Summary:  “I understand how hard it is, Hill, to be passed over for someone else…I should know, I got passed over for you.”Hillary didn’t know how to answer to that.

AN: This is as much about my need to forgive Evan as Hillary’s need to y’know whatever Hillary’s doing right now.

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                “There’s not a thing about this that’s fair, not a thing about it that makes sense. It sucks, Hillary.  You’re allowed to say that.”  Evan Bayh had been watching his old friend for the better part of an hour and she didn’t seem inclined to say much to him.

                He’d come by a couple of methods of travel and under the cover of a congressional delegation to see her.

                Marseilles, France was the place she had gone to “lick her wounds,” as the pols-for-pay called it.  She wasn’t licking anything from what he could see. She wasn’t backed into a corner and she wasn’t rocking like an abused child, crying.  That wasn’t Hillary’s style, not her M.O.  She was hurt to be sure, but she’d be damned if anyone ever saw it.

                Bernadette and Jacques Chirac had been more than willing to open their home to their old friends, Hillary and Bill, as they tried to escape the merciless press.  They answered any and all inquiries with the same aloofness the Clintons themselves employed when answering personal questions.  We don’t know where they are, but we hope they are well wherever that is.  There would be no secrets leaking from the windows and cracks of the Maison.

                It was only through quite a lot of asking, and a not a little acting, that he’d had his suspicions of their whereabouts confirmed.  Too long had gone by since that Saturday.  She’d been sighted in D.C. for a vote.  It was on record, she’d been there, but he hadn’t been in town that day and had missed her.  She’d been caught on camera at her New York office.  He never had any business there at all and so she was out of reach.  After that, Hillary Rodham Clinton was incommunicado; out of sight but hardly out of mind.

                In her absence, things of consequence were happening.  The base was rejecting the Party’s candidate, as she’d predicted they would, and they were revolting.  Evan winced as he thought of the many women of all parties and classes waving McCain-Clinton and Clinton-McCain signs about.  It made him slightly sick and, well, envious to see so many accept the imaginary ticket without hesitation.  It would be death to both parties, death to the radical edges of politics.  That ticket would mean a cool centre of policy would rule.  That ticket would mean…that there was no room left at her side for him.

                Maybe it was more that emotional reality that had catapulted him to her side than any need to tell her about Tim Russert’s demise in person.  There had been no love lost between the “political analyst” and Evan’s old friends.  Their reactions had been as expected—somehow, someway, this was going to be their fault, the way that everything was.  They were of course saddened for the loss of the family that had loved him.  They saved their ill will for the offenders, but tried to spare the bystanders. Hillary had looked somewhat worriedly at Bill when Evan had filled her in on the details of Russert’s death: a heart attack or something similar.  She always worried too much about his heart.  With her worrying, Evan always worried too much about hers.

                Once that perfunctory briefing was over, Bill left to read.  He was still too angry to go out in public, and far too angry to talk politics with the two of them.  It appeared to Evan that he was almost angrier than Hillary.

                The junior Senator from New York, for her part, was a paragon of calm.  She was wearing a white tunic, open at the neck, and loose white pants.  Her feet were bare.  She was dwarfed but not diminished by the oversized wicker chair she had folded herself into.  The windows were wide open in the French morning and it seemed to greet her like a native daughter, with the wind’s kiss pinking her cheeks.  He was reminded once again, why he’d once envied God.

                “You really don’t have anything to say to me, do you?”  No response.  He didn’t know what he’d expected exactly.  He was just like the rest of them, as much of a sellout as any.  Oh, he’d had her consent to “throw his support” behind Obama, but that didn’t mean he should’ve.  There had always been a something between them, a quiet way of communicating that had surpassed anything words could convey.  He often relied on it during hearings when it would be conspicuous to be seen passing a note back and forth.  She had been an open page to him, but a question mark at best to others.  He didn’t envy God, he now realized, he envied the man he had been a week ago. 

That something that had always been there had failed him.  In her profile, in her posture, he could read it.  She was as defiant against his intrusion as she would’ve been to anyone else’s.  He wasn’t the exception…She had wanted him to be the one to never leave her.  He hadn’t been the one.

“I worried about you when you didn’t show up sooner.”  A statue like this he could talk with, he could defend himself to it, as long as it didn’t talk back.  “They’ve spent the day vacillating between praising Tim like the Mother Theresa and playing clips of you talking to him.  McCain and Obama made statements.  I watched Terry on the plane.  They don’t like to say it, but you’re the one they’re waiting to hear from.  No statement from the Clintons—they’ve fallen off the edge of the earth.  For a while, I wondered if you had.”

Her eyes were closed and her breathing had slowed to match the tides that touched the shoreline.  Absently, he wondered about her heart.

“Paul said, a few days ago, that you had gone on a mini-vacation.  I have to say, it stopped being a mini-vacation around mid-Wednesday.  It’s a full blown sabbatical now.”  She still wouldn’t speak.  Heat rose up the back of his neck.  He felt like an irritating fan who didn’t know when the concert was over.  He felt like for all the doors this campaign had opened between them, he had been the one to slam shut the last.

“You know,” he started after too long of watching her exist in that bubble without him, “I can leave here and not bother you again.  I haven’t told anyone this is where you went.  I wasn’t even sure until Bernadette confirmed it.  I guess I sounded desperate, like a man who…” He smiled a mirthless smile, dimples and all.  “You really don’t care that I came all this way to see you.  I lied to Susan, made up some ludicrous story about a congressional delegation to an unnamed country—like I’d go on a trip in the middle of an election campaign.  She believed it.  My assistant even believed it.  I convinced everyone I had to convince, and here I am; and it doesn’t mean a thing.”

