The beer had tasted like dishwater but it was alcohol and, more importantly, it wasn’t champagne. Champagne was for victory and she wasn’t feeling very victorious. She knocked them back and he started talking about attack ads and campaign missteps, closer to sober than she was, and somewhere between her third and fourth beer she’d ended up sprawled on the bed with him propped up against the headboard.
CNN took a break from scrolling primary results to cut to commercial and she had said, “I don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing right now.”
That was when he had kissed her.
He was still there in the morning.
Relative morning, anyways.
He was still there when she woke up and he was still there when she came out of the shower, an abandoned room service tray on the coffee table next to the remote, a glass of orange juice in front of him. CNN was still on, only they were replaying the concession speech for the fiftieth time and one of the talking heads was calling Selina petty and emotionally unstable.
“It was Oregon,” he said, again.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
(But he did.
She knew that then and she knew that when he told Selina the same damn thing outside of Hallows’ office. Here she threw his clothes at him and told him to get out, there she pulled a face and a gesture that served as the universal sign for gag me. Amy has never been very good at admitting when she’s wrong. Neither has he.
They’ve always been alike in more ways than she is entirely comfortable with.)
Rawlings’ dick ends up all over Twitter two weeks later.
Dan sends her a link to an article with the headline Presidential Hopeful Couldn’t Keep It Up five minutes before the congressman calls a press conference announcing he’s suspending his campaign, accompanied by a note that says it could’ve been worse.
They don’t talk again until that meeting with Hallows.
The Present:
They find out Mississippi is something other than a quick stopover for a press event while they’re on the plane.
“It’s three days,” Sue says.
“Three days?”
“Yes. And then a stopover in Colorado.”
“For what?”
Dan doesn’t even bother to look up from his phone. “Lowest obesity rate.”
“Those are old numbers,” Mike murmurs, slumped over in his chair and reeking of bourbon, which is how he was in the limo at six this morning, and probably how he’ll be in the one that greets them when they touch down in Jackson. It’s sincerely one of the most pathetic things she has ever seen.
“Rough weekend?” Dan inquires, not at all interested in the answer (which, for the record, is a muffled what weekend). “Nice shoes, by the way. Very Helena Bonham Carter at the Globes. Did you get dressed in the dark?”
“Fucking dog took a shit in my shoe,” he replies, like that makes up for the mismatched disaster happening on his feet. As an afterthought, he adds, “Real cute reference though, pretty boy.”
Sue just shakes her head at them and walks off towards where Selina’s having some sort of freak out over her remarks for this afternoon and, sure, she’s Chief of Staff, she should probably go handle this but Mike’s the Communications Director -- he’s the one who wrote the damn thing -- and he can’t be fucked, so neither can she. Plus, her right leg is kind of asleep and Dan is nudging her with his elbow and handing her his Blackberry.
“Is that POTUS’ head photoshopped onto FLOTUS’ body or did the President just decide to crossdress at the correspondent’s dinner?”
“If I told you it was part of his bit, would you believe me?” And, sadly, the answer is yes. Yes she would. “He looks better in it anyways.”
“God, I wish you weren’t right.”
Selina gives a speech outside of the University of Mississippi’s Medical Center, home of the new Obesity, Metabolism, and Nutrition center.
It is not the speech that was written for her, however, because Jonah calls from The West Wing (a fact he repeats quite frequently) with a list of Things The Vice President Cannot Say Because They Might Possibly Be Construed As Offensive, which leads to Dan and Mike squabbling over rewrites thirty minutes before showtime while Gary drones on about Jonah’s lack of respect for the office and Amy tries desperately to pretend that she is anywhere but here.
She only trips over the new language twice.
In this business, they call that a win.
There’s a 5K ‘Fight Against Obesity Fun Run’ on the agenda for tomorrow and Selina’s supposed to be, like, handing out fucking water bottles or some shit, so now they have to have the obligatory ‘what is an appropriate outfit to wear in order to seem normal and in touch with the people while still remaining vice presidential’ conversation because skirt suits and pearls are so not going to cut it here.
