Chapter Text
The very first time Cosima pulled up to Pennsylvania Avenue as the First Daughter of the United States, she almost fell into a bush.
She can remember it vividly, even though the whole day was surreal. She remembers the interior of the limo, how she was still unused to the way the leather felt under her clammy palms, still green and jittery and pressed too close to the window to look at all the crowds.
She remembers her mother, her long hair pulled back from her face in an elegant, no-nonsense twist at the back of her head. She’d worn it down for her first day as mayor, her first day in the House, her first day as Speaker, but that day it was up. She said she didn’t want any distractions. She thought it made her look tough, like she was ready for a brawl if it came down to it, as if she might have a razor in her shoe. She sat there across from her, going over the notes for her speech, a twenty-four-karat gold American flag on her lapel, and Cosima was so proud she thought she’d throw up.
There was a changeover at some point—Siobhan and John escorted to the north entrance and Cosima and Sarah shuffled off in another direction. She remembers, very specifically, a handful of things. Her earrings, custom sterling silver X-wings. A tiny scuff in the plaster on a western wall of the White House, which she was seeing up close for the first time. Her own shoelace, untied. And she remembers bending over to tie her shoe, losing her balance because of nerves, and Sarah grabbing the back of her jacket to keep her from plunging face-first into a thorny rosebush in front of seventy-five cameras.
That was the moment she decided she wasn’t going to allow herself nerves ever again. Not as Cosima Niehaus-Sadler First Daughter of the United States, and not as Cosima Niehaus-Sadler, rising political star.
Now, she’s Cosima Niehaus-Sadler, center of an international political sex scandal and girlfriend of the Princess of France, and she’s back in a limo on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there’s another crowd, and the imminent barf feeling is back.
When the car door opens, it’s Sarah, standing there in a bright yellow T-shirt that says: HISTORY, HUH?
“You like it?” she says. “There’s a guy selling them down the block. I got his card. Gonna put it in my next column for Vogue.”
Cosima launches herself at her, engulfing her in a hug that lifts her feet off the ground, and she yelps and pulls her hair, and they topple sideways into a shrub, as Cosima was always destined to do.
Their mother is in a decathlon of meetings, so they sneak out onto the Truman Balcony and catch each other up over hot chocolates and a plate of donuts. Art has been trying to play telephone between the respective camps, but it’s only so effective. Sarah cries first when she hears about the phone call on the plane, then again at Delphine standing up to Philip, and a third time at the crowd outside Versailles Palace. Cosima watches her text Delphine about a hundred heart emojis, and she sends her back a short video of herself and Catherine drinking champagne while Marcus plays “La Marseillaise” on electric guitar.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” Sarah says afterward. “Nobody has seen Felix in two days.”
Cosima stares at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve called him, Alison’s called him, Mike and his parents have all called him, he’s not answering anyone. The guard at his apartment says he hasn’t left this whole time. Apparently, he’s ‘fine but busy.’ I tried just showing up, but he’d told the doorman not to let me in.”
“That’s ... concerning. And also, uh, kind of sh*tty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Cosima turns away, pacing over to the railing. She really could have used Felix’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just her best friend’s company. She feels somewhat betrayed he’s abandoned her when she needs him most—when she and Sarah both need him most. He has a tendency to bury himself in complex calculations on purpose when especially bad things happen around him.
“Oh, hey,” Sarah says. “And here’s the favor you asked for.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and hands her a folded-up piece of paper.
She skims thefirst few lines.
“Oh my God, Sar,” she says. “I—Oh my God.”
“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”
She’s cut off because she’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, Sarah.”
“Hey, First Offsprings,” says a voice suddenly, and when Cosima puts Sarah down, Helena is waiting in the doorway connecting the balcony to the Oval Room. “Madam President wants to see you in her office.” Her attention shifts, listening to her earpiece. “She says to bring the donuts.”
“How does she always know?” Sarah mutters, scooping up the plate.
“I have Bluebonnet and Barracuda, on the move,” Helena says, touching her earpiece.
