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It was close, so close that the walls were wet
And she wrote it out in Letraset
“No, you can't call me her name.”
In her dreams she kills him.
It matters less than it should.
He was wearing another face, again. One that she didn’t like. (She liked all of them, but that didn’t matter much, either.)
Was this before or after Selina’s attempt at the presidency? The second or the third time? The chess board had been arranged and set so many times that it was hard for Amy to keep track, now.
“God, you two are so cute,” Mike quipped, interrupting the sound of their bickering. “What color are you thinking for the wedding invites? Piss yellow?”
“Please, the only thing that’s ever loved him is his left hand,” Amy pointed a finger at her mouth and mimicked gagging.
“You can’t love anyone if you don’t love yourself first, you know?” Dan shone at the attention from his seat in the corner, waving his hand above his head to emphasize his point.
“I wasn’t aware you were capable of love, Dan,” Sue contributed, not sparing them a glance as she crossed something out on the calendar hanging by her desk.
“They taught me it at college, Sue,” he repeated back in the same monotone. “Something I’m not sure you're too familiar with. Remind me what are your qualifications for this office, again?”
“Okay, pretty boy with a communications degree,” Amy cut in, mainly to save him from one of Sue’s scarier facial expressions. “You could have gone anywhere to get that, they would have worshiped your feet at the University of Arizona. You could have been the king of South Western American realty and spared us all from the punishment of your existence. A life of bottle blondes and cactus shoved up your ass.”
“Depends on which order that's in, Ames, and that's a pretty good life.” He looked over at her, eyes alight, smelling blood in the water. She shouldn’t have called him pretty.
“For you it would be,” she said. “Mediocrity is the altar you serve, after all.”
“Children, stop flirting.” (Caught.) Selina breezed into the room, authority looped around her neck like the thick string of pearls that currently sat there, heavy. Gary close enough to be stitched into her shadow. (Was this before or after Dan slept with her? Amy couldn’t remember that, either.) “I was held hostage at one of Catherine’s god awful film premieres last night and the headache I have from stomaching that shit is the only reason this is all I have to say: good morning, now shut the fuck up.”
“You have to know that I didn’t actually go to ASU, right?” Dan asked, once Selina was out of sight in her office. The real fear that for even one second someone might think that Dan Egan attended a state school (one with no coastal access at that) crept in his voice.
“One, not the college I said. And, two, as someone unfortunate enough to have slept with you, I have witnessed first hand the freak shrine over your bed dedicated to Hampden-Sydney. Go tigers!” She wiggled her fingers, pretending to cheer.
“Unfortunate?” He laughed, harsh and confident and mean. “Many a senator's daughter have worshiped that false god.”
“Yeah, immediately before they went missing,” Mike said. “I just hope you’ll finally tell the authorities where you hid the bones of those poor girls so the families can get closure.”
“We desperately need an in-house HR department,” Sue’s voice echoed from the hallway as she left the office.
“If it's a sin to please women, then I will send you a postcard from hell,” Dan grinned, proud. “Although I suspect you all will already be right there next to me.”
“You wish, your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing,” Amy said, dismissive.
“Oh, Crime and Punishment. Impressive.” He stood, now, close. Shark smile wide and knowing. Caught, again. “And did they teach you how to read that behemoth of literature at UPenn?”
“Try a 7% acceptance rate to 40%.” She knocked shoulders with him lightly as she maneuvered around him. “And we let girls in!”
“Hey, trust me, I had no problem meeting women there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You might have wanted to pull on those wigs a little harder.”
He laughed, this time genuine and unexpected and devastating.
It almost made her pause—almost.
“I’m sorry, am I speaking to the cast of muppet fucked Sesame Street out there? Can anyone hear me? Won’t you be my neighbor? Did I not just ask for complete fucking silence?” Selina’s head reappeared from her office, glaring.
“She’s definitely getting two shows mixed up, right?” Mike asked to the sound of the door slamming as everyone retreated to their desks. “There's just no way that's correct.”
Her desk looked vacant once he was gone (years later. For good, this time.)
It took her a while to stop finding abandoned aluminum pull-tabs littered with her possessions. (In a past life belonging to the colorful energy drinks that he pretended not to consume in bulk.) He had made a habit of sneaking them hidden among her things: in between the contents of dusty forgotten files, with dried highlighters rolling around otherwise empty drawers, slipped into the zipped pockets of her purse.
It took her a while to stop expecting to glance up and see the curve of his back bent into a painful shape as he edited a speech or scribbled a press release or shot off a detached break up text to some senator’s daughter across from her.
