White House Autumn (6 page)

“
Very
sexy,” he said.

“Oh, really?” She tossed it back again.

“Stop it,” he said. “You’re making me crazy.”

She threw her hair back a third time.

“Okay.” He put his glasses on the side table. “You asked for it.”

She grinned at him. “For what?”

He pushed her onto her back, kissing her, both of them laughing.

“I may ask for it more often,” she said.

“Well, let me tell you,” he kissed her, “I’ll—”

“Christ,” Steven said, coming in from the Center Hall. “Is making out all you guys ever do?”

They sat up quickly, Meg straightening her hair, while Josh put his glasses back on.

“You’re lucky I’m not Dad,” Steven said.

“Yeah, well, what do you want?” Meg asked, trying to recover her dignity.

“I just came downstairs. Can’t a guy come downstairs?” He grinned, and sat on the couch between them. “So. How’s it going, Josh?”

“Fine,” Josh said.

Steven put his arm around Meg. “You’ve got yourself a good little woman here. You know that, don’t you?”

She ducked away from his arm. “Steven, will you get out of here?”

“I just want to know his intentions,” Steven said. “Can’t I ask his intentions?”

Meg shook her head. “You can get out of here, that’s what you can do.”

“Well, okay. I’ll leave you two kids alone.” He grabbed Josh’s hand, shaking it firmly. “Come down to the office sometime, boy. We’ll talk.”

“Thank you, sir,” Josh said. “I’ll do that.”

“Good.” Steven nodded several times, starting for his room. “We’ll talk.”

Josh watched him go, walking like an elderly Supreme Court justice. “The kid’s a maniac.”

“The kid’s
a pain,”
Meg said.

Josh nodded, and she knew he was refraining from saying that he thought the two of them had the exact same sense of humor. They headed up to the solarium to watch television for a while—she was a
big
one-hour drama person—and then, switched over to the news at eleven, where the top story was about the President, and her response to the most recent flare-up in the Middle East.

“Do you really want to watch this?” Josh asked.

Would it be embarrassing to admit that the answer was yes? “I don’t know. We could just go down and
ask
her, I guess.” She took off his glasses, putting them on herself. “What do you want to do?”

He removed the glasses, putting them carefully on the nearest table, and then leaned forward.

“We could listen to music,” she said, just as he was about to kiss her.

He stopped, his arms resting on her shoulders. “Do you want to?”

“If you do,” she said.

He kissed her, and slowly, they moved until they were lying on the couch.

“We got a whole new shipment the other day,” she said. The music companies—along with publishing houses, and Hollywood—almost always sent their latest releases to the President and First Family as a matter of courtesy, and there were literally thousands of
recent movies and CDs in the White House collection, most of which was stored up here on the third floor. “I could just walk out there and pick out a few—”

Josh kissed her harder.

“Or,” she said, when she got her mouth free, “I could stay right here.”

He nodded. “You could do that.”

“Unless you want to hear some inspirational gospel songs,” she said. “You want to hear some gospel music? Or folk music. I bet I could dig up some really rousing folk music.”

He moved to kiss her neck, and she decided that it would be much more pleasant to remain where she was.

“I’m going to take off my shirt,” he whispered, after a few minutes. “Okay?”

She nodded, not even wanting to let go of him for that long, and he sat up, yanking the t-shirt over his head, then stretching out back on top of her.

Wow. She slid her hands over his shoulders and down his back, feeling the muscles and the warmth of his skin. Wow. Why did she always get excited so quickly? Maybe there was something wrong with her.

His breathing was faster, and Meg could feel and hear herself breathing almost as quickly. Practically panting, in fact. She blushed, embarrassed by the sound, a blush that made her face feel even hotter. His hand was inside her shirt, and she wondered if it was supposed to feel that good, or if there really
was
something wrong with her. Well, Meg, she could hear the White House doctor, Dr. Brooks, saying, I’m sorry, but it looks like a case of terminal libido. How long do I have, doctor? she would ask, choking back tears. Three months, he would say. Make them good ones.

Josh’s heart was pounding, and she hugged him closer, affection and passion mixing somewhere inside her.

“I wish—” He sighed, resting his head against hers.

“What?” she asked, although she was pretty sure she could guess the answer.

“I don’t know.” He rolled onto his back, bringing her with him. “I wish we could go somewhere where I didn’t have to be scared that the President of the United States was going to walk in.”

Meg laughed. “I’d be more afraid of the First Gentleman.”

“You know what I mean,” he said.

Now, she sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You
know
what I mean,” he said.

“Yeah.” She turned her head enough to look at him. “If we went anywhere else, my agents would have to be there.” And it wasn’t as though they could be alone over at his house, because if his mother wasn’t home, he was invariably babysitting for his little sister.

Josh nodded, looking very frustrated.

“It’s not my fault,” she said defensively.

“I know it isn’t.” He rested his hand on her face, running his fingers along her cheekbone. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, starting to feel a little testy.

“I’m sorry, I won’t.” He stopped. “I mean—”

She shook her head, amused. “I know what you mean.” She ran her hand across his chest, very much liking the fact that he had hair on it. Not too much; just enough. “If you want, I could tell you some jokes.”

He relaxed, too. “You don’t know any jokes.”

“I know lots of jokes,” she said.

He grinned. “You always say that, but you never tell me any.”

“I’m afraid of offending you,” she said. “Most of them are anti-male, anti-Jewish, anti-musician, and anti-people-with-glasses.”

He nodded. “That kind of cuts me out.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “So I don’t tell them, because I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

He kissed her. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“If you want,” she moved to a more comfortable position, so her
arm wouldn’t fall asleep, “instead of listening to music, I could sing for you.”

“You’re getting in a weird mood,” he said.