“I still can’t believe you picked that for your stupid codename,” Sarah says to her. Cosima trips her on the way through the door.
The donuts have been gone for two hours.
One, on the couch: Sarah, tying and untying and retying the laces on her Keds, for lack of anything else to do with her hands. Two, against a far wall: Alison, rapidly typing out an email on her phone, then another. Three, at the Resolute Desk: Siobhan, buried in probability projections. Four, on the other couch: Cosima, texting Delphine.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Felix comes careening in.
He’s wearing a bleach-stained HOLLERAN FOR CONGRESS ’72 sweatshirt and the frenzied, sun-blinded expression of someone who has emerged from a doomsday bunker for the first time in a decade. He nearly crashes into the bust of Abraham Lincoln in his rush to Siobhan’s desk.
Cosima is already on her feet. “Where the f*ck have you been?”
He slaps a thick folder down on the desk and turns halfway to face Cosima and Sarah, out of breath. “Okay, I know you're pissed, and you have every right to be, but”—he braces himself against the desk with both hands, gesturing toward the folder with his chin—“I have been holed up in my apartment for two days doing this, and you are super not gonna be mad anymore when you see what it is.”
Cosima’s mother blinks at him, perturbed. “Felix, honey, we're trying to figure out—”
“Siobhan,” Felix practically yells. The room goes silent, and Felix freezes, realizing. “Uh. Ma’am. Mom-in-law. Please, just. You need to read this.”
Cosima watches her sigh and put down her pen before pulling the folder toward her. Felix looks like he’s about to pass out on top of the desk. She looks across to Sarah on the opposite couch, who appears as clueless as she feels, and—
“Holy ... f*cking sh*t,” her mother says, a dawning mix of fury and bemusem*nt. “Is this—?”
“Yup,” Felix says.
“And the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
Siobhan covers her mouth with one hand. “How the hell did you get this? Wait, let me rephrase—how the hell did you get this?”
“Okay, so.” Felix withdraws himself from the desk and steps backward. Cosima has no idea what the f*ck is happening, but it’s something, something big. Felix is pacing now, both hands clutched to his forehead. “The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a f*cking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
Cosima stares at him. “What?”
Felix looks back at her. “I know.”
Alison, who has been standing behind Siobhan’s desk with her arms folded, cuts in to ask, “And you didn’t report this to any of the proper channels because?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was anything at first. And when it was, I didn’t trust anybody else to handle it. They said they sent it specifically to me because they knew I was personally invested in Cosima and Delphine's relationship and would work as fast as possible to find what they didn’t have time to.”
“Which is?” Cosima can’t believe she still has to ask.
“Proof,” Felix says. And his voice is shaking now. “That Richards f*cking set you up.”
She hears, distantly, the sound of Sarah swearing under her breath and getting up from the couch, walking off to a far corner of the room. Her knees give out, so she sits back down.
“We... we suspected that maybe the RNC had somehow been involved with some of what happened,” her mother says. She’s coming around the desk now, kneeling on the floor in front of her in her starched gray dress, the folder held against her chest. “I had people looking into it. I never imagined ... the whole thing, straight from Richards campaign.”
She takes the folder and spreads it open on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
“There were—I mean, just, hundreds of thousands of emails,” Felix is saying as Cosima climbs down onto the rug and starts staring at the pages, “and I swear a third of them were from dummy accounts, but I wrote a code that narrowed it down to about three thousand. I went through the rest manually. This is everything about Cosima and Delphine.”
Cosima notices her own face first. It’s a photo: blurry, out of focus, caught on a long-range lens, only barely recognizable. It’s hard to place where she is, until she sees the elegant ivory curtains at the edge of the frame. Delphine’s bedroom.
She looks above the photo and sees it’s attached to an email between two people. Negative. Nilsen says that’s not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we're not paying for Bigfoot sightings. Nilsen. Nilsen, as in Richards’s campaign manager.
“Richards outed you, Cosima,” Felix says. “As soon as you left the campaign, it started. He hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman.”
