Chapter Text
Dan honestly had not thought that it was possible to assemble a team less qualified or more disorganized than Selina’s old crew at the EEOB.
He'd been wrong. Most of the campaign volunteers besides him are Kat’s old Twitter followers. It seems the #clicktivism cause that had united most of them had been #legalizeit. Now that they've won that battle, they're taking smoke breaks as if they’re office temps in the 90s.
Dan really doesn't know how he ended up the straight-edge Hall Monitor here. He was mixing coke and Klonopin when these kids were probably in diapers.
Now, though, he needs eyes on these massive spreadsheets of old email lists and contact info, needs people on the phones with likely voters, needs bodies in the fucking seats in front of the computers because that’s what makes this a fucking campaign office and not an abandoned tractor warehouse.
Dan reminds himself to take deep breaths. In his experience, it’s even odds whether thinking harder about breathing makes the squeeze in his chest easier or harder to deal with. What really works is lorazepam, but it seems as if it’s fallen to Dan Egan to somehow be the one sober man keeping this fucking campaign afloat.
He finds his staff outside- they hadn’t even moved far, all eight or nine of them lounging on the end of the concrete loading dock outside. Not one of them has had the haircut they needed in the last two years. They are wearing at least four different types of hats, all atrocious.
“Hey!” he shouts to get their attention.
“Hey,” one of them says, grinning. They are blonde and androgynous and holding out the biggest vaporizer Dan has ever seen. “You want?”
“No thanks,” Dan says, and is annoyed when no one reacts to the obvious message in his tone. Six of them are staring off into space, and one of them is laughing hysterically.
“Stop being so fucking old, dude.”
“What are you afraid of? You know it’s legal here, right?”
Dan hasn’t smoked regularly since college. The best case scenario is eating everything in sight and wasting hours of time thinking about the universe or some shit. The worst case scenario was the time he spent two days feeling like he was trapped in a dream version of his life and unable to sleep, feeling watched. Jonah had gotten him to agree to shotgun one time last year, and nothing catastrophic had happened, but that was over some three-day weekend, and they’d been a couple beers deep. Today is Thursday and it’s 11AM and they are at the office of a US senatorial campaign, for Christ’s sake.
“Do you guys not have, like, homes to go to? If you just want to smoke up all day, and don’t give a fuck about whether the Republicans win this Senate seat? Is this really what you pictured when you signed up to volunteer?”
“Nah, man,” one of them says. “We want Kat to win and everything. We love her, she’s fucking awesome. But the election’s not till, like, the middle of November. Chill.”
People out here talk so excruciatingly slowly. If these were DC interns, Dan would go off on a diatribe with a lot of graphic sexual imagery and put the fear of God in them. With this pile of retarded sloths, though, the words would probably zoom right by them as they inhaled. It’s pointless.
Dan pinches the bridge of his nose and turns around. If nothing else, he can be making donor phone calls right now until the rally later tonight. Fuck the West Coast. Dan will literally never “relax,” “chill,” or “go with the flow.” Not even in the grave.
It’s more and more obvious that he’s being set up to fail here. A month ago, he’d been euphoric, with visions of pulling off an underdog win and re-making his name in DC, finally. It’s still beyond him how one fucking panic attack has fucked over his entire life and reputation so thoroughly.
---
Historically, Dan’s taste and experience with women has always sort of skewed older. Today, though, they’re in Boulder, overgrown college town that it is, for the hundredth time. After a long day of being photographed looking adorable and wholesome at the farmer’s market on an unseasonably warm Saturday, Sophia breaks and throws a massive tantrum. Dan can’t quite track the cause of it, but he’s grateful to see her handed off to the nearest set of grandparents. He’d sort of begun revising his thoughts on kids these past few weeks- Soph is way cuter and more easygoing than Dave’s kids, and the voters fucking love her, so- but the pitch of her wailing, almost non-verbal at this point, reminds him why he hasn’t been back to Rochester in years.