They had been hinged on the same axis for so long that it was impossible to label the point where she ended and he began (somewhere microscopic, in between the webbing of her bones.)
Selina used to call them her demented fucking Shining twins—borderline obsessive, almost telepathic. (Toxic, codependent, insert your preferred therapy-speak buzzword here.) Before, back when they used to huddle in the corners of rooms, just the two of them, and ask one another, “Where do you think this is heading?”
His absence bloomed a rotten cavity through the fabric of her life. Reflected a stranger in the mirror, sewn into her skin. Hung the corpse of an albatross decaying and worm-riddled around her neck.
Butch and sundance.
She could feel the weight of his stare, the way he would try to catch her eye —read her mind— long after she had stopped looking back, clairvoyance severed by the pointed shape of the letter V in CVS.
She wonders if the terms of their suicide pact are still active.
(He still dies first, and she still gets to stab him a million times. That’s the deal he shook on.)
Here is her problem: her mother was right, she is doomed to spinsterhood.
No, here is her problem: she’ll never be better at anything than she is at her job so it's okay to throw the other parts of her life into the fire to better worship it.
No, here is her problem: she had lived a childhood in the shadow of her sister despite being better and smarter and that meant that anything that belonged to Amy was also labeled in neat permanent ink with ‘Sophie.’
(The actual problem is that she might have, at one point in time, accidently and probably based on some weird hormonal change brought on by the cycle of the tides or the phases of the moon or whatever other bullshit that was completely out of her control: loved Dan just a little bit.)
In her dreams he is always on his knees.
But that matters even less.
The first time she met him he had worn a tie patterned with tiny stars.
He was her inaugural taste of true blue D.C. politics. The quick talk, so fast it hid intention under its tongue. The test of strength in the resolve of a handshake. The hierarchy of influence that could lie within the expanse of her palm, in the undercurrent of her veins.
She was addicted. More importantly: she was good at it.
(She would later rationalize this initial spell of hypnotism by proxy as some sort of twisted hazing ritual to see if she could really make it on the Hill—a seat to be earned in the old boys club.
He turned out to be one of those fraternities tucked away in a deep southern state that routinely ends its fall semester with the dead body of a freshman and settlements outside of court for its legacy chapter members.)
He had singled her out, started making himself apparent at her favorite coffee shop almost immediately after it was decided that Selina would make a bid at the presidency. This was back in ‘08, when no one knew what they were doing and Selina was just a low-tier senator and Amy still ordered her lattes with whole milk. He made sure to catch her attention before the announcement had even leaked to the press. It was a masterful game of opportunity, really: the fall of a napkin here, the accidental brush in line there.
He worked at a deadly pace, one step ahead. Always.
She didn’t fall for a single second of it.
But she still said yes when he asked her out, anyway.
The freckle on his bottom lip might have helped sway her decision.
(This was long enough ago that he was still just Daniel, sans the smirk and self-satisfied addition of Egan, Vice President’s Office. When he belonged only to her, not Selina or Jonah or the two point five million daily viewers of CBS This Morning.
She would let him take her on a few more dates after this, then she blocked his number and didn't speak to him for five years.)
She had worn a sweater that her mother gifted her two Christmases ago, clearance tag still highlighter yellow and securely attached when she removed the tacky wrapping paper.
The restaurant was trendy, one of those places that served pretty crumbs for perfectly crafted social media feeds, with a line wrapped around the front. A line that he promptly ignored with the curve of a sharp eyebrow, lifting the heavy velvet partitioner in a way that was designed to impress her.
Douchebag.
Later, in the dim light of the porch at her shitty first post-college apartment, he would press his open mouth against her neck and ask, “Please.”
He played her roommate's stupid guitar. Afterwards.
She pretended not to know the song.
(It was a forgotten early 2000s track from one of Sophie’s old college CDs that Amy had played so often growing up that now when she stuck the disk into her decrepit SUV the singer’s voice tripped and skipped over each track. The CD had been a birthday gift from some distant grandparent or cousin and she had stolen it from her sister’s room, walked gentle and quiet as she snuck in and lifted it from its discarded stack on Sophie's desk.
Like college, and eventually much later Dan, Sophie didn’t pay it enough attention to realize it was even gone.)
God, Sophie.
Was this before or after he slept with her sister? The second or the third time? Another thought that slipped beyond the reach of her memory, now.
(It was before. He was kissing her. Of course it was before.)
Their relationship was cyclical.