Her mother is next to her with a highlighter cap already between her teeth, slashing bright yellow lines across pages. There’s movement to her right: Alison is there too, pulling a stack of papers toward her and starting in with a red pen.
“I—I don’t have any bank account numbers or anything but, if you look, there are pay stubs and invoices and requests of service,” Felix says. “Everything, guys. It’s all through back channels and go-between firms and fake names but it’s—there’s a digital paper trail for everything. Enough for a federal investigation, which could subpoena the financial stuff, I think. Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Cosima and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. I mean, we're talking about having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security to try to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race, that is some f*cked-up shi—”
“Felix, can you—?” Sarah says suddenly, having returned to one of the couches. “Just, please.”
“Sorry,” Felix says. He sits down heavily. “I drank like nine Red Bulls to get through all of those and ate a weed gummy to level back out, so I’m flying at fasten-seat-belts right now.”
Cosima closes her eyes.
There’s so f*cking much in front of her, and it’s impossible to process it all right now, and she’s pissed, furious, but she can also put a name on it. She can do something about it. She can go outside. She can walk out of this office and call Delphine and tell her: “We're safe. The worst is over.”
She opens her eyes again, looks down at the pages on the table.
“What do we do with this now?” Sarah asks.
“What if we just leaked it?” Cosima offers. “WikiLeaks—”
“I’m not giving them sh*t,” Siobhan cuts her off immediately, not even looking up, “especially not after what they did to you. This is real sh*t. I’m taking this motherf*cker down. It has to stick.” She finally puts her highlighter down. “We're leaking it to the press.”
“No major publication is going to run this without verification from someone on the Richards campaign that these emails are real,” Sarah points out, “and that kind of thing takes months.”
“Felix,” Siobhan says, fixing him with a steely gaze, “is there anything you can do at all to trace the person who sent this to you?”
“I tried,” Felix says. “They did everything to obscure their identity.” He reaches down into his shirt and produces his phone. “I can show you the email they sent.”
He swipes through a few screens and places his phone face up on the table. The email is exactly as she described, with a signature at the bottom that’s apparently a random combination of numbers and letters: 2021 SCB. BAC CHZ GR ON A1.
2021 SCB.
Cosima’s eyes stop on the last line. She picks up the phone. Stares at it.
“Goddammit.”
She keeps staring at the stupid letters. 2021 SCB.
2021 South Colorado Boulevard.
The closest Five Guys to the office where she worked that summer in Denver. She still remembers the order she was sent out to pick up at least once a week. Bacon cheeseburger, grilled onions, A1 Sauce. Cosima memorized the goddamn Five Guys order. She feels herself start to laugh.
It’s code, for Cosima and Cosima only: You're the only one I trust.
“This isn’t a hacker,” Cosima says. “Rafael Luna sent this to you. That’s your verification.” She looks at her mother. “If you can protect him, he'll confirm it for you.”
[MUSICAL INTRODUCTION: 15 SECOND INSTRUMENTAL FROM DESTINY'S CHILD'S 1999 SINGLE, “BILLS, BILLS, BILLS”]
VOICEOVER: This is a Range Audio podcast.
You’re listening to “Bills, Bills, Bills,” hosted by Oliver Westbrook, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU.
[END MUSICAL INTRODUCTION]
WESTBROOK: Hi. I’m Oliver Westbrook, and with me, as always, is my exceedingly patient, talented, merciful, and lovely producer, Sufia, without whom I would be lost, bereft, floating on a sea of bad thoughts and drinking my own piss. We love her. Say hi, Sufia.
SUFIA JARWAR, PRODUCER, RANGE AUDIO: Hello, please send help.
WESTBROOK: And this is Bills, Bills, Bills, the podcast where I attempt every week to break down for you, in layman’s terms, what’s happening in Congress, why you should care, and what you can do about it.
Well. I gotta tell you, guys, I had a very different show planned out a few days ago, but I don’t really see the point in getting into any of it.
