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“…You’re giving a speech at your high school reunion?”
CJ resists the urge to slam her head into the table.
Alex smiles down at her from the other side of her desk and hands her the coffee from their left hand. “The promise of a generation.”
“I’m not going.”
Studying her from home above the rim of their own coffee mug, Alex raises one eyebrow in disbelief. “You’re booked on a flight, love.”
Ignoring the way the endearment makes her stomach flip, she shrugs her shoulders and takes another sip of coffee. “I have a press briefing.”
But of course, that is the precise moment Carol chooses to come into the office with a stack of notes for said briefing, and she says, before CJ can get a word in edgewise, that the flight’s been moved to five. The traitor. Alex smiles like they know what CJ is thinking, and maybe they do to an extent, but it’s not enough to stop her from viciously throwing her assistant out of a window in her mind’s eye.
“You hanging around?”
She has no idea why the question comes out of her mouth like a cannon into a church service, but here they are, and she flinches when Alex gives her a confused look.
“Yeah, Toby needs me for a thing and to act as a buffer… him and Addie have a thing at the moment. You noticed it?”
CJ has. She wisely says nothing.
“Why? You want me to come with you?”
Actually, she would like nothing less, and internally reacts to the joking offer by recoiling until she is nothing but a vague mass of cells floating in the void. Outwardly, she laughs and shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t wanna take you away from anything important. Plus I’m, staying with my dad. Not sure how good he’s going to be with… everything.”
The ‘with you’ hangs silently between them, a gulf that has only opened recently but has rapidly spread, and Alex’s smile turns strained. They get up to leave.
“Yeah. Good luck with the press briefing and the- yeah.” When they leave, CJ watches until they turn a corner and run smack into Sam before she blocks out what feels like the beginning of the end and gets back to her notes.
The plane is about as horrible as she thought it would be, and when she gets off and is greeted with the most horrendous rain she’s seen in months, it feels like an omen.
Marco feels like the nail in the coffin.
Her father is getting worse, and he’s started smoking again, and throughout the entirety of the first evening spent in her childhood home, CJ wants Alex next to her so badly it aches. And when morning comes, and she marches up to and confronts the woman who has abandoned her father right when he needs her, CJ wishes there was a long-fingered hand resting gently on her leg under the table, but she all but asked them to stay behind, so of course, they are not there.
She goes fishing with her dad, and they fight for the first time in five years. CJ tries not to think about how it’s only because she hasn’t visited in six.
She writes the speech in a day, and it’s not even half bad.
And she feels good in her dress, feels even better when she gets a call from Alex wishing her good luck, and she leaves her father’s house feeling more positive about the immediate future than she has in an age.
But then Marco drives her up to the venue and she freezes, and when he asks if she wants to get out of there she looks him in the eye and says yes. Her stomach drops when she does, she can hear her mother’s disappointment and the weight of Alex’s potential hurt like a elephant on her chest, but she bulldozes past it and follows him to his hotel room.
She needs the sensation, more than anything else, and if she presses her lips together over the syllables of someone else’s name, then no one needs to know except her.
And it gets some of her anxiety out, the roiling black cloud that has been building and building for weeks, but the guilt rises within her again, and when her phone rings at the lectern in the church hall she freezes. A very small part of her wonders if somehow Alex knows, knows what she has done and is calling to tell her never to wait up for a timezone phone call again, but she takes one look at Toby’s name and all the air leaves her in a rush.
“Toby,” she says, the warning in her voice, “this better be good. I am halfway through my speech.”
“There was a bomb,” he says breathlessly, and she hears Alex talking over people in the background, “there was a bomb, at a college. We need you.”
“Okay.”
She makes it back to Washington in five hours. The guilt continues to eat away at her.
The first time she’s alone in a room with Alex after she gets back, she’s slightly tipsy and utterly miserable, and she tells them everything.
“And I hated it,” she says into the stunned silence, “I hated it but I did it anyway, and you didn’t deserve that, you still don’t and I feel so horrible keeping it from you, but I know that telling you hurts too and I just-”
Alex stands and does three laps of the room.
They sit, only to get up again and walk over to the window.
They pass their fingers through their hair six times in two minutes.
And the silence persists.
Until, out of nowhere, comes a ragged, broken voice that CJ distantly recognises as the one that has wished her good morning almost every day for a month.
“If this is going to happen again, you have to tell me now.”
And that- that cracks CJ’s chest wide open, that little line being drawn. Because it means she gets to keep this, keep Alex, that Alex would still take her if she did it again , that makes her start crying. She crosses the room and sits next to them, one hand in her lap, the other on their jaw.
“Never,” she promises, hissed out between her teeth. She means it. “Never again. I’m sorry.”
And she did mean it. Meant more than just what she said, had wanted to say, but it isn’t enough. Because as much as she loves Alex, and as much as they love her, nothing in the world is great enough to repair the damage she has caused.
Alex has a job for four weeks in Italy, and they leave without telling her.
CJ understands it for the goodbye that it is and moves her stuff out of their apartment that weekend.