Kat’s face looks how he feels when she suggests they go for a drink. They agree on a place, back in Denver, and a couple of hours later she shows up sporting her “incognito” look, which includes jeans and an unironic snapback. Dan hopes passively that they’re not photographed.
One beer in and he manages to put thoughts of work from his mind. More pressing is the look Kat is giving him. She has this whole ~all-knowing earth mother shtick which he knows is mostly bullshit, but still. It's unsettling.
“So,” she says finally. “I can't get my head around it. You roll up here after a weekend off with marks all up your neck like that, and I'm thinking wow , somebody locked that shit down, and congrats are in order. But two days out and here you are, running around looking fucking miserable. And now you're thinking about getting a number from that fucking coed over there.”
“She's gotta be at least a grad student,” Dan counters, looking quickly across the room to the girl in question, then back again. Yeah, she’s gotta be at least twenty-four .
“No, no shade, man. She's cute as hell. Point is, now I'm thinking, this must be, y’know, breakup sex aftermath.” She reaches out a hand to indicate the mess on his right side. She has a point. It's not so noticeable under coats and scarves but it's been warm today, especially inside the bar, and Dan can tell there are at least three different colors decorating the join between his neck and shoulder.
Dan makes a face before he can think better of it.
“That sucks, dude. I been there.” Dan thinks about correcting her, explaining that there had been nothing to break up, but that would entail getting into it, which he categorically does not want to do.
“Yo, if you don't wanna talk about it, just lemme know. And if you need me to run interference,” she flicks her gaze subtly towards the girl across the bar, who's still making intermittent eye contact- “I got you.”
Dan shrugs, channeling nonchalance. “Nothing to talk about.”
“Okay, fair enough. One question?” Dan raises an eyebrow. “Guy or girl?”
Dan takes a drink. “Guy.” It still feels a little weird telling the truth- Dan’s never exactly been closeted, he’s always allowed people to read into him whatever they most wanted to see, but admitting that just because it’s true, not to help him manipulate the outcome of the conversation, is still a novel choice.
Kat nods knowingly. “Aight, so you know what to do. These are the perks of non-monosexuality, right? Fuck men. No offense, but men fucking suck. Go eat some pussy and I guarantee you'll feel better in the morning.” She hops off the barstool and smacks a kiss on his cheek.
“Godspeed, cariño.”
---
Kat turns out to be right. It's been a long time since Dan has done this and it's kind of nice to be so far removed from the Beltway that just mentioning that he knows the president is impressive. In fact, he’s so off his game that the obvious name-dropping strategy doesn’t even occur to him at first. He’s telling some stupid story about the 2016 election when the girl stops him.
“Wait, when you say Selina, you don’t mean Selina Meyer, do you?” She’s giving him a face like she thinks he’s full of shit.
“What?” Dan says, caught off guard. “Oh, yeah. I was on her vice presidential staff. Here,” he says recovering, “I have pictures.” Swiping through the album on his phone to show her, he’s so excited to be winning a conversation so decisively that he slips up and lands on a picture of Jonah, in some ugly sweater with his West Wing badge on. He freezes, just for a split second, and locks his phone screen.
“Enough about that boring political stuff, anyway,” he says, affecting an easy tone and making reassuring eye contact. “Tell me about you.”
The girl, Callie, is smart and funny, at least to the extent that you can tell from a single conversation in a loud bar. She's very pretty, if a little small- she might even be shorter than Amy- but she has dark hair and bright green eyes, with a focus behind them that Dan recognizes. After two or three more drinks, which he insists on paying for- he’s still consistently blown away by how cheap alcohol is outside the Eastern seaboard- he lets her invite him back to her apartment, lets her call the Uber on her phone, and as they walk outside he notices the calm, fluid way she moves and the slight wave in her hair. On second thought, she's really not like Amy at all. For all he's infuriated by the West Coast approach to life, her relaxation is contagious as she drapes herself over him in the car. Her mouth is small and pouty and tastes of gum, some kind of artificial fruit flavor.
After she lets them into her apartment - a decently sized one bedroom with one grey cat waiting by the door- Dan takes a look around. He sees an open gym bag by the door with a pair of pointe shoes sticking out of it.
