The Era of Good Feelings
Chapter 7: ’Twas the Lunchtime Before Christmas, and All Through the White House...
...not a creature was stirring, because by Christmas Eve, even the mice are on annual leave.
I exaggerate, but not by much. The only feds working on Christmas Eve in DC are (a) people who have to be here—those folks who are never, ever considered “nonessential personnel,” (b) people who have either used up all their annual leave or haven’t earned any yet, or (c) the poor suckers who can’t take annual leave because everyone else has. In the case of Christmas Eve 2013, I was officially in category (b) since I’d only been on the job for about a week. But since I was helping Natalie run the country while she tried to figure out how to get out of the mess she’d created, I was unofficially in category (a) as well.
Not surprisingly, I’d been working my ass off all week—coming in early and staying late, helping Natalie keep up on phone calls and requests from all three branches of government, not to mention the occasional foreign government. (It’s hard to conduct top-level telephone diplomacy while the other country’s head of state is attempting Kama Sutra positions with his wife. Especially when they call out the current position in the middle of negotiations. No, I’m not going to tell you which head of state.) My parents had been concerned about my health and recovery until one of the staffers called to reassure them that I was fine. (Natalie managed to nudge her away from her boyfriend long enough to make the phone call.) I would have stayed in the office as long as Natalie, until she told me she’d claimed an unused bedroom so she wouldn’t have to leave.
Natalie had been in sweats ever since I met her, so I was a bit surprised to find her in a sweater and jeans—with a Santa hat, of course. “I know, I know, but I’m gonna have to emerge from the cave today for lunch, so I might as well dress like the other inmates.” Christmas Eve was usually an office-casual day, and the office—or more accurately, the stragglers stuck working that day—usually did a potluck lunch. She warned me about it the day before, so I brought cookies and left the suit and tie at home. (No, I wasn’t wearing cookies; this wasn’t that sort of party.)
Another thing that was different that day: Natalie was in much better spirits. I mean, she’d been in progressively better spirits since I first met her; the bags under her eyes were improving, and she’d cut her daily coffee consumption by a pot or two. But even so, there was a big difference in her mood that day. She almost looked like a grad-school intern instead of an Emergency Benevolent Dictator of the World for Life. I asked her about it (although not in those terms), and she said part of it was because it was Christmas Eve, but she’d also been able to spend more time researching ways to undo the pornographic rewiring she’d accidentally unleashed on the world.
As usual, we didn’t leave the study much, but when we did, most of the non-sexual office conversation centered around early dismissal. Sometime a President issues an Executive Order that sends everyone—or at least the nonessential ones—home at noon on Christmas Day, but that didn’t happen this year. (Natalie didn’t know about it until it was too late for her to write up the EO.) Other times, agencies are free to declare early dismissal on their own—as long as someone’s around with the authority to make that declaration and announce it to everyone else, which can be a challenge on Christmas Eve. (That was the real reason Natalie was attending the party—so she could discreetly tell people that early dismissal had been approved without anyone realizing that she’d done the approving. That, and she was a grad student, and there was free food.)
Natalie and I weren’t at the lunch for long—just long enough to load up on food (hey, I was a college student, too), circulate the word about early dismissal, and mingle from a safe distance. Now I knew enough about office politics to know that “see and be seen” is the normal rule of thumb for gatherings like this, but with the “change in priorities” (the euphemism Natalie and I used for the ongoing sex-fest), neither of us wanted to be seen (and possibly propositioned) too much by unattached employees. Every story I’d ever heard about office Christmas parties appeared before my eyes, except that they were taking place in the middle of the party instead of broom closets and supply rooms. And people already in a relationship restricted their fooling around to their own significant others, but it was still awkward to see one guy lick eggnog off his wife’s breasts. (OK, so maybe cookies-as-clothing would have been appropriate.)
So after seeing and being seen, we were both happy to retreat to the safety of the study. As she fixed her next pot of coffee—she’d only cut back a pot or two—she said, “Thanks again for your help. I think I’m finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.”
“With this job, or with this research?” This could have been a mistake. It’s a Bad Thing to ask a grad student how her research is going. If it’s going poorly, the question triggers a nasty case of depression and Impostor’s Syndrome; if it’s going well, good luck getting her to shut up about it.
“Both. The job’s been easier, again, thanks to you. And for the research, I’m wondering if I could somehow replace the current response with a graduated response. The current response is too hypersensitive—any thought about news or politics sends people into the gutter—but I think the risks of entirely eliminating the current response are too high.”
“Yeah. I know this sounds mad-sciencey of me, but I’d hate to see him off his leash again.” I nodded at the talking-head pundit on one of the TVs. He was extolling the wonders of his wife, which was a huge improvement over the issues he used to spin doctor.
Natalie rolled her eyes. “She told you about the leash too?”
“Huh?”
“His wife. She was here the day after she bought it and put it on him. Told us all about it. Everyone else was taking notes, but it was way too much information for me.”
I glanced back at the screen, then turned away. “Oh gee, thanks!” Now I had two mentally-scarring images competing for supremacy in my brain—my parents ducking away for a quickie in the hospital, and now that guy wearing a leash. Neither image was winning, but I sure as hell was losing.
“But you’re right. Better for him to be passionate about his wife than the crap he used...to...fling....” I wondered how on earth she could bear to look at that guy on TV without thinking of the leash, until I realized she wasn’t looking—she was staring blankly instead.
“Um, Natalie?”