Unfortunately, Selina’s at dinner with some guy from the Department of Health which means they also have to have that conversation without her. Also without Gary, though no tears are shed over that since that means she can raid the minibar without having to hear about unnecessary spending on the government’s tab. Sue is out meeting up with friends who live around here because Sue has an actual social life, which leaves her, Dan, and Mike to squabble over footwear and, wow, is that a combination of people that she is getting tired of.
She gets up to, like, throw some water on her face and just generally to put some space between herself and the two idiots discussing appropriate color palettes on her couch and that’s when she notices the peeling patterned wallpaper over the bathroom sink that looks like something Laura Ashley had a hand in, with all the pastels and the tiny little flowers, and realizes that she’s been here before. Maybe not this room but this hotel and, sure, Amy’s stayed in literally hundreds of hotels but this is the hotel they were staying in when they lost ten out of twelve states on Super Tuesday and this is the hotel where they cut that deal to endorse the guy who would later take Selina on as his running mate and this is the hotel where her and Dan fucked in a cloud of bad judgement and worse beer.
Which is to say: this gives her pause.
And a headache.
“Don’t you have an opinion on this?”
“What because I’m a woman I suddenly love all things fashion?”
“Well you don’t read Cosmo for the sex tips.”
“Yeah and believe me when I say every guy I have ever slept with should be incredibly grateful for that.”
Dan eyes the bed.
Dan eyes the fucking bed.
So, Amy knows herself pretty well by now. She knows her limits and her weaknesses because they’re kind of impossible to miss when you’re in the habit of exploiting those same things in other people. She knows that she dates assholes and she fucks assholes and that most of those assholes are political players because she likes to argue and she likes to know that there’s another contender in the room with her while she’s doing it. She knows that Dan was the rule not the exception to it and that she’s prone to repeating her mistakes, which pretty much makes all of this an exercise in delaying the inevitable.
She knows it and yet she still doesn’t kick him out when Mike calls it a night, she just throws the empty takeout containers and bottles in the trash, acutely aware that when he’s not checking his messages for the billionth time he’s looking at her and, more specifically, her legs.
“I think navy and red was the right way to go,” he says.
“I think it’s boring as shit, but, sure.”
“Says the woman whose favorite colors appear to be gray and brown.”
“It’s fucking Americana. What, are you afraid people are going to forget she’s the Vice President just because she doesn’t have a flag pin stuck to her jacket?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I don’t know, Dan, it’s a pretty low bar.”
They’re really not arguing about the Veep’s wardrobe. They’re arguing to argue. He’s starting shit because he knows she’ll bite and because he gets off on it too and because, most annoyingly of all, the ways in which her and Dan are most alike all come down to just how determined they can be when they decide they want something.
He’s apparently decided he wants her.
She meant what she said about his inability to master traditional foreplay.
Tragically, this is her preferred version of it.
“And you understand there’s no possible way that this can help your career?”
Her ability to have this conversation is severely hindered by his desire to get her shirt off, the fabric muffling her words, and it’s not smooth or graceful the way he manages to catch the neckline of it on one of her earrings and then leaves her to flail, entirely too confused for a grown man who claims to have done this several dozen times. She shoves it away and does it herself and then he’s on her again, like, aggressively so.
She ends up on the desk with her skirt bunched up around her waist, despite there being a perfectly good bed not ten feet away and she thinks this is quite possibly speaking to work-related fantasies that he may or may not have of fucking someone in the Vice President’s office. Or the Oval Office. Which reminds her. “You can’t go down to go up here.”
He smirks against her mouth. “Oh, I can assure you no one’s going down.”
“Shock and fucking awe -- “ she starts, except that last syllable or so disappears in a rough intake of breath as he pushes into her. Her entire body jolts with it and when her nails dig into his shoulders he groans. It feels loud. The desk rattling against the wall feels extremely loud and she doesn’t know who’s presently occupying the room next door but she’s praying that it isn’t Gary because he would probably ask and that is absolutely not on the list of things that she can handle tomorrow morning.
There is something to be said for unfortunate angles here because her forehead keeps bumping his in a way that is neither romantic nor helpful and the rhythm of his hips quickens and turns erratic before she is anywhere near ready for that.
