Give Yourself Away.  He had taken to walking after Susan left him alone in the kitchen.  The White House had been his natural sanctuary.  That’s where he spent the most interesting hours of his day—the most enjoyable ones too.  Maybe that’s what had drawn him back in once the lights were mostly out.  Crossing the street, he’d seen the Oval Office lamps a-burnin’ and he couldn’t keep his peace.

The government-issued carpet muffled his steps.  Otherwise, she might have heard him coming.  She wasn’t busy, it looked like, wasn’t doing much, but he could see that her heart wasn’t in whatever lay in front of her.  She looked slightly hopeless, slightly crushed around the eyes, and so very alone.  There wasn’t a reason in the world for her to feel that way when he was there.  At least not that he could see.

“Hey.”  He came in with a whisper.  The air was thick with an unidentified tension.  It hadn’t been there before she’d seen him.

She gave him a small, tight smile.  “Hey.”

“You busy?”

She rolled her eyes dismissively at his question.  “There are twenty-eight hours in my day, Evan. I’m always busy.”  She waved him towards his usual station.  “Sit.”

He dropped down into the trusty heirloom with an exhausted sigh.  It hadn’t quite hit him before how draining his conversation with Susan had been.  It hadn’t taken very long, but he could’ve sworn they’d gone fifteen rounds in the ring.  He wasn’t used to having his heart judged; he wasn’t used to being so easily exposed for a fraud.  He loved his best friend—was in love with her—and it had happened effortlessly.  Living with his feelings now, however, wasn’t effortless in the least.

“What brings you back so late? I thought you had an early night with Susan.”  She returned to pretending to scan government documents for matters of importance, but he could see that he had at least some of her attention.  He could also see that what he didn’t have wasn’t focused on her desk either.  She was in another world.  He thought he could guess which one.  Knowing that did nothing to free up the knot in his chest.

“Yeah, I did. We had dinner and talked—talked a lot, actually, about a lot of things that have been bothering her.”

Hillary seemed to freeze.  “Oh.  I guess that means everything’s worked out now,” she said, sounding almost disappointed. 

He wished thinking that didn’t give him the rush of elation that it did.  He felt four kinds of guilt about wanting Hillary to care what happened in his marriage.  Not one of them was because Susan was waiting for him in Blair House tonight.  She wasn’t.  And he felt safe in saying that no one was waiting upstairs for his President either.  They were both alone here; he’d never felt more sorely tempted.

“Everything is worked out, but definitely not the way I expected—and I imagine not the way you expected either.”  Hillary’s gaze flew quickly to his only to slide away, tinged with guilt.  “I wondered and wondered what had finally pushed you.  You never said.  It was like you just woke up from a near-death experience and decided that you needed to work more and I needed to work less.  I thought you’d lost faith in me.”  The confession caught in his throat with many others.  Even if she couldn’t let go of her former partner long enough to love him, he couldn’t bear the idea that she’d stop counting on him.  They were a team, one and the same.

There came that crushed look again.  She shook her head sadly.  “No, not in you.  I have always had faith in you.  That’s why I want to make sure you go on.  I love you and the work you do.  The country will need you to keep the progress going if ever comes a day I’m not here to do so.”

Evan’s thoughts rolled quickly on a life without her as his friend and President—images of hospital corridors, doctors, flowers, funerals, and tombstones inundated his mind.  He tasted bile rising at the back of his throat.  Presidential portraits and sadness encapsulated in oil paints and gold chilled him to the bone.  He could imagine it; he just didn’t think he could survive it. 

“As long as I’m here, there will never be that day.”  He took her hand and held it to his heart, willing her to understand that it was beating for her.

“You can’t promise that.  No one can.  All I’ve got sometimes is faith, Evan.  That faith is in you to continue the work that Bill and I started when we were young, and that I hope that Chelsea will carry on when you’re done.  We’ve got to help people.  I’ll know I’ve done right by his memory and by my legacy if I can say that everyone in this country is better off than before I came into Office.  With you in my seat, I know everyone will be better off.”

Evan touched his free hand to her face.  “With you in that seat, I know that we are all better off.  You were born for this job, born for this burden and you carry it well. I have never been so proud of anyone for being so hard-headed.  It makes me want to pull my hair out when you pull late nights like this and don’t sleep.  I worry when you don’t eat or when you look about ready to blow a blood vessel.  You do it all so I don’t have to.  That is remarkable and selfless.  If I can be half the public servant you are, I’ll have really done something but I already know that I could never even come close the President, the person, and the friend you are, Hill.”  He gingerly caressed her cheek.  “And I love you, just for that.”

“I love you, too.” She smiled feebly, averting her eyes to look out the windows overseeing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  He could feel the tension return; it marred her smile, carving taut fissures into her brow and putting an unhappy glister in her eyes.  The truth was there, lurking in the silent emptiness of the greatest room on Earth.  He could wait.

Apparently, she decided that he’d waited long enough.  “Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m all there anymore.  It’s like he took everything with him when he left; and, all there is of the woman I used to be is stories and pictures.”  There was no question who he was.  And, not for the first time, Evan started to get angry at his old friend for leaving her this way. There was nothing that this woman couldn’t do, yet… some things were just asking too much.

“I know that isn’t true.  I see you every day and you are all there.  Everything about you, I love.  Everything about you, I recognize as the woman who has never surrendered, no matter how she hurt.”  He tugged her toward him.  “Everything about you is just the same.  All that’s missing, I think, is the grief.  It’s been with you for so long, you’ve forgotten how to live without it—but you can.  You have made history in this very room.  Be the woman who did that again and you’re back to where you need to be.  Come home.  I’m waiting for you.”

“That’s what scares me, Evan.  I don’t think you’re waiting for the reason I want you to be and there are no words for how much that hurts.”

“I am waiting because I love you.”  That confession had become easier to make once he admitted it to himself.

“You keep saying that and but you don’t know what that means.  You don’t know how I feel when you say it.  I don’t feel like a trustworthy friend. I feel like a traitor.  I betrayed your confidence in me, and I betrayed Susan’s.  Most of all, I betrayed Bill’s.  I did the worst thing a President can do.  I fell in love with my replacement,” she whispered.

“That’s not as bad as what I did,” he reasoned.  She looked back at him, wary but interested.  “I fell in love with my boss; I don’t think that’s in the handbook.”

She smiled. It was a small one but it had the potential to blow him away. “Then, I guess it’s time for that book to be re-written.”

He nodded, glad to see some of the tension smoothing out across her face.  She was vision to him daily, but especially when she was at peace. “I guess it is.”

                She grasped his hand and he kissed her.

                When he pulled away, he simply looked at her to see what she’d say. He got nothing and he had nothing left to give.

                He hadn’t run out of things to say, just out of courage to say them.

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