Let’s just, ah. Take a minute to review the story the Washington Post broke this morning. We've got emails, anonymously leaked, confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, that clearly show Jeffrey Richards—or at least high-ranking staffers at his campaign—orchestrated this f*cking diabolical plan to have Cosima Niehaus-Sadler stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed by the Daily Mail as part of an effort to take down Siobhan Sadler in the general. And then, about—uh, what is it, Suf? Forty minutes?—forty minutes before we started recording this, Senator Rafael Luna tweeted he was parting ways with the Richards campaign.
So. Wow.
I don’t think there’s any need to discuss a leak from that campaign other than Luna. It’s obviously him. From where I sit, this looks like the case of a man who—maybe he didn’t really want to be there in the first place, maybe he was already having second thoughts. Maybe he even infiltrated the campaign to do something exactly like this—Sufia, am I allowed to say that?
JARWAR: Literally, when has that ever stopped you?
WESTBROOK: Point. Anyway, Casper Mattresses is paying me the big sponsorship bucks to give you a Washington analysis podcast, so I’m gonna attempt to do that here, even though what has happened to Cosima Niehaus-Sadler—and Princess Delphine too—over the past few days has been obscene, and it feels cheap and gross to even talk about it like this. But in my opinion, here are the three big things to take away from the news we've gotten today.
- The First Daughter of the United States didn’t actually do anything wrong.
- Jeffrey Richards committed a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president, and I am eagerly awaiting the federal investigation that is coming to him once he loses this election.
- Rafael Luna is perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the 2020 presidential race.
A speech has to be made.
Not just a statement. A speech.
“You wrote this?” their mother says, holding the folded-up page Sarah handed Cosima on the balcony. “Cosima told you to scrap the statement our press secretary drafted and write this whole thing?” Sarah bites her lip and nods. “This is—this is good, Sarah. Why the hell aren’t you writing all our speeches?”
The press briefing room in the West Wing is ruled too impersonal, so they've called the press pool to the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor. It’s the room where FDR once recorded his fireside chats, and Cosima is going to walk in there and make a speech and hope the country doesn’t hate her for the truth.
They’ve flown Delphine in from Paris for the telecast. She'll be positioned right at Cosima’s shoulder, steady and sure, the emblematic politician’s spouse. Cosima’s brain can’t stop sprinting laps around it. She keeps picturing it: an hour from now, millions andmillions of TVs across America simulcasting her face, her voice, Sarah’s words, Delphine at her side. Everyone will know. Everyone already knows now, but they don’t know, not the right way.
In an hour, every person in America will be able to look at a screen and see their First Daughter and her girlfriend.
And, across the Atlantic, almost as many will look up over an americano at a café or dinner with their family or a quiet night in and see their youngest princess, the most beautiful one, Princess Charming.
This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.
Cosima waits on the South Lawn, within view of the linden trees of the Kennedy Garden, where they first kissed. Marine One touches down in a cacophony of noise and wind and rotors, and Delphine emerges in head-to-toe Chanel looking dramatic and windswept, like a dashing hero here to rip bodices and mend war-torn countries, and Cosima has to laugh.
“What?” Delphine shouts over the noise when she sees the look on Cosima’s face.
“My life is cosmic joke and you're not a real person,” Cosima says, wheezing.
“What?” Delphine yells again.
“I said, you look great, baby!”
They sneak off to make out in a stairwell until Alison finds them and drags Delphine off to get camera-ready, mainly to cover up the blooming hickey Cosima just gave her, and soon they’re being shuffled to the Diplomatic Reception Room, and it’s time.
It’s time.
It’s been one long, long year of learning Delphine inside and out, learning herself, learning how much she still had to learn, and just like that, it’s time to walk out there and stand at a podium and confidently declare it all as fact.
She’s not afraid of anything she feels. She’s not afraid of saying it. She’s only afraid of what happens when she does.
Delphine touches her hand, gently, two fingertips against her palm. “Five minutes for the rest of our lives,” she says, laughing a little laugh.