He comes before she does but finishes her off with his fingers before she’s done telling him just how much of a complete and total shit he is.
“You know, as much as I hate myself right now, I can’t help but think it could be worse. We could’ve done this in Paris.”
“Are you saying it could’ve been better?”
“First of all, glad to know your ego is still alive and well. Second of all, even if I were saying that, it doesn’t mean you get to go again.”
This is later.
He is still there in the morning.
They dated for a week in February once.
Of course, this was the Capitol Hill version of dating which more or less amounted to attending the same events and occasionally falling into bed together. It’s not like they took in a ballet or strolled hand-in-hand through the hallways of the Hart Office Building. They were both working for Congresswomen -- Maryland for her, Illinois for him -- who were sitting on the same committee and for a couple of weeks they ran circles around each other.
They met while getting coffee during a breakfast meeting at the Ritz where, after ten minutes of talking to him, she deduced that he was an ambitious asshole and decided that there had to be something more to him than just that. Amy still had some naivete then; she hadn’t been totally corrupted yet. Three days later there was a party, and the week after that a fundraiser with an open bar. Back then, before she had to spend every single event running damage control, she used to drink martinis instead of water with lemon, and she was doing just that when he sidled up to her.
“I think my boss just managed to single handedly sink the energy bill,” he tells her.
She pops an olive into her mouth. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” and she’s going to make a comment about how she’s surprised that bill didn’t die in committee, that they should be proud it got as far as it did, but what comes out is, “I think my boss is running for President.”
She lets him crowd her into the back of a cab later that night.
In retrospect, she should have known better.
At the Fun Run, Dan wears jeans that probably cost more than most of these people make in a month and talks about blending in without a single hint of irony.
He also runs the last half mile alongside someone’s grandmother as a form of, like, fucking encouragement or something, and then gets fawned over by adoring women who think that’s just the sweetest thing ever. The local NBC affiliate even sticks a microphone in his face for him to bullshit into.
It’s gross.
It’s gross and one day Dan is going to get bored of always being behind the scenes and run for political office himself, and he’s going to win because of shit like this.
She sticks her tongue out at him from the sidelines and prays the cameras are too busy with the Vice President to notice.
This is a prayer that she will later come to regret.
Later:
Fox News wants to know why the Vice President wasn’t wearing a flag pin. Fox News wants to know what happened to showing a little patriotism. Fox News wants the American public to know that the Vice President’s office refused to comment on this matter, which is interesting since as far as Amy knows no one from any of the news outlets ever tried to contact said office for a comment.
“You’re fucking kidding me with this,” he says and, yeah, they’re in her hotel room again, except instead of beer bottles spread out across the table it’s a mess of electronics and cords, laptops and phone chargers and the remote control they keep fighting over.
“If you’re reading the blogs, I don’t want to know,” she says and then, into the phone, “Yeah, this is Amy Brookheimer and I’d like to speak to whatever jackass just cleared your news anchor to lie on air.”
It goes on like this for a while.
Dan leaves to cajole Mike into drafting a press release midway through Amy’s fifteen minute long inter-state witch hunt after it’s determined that Fox News did in fact get a ‘no comment’ from some intern who probably didn’t know what he was saying but who will still be professionally dead in Washington by the end of the day, and returns just as she’s hanging up.
“Is he handling it?”
“Yeah, in exchange for not being in the room when Selina finds out what her new nickname is.”
She lets her head loll back against the wall. “Don’t remind me.”
He doesn’t.
He drops to his knees and for the second time in twenty-four hours she loses a pair of pantyhose to him and his impatience, only she doesn’t mind so much here, not with his mouth against her like that and his hands spreading her wider.
“Don’t you dare make that fucking joke,” she says, her toes curling and her mouth hanging open in a way that will later make it impossible to lie and claim she only sort of enjoyed herself (it’s so much fun toying with him like that), and he laughs against the inside of her thigh.
“I have got to get out of this godforsaken state.”
Her phone rings again.
It’s Jonah.
So maybe not.