Chapter Text
"We have to stop doing this."
The briefing book tumbles down onto the desk before Myka, her eyes growing hard. This has never been easy. It never can be easy.
And yet complacency rises like a specter in the room. Her eyes trail up the figure leaning against the doorway and her tongue darts out, wetting her lips.
There's a door and the drapes are pulled and god - complacency sounds really good right about now.
"I know."
Myka's taller than her but a good four inches, even if she favors flat shoes. She pushes herself to her feet and leaves the briefing book open on the desk. Corn growth in Nebraska is mind numbing on a good day.
Want fills her and she finds herself unsteady. They should not be doing this. They cannot be doing this. They're not supposed to know each other, let alone be fucking behind the closed door of Myka's office.
Once, in anger, Myka had asked if she fucked all her subordinates, or just the ones that interested her. The answer was not what Myka had been expecting, a quiet confession that it was only ever her. Myka is just a girl from Colorado. She has nothing that someone else couldn't give her a thousand times over.
And yet it's always Myka.
Her eyes flick to the door and it's closed with a snap.
There's never any words between them, they hardly ever have time. They're far too busy for romance.
They had never intended for it to go this far, for them to rise so high. She's speaker now, the mouth of the party. Myka knows her resume backwards and forwards, American but raised in England, graduated Oxford and Harvard Law. Lost a child and a husband and spun her grief into political gold. A silver tongued devil - a politician to the core.
And this? This is best kept secret in Washington. This will destroy both of them. And Myka wants to be press secretary or communications director someday.
"Speaker..." Myka begins, but there are fingers pressed to her lips and the sin of what's about to happen collapses down upon her. She can't let it, and yet it's all she wants.
"Come now, Myka. We know each other far too well for titles."
She hops up onto the desk, those legs crossed and her sinfully high heels dangling off of one stocking-clad foot.
And Myka wants.
Wants and knows that she should not take. She's a first term junior congresswoman from Colorado. She got elected on a conservative platform, harping on the military and families. They ate it up, her own two-faced-ness had never been brought into question. They see her as a former secret service agent who left the job after tragedy.
Myka'd been the one to pull the trigger that time. A necessity for a cause she hadn't quite realized.
They're fools all of them.
Her depravity is evident now, hesitant fingers sliding up the Speaker's leg and her eyes never leaving the intense brown of the Speaker's. Her skirt slides up easily, stockings giving way to garters and Myka falls to her knees before this woman who has figured out what makes her tick almost effortlessly.
"Aren't you just the perfect little liar," She'd said when she first saw Myka's eyes flick downwards to the many open buttons of her shirt not three days after Myka'd moved into her office in the Capitol.
They're political enemies, but probably allies now.
Sweat and pain and lingering looks is the currency that they trade.
And it's helped, maybe more than it should. Myka is a junior congresswoman, but she gets called into committees and meets with the other side more often than many of her peers. They resent her, she knows, but she doesn't care. This is just a stepping stone, even if she must mount the Speaker to get where she wants to go.
"I know what you're doing," she says and Myka looks up, staring into the charming face of her downfall. "And that isn't how this works."
Myka bows her head.
"What do I have to do?" She asks, and she won't admit that she's desperate to touch once more. This woman can smell weakness and weakness can be manipulated.
Manipulation works better as a two-way street.
That question earns her a head tilt. "We have to stop doing this, Myka dear. Do not give me a reason to cut you off before you're ready." Fingers cup her cheek and Myka bites her lip to keep from leaning into the touch. "You need to get Yeltz on board with HR-236."
And Myka cannot help but ask, "How?" Yeltz is the bill's most vocal opponent, he hates that it’s establishing that creationism is a religious concept and cannot be taught in schools. The Speaker’s party loves it and Myka thinks it’s a good thing too. The constitution pretty clearly establishes a difference between church and state, and such things have no business being taught in schools.
Still, Yeltz is of the vocal part of the party, not the part that stands for things that maybe Myka can actually get behind. They’re religious and they’re vicious in their defense of it, to defy them would be to bring their ire and their attention. The Speaker knows this, and she’s asking for it anyway.
"Oh, I'm sure you'll think of something," The Speaker replies airily. "You're very persuasive when you want to be."
"I won't sleep with him," Myka says quietly.
She's met with a critical look then, and Myka assesses her position and realizes how terrible it is to denounce such a thing when that's what she's technically doing. Even if the Speaker is her opposition's boss and certainly not her own, the remark goes unsaid and Myka swallows.
"I don't sleep with men," she amends.
And the Speaker's eyes turn dark and Myka is pulled roughly to her feet. "And thank god for that," the Speaker says. "Your talent is wasted on them."
The door is locked and complacency comes back so easily that Myka can almost forget the pangs of longing she gets when she wakes up alone in her apartment most mornings. She wants this woman more than she probably should and she cannot help herself.
"Helena..." she breathes quietly, and leans forward to kiss her. Her fingers grip the edge of the desk on either side of Helena’s thighs and she pushes herself up and into the kiss, knowing that this stolen moment is all that they will have to be themselves before they fall, once more, into the roles that they’ve been cast into.
Ambition does terrible things to people.