Cosima reaches for her in return, presses one thumb into the hollow of her collarbone, straightening the lapels on her dress. “You are,” she says, “the absolute worst idea I’ve ever had.”
Delphine’s mouth spreads into a slow smile, and Cosima kisses it.
FIRST DAUGHTER COSIMA NIEHAUS_SADLER’S ADDRESS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, OCTOBER 2, 2020
Good morning.
I am, and always have been—first, last, and always—a child of America.
You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand.
I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a girl who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for herself in the White House.
You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down.
Years ago, I met a princess. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, her country had raised her too.
The truth is, Delphine and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms.
We were not afforded that liberty.
But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love her, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books.
America: Delphine is my choice.
Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say:
I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Daughter of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us.
If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward.
I ask the media not to focus on me or on Delphine, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election.
And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the daughter you raised. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I've met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Daughter, yours in actions and words.
And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.
The first twenty-four hours after the speech are a blur, but a few snapshots will stay with her for the rest of her life.
A picture: the morning after, a new crowd gathered on the Mall, the biggest yet.
She stays in the Residence for safety, but she and Delphine and Sarah and Felix and her parents sit in the living room on the second floor and watch the live stream on CNN.
In the middle of the broadcast: Helena at the front of the cheering crowd wearing Sarah’s yellow HISTORY, HUH? T-shirt and a trans flag pin. Next to her: Vic, with Helena's wife on his shoulders, in what Cosima can now tell is the jean jacket Helena was embroidering on the plane in the colors of the pansexual flag. She whoops so hard she spills her coffee on George Bush’s favorite rug.
A picture: Senator Jeffrey Richards’s stupid Sam the Eagle face on CNN, talking about his grave concern for President Sadler's ability to remain impartial on matters of traditional family values due to the acts her son engages in on the sacred grounds of the house our forefathers built. Followed by: Senator Oscar Diaz, responding via satellite, that President Sadler's primary value is upholding the Constitution, and that the White House was built by slaves, not our forefathers.
A picture: the expression on Rafael Luna’s face when he looks up from his paperwork to see Cosima standing in the doorway of his office.
“Why do you even have a staff?” Cosima says. “Nobody has ever tried to stop me from walking straight in here.”
Luna has his reading glasses on, and he looks like he hasn’t shaved in weeks. He smiles, a little apprehensive.
“If you think I don’t tell every hire on their first day that you have a free pass,” he says, “you do not have an accurate sense of yourself.”
Cosima grins, and she reaches into her pocket and produces a packet of Skittles, lobbing them underhand onto Luna’s desk.
Luna looks down at them.
The chair is next to his desk these days, and he pushes it out.
Cosima hasn’t gotten a chance to thank him yet, and she doesn’t know where to start. She doesn’t even feel like it’s the first order of business. She watches Luna rip open the packet and dump the candy out onto his papers.
There’s a question hanging in the air, and they can both see it. Cosima doesn’t want to ask. They just got Luna back. She’s afraid of losing him again to the answer. But she has to know.
“Did you know?” she finally says. “Before it happened, did you know what he was going to do?”
Luna takes his glasses off and sets them down grimly on his blotter.
“Cosima, I know I... completely destroyed your faith in me, so I don’t blame you for asking me,” he says. He leans forward on his elbows, his eye contact hard and deliberate. “But I need you to know I would never, ever intentionally let something like that happen to you. Ever. I had no idea until it came out. Same as you.”
Cosima releases a long breath.
“Okay,” she says. She watches Luna lean back, looks at the fine lines on his face, slightly heavier than they were before. “So, what happened?”
Lunasighs, a hoarse, tired sound in the back of his throat. It’s a sound that makes Cosima think about what her dad told her at the lake, about how much of Luna is still hidden.
“So,” he says, “you know I interned for Richards?”
Cosima blinks. “What?”
Luna barks a small, humorless laugh. “Yeah, you wouldn’t have heard. Richards made pretty damn sure to get rid of the evidence. But, yeah, 2001. I was nineteen. It was back when he was AG in Utah. One of my professors called in a favor.”