She waved me off, then started looking feverishly around her desk. “Not yet, not yet, let me find...there!” She grabbed a pen and paper, and started writing furiously as she muttered to herself. “So if we add additional triggers related to mood and intensity on top of the existing filters...and maybe add some sort of graduated, maybe a...” She waved one arm in the air like she was tracing a line or flying an imaginary airplane. “Um...exponential response, I think that’s what I want...YES!”
I jumped.
“Don’t you get it?” she exclaimed. “We keep the existing filter for news and politics, but we also tie it into their emotions, mood, and intensity. The stronger the emotion, the more batshit crazy extreme they get over it, the stronger the resulting sexual response, and the more distracted they get from their original reaction! That could work! Thank you, thank you, thank you, that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out!” And with that, she practically leaped toward me, wrapped her arms around me, and planted a big fat kiss right on my lips.
And then we stood there, her arms around me, both of us looking really, really awkward for a couple of seconds.
And my mind went to some awkward places. Like how Natalie was looking much better now that her sleep deficit was getting better, or at least not getting any worse. Really good, actually, in an understated nerdy-girl kind of way. Or how her sweats had masked a really nice body for the past week. A body that was now pressed against mine. Hard not to notice, really; I’d been keeping my head low, so I hadn’t been pounced upon by anyone since Meg, and that was over a week and a half ago, and after a few weeks of aggressive “therapy” from Dr. Toms and the nurses and Meg, it wasn’t easy to go cold-turkey.
And that led to the most awkward realization of all. I’d just been kissed by this really cute, super-smart woman who’d been working with me for the past week, and she had an amazing body, and it was pressed against me, and—above all—it wasn’t because her mind had been scrambled into a sex-crazed mess. And it felt good, and I don’t just mean her body.
She dropped her arms and stepped back, and we both stuttered at each other for a few seconds.
Natalie’s language center rebooted first. “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to go overboard like that, but I’d been trying to pin down how to fix the controls for days!”
“No prob, but...is that what you need, or will you need to develop it further? I mean, I was kidding about the mad-scientist thing, but....” I was thinking along the lines of, “Wasn’t this what got you into trouble in the first place?” But either I was too stunned to say it, or I was sufficiently unstunned to know better than to say it. While trying to avoid the awkwardness of the past few seconds.
“You’re right, the devil’s in the details, but at least I’ve got an avenue to pursue—hang on,” and she walked back to her desk to make a few more notes. “OK, got it. Now, um...” She looked up sheepishly. “Could I try an experiment?”
“Um, sure?”
She repeated her earlier movements, except that she didn’t. Instead of leaping at me, she walked toward me hesitantly, more like a middle school girl with a crush than a grad-school student five years older than me, complete with gawky, nervous smile and gawky, nervous eyes staring at me. She kept staring at me as she slowly wrapped her arms back around me, and her stare became even more intense as she leaned toward me for another kiss, like she was prepared to back off at the first sign of rejection or rejection.
She did kiss me, so I guess I didn’t do anything to scare her off. Unlike her earlier spur-of-the-moment kiss, this one was more tentative and gentle. And about a hundred times more breath-taking than anything I’d done with Dr. Toms, the nursing staff, Gina, or Meg.
I responded by wrapping my own arms around her, and staring back at her like...OK, I don’t know what I looked like to her. It must have been OK, though, because she leaned back in for a third kiss. Or I leaned in, or maybe we both did. Either way, the third kiss led to a fourth kiss, and then a fifth, each one warmer and less tentative.
After the fifth kiss, she pulled back just enough to look me in the eye and smile. “I know that was a stupid, stupid idea, but....” She took a deep breath. “For one thing, you’ve probably saved my life. Or at least I’m not killing myself as fast, or something.”
“But I haven’t been doing—”
“You’ve done more than you think, even before you gave me that idea. And it’s just felt so good not to be doing this all alone, y’know? Also, um....” She blushed as she let go of me and took a step back. “When things first started getting weird—back before my work load at NIH took off, and before I stopped trying to convince myself that the weirdness wasn’t my fault—well, I hadn’t been dating much because of my schedule and my research, and there were a few guys who kinda threw themselves at me, and they were really cute, and...”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Yeah. And, well, you know what that was like.” We’d talked last week about my own experiences at the hospital, as well as the Meg story. Not something I would have normally confessed, but Natalie said she needed the information for her research. “It was good...OK, hell, it was great, but it was all heat, no emotion, y’know?”
“The lights were on but no one’s home.”
“Exactly! But it’s so good to look in someone’s eyes, and they’re really there, and...and...”
OK, we were staring in each other’s eyes again. Sounds cheesy, I know, but I knew exactly what she meant, because I was thinking the same thing about her. Like I said, every woman who’d taken an interest in me since I woke up had been a sex-crazed mess, which sounds awesome on paper. Which it was, don’t get me wrong. But they were all running on auto-pilot, and Natalie wasn’t.
Until we started kissing again, and even this, this was a good sort of auto-pilot, and we were both on it.
This time when we stopped kissing, we both knew what was next, but Natalie said it first. “You wanna go somewhere where...”
I nodded. “Your room?”
She nodded back. “It’s that way,” and she waved down the hallway.
“That way” turned out to be down the hallway, down the colonnade, into the Residence, down hallways, up stairs, and into the Lincoln Bedroom. As she explained it when we walked in, “Hey, with everyone at Camp David, they don’t have a lot of guests up here, and it didn’t make sense to roll out a sleeping bag in the West Wing when there’s a perfectly good bed here, and—wait a minute.”
OK, since this was her room, I wasn’t surprised to see a coffee pot in it, but I was surprised when she stopped to make a pot.
Turned out she was willing to share, though.
Remember that I’d told her the Meg story?
Let’s just say that Natalie was even more creative with the coffee than Meg.