They would fight, exchange insults so loud the sound would echo against the vaulted ceilings of the West Wing. Then, in a month or so, his name would flash across the home screen of her second or third phone and he would try to poach her for whatever job he had used his spider’s web of connections to scrounge up this time.
She only said yes sometimes.
(In those five years they didn’t talk, after he took her on however many dates and then ruined it all, she still kept tabs on him. Would poke around her contacts, check the list of staffers for each senator at the start of a new session, then the lobbyists. Would track his trajectory through and, occasionally, outside the fringes of Washington.
She would calculate his mile marker in relation to the Potomac.
And in relation to her.)
He would come back around. Eventually.
That’s how this went.
Before she even realized it he would reappear in Selina’s office, balancing backwards in his chair and victorious once again.
Or he would manifest around the corner of whichever news station was currently funding his loyalty, tan too orange and teeth too white, able to rely on his magnetism when all other avenues failed.
Expect this time he doesn’t.
(You can’t love a moving target.)
He leaves the White House one day and doesn’t come back the next.
He leaves and he doesn’t forgive her for what she spits at him, the words cutting down to the lead in the original layer of paint coating the walls.
And that’s, well, fine. She doesn’t forgive him either.
She hears later (from Richard of all fucking people) that he had booked the earliest flight to LA. Handed his clearance badge to security with a wink out the door and called an old Purcell contact to situate himself as Pasadena’s hottest up-and-coming realtor before his plane had even landed.
A prophecy of her own making.
What’s the great Dan Egan going to do now?
(His sunglasses are still in her car. Sometimes she’ll dig through her glove compartment to touch the cool metal and think about how he had to buy a new pair.)
She doesn't go to any of their bars. Afterwards.
And that's, well, that’s also just fine. She couldn't stand being entombed within the dark cherry-cola wood on the walls of all those little downtown places he liked so much, anyways.
She doesn’t miss the sound of the ancient heater rattling away overhead at the place on 4th Street or the feel of the sticky varnish on the tables at Clancy’s or the way that her hair would always end up smelling like cigarettes no matter where they went.
She doesn’t miss the lush feeling in her blood when she would stay too late and order her drink too strong—Dan’s cologne even stronger when he would stand close, radiating heat, smiling polite and patient as he let her pretend that he wasn’t going to take her home at the end of the night.
(She doesn’t think about how each spot they had carved out for themselves near Adams Morgan has a different name, now.)
Sometimes, she imagines a baby girl with his eyes.
Then, the image warps into a nineteen year old waitress.
Selina.
Her sister.
Her name is Meagan.
When she lays in the dark and convinces her mind to slow to a pace that resembles something close enough to sleep, she swears he is there. A specter in the corner of the room. Swears he speaks—the violent hinge and unhinge of his jaw—his voice a mocking phonograph recording as he says that he doesn’t know what he’d do without her. (Hope so fleeting it had hit her like a train on a track.) Swears the parallel line of his body curls next to her in the sheets and laughs that same laugh he mimicked in her ear when he had stood behind her and reached for the key card she was fumbling with (the closest they came to getting it right.)
(“You’re like a real friend.” A hospital room somewhere in London, after the stress of being campaign manager had made him collapse—her fault.
Under the shitty yellow overhead lights, that fairytale freckle still on his lip, before Jonah appeared in the doorway and brought her back to reality. Her fault, again.)
She has this nasty, habitual practice of reading the Vegas board of her life, always.
An intrinsic ability to calculate momentum, a strategist through and through— Ben Cafferty’s protégé after all.
A control freak eternally on the verge of a nervous breakdown/a collapsing star with tunnel vision/single-minded to the point of recklessness.
(And, known only to the note pages of the “strongly recommended” disciplinary therapist HR had punished her with for three months after she made one too many interns cry into their paper sack lunches, Sophie through reading every childhood diary she so much as scribbled in and a near-canny ability to guess every LiveJournal password her developing brain could invent, and maybe—probably—Dan from the moment he met her: a perpetual grave digger, unable to leave the past to rot in its crypt.)
I like the name Meagan, too.
In her dreams she kills him.
His blood mats to her hair, stains the pale skin of her hands bright cadmium red.
The entire time he smiles that perfect Kennedy Camelot smile, all teeth.
Bill is nice. Just like Ed and even sometimes Buddy were both nice (not “kind” in the definition of the word, but, easy enough. Stable. Attainable.) Competent at his job, the patron saint of loss causes. He is smart, whip-quick, buttoned up with vanity that isn’t unearned.
She likes that he’s tall.
There was that whole enemy of the state thing, but a presidential pardon is as good as any penance, she supposes.