There were rumors, Luna explains, among the low-level staffers. Usually the female interns, but occasionally an especially pretty boy—a boy like him. Promises, from Richards: mentorship, connections, if “you’d just get a drink with me after work.” A strong implication that “no” was unacceptable.
“I had nothing back then,” Luna says. “No money, no family, no connections, no experience. I thought, ‘This is your only way to get your foot in the door. Maybe he means it.”
Luna pauses, taking a breath. Cosima’s stomach is twisting uncomfortably.
“He sent a car, made me meet him at a hotel, got me drunk. He wanted—he tried to—” Luna grimaces away from finishing the sentence. “Anyway, I got away. I remember I got home that night, and the guy I was renting a room with took one look at me and handed me a cigarette. That’s when I started smoking, by the way.”
He’s been looking down at the Skittles on his desk, sorting the reds from oranges, but here he looks up at Cosima with a bitter, cutting smile.
“And I went back to work the next day like nothing happened. I made small talk with him in the break room, because I wanted it to be okay, and that’s what I hated myself the most for. So the next time he sent me an email, I walked into his office and told him that if he didn’t leave me alone, I’d take it to the paper. And that’s when he pulled out the file.
“He called it an ‘insurance policy.’ He knew stuff I did as a teenager, how I got kicked out by my parents, and a youth shelter in Seattle. That I have family who are undocumented. He told me that if I ever said a word about what happened, not only would I never have a career in politics, but he would ruin my life. He’d ruin my family’s lives. So, I shut the f*ck up.”
Luna’s eyes when they meet hers again are ice cold, sharp. A window slammed shut.
“But I’ve never forgotten. I’d see him in the Senate chamber, and he’d look at me like I owed him something, because he hadn’t destroyed me when he could have. And I knew he was going to do whatever shady sh*t it took to win the presidency, and I couldn’t let a f*cking predator be the most powerful man in the country if it was within my power to stop it.”
He turns now, a tiny shake of his shoulders like he’s dusting off a light snowfall, pivoting his chair to pluck up a few Skittles and pop them into his mouth, and he’s trying for casual but his hands aren’t steady.
He explains that the moment he decided was this summer, when he saw Richards on TV talking about the Youth Congress program. That he knew, with more access, he could find and leak evidence of abuse. Even if he was too old for Richards to want to f*ck, he could play him. Convince him he didn’t believe Siobhan would win, that he’d get the Hispanic and moderate vote in exchange for power.
“I f*cking hated myself every minute of working with that campaign, but I spent the whole time looking for evidence. I was close. I was so focused, so zeroed in that, that I... I never noticed if there were whispers about you. I had no idea. But when everything came out . . . I knew. I just couldn’t prove it. But I had access to the servers. I don’t know much, but I’d been around the block enough in my teenage anarchist days to know people who know how to do a file dump. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not that old.”
Cosima laughs, and Luna laughs too, and it’s a relief, like the air coming back in the room.
“Anyway, getting it straight to you and your mother was the fastest way to expose him, and I knew Felix could do that. And I... I knew you would understand.”
“I believe you,” Cosima says readily. “I just wish you would have told me what you were doing. Or, like, anybody.”
“You would have tried to stop me,” Luna says. “You all would have.”
“I mean... Raf, it was a f*cking crazy plan.”
“I know. And I don’t know if I'll ever be able to fix the damage I’ve done, but I honestly don’t care. I did what I had to do. There was no way in hell I was going to let Richards win. My whole life has been about fighting. I fought.”
Cosima thinks it over. She can relate—it echoes the same deliberations she’s been having with herself. She thinks of something she hasn’t allowed herself to think about since all this started after Paris: her LSAT results, unopened and tucked away inside the desk in her bedroom. How do you do all the good you can do?
“I’m sorry, by the way,” Luna says. “For the things I said to you.” He doesn’t have to specify which things. “It was... f*cked up.”
