Author: Regency
Title: Playing It Straight
Pairing: Hillary/Bill
Rating: G
Time period: Around June 2009, after North Korea, during
the trip to Africa.
Word count: 1,797
Summary: It’s funny how little trouble he can be
when he wants to behave.
~!~
He’d done a good job of not drawing attention to himself. He was unobtrusive as could be, wearing a black suit
and earpiece at the back of her entourage. Even the white hair, his calling card in the last few years of their public life,
managed not to draw the eyes of the waiting crowds. He disappeared because he
wanted to.
She was surprised—and a little sad to be. It was a mystery to her
when she’d come to see his charisma as selfishness and not a by-product of simply being Bill. There were a lot of things that were just facets of him that she’d come to hate, just a little bit. That didn’t mean she didn’t love him, but the pedestal was gone.
Funny, she stayed surprised that he didn’t steal the limelight while she answered questions or was shown around
the sights. He was always several feet behind her, lost but not missing, among her expanded security detail. They knew who
he was and they were dazed and terrified of anything that might go wrong. Losing either or both of them could facilitate an
international incident. They’d had quite enough of those for two hundred days.
She was aware of him, too, and she brought
her A+ game when B- would have sufficed. A lot like the old days, he brought
out the best in her. She wondered, if he was given the chance to speak, whether
she’d do the same for him.
There wasn’t the occasion for her to
find out. The day ended with the Great Communicator cooling his heels behind the stage as she spoke, shades blocking out the
true blues that made her unsteady on her feet—or had, once upon a time—and deadly hands folded on his knee. He
looked good for an invisible man.
She made her speech. She got her ovation.
The good press hit the wire an hour later. She and her staff celebrated. They
had to, no one else was going to declare to good days good for them and they could figure out the bad ones on their own. All
the little victories let them sleep at night.
He wasn’t there with a glass of bourbon
though she found one, still warm from his touch, sitting on the desk in her suite. The
other bedroom, which she’d expected to remain unoccupied, wasn’t but she didn’t pry. If he wanted her, he
knew where to find her.
Their last blow-up had been silly, riddled
with talk of lovers and redemption and trying so hard one couldn’t see past their feet for fear of a misstep. For all of its silliness, it had been uglier than things had gotten between them in a long time. She was
a little sorry for it; she’d done the objectionable thing this time. His name was Evan and it had been so easy with
him when things with Bill had gotten so hard.
She was only so apologetic, however. He’d
started this, decades before with women who he admitted to not remembering that well. At least she’d had the decency
to make it worthwhile, to pick someone she’d be willing to make a life with. Evan wasn’t a fling, he was a possibility
with—amazing lips—real potential. She could spend her life with him doing good things without worry about who
he was doing when they weren’t together. It could be so good with him.
She was tempted to try.
Then, of course, there was the Man from Hope
in the room across the suite. He’d been so silent this trip that she had
a hard time believing he was here at all. None of his brash intellectualism or
his comforting words had made the front page of any newspaper. This had been
her playground and yet she found that as much fun she’d had, she was sick of playing in it alone.
Hillary let out a frustrated sigh and seriously
considered going right in that room to talk this out. Thirty-seven years as lovers and that was the least they could do to
hold it together. But before she could take another step, she heard the sudden racket of the showerhead. She rolled her eyes
to the ceiling, wondering if this was a sign that they weren’t supposed to work it out, that this was supposed to be
all there was: a trip where they didn’t talk and she left her mark, not him. Maybe,
she thought. Maybe not.
Nevertheless, she backpedaled to her bedroom
and undressed to follow his example. A shower sounded like the best idea she’d heard all day. Maybe she’d feel
better when she was clean.
She felt different, certainly, once she’d
stepped out from under the blistering water, but she wouldn’t say better was any part of it.
He wasn’t there after she’d dressed.
She poked her head out of her bedroom door to see if he’d come out of hiding yet. No sign of him. His scent, however,
lingered and tickled her nose. The door to his room gaped and the steam drifted
out to meet her.
She had some time to kill and since she’d
wanted to speak with him anyway, everything seemed to be coming together. That had to be a good thing, she thought. For that
reason, she padded on over in her pajamas.