Once, she had told Dan that she had sworn off dating men from D.C., but she was as good as sticking to her promises as he was.
(Her wedding had been unbelievable, expensive and sprawling and attended by people she never met in her life. Edison lights and artisan natural wood and infinite acres of land that she is still only pretty sure didn’t host the skeletal remains of a plantation. Her dress was custom, a semi-sheer creme egg color that settled against her skin like thinly sliced butter and wrinkled in her fist— nervous habit. Bill had arranged for a ten page spread in a respected local magazine and they both received a notable bump of prestige to band-aid their fractured careers from all of it, which is nice— fine.
Her bouquet had polled middle-America friendly, rustic twine and perfect crisp pink roses.
She would have preferred the bolt of satin and curved white tulips hidden in the files of her teenaged Pinterest boards, but that wasn’t what the wedding planner Bill hired had “envisioned.”
She doesn’t take his last name.)
When they go on their first date, Bill pulls back her chair and compliments that sweater her mother gave her all those Christmases ago.
Bill is fine. And she is fine. Their house is fine, and their life is fine.
God, it bores the hell out of her, though.
And she fucking hates the greyhounds.
Dan looks brutally older, with skin he had thinned and stretched upwards to try and regain the looks that previously opened doors for him. His wife is exactly as she expected, a scandalously young internet starlet with all of the time (and daddy’s money) in the world to keep her body perfect and tamper her concerns to be no larger than the appetite suppressant lollipops she shrills to insecure middle schoolers.
She stalked him on her burner’s burner Instagram account, a favorite pastime of hers once she had drank too much, accidentally liking archaic pictures when she scrolled back far enough to start catching glimpses of the EEOB in the background again. She figured that there was no harm, he would never remove his mouth from the dimensions of his own dick long enough to take a second glimpse at the profile of Alfred Johnson, follower of God, grandfather of 2, AMERICAN FIRST anyways.
(Him and his child bride divorce as quickly as they had married, just missing the parameters for annulment, in an identical notes app announcement posted to both of their pages. Something about irreconcilable differences.
Pretentious assholes.
On a night that Bill is out of town for work and after a glass too many of that expensive shit Sue keeps gifting her despite her many protests and lack of gifts in return when they always meet up for dinner, Alfred Johnson decidedly likes both break up announcements.)
The first time she brings Bill home to meet her parents, her mother cries. Real, Shakespearean tragedy tears when the woman saw the tasteful diamond fixed to her finger as she pulled Amy aside and whispered, “It didn’t work out with Dan?”
(Her parents aren’t supposed to be able to read her like this, not anymore. She has had an IQ higher than both of them combined since she was eight years old. She still isn’t convinced that they know Iran and Iraq are two different countries, and they get all of their news from the local cable station that the governor currently has in his back pocket.
But still, her hands had shook and her voice broke when she whispered back, “No.”)
In her dreams she kisses him.
The white flash of his canine tooth is sharp against the gentle skin of her wrist.
And it doesn’t matter, or it does, she doesn’t fucking know.
(He tastes like the first few days of summer, before the heat settles in and makes everything miserable, when time seems to yawn and stretch itself neverending in front of you. Like driving a little too fast with the windows down and whatever ear worm is currently overplaying itself on pop radio and sunsets that last for hours.
Like that specific brand of shitty instant coffee that Mike would complain about and Gary would keep fully stocked when they all used to be their own planetary system, gravitationally anchored to one another.
Like finally, finally, getting what you want.)
She was wrong, a million years ago, when she had goaded him in the Vice President’s office. Realty didn’t suit him. Or it did, everything did, but it limited him. Encapsulated that clever tongue and quick mind in tempered gilded gold. Left him stunted, hollow. A shade of the former technicolor marvel he had been when he used to slither along the baseboards of the White House.
(Television had loved him even when gray began to pepper his hair, like the little embroidered stars on that stupid fucking tie he wore the first day he shouldered his way into her life. But he left that behind, too.)
They had lobbied (sorry, consulted) together, guilt intertwined and hands chained with the same cuff on trial in front of the house special committee. They had sat side by side in crappy greenrooms, plotting world domination. Again, side by side, black and white and miniscule, damned by association on the pages of the local pundit papers.
(They had stood together outside in a parking lot somewhere in the Bronx, draped in glacial blue golden light before they ruined it all—again, again, again—by committing to another failed attempt at the presidency, resown together for a single second before the tapestry was disentangled entirely, so cold she could see her breath when she spoke — it’s yours.)
