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Liz Bartlet, even when she’s peacefully asleep on CJ’s pillow with her hair a mess around her face and one arm still lazily draped across CJ’s bare hips, is a game and a lie, a pleasure so guilty it’s hard to stomach. CJ can’t possibly extract herself from it.
At breakfast, Governor Bartlet will once again thank CJ for being generous with her space and sharing her room with his daughter when the hotel ran out of empty space. She will tell him it was no trouble at all, that she’s happy to help.That’s part of the game, too. It thrills Liz more than it ever will CJ.
She leans over and kisses Liz awake moments after turning off the alarm that was supposed to do the job for her.
“Morning,” Liz mutters, chasing CJ when she sits up straight so she can kiss her again. “Six already?”
CJ confirms regretfully, though the time and the strict schedule don’t keep them from wasting a whole precious minute being pulled back down into the sheets. Getting ready becomes all the more of a rush.
“They got a nice shot of you and Annie the other day,” Liz comments with a toothbrush in her mouth and half a suit on. “That ought to play well for the campaign.”
“Less for me,” CJ mutters. Annie’s a great kid — she reminds you of her mother — but the last thing she needs as the only woman at the front of this campaign is to be painted as the babysitter. “But it’s a nice picture,” she tries to save it.
Liz rolls her eyes, but CJ knows she understands.
The press is part of it, it has to be. One of the key parts, really, of this game CJ keeps falling back into. It’s the part she’s good at.
One paper publishes a picture of CJ fixing Liz’s dress before Liz goes up to introduce her father. Another is happy to mention the close friendship forming between CJ and the Bartlet daughters using a picture of the two of them with their arms around each other, smiling awkwardly at a nearby camera — CJ more so than Liz, who jokes about having been camera-trained since birth.
The Governor is asked, after the important questions have all been handled, if he’s pleased with the way his new staff and his family are getting along; CJ feels sickly guilty at how he smiles when he says nothing delights him more.
Every time they evade the press and Liz kisses her, undresses her, goes down on her, behind the locked doors of CJ’s ever-changing hotel rooms, she feels more guilt towards Liz’s father than her husband.
Doug Westin can go straight to hell for all she really cares — the way Liz talks about him in between kisses and muttered he’s really not that bad when you get to know him’s, CJ doesn’t feel half the remorse she might have about tasting his wife on her tongue when she greets him before a rally.
The Governor’s a different story. She might not resign as much as she might throw herself out of the window of these hotel rooms she generously shares if he ever found out how she’d thought about his daughter.
He tells her, and he tells the press sometimes even though she and Leo have both asked him to stop, that she reminds him of his own girls — Liz in particular, though he’s never put into words what it is. Every time he does, Liz tells her they should stop this whole charade.
It never lasts long. It never stops hurting. CJ always finds herself crawling right back when Liz joins them next. She’s never been good at saying no to Liz Bartlet.
This morning’s no different.
They come into the hotel’s dining area at the same time, dressed for the day — Liz’s wedding ring right back into place. Josh rushes her way to update her on the latest thing Hoynes said into a microphone; the Governor kisses Liz on both cheeks and tells her she looks beautiful.
CJ agrees in silence.
“Thank you, CJ, I’m so happy she could stay with you— would’ve hated to have her travel back and forth to that place a few blocks down after the day.” Governor Bartlet kisses her cheek, too, and she returns the gesture with a fond smile.
She does really love this man. It’s hard to imagine his daughters having such a tenuous relationship with him, sometimes.
“It was no problem, sir,” she assures him.
The Governor smiles at her. Leo joins them just in time for the Governor to turn to him and proudly start on “have I said recently how much this one reminds me of my own? I swear, she and Liz could have been— oh, you know.”
CJ’s smile doesn’t change as he keeps talking, though she’s barely listening anymore. Her eyes try to find Liz somewhere across the room and her smile doesn’t change even when Liz does the courtesy of glaring her way once before turning away.
That’s that, then.
Liz gets up without as much as finishing her coffee when CJ, foolishly, tries to sit next to her and breathe out loud. CJ doesn’t follow. Foolishness has its limits, too.
She knows the deal — Liz has hissed it at her in an argument about fathers and husbands and how very much CJ doesn’t have the right to be tired of the games around journalists and newspapers. Liz is her father’s daughter in every way imaginable if you don’t count the choices she’s made — her father never forgets.
To Liz, it feels like he never forgives. What’s the point in being so much like her father if all she’s done with it is get married young and never step foot into the political arena if not as part of her father’s own entourage? Neither the Governor nor Liz could tell her.
CJ knows — she really does — that every time the Governor so fondly claims the similarities between herself and Liz, all Liz is going to hear is that if she’d just made different choices at eighteen, she might have been in CJ’s place. CJ pictures college days with Ben and a donkey in Cabo and knows if she’d made some different ones herself, she might have been in Liz’s — without a father’s wealth and name, that is.
Her mother might have made the same comparison. Her mother might have strongly preferred Liz. She thinks she knows a thing or two about being a very successful disappointment.
The Governor sits down next to her and finishes his daughter’s coffee. He comments that Liz has never been the easiest, and CJ smiles at him the same way she always does.
She pictures his face if he ever found out what she really does with the daughter that’s never been easy — pictures being at the receiving end of Jed Bartlet’s fatherly disappointment.
Sometimes, it doesn’t surprise her at all that Eleanor’s rarely here. Sometimes the only surprise is that Liz keeps coming back.
It shouldn’t — every time Liz comes back to her father; CJ comes back to her. Two peas in a pod after all. If only the Governor knew.