Page 14 of The Night Of
And, where Baker was, Jonathan was often there as well. The president began and ended his days with his best friend, bouncing thoughts and ideas and worries off of him, sometimes tossing a football across the Oval Office or the private patio or walking laps through the twisted hallways of the West Wing as they confided in each other. Sometimes he hid in Jonathan’s office, trying to avoid gate-crashers and members of Congress. They were a matched set, and the First Lady made three, a trio who had been friends for half their lives and loved each other so deeply, so openly.
I fell face-first into the tall, dark, and handsome aura of Vice President Jonathan Sharp through raw exposure. He was everywhere, all the time, magnetic and white-hot and pulling me to him like a gravity well. It didn’t matter how much I lectured myself: pep talks while driving in, staring myself down over the sink, berating myself for watching him too often and too long. Exposure eroded each one of my defenses until I was a ball of naked craving, desperately trying to hide how far I’d fallen. I thought if I just buried it deep enough, it would be all right. No one needed to know of my embarrassing crush on the most reticent man in the world.
Until I noticed him glancing at me a little more than was warranted. Sideways looks. Gazes held for too long when we crossed paths, which we seemed to do more and more with each day that passed. What the fuck did that mean?
The First Lady was the first to drag Jonathan into conversation with my team. It was Veterans Day, and she’d pointed out the members of my team who were vets: air force and marines, and then me, army. “Like you, Jonathan.” She’d squeezed his arm, smiled. “Where were you stationed, Agent Avery?”
I fumbled through a recitation of my postings, and when I got to Grafenwöhr in Germany, something shifted in his gaze, and he’d said, “I was at Stuttgart, as part of—”
“EUCOM HQ, yes, sir.” I’d burned then, my cheeks flaming. I’d interrupted him, the vice president and a former colonel, someone who had outranked me by a million years—and who did even more as the VP. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
That should have been the end of it. Jonathan should have given me a nod and aThank you for your service, soldier, and he should have left and nothing would have ever gone wrong, because nothing would have ever happened. But he hadn’t done that. Instead, he’d started asking me questions about the Bavaria Garrison and my time in the army and how I’d come to the Secret Service, and I was so completely captivated by him that I didn’t notice the First Lady subtly moving the rest of my detail away, distracting them and giving Jonathan and me a private corner of the West Wing.
I’d always wondered about that. Why she’d done it. It had beenthemoment that enabled the next, and then the next, and that started me down my damned path, a path I’d thought he and I were moving down together.
Turned out, it was only me all along.
My mind wandered as the rain and the wipers hypnotized me, combining with the rumble of the tires on the highway to lull me into a daze. The radio was a murmur in the background, more bullshit about President Baker. But I was pulled back to reality when the radio started its next deep dive, a retrospective on the tragic life of the First Lady, Felicity Baker.
When she was eight, she and her sister had been the only survivors of a car crash in Finland that took the lives of their parents. Her father and mother had both been expats in the oil industry, and their mother’s sister, who lived in Copenhagen, took the orphaned girls in. Felicity and her sister both excelled, despite their early tragedy, turning to each other for strength throughout their childhood and teen years. That strength took them through university in Oslo and then graduate school in Brussels, where Felicity met an American man named Steven Baker. By everyone’s account, it was love at first sight. They were married soon after. Jonathan was Baker’s best man.
Steven, Jonathan, and Andrew Rees had been a trio of friends, diplomats and expats in the heart of Europe banding together. Steven introduced Andrew to Felicity’s sister, Annette, and before long, they too were married. Annette moved to London with her husband, who, years later, became the prime minister of the United Kingdom.
It had been the talk of the global media when Steven Baker was elected president the following year. The men were friends, brothers-in-law, and now both heads of state, their wives sisters on the global stage.
From the tragedy of losing her parents to the high of marrying the love of her life and then becoming First Lady of the United States, Felicity Baker had once again been plunged into despair. Her husband was gone. Her parents were gone. All she had left in the world was her sister, who lived an ocean away.