He stood up from the chaise he’d been balancing on for the longest.  He wanted to pace, but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing him hurt.  Maybe that was it, probably not.  He trusted her with his emotions before anyone.  She wouldn’t use them against him.

“I thought the last twenty years meant something.  I thought they meant that when I travel around to globe to see you, I at least get the benefit of eye contact.”

“I’ve looked at you.”

                “She speaks!” he announced grandiosely to the summer room.  There she was, his—former—presidential candidate, wide awake and watching him, frowning at him.  She didn’t like macho bullshit. In fact, she was allergic.

                “If you’re going to make an ass out of yourself, can I leave first or do I have to wait for intermission?”

                He offered a tooth-grinding grin.  “I’m not making an ass of myself, Hillary.  I’m trying to get you to say something.  Get mad at me, yell at me. Hit. Me.  But don’t do this.  Don’t pretend you aren’t the least bit upset, and don’t pretend that I’m not here.  I came for this.”

                She stood up slowly.  “And I came to get away from it. I don’t want anymore fighting, Evan.  I’ve done enough of that. I fought and I lost, because in the end nobody would fight with me.”  She walked away from him.

                And that was the kicker.

                “You asked me to go.”

                “The difference between those who are with you now and those who with you always, is that those eternal friends don’t go even when you ask.”

“I figured that out too late,” he murmured.  “When you went silent on us, I realized that there was probably a handful people left in this country, forget the Party, that you could trust, and that I wasn’t one of the lucky ones.  I want to be, again.  I want to know what you’re thinking before you say it.  I want you to give me that look you give when Chuck Schumer gets going that says you’d rather put your head in a guillotine than wait for him to get to his point.”

“Evan, stop! Stop it.” She raised her voice for the first time since he’d come to here. “You’re running a laundry list of things we’ve been to each other over the years.  What you want to do is go back in time and that’s just not possible.  What happened already will not happen again.  That’s not because of you.  That’s because whoever I was then, I had the support of my own Party. I had colleagues I respected.  I had friends I could trust.  I don’t have those things now.  Right now, today, I’m still trying to choreograph my next move.  I don’t know what that consists of or who my partners will be.  I can’t waste time trying to understand why you felt the need to deceive your wife and assistant en route to finding me.  I’m still not clear on why you care so much.  I’m one a dozen friends you’ve had for this long.  Replace me, the Party has.”

He shook his head emphatically, vehemently.  “None of them mean to me what you do.  I don’t love them as much.”

She was momentarily taken aback.  “Oh.  Okay. Well, regardless, I am in no position to be re-forming alliances.” She padded slowly around the chaise he’d vacated, putting the hulking but chic piece of furniture between them as a shield.  “I’m not ready to face the people who stabbed me in the back.  They might be bolder this time; they’ll just go for the heart.”

“They won’t,” he assured, almost smug.  At her surprised look, he demurred.  “They’re afraid of you. That’s why they came from behind you to take you down.  The problem is, even when you’ve gone AWOL, you’re still a stronger presence than they are in all their glory.  They know they’ve made an enemy of you, an adversary.  They’ve stabbed you, now they want to bury you.”

“They won’t.”

He nodded numbly.  “I know.”

“I would’ve won, Evan,” she uttered so quietly.  There was no doubt in that voice, no reservation or indecision.  She knew with all her being the same reality he did.  She’d been essentially robbed—and for what?  A few million dollars and a place in the history books.  Guess someone forgot she was making history too.

“There’s nothing about this that’s fair, Hillary.  It’s all politics, all one big game of Hangman.”

She chuckled, dryly.  “With me starring in the title role.”  She sat down on the chaise, wrapping her arms around herself as she did.  She same wind that had caressed her before was so cold now.  “They set this up and I walked right into it.  Here I am, one of the greatest political minds of my generation, and I walked right into it like the fool I am.  I should’ve seen the light and cut my losses.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because you had a dream.  The very same dream that he had, that I had, that Bill had, that John had.  We all had a dream.”  He found himself touching her cheek.

“Only Bill’s came true.”  She turned away again, for the window.  It was easier to look at nature in perfection, than humanity in a mess.  “Only Bill’s will, it looks like.”

He reached out a tentative to hand to touch her back. “I understand how hard it is, Hill, to be passed over for someone else…I should know, I got passed over for you.”  Hillary didn’t know how to answer to that. It was more than a year ago now.  Evan had been running for President, too.  He’d said things, things that had hurt when she heard them, and that reverberated in her ears in moments like this.  He’d said them because he had a dream.  He’d never said them again because she’d gotten in the way.  Back then, she’d been the sure thing.  Now, she was the also-ran.

“I love you, you know.  Even if you’re not President, you’re still one of the finest people I’ve had the honor to work with and know.  You are the gift the Democrats shouldn’t have turned down.  If I can help it, I won’t ever turn you down again.”

She turned into the arm slyly encircling her waist.  “You keep telling me you love me, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean…that twenty years is a long time to wait to be this close to anyone.”  She was fitted snugly between his arm and his chest.  She was just slightly below him, just low enough for her exhales to tickle his jaw.  This close, she was perfect.  He kissed her with his next breath—and forgot to breathe again.

 She tugged sluggishly at his tie, drank deeply of his kiss and let it go on.  He couldn’t let go and she had no need to force him.  Everything was over anyway, wasn’t it?  Perhaps what she’d come looking for, so far away from home, was the start of something new.  She’d wanted so badly something that wasn’t tainted by the last year-and-a-half of her life that would never come back.  She hadn’t found that, but she had rediscovered something—someone—old and borrowed.  And here he was.

Dimples, love declarations, kisses and all.