“Sorry,” she says, walking back towards him. “He was just hungry.”
Dan kisses her, exploratory, testing the waters. “It's okay,” he says, and it is. The apartment barely even smells of cat.
“Do you wanna,” she says, a little awkwardly, and then moves to lift the hem of her black dress. Dan takes her meaning, shucks off his dark-wash jeans and shirt, looks at her. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of blue lace boyshorts, no bra, and he can see the outlines of her abs.
“Sorry,” she says, fidgeting with her hair.
“Fuck that,” Dan says without thinking, then- “I mean, you look incredible. Can I- What do you like?” He takes a step forward, and she takes a couple steps backward, and now she’s backed up against the wall, looking up at him. It’s weird to be on this side of things, looming over someone rather than being caged in- weird in a good way, Dan tells himself. He leans down again to kiss her, but he gets this urge-
“Sorry,” he says, “Can I-” and he grabs her by the backs of her thighs, lifts her up so their faces are even. Christ, it’s fucking easy to do it, too, she’s so tiny. He could do anything to her. He meets her eyes. “Okay?”
She nods, looking a little flustered. “Yeah. That’s good. That’s-” her hips move forward a little, and Dan moves one hand to her ass, pulls her so she’s grinding her clit flush against his stomach.
“What do you want?” he asks into her mouth.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Whatever is fine. This is fine.”
“Do you like- can I-” and he’s had just enough to drink that he slips to his knees without second guessing himself, glancing up for her reaction. She nods again, looking a little shell-shocked. Good. Dan pulls the panties down, lets her step out of them. She’s totally hairless, which is usually not his thing, but he likes it today, a detail to ground him in the here and now. He just looks at her for a long minute, already a little wet and slick, flushed red in contrast with the pale tone of the rest of her body. “Callie?” he says, questioning.
“Mhmm?”
“Can I try something? You’re a dancer, right? I just wanna-” He doesn’t know exactly where the idea comes from- a combination of things, probably. Living out of a hotel for weeks on end now, he hasn’t been sleeping much. At three in the morning, alone in Colorado, there’s nothing better to do than go to the hotel gym and lift until his body, if not his mind, is ready to rest. He knows his upper body strength has improved some, and that’s just exaggerated by the size contrast here.
It's very hot that he's able to move her around so easily, she's so small. But strong, too, he can see in the lines of her arms and the definition in her thighs- and something about the play between endurance and pleasure is fucking hot.
“What?” she asks.
“I want you to sit,” and he lifts up at her hips to demonstrate, “like, put your legs over my shoulders. Yeah? Does that work?”
She does it, bracing her arms against the wall, but balancing with his hands under her hips, spotting her.
“Yeah,” she says after adjusting her position for a minute. “Yeah, I got it. Hey, what if you sit down? Like, instead of kneeling?”
“Okay, hop down,” he says, and moves so he’s sitting with his legs crossed flat on the floor. She nods approvingly and climbs back on.
“Yeah, that’s good,” she says, stretching out, and he can tell now that her feet are actually touching the floor behind him, somehow- he doesn’t understand how she can stretch that far, but this is some Cirque du Soleil, kama sutra shit, and Dan is one hundred percent into it. It’s good because this position requires all of his focus, requires him to be in his body in this room and this moment. The racing of his thoughts is finally quiet for the first time all week.
“I’m gonna eat you out now,” he informs her. “Tell me what you like.” She makes a kind of whimpering noise in answer. He starts by just moving to taste her, after what feels like an eternity of waiting. She’s dripping in earnest now, sweet and clear and tangy,and he just laps at the excess to start with. She’s incredibly responsive, heaving little gasping breaths and squeezing her thighs together around his head. He circles around her clit slowly, gently, the exertion in his arms making it seem like hours when it’s probably only minutes. Finally, when she’s shuddering and whining around him, he zeroes in on her clit, sucking it in earnest, and she comes with a high-pitched cry.
Dan looks up at her and quirks an eyebrow. “Good? You wanna go again?”