That wasn’t true. She had Jonathan. They were friends, not as close as Baker and Jonathan had been, but real friends in their own right.
The radio report ended by saying the First Lady had hidden herself in the White House Residence, torn apart by the ravages of her grief as Vice President Sharp took the presidential oath of office.The White House says President Sharp has no plans to evict the First Lady, and he insists he will maintain his current commute from the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory to the White House. However, President Sharp will need to appoint his new vice president soon, and whoever that is, they will be moving into the vice president’s residence after they are confirmed by the Senate.
I needed to talk to Felicity Baker. I needed to get back to the White House, to Jonathan, too. The specter, thewhat-if, haunted me. What if an assassin targeted Jonathan?
What was I going to say to him when he asked what I’d found? When he wanted answers I couldn’t give? So far, I hadn’t found any evidence of a murderer or a conspiracy. Like in football, to overturn the ruling on the field, we needed to find overwhelming proof that this wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be.
I hadn’t found much so far. A bed out of place.Flowerterrible. That wasn’t enough to bring back to Jonathan, and it wasn’t going to do anything to heal the wound in his soul.
I took the exit to Cabin John Parkway and followed the Potomac as it wound toward downtown. Turning off Washington Circle onto Pennsylvania Avenue, I started the crawl back toward the White House.
Four
It waslate afternoon by the time I parked in the underground garage. I slumped in the driver’s seat, my head falling back as I prepared to face Jonathan again. A year earlier, I’d have given anything to see him so many times in one day, would have come up with excuse after excuse to run into him, swing by his office, drop by with a coffee or a question. Now I just wanted to put the car back in drive and turn around, head west, all the way to California. Slither away.
I found Jonathan in the Oval Office, using one of the couches in front of the fireplace and the coffee table as his workspace. The Resolute desk was untouched, exactly as Baker had left it. Both doors leading out to the West Wing hallways were propped open. He’d listened to me, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. Part of me had assumed he wouldn’t, whether out of a knee-jerk reaction to wanting nothing to do with me, or from the natural order of him being the now-president and me nothing more than an underling. Who was I to be telling him what to do?
But he’d listened, and I took a few seconds to hover in the doorway and watch him work. He was gorgeous, even in the rigidity of his grief. He was still breathtaking: the lines of him, the hollows and valleys of his lean features, and the strength of his body, concealed beneath his suit like armor.
Anyone else wouldn’t be able to see the signs of his distress, but I could. His straight back, overly tense, his shoulders almost pulling apart the seams of his suit jacket. His hands, the knuckles pale where they clenched the binder he was reading from. The tap of his toes against the carpet, the greatest betrayal from a man who was controlled and contained all the way down to his core. I’d never seen him fidget like that.
Something gave me away. He looked up, his eyes flashing to the door as he froze. I saw his muscles tense, saw him ready to move, react. A warrior’s response. He was on guard. That was good, but it wasn’t what I wanted when he saw me. I wanted him to relax, let the tension out of his shoulders as he curled the corner of his lip up, just barely, just enough for me to call it my own secret smile. Instead, he seemed to grow even more tense and wary, watching me like I was the threat he’d been fearing all day.
I couldn’t think about that. I’d fucking lose it if I did.
I shoved off the doorframe and trudged inside, making my way to the couch across from him, where I threw myself down with a ragged sigh. Mud clung to my boots in wet chunks, and I hadn’t noticed until now. I’d trampled it all over the rug, brought a trail from the garage to the Oval Office. My sweatshirt was still damp from running through the rain at Camp David, and my jeans stuck to my thighs. I was a disaster in comparison to Jonathan’s precise perfection. There were too many things I had to feel guilty over, though, and that barely registered on the scale.
A cup of coffee sat at his elbow next to a full pot from the Mess, a second unused mug and saucer next to it. “Coffee?” he asked, pointing to the spare cup.
“Thanks.” I poured a cup and chugged. I needed the heat in my soul more than I needed the caffeine in my brain. I needed both more than I needed my taste buds.