He didn't get to exit stage left, blindly taking the easy way out. No, that's not how this worked.
The doors of hell have opened and you’re my plus one.
If she believed in anything close to it, she sometimes thought that this was their punishment—this self-imposed alienation. A form of karma or fate or whatever the fuck for sacrificing themselves to the same beast over and over again, woven together with thick red cord and lost. Continual damnation for a life-long dedication to not bettering themselves or the system they represented or the people in it.
(Fake fortune-tellers scandalized by fate.)
When she was young, her mother used to parade her in front of guests (two steps behind her sister always) and her mother used to laugh. Cackle and wink conspiratorially with her friends, stage whispering as she told them to watch out, this one has a mind like a needle.
Sharp, dangerously unassuming, something not to be left unattended. Not like sweet Sophie.
She wonders what stories his mother used to tell about him. If his childhood was spent in front of friends and family and laughter (calculated or not.)
If he got to share even a peak into those esoteric thoughts.
(She already knew the answer: A home full of silver spoons and downturned stares and closed bedroom doors.
A classic east coast elitist shade of generational penitence seeping through the walls, staining the carpet, and a father that you’re named after but aren't allowed to look in the eye at the dinner table.)
She sees him, briefly, after it all goes to shit. After the Meyer’s administration goes their own way and the country is better for it, but her life isn’t.
(Ben and Kent had been there too, performing their familiar C-3PO and R2-D2 slapstick bullshit act in the corner. If she was the type of person vulnerable to nostalgia the scene would have been tinted with sepia-colored ink.)
It's at a generic hospital's generic childhood cancer banquet, one that her husband donates a considerable portion of money to, despite his absence.
By this time, it had been years since they had seen each other. Again.
The fillers on his face looked horrible in person. He was wearing suit pants cropped high on his ankles, a popular style among the junior staffers this session, and he was certainly the oldest man in the room attempting the trend.
She still found him pretty.
She figured it would be harder to see him, but she was mostly left tired.
(Weirieness rooted deep in the marrow of her bones. The hinge of that old axis—the pins and needles of phantom pain prickling along her spine, even though the limb had been cauterized and removed a lifetime ago.)
And he was too busy balancing one foot in politics and the other out the door to notice that she was ever there, still Machiavellian in his innate ability to charm a room. She promptly finished her glass of champagne (too expensive and too dry, wholly responsible for the catch in her throat) and materialized in front of the nearest exit as she pushed the metal handle and braced herself against the cold.
That familiar ghost of Christmas past moonlighting as her first date sweater (a bit threadbare now, admittedly, after all these years) lay abandoned at the table she hurried to vacate.
(Along with her favorite engraved Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, which was probably the only real hand-to-God genuine gift Selina gave her in the sixteen years they worked together. But what the fuck ever, it wasn’t her shade anyways.)
On her way home from work one night she drives past a billboard that says: “The end is near!”
That scratched CD she stole from her sister had been playing.
Which, of course, would mark Dan Egan's triumphant return into the orbit of her life. Crashing into her inbox at 4:02 pm on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.
A single text, no introduction, no sheepish preamble about how he got her new number. No acknowledgement of the successful operation that cleaved their point of conjuncture (horror movie twins) and the subsequent radio silence that followed.
Just this: “Hi, Alfred.”
Caught.
Then, exactly one minute later: “You do realize ‘Alfred Johnson’ is the fakest fake name ever, right?”
Caught, again.
And one more, because apparently he couldn’t help himself: “And you overdid it with the patriotism, too many words and not enough emojis.”
Another text, sent against the veil of night, one week after she left him without a response: “I saved your old sweater. Recognized it right away. But you can’t have it back.”
A final text, sent that same night, ripping her from sleep even with her notifications silenced. He had to have been drinking, the words jumbled and misspelled but unmistakable: “I still dream about you.”
When they were younger and still liked each other just a little bit, before the bickering and senior year prom and before they both grew boobs and fought over the family’s shitty spare four door sedan when Amy finally turned sixteen, before Dan betrayed her (willing and wanting) to be the next number added to her sister’s repertoire and her sister betrayed her by saying yes, Amy and Sophie would play at pretty hypotheticals.
They would waste entire sleepy suburban childhood days to what ifs. Would-you-rathers and MASH and rhythmic clap games where Sophie would hit back a bit too hard on purpose, despite the innocence she would feign afterwards.
During these games her sister would wish for nonsensical things: unicorns and fountains of candy and pink bows the size of her tiny head.
Amy’s third wish has always been for three more.
We could still be great.