Her face is flushed. “You don’t have to.”
“I’m not gonna drop you,” he says. “Anything I should do differently?”
“Um,” she says, biting her lip. “I like it if you- like, start at the bottom? And just lick up the whole way, like, slowly. I’m really sensitive the second time. Just straight up and down is good.” She nods, looking more sure of herself.
Dan grins and hurries to comply, keeping a rhythm in his head and savoring all the sensory details- the slight soreness in his shoulders and forearms, the drag of a little bit of stubble on one of her pussy lips, the drip of wetness down his chin. Nothing else exists. When she finally comes, slapping at the wall behind her, he’s taken by surprise.
“That’s so good,” she’s saying. “God, that’s perfect. Just like that. Perfect. Oh. ” She clambers down, looking overwhelmed.
Dan looks up at her. She licks her lips and gestures for him to stand. They make out messily for a few minutes before she pulls back. “You can- if you want- I have condoms,” she says.
Dan considers it for half a second. “It’s okay,” he says finally. “I’m pretty drunk, so. I’m just kinda tired-”
He’s not that drunk, actually, but it’s an easier explanation than telling her that he got exactly what he wanted out of this situation, that he feels settled in his skin now.
“Sorry,” she says again. “You didn’t have to- If I’d known you were that tired, I wouldn’t-”
“Shh,” he says. “It’s fine. I wanted to.”
“You can sleep here,” she offers next, and it’s obvious she’s saying it partly out of obligation, but Dan is actually pretty tired in the scheme of things, and leaving here just means going back to a sterile hotel room and probably waking up in a couple hours and going to work out again.
“I have to be up early,” he hedges.
“No, me too,” she says. “5 AM. Sorry. You can go if you want.”
He stays, though, which he would never do with a one-night stand back home, but no one is watching him here and it’s not like he would really be going home , anyway. They sleep in her messy IKEA-looking bed for the few hours until both their phone alarms go off. In the morning, Dan pets her cat and leaves her his card, “Just in case you’re ever in DC.”
“Thanks,” she says. “This was fun.”
Dan is able to hold on to the grounded, after-glow feeling until almost lunchtime, which he counts as a victory.
---
That afternoon, though, the first poll in four weeks comes out, and it’s not looking good. That night Dan stays in, buys a bottle of whiskey (a thirty-five dollar bottle, because drinking out of the minibar feels too pathetic) just for himself. He spends half an hour googling Callie, finds her picture under “Corps de Ballet” on the Colorado Ballet website. He thinks about last night, opens one tab of porn and one of a ballet performance- it takes him a minute to find one that’s not the Nutcracker- but a third of the way or so into the bottle he gives in to the inevitable and dials.
The phone rings- once, twice, three times, four- and Dan hangs up quickly. The sound of Jonah’s voice mail message- obnoxious, profane, completely inappropriate for a former congressional candidate, or for any human adult- would be too humiliating. Dan resists the urge to throw the phone across the room.
When the phone lights up forty-five seconds later, Dan picks up before he remembers that answering on the first ring makes you look desperate and pathetic.
“Dan,” Jonah says, and Dan can tell from his voice that he’s half asleep. “What the fuck? Why are you calling me at three thirty ass in the morning?”
“I dunno,” Dan says. “Why did you call me back, if it’s so late?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s just me pretending that it’s late! It’s the middle of the fucking night, and I know you understand time zones. What the fuck is this about? I thought we weren’t talking anymore, remember?”
Dan hums noncommittally. “No, Dan, not ‘hmm’,” Jonah splutters. “You said that. You said, never again, blah blah blah, this is the last time, and threw a whole dramatic hissy fit over nothing. You ended it. Why are you fucking calling me?”
“I dunno,” Dan says again. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. We can still talk, if you want.”
“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Jonah says, sounding resigned. “You’re lucky you’re so hot.”
Dan grins. “Go fuck yourself. Look, do you want to hear about the ballerina I fucked or not?”