He was there after all. Sitting on his bed,
glasses perched on his nose, and his hair still wet, he was there all right. There
were a bunch of papers spread across the bed and he had pen in hand. He looked the wonk with three hardcover books stacked
on his nightstand and an issue of the Wall Street Journal opened to the Op-Eds
on the unmanned pillow. Not a lot of room in that bed for her. Well, isn’t that
poetic, she mused silently.
“Would it be presumptuous of me to
assume that you’d like to sit down someday?” he asked without raising his eyes from the bundle of invoices in
his grasp. He wore his signature frown but the bags under his eyes made him look sadder than she was used to, more serious
than he used to look when concentrated on the work he loved.
“No, sitting would be good. I’ve
come all this way.”
He smiled faintly, gathered up the Journal along with a few other stray memos and patted the place beside him.
She sat down because to do anything else would have been unnatural. Their shoulders rubbed together as he flipped back
in forth between different pages, making mostly legible notations in the margins and contemplative noises when he found things
that didn’t add up.
She didn’t want to talk right now. The silence was being good to them, the proximity, too. His sighs were minty and his hair was drying in a mess of curls he’d curse as soon as he could see
his reflection. She wanted to kiss his forehead and maybe ask what all this was.
What was this gesture he’d made in traveling from one continent to another to simply not speak? Why had he followed
her, yet not sought her out? She thought he must have been getting hard to understand in his old age—for her anyway.
He never asked her anything else. While,
admittedly, he’d been with her most of the day, she thought it would have made good conversation. That wasn’t what he seemed interested in. His gaze didn’t stray from the letters on the pages
that were too small for her to read without her glasses. Neither did his smile seem to be on the way back. The only sign that
he knew she was there at all came from his right hand. It made its way to her knee and sat, unmoving for the longest time. Its calluses and planes were familiar to her skin, so she didn’t push it away.
The feeling was good.
“I don’t know what we’re
doing anymore, Bill.”
He flipped another page and made another
note, all without moving his hand. “I don’t either, but I figure
if I keep taking steps in any direction, that’s gotta be better than giving up altogether.”
She felt her lips turning up at the ends.
It was the smirk she was always accused of giving out of spite by people who didn’t know better and didn’t care. In this moment, she didn’t feel spiteful.
“So you haven’t called it a day?”
she asked.
“Wild horses and high-powered divorce
attorneys couldn’t drag me away,” he answered, pen still and glasses about to slip right off his nose.
She laughed out loud at that. “I’d like to see them try to get between us.” She
covered his hand with hers and caught his glasses before they fell. “I
love you, Bill Clinton.”
“I love you so much more,” he
told her and slipped his arm around her. He pulled her against him and she sank
into his chest, her nose buried in his neck and her arms as tight around him as they would go.
She’d missed sharing space with him, she’d missed sharing kisses.
Their relationship was only a third of its strength without kisses. She didn’t want to calculate how much they’d
lost by not sharing a bed.
Hillary didn’t want to do anymore math
on their marriage. They had time left and that was important. She didn’t want to waste anymore of it.
“So, I hear you’re James Bond
now,” she teased, resting her head on his shoulder. She’d been meaning to mock him about this for a while. There
hadn’t been any use doing it over the phone; it was much more effective in person.
“Only if you can be my Bond girl.”
She leaned back to give him exactly the look
he’d come to expect from her. “Not in a million years.”
“Aww, why not? I picked up a bikini
and everything.”
She snorted and scooted away from him. “You’d
better be the one wearing it.”
He frowned. “I don’t think that’d
go over too well.”
“Don’t wear it to a press conference.
That’s all I’ll say.”
“Pumpkin,” he coaxed, looking
at her pathetically. She scooted away again.
“Not a chance, 007.”
He tapped his fingers on his leg. “I could probably convince you.”
“You don’t have that kind of
time.”
He caught her arm and tugged her back in
his direction. She looked at him warily.
She saw a glimmer in his eyes that made his motivations suspect.
“You think I can talk you out of that
robe?”
She grinned in response. “You don’t need special gadgets for that.”
He pulled her across his lap and enveloped
her in his arms. “That’s a shame since I brought some of those, too.”