The Speaker’s lipstick is smeared across her cheeks, on her neck and the valley between her breasts before long. Myka wants and Myka needs and Myka takes what she is given because she will figure out something with Yeltz, she knows she will. She bends to her knees and pulls the Speaker’s skirt up, fingers lingering too long on the backs of her thighs, nails scraping up the backs of them to cup her ass.
And there is nothing there.
“Why Speaker Wells,” Myka murmurs. She looks up through her eyelashes at this great political force above her. She’s greeted with a fond smile and fingers in her hair. They tug and Myka grins back up at her. “People would talk, should they know.”
“They talk anyway darling, they loathe women in power.” Helena sighs and scoots forwards. Her skirt has ridden up completely over her ass now, bunched at her waist, just garters and stocking and heels. Myka’s tongue darts out of her mouth, swiping at her bottom lip nervously. “But I think you rather like it.”
Someday, she knows, this woman will be president. And they don’t agree on much of anything except that yes, Myka does so love a woman in power. A walking hypocrite and a living contradiction – she is sure that she’ll end up in disgrace. Forced out of the closet on her knees before this woman and loving every minute of it.
A drug she’ll never dare quit.
Myka dips her head forward, her lips brushing gently at the juncture of thigh and hip. The Speaker is warm and smells as good as ever, and Myka’s tongue darts out to lick tentatively at first. She likes to start gentle when they do have time, and she’s not sure that they do right now. She delves in, licking just once, a slow circle around overly excitable skin and above her, the Speaker’s fingers tense in her hair.
She’s close then, close and needing to release this tension.
It’s so easy to wonder if this is all that the Speaker sees her for, but Myka’s seen signs that it isn’t. This could become something, she knows. She could fall in love with Helena Wells, if only they’d talk to each other instead of doing this. Her tongue circles once more and the Speaker lets out a barely muffled groan.
She goes for the easy way, because she wants what she can get and she truly could be falling in love with this woman and the very idea of it terrifies her. Myka flicks her tongue back and forth and slides the fingers of her right hand to press gently into the Speaker, curling and pushing forward. She sets a steady rhythm, her fingers rocking in time with the Speaker’s hips as her tongue moves faster and faster still. Her jaw aches but Myka doesn’t dare stop. Her hair is being pulled and this woman, this powerful, put together woman, is falling apart in her hands.
This is her power.
The Speaker does this with no one but her.
And when Helena comes, Myka kisses her full and deep, their bodies pressed against each other. The Speaker’s tongue is in her mouth and her fingers are undoing the button on Myka’s slacks, sliding her hand into sticky damp heat and tracing small circles around Myka until she’s bucking into the touch and biting the Speaker’s neck hard, trying not to scream.
Myka likes the afterwards the best. It’s when Helena stops being the Speaker all together and is simply a woman who Myka could easily fall in love with. They linger there, with weak knees and breathless from the endeavor. Helena rests her head on Myka’s shoulder, her breathing steadying and her fingers playing idly with the curls that run riotous down Myka’s back. Myka trails her fingers down Helena’s perfectly starched shirt, smoothing away the wrinkles of this encounter and breathing in the scent of Helena’s shampoo, her nose buried in Helena’s dark hair.
“We really need to stop doing this,” Myka says as Helena pulls away and her face once more schools itself perfectly neutral. She’s the Speaker once more, and she holds all the power in this house of cards.
“You’ll talk to Yeltz?”
Myka smiles wanly at the Speaker, pulling a tissue from the box on her desk and moving to stand by the mirror mounted on the wall. She licks it and begins to scrub away the lipstick that’s smeared across her neck. Her skin turns red and somehow it isn’t enough. She scrubs and scrubs and there’s fingers closing around her own.
“Darling,” and its Helena once more. Myka only wishes she could turn herself on and off like that. “I don’t ever want to stop doing this with you,” and when Myka meets Helena’s eyes there’s such truth there behind that silver tongue that Myka should know better than to trust it. But she trusts it all the same. A fool for what could someday be love, that’s all she is.
“Then don’t,” Myka says rashly. “Come out with me, somewhere nice. We can have dinner.” She throws it out there, knowing it can never truly happen. It would doom both of them before they ever had a chance.
Helena looks away, biting at her lip and tucking in her skirt at the same time. She runs her hands over it once, making sure she’s satisfied, before she reaches for Myka. “If that is what you truly want, I will not deny you it.”
Because they both know it can never be.
No matter how hard they want it.
Myka buttons her blouse and turns to press her lips gently to Helena’s cheek. “I’ll speak to Yeltz, but don’t expect a miracle.”
The mask falls back into place, and the Speaker nods, heading for the door.
“And one other thing,” Myka says quietly, bartering when she has nothing in her pockets. “Don’t come here again as the Speaker.”
A single nod is all the response she gets, before the door is flung open and the quiet buzz of conversation and activity fills her office once more. “Thank you, Congresswoman Bering,” the Speaker says smoothly. She nods curtly to Myka, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Thank you,” Myka says quietly in response. She’s rewarded with a weak smile and then the Speaker is gone and Myka’s left alone with her briefing book once more.
Corn growth in Nebraska it is then.