A pause. “Jesus, Dan. Why didn’t you lead with that?” The timbre of Jonah’s voice has changed, just subtly, and it’s fucking stupid how easily Dan’s whole body sort of melts into it. He thumbs the tip of his dick through his pajama pants and finds it already wet.
“Dan?”
“Hmm?”
“Tell me about her. Was she hot?”
Dan nods emphatically even though Jonah can’t see him. “Yeah. At least an eight. Not a DC eight, either. Really cute, super tiny with, like, dark brown hair-”
“Isn’t your type usually blondes?”
“I don’t have a type. Shut the fuck up and let me talk, will you? Anyway, she was wearing this, like, black dress thing with no bra underneath-”
“You fuck her in the bar, the bathroom, or did you make it into the cab?”
“Shut up,” Dan says. So he has a little bit of a thing for sex in public places. It’s not that weird. “No, I went back to her place.”
“Oh wow, straight sex in a bed? You going vanilla on me, Egan? Did you do it missionary and come inside her? You gonna have wife her up and have some Mormon babies?”
Jonah is so fucking weird, nothing he’s saying makes any kind of sense but Dan can tell from the change in his breathing that he’s touching himself, getting off on the idea.
“Okay, first of all, I’m in Colorado, not Utah. And we didn’t use the bed. And I didn’t actually, like, come.”
“Oh really?” Jonah sounds interested.
“Yeah,” Dan says. “She was so little, I could throw her around no problem. I held her up and made her come on my tongue, twice.”
“Yeah? You’re good at that, aren’t you? You like making yourself useful.”
Dan whines and steps out of his pants to try and get a better angle as he strokes himself. It’s almost infuriating how well Jonah knows him at this point, knows exactly the right, humiliating thing to say to get him off. Or, it would be infuriating if it wasn’t so fucking hot.
“Yeah. She really liked it, too. Said it was perfect. I thought- Jesus- after the first time I was afraid I was gonna drop her, but I didn’t.”
“Good boy,” Jonah says, and Dan can tell he means to be condescending, but he flushes with pleasure anyway. “Why didn’t you fuck her?”
“I dunno,” Dan says, and he really doesn’t. He couldn’t explain it well even stone sober in the light of day, and he’s certainly not going to try now. The less he says, the easier it is to keep Jonah talking.
“I would have fucked her for you,” Jonah says, considering. “If you weren’t up to it. Would you like that, Dan? Taking home a beautiful girl and just getting her all wet and dripping and ready, and then you just watch me fuck her? Maybe if you’re good I’ll let you touch yourself while you watch. Maybe not, though. You’ve been kind of a brat lately.”
Dan’s picturing it, and it’s a good mental image- he doesn’t know how Jonah does this, hits buttons sometimes that he didn’t know he had. “She might-” he says, hesitating. “You’re pretty big.”
Jonah laughs. “You’re not the first girl to tell me that, Danny. What’s your point?”
“It just- she was really tiny. Like, maybe five feet. You might-”
“What, you think I might hurt her? You think I should fuck you instead?”
“Fuck, yeah,” Dan says mindlessly, and his hand is really flying now.
“How about this,” Jonah says. “I fuck you from behind while you keep your mouth busy with her pussy. Make her come a third time, yeah? You can do that, right?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Dan says, thinking about how sensitive Callie had been after the second time, thinking about her making noises, directing him, her voice mingling with the slapping sounds of Jonah behind him. “Christ, I’m so close.”
“Yeah? You don’t come until I- until we tell you. Until we’re both done using you. Okay?”
As always, the denial makes Dan even needier. He forces himself to hold his hand away for a minute, tries to get his breathing calmed down. “Okay,” he says, voice tight. “When you tell me."
“Fuck. I’m so close, baby. You want it in you or on you?”
“On me,” Dan says. “Come on me, I want you to. Mark me up.”
“Shit!” Jonah says, breathing heavily. “Holy shit. Okay. Fuck, that’s hot. I’m gonna rub it all over your back, huh? You’re gonna smell like me. Don’t shower, just put on your clothes and go to work like that so everyone knows who you belong to.”