Seemed that way, yeah.

He sighed, and then sat up.

“I have these spells,” she said. “It’s because I was born in Salem.”

He reached for his glasses. “You were born in Boston.”

She nodded. “At the State House. My mother was giving a speech.”

“And you finished it, because she was tired,” he said.

She turned to look at him. “I’ve told you this before?”

“Lucky guess,” he said.

They both laughed, and he leaned over to kiss her.

“I should probably go,” he said. “It’s pretty late.”

Yeah. Unfortunately.

After walking him downstairs, and saying a very chaste good-bye, because of the doorman, and the Secret Service agents nearby, Meg went back up to the second floor. She walked down to the kitchen, deciding to get herself a couple of cookies, and maybe some cheese for Vanessa. When she came out, her mother was standing outside the Presidential Bedroom door, holding a cup of coffee.

“Did Josh leave?” she asked.

Meg nodded. “Yeah, a few minutes ago.”

“I would have come out to say good-night, but,” her mother gestured towards her bathrobe. Then, she glanced at her watch. “Does his mother mind him getting home this late on a school night?”

“I don’t think so,” Meg said.

“Were you two up in the solarium this whole time?” her mother asked.

Meg nodded.

“Was there something interesting on television?” her mother asked.

The President, being indirect, and not very subtle about it. “The news,” Meg said.

Her mother looked at her watch again.

“And, you know, um, SportsCenter,” Meg said, embarrassed to feel herself blushing. “And—homework.”

Her mother wasn’t doing a very good job of pretending not to be concerned, so Meg decided to change the subject.

“You want to see if there are any good movies on?” she asked. “Maybe we could—”

Her mother shook her head. “It’s a little late. Don’t you think you’re going to have some trouble getting up tomorrow?”

So far, this conversation wasn’t going very well. “Yeah, probably.” She edged towards the Center Hall. “Guess I’ll go to bed.”

“All right, sleep well,” her mother said.

Meg nodded. “Yeah, you, too.”

“Thank you,” her mother said, and paused. “You
are
as mature as I think you are, aren’t you?”

Meg was very tempted to ask exactly how mature she thought she was. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, taking an Oreo apart to eat the middle.

“Meg, I’m not trying to invade your privacy. I just—” Her mother frowned. “Worry.”

“Well,” Meg said, for lack of anything better to say.

They both stood there.

“Is that it?” her mother asked.

Pretty much. “Well, kind of. I mean, we—well, it’s—” Meg sighed. “Want an Oreo?”

EVEN IN THE
White House, life could be fairly routine. Meg spent the rest of the week concentrating on tennis, and having long discussions with her parents—which, on her part, mostly involved listening and nodding—about where she should apply to college. Right now, she had it narrowed down to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, Williams, Stanford, and Georgetown, although Beth had been lobbying pretty heavily for Wesleyan, Sarah Lawrence, and Hampshire. Or, alternatively, hiking around Europe and getting into as much minor-league trouble as possible. In the meantime, her parents were still pushing Harvard—and only Harvard.

Right after school started, she and her father had visited a bunch of different colleges, mostly in New England—a trip the media adored. Like at Yale, Senator Quigley’s son had taken her on the campus tour, which the press seemed to think made for a nice human interest spin, and photos of the two of them together showed up in numerous places, identifying him as her new boyfriend, and describing them—since Senator Quigley was the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee—as “young Washington royalty.”

In any case, Meg was sort of leaning towards Williams—off in the mountains, away from publicity, near skiing. Harvard would be pretty much exactly the opposite.

Her mother had been tense and distracted all week, worrying about the escalating problems in the Middle East, and the summit meeting which was going to be held at Camp David right after Thanksgiving. It was, essentially, a G-8 conference of world leaders, and there was a lot at stake. Her mother had made a number of foreign trips, including Berlin, London, Paris, and Madrid, as well as
recent short visits to Canada and Mexico, but this was the first time that all of the major foreign officials were coming to the United States during her administration, and the staff had been working on all of the pre-summit negotiations for weeks.

Her father was mostly concentrating his efforts on housing and environmental stuff, and ever since her mother took office, he had regularly appeared at global warming conferences, and made trips to places like the Gulf Coast, to help with the still-extensive rebuilding efforts. Her mother had a great Secretary of the Interior, with whom her father had hit it off, and they had been making a point of coordinating their policy efforts. Even though everyone else in the family usually made a point to stay as far away from nature as possible, Meg had a theory that her father’s secret ambition was to be a forest ranger.

Steven had made the basketball team and seemed to spend every waking moment dribbling, although he probably wouldn’t get to play much. There was a half-court in a secluded spot on the South Lawn, so he was always out there for hours. The only place he was allowed to dribble inside the house was the North Entrance Hall. The doormen and guards really seemed to get a charge out of it, and kept giving him tips.

Neal was mad, because the Secret Service didn’t want him to go trick-or-treating. Apparently, if he kept his mask on, he might be permitted to stop at a few, carefully selected houses, but he wouldn’t be allowed to eat any of the candy, afterwards. Steven thought this was uproariously funny, until it occurred to him that this year he wasn’t going to be able to go out and throw eggs or whatever delinquent thing he and his friends in Massachusetts would have been doing.

Her mother’s solution to all of this was to have a Halloween party—a costume party—to which Steven’s and Neal’s friends could come. Meg thought
this
was hysterically funny, until her father came up with the bright idea that Meg and some of
her
friends could dress up and be chaperones. The press thought it all sounded wonderful,
and the event had apparently already become so prestigious, that half of the offices on Capitol Hill had called, trying to wrangle invitations for their various bosses’ progeny. For her part, Meg was kind of hoping to contract the flu that day, and conveniently be unable to attend.