“Jonah, please,” Dan says, pressing the heel of his hand into the base of his cock. He can feel his heartbeat throughout his entire body. He feels flushed and electrified and desperately turned on.
“Okay, I got you. You want to come?”
“Fuck you,” Dan says. “Please.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to set the pace for you. Get your hand around yourself, but hold it still for me. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Good boy. Now I’m going to count for you. Pretend it’s my hand, okay? I’m gonna make you feel so good, if you can be good for me. Are you going to be good?”
Dan wants to say yes, but it’s taking all his concentration to hold his hips still, not to thrust forward into the loose circle of his hand. There’s no brain capacity left for the formation of words. He lets out a sort of squeaking sound, and luckily Jonah understands.
“Okay, baby. With me, now. One. Two. Three, four, five-”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck. Dan is so close already, can feel it coiling up in the pit of his stomach, but he’s not sure if he’s allowed yet. “Jonah,” he says urgently.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven- stop.”
Dan cries out involuntarily, jerks his hand away and rakes it through his hair, pulling at the roots, trying to ground himself. Incredibly, he feels his eyes tearing up. “Jonah, please.”
“Shhh. Soon, baby. I got you. You just gotta be patient for me. You can do that, right?”
Dan watches his cock jerk in the air, leaking a steady stream of precome that’s dripping down onto the hotel desk chair. He tries to breathe, tries to form words in his mind, but all he can do is want.
“Okay, again. One, two, three-” Dan tries to stroke slowly, to make them last, tries not to work himself up too quickly, but when Jonah stops him again he can’t help crying out.
“Fuck! Please, Jonah, please-”
“Jesus Christ, Dan, you’re unbelievable. I wish I was there, wish I could see you. You look so good like this, you’re so good for me, baby. Can’t believe how good you are. I’m going to count it out again, and you can come whenever you want to, okay?”
Dan whimpers. “Okay. One, two-” Dan doesn’t make it through the second upstroke.
It takes Dan a couple minutes to come down, breathing heavily and wiping himself and the furniture down. He notices after a bit, though, that Jonah has gone uncharacteristically quiet.
“You asleep?” he asks, and whatever weird thing his voice is deciding to do, he’s not thrilled about it.
“No,” Jonah says after a beat. “Just thinking. Look, about the other day-”
“I’m sorry,” Dan cuts him off. “I overreacted. We don’t have to stop, if you don’t want to. The sex is fucking great. Let’s just keep it simple. You’re not my boyfriend, y’know, but when I’m back in the 202 I’ll hit you up.”
“Fine,” Jonah says. “If you fuck anyone else, feel free to actually come next time. I’m not actually your, like, dungeon master.”
Dan snickers at that. “Got it. Go back to sleep, Bigfoot. You’ve got work in the morning.”
Jonah hangs up. Dan is left feeling monumentally relieved. Even the next morning, he gets out of the shower and catches himself smirking in the bathroom mirror. He tries to tamp it down, but can’t.
---
It’s nice to have one good, reliable thing in his life, anyway- over the next couple weeks they talk intermittently. Dan tries not to examine too closely the fact that he gets off harder jerking it on the phone with Jonah than with any of the Coloradans of various genders he’s picked up in bars over the past month.
In an unsurprising turn of events that follows up on a series of minor humiliations on the campaign trail, they lose the election pretty dramatically. It’s so bad that Kat’s congressional seat ends up going to the GOP as well. That part is obviously not Dan’s fault, but somehow Selina and the DNC at large don’t see it that way. For her part, Kat doesn’t seem too fazed.
“I think it’s probably good to take a break from politics,” she says. “Get some actual work experience, you know. Raise my kid. Smoke weed. Talk to me in five years and we’ll see where we are. We’re both young, you know.”
Dan doesn’t really feel young, though. He checks his fine lines in the mirror the morning before he flies back to DC and tries not to think about the fact that he doesn’t actually have, like, a job or life purpose of any kind waiting for him. He tries not to think about it the whole flight home and the whole night after that, too.