“It’s cool,” Cosima tells him, and she means it. She forgave Luna before she ever walked into the office, but she appreciates the apology. “I’m sorry too. But also, I hope you know that if you ever call me ‘kid’ again after all this, I am literally going to kick your ass.”
Luna laughs in earnest. “Listen, you’ve had your first big sex scandal. No more sitting at the kids’ table.”
Cosima nods appreciatively, stretching in her chair and folding her hands behind her head. “Man, it f*cking sucks it has to be like this, with Richards. Even if you expose him now, straight people always want the hom*ophobic bastards to be closet cases so they can wash their hands of it. As if ninety-nine out of a hundred aren’t just regular old hateful bigots.”
“Yeah, especially since I think I’m the only male intern he ever took to a hotel. It’s the same as any f*cking predator—it has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with power.”
“Do you think you'll say anything?” Cosima says. “At this point?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot.” He leans in. “Most people have kind of already figured out that I’m the leak. And I think, sooner or later, someone is going to come to me with an allegation that is within the statute of limitations. Then we can open up a congressional investigation. Big time. And that will make a difference.”
“I heard a ‘we’ in there,” Cosima says.
“Well,” Luna says. “Me and someone else with law experience.”
“Is that a hint?”
“It’s a suggestion,” Luna says. “But I’m not gonna tell you what to do with your life. I’m busy trying to get my own sh*t together. Look at this.” He lifts his sleeve. “Nicotine patch, bitch.”
“No way,” Cosima says. “Are you actually quitting for real?”
“I am a changed man, unburdened by the demons of my past,” Luna says solemnly, with a jerk-*ff hand gesture.
“You f*cker, I’m proud of you.”
Delphine gets her own room in the White House while she’s in. The crown spared her for two nights before she returns to Paris for her own damage control tour. Once again, they’re lucky to have Catherine back in the game; Cosima doubts the queen would have been so generous.
This particularly is what makes it a little funny that Delphine’s room—the customary quarters for royal guests—is called the Queen’s Bedroom.
“It’s quite . . . aggressively pink, right?” Delphine mutters sleepily.
The room is, really, aggressively pink, done up in the Federal style with pink walls and rose-covered rugs and bedding, pink upholstery on everything from the chairs and settee in the sitting area to the canopy on the four-poster bed.
Delphine’s agreed to sleep in the room rather than Cosima’s “because I respect your mother,” as if every person who had a hand in raising Cosima has not read in graphic detail the things they get up to when they share a bed. Cosima has no such hang-ups and enjoys Delphine’s half-hearted grumblings when she sneaks in from the East Bedroom right down the hall.
They’ve woken up naked and warm, tucked in tight while the first autumn chill creeps in under the lacy curtains. Humming low in her chest, Cosima presses the length of her body against Delphine’s under the blankets, her back to Delphine’s chest, the swell of her ass—
“Well, hello,” Delphine mumbles, her hips hitching at the contact. Delphine can’t see her face, but Cosima smiles anyway.
“Morning,” Cosima says. She gives her ass a little wiggle.
“Time is it?”
“Seven thirty-two.”
“Plane in two hours.”
Cosima makes a small sound in the back of her throat and turns over, finding Delphine’s face soft and close, eyes only half-open. “You sure you don’t need me to come with you?”
Delphine shakes her head without picking it up from the pillow, so her cheek squishes against it. It’s cute. “You're not the one who disrespected the crown and your own family in the emails that everybody in the world has read. I’ve got to handle that on my own before you come back over.”
“That’s fair,” Cosima says. “But soon?”
Delphine’s mouth tugs into a smile. “Absolutely. You’ve got the royal suitor photos to take, the Christmas cards to sign ... Oh, I wonder if they'll have you do a line of skincare products like Celine—”
“Stop,” Cosima groans, poking her in the ribs. “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“I’m enjoying it the perfect amount,” Delphine says. “But, in all seriousness, it’s ... frightening but a bit nice. To do this on my own. I’ve not gotten to do that much, well, ever.”
“Yeah,” Cosima says. “I’m proud of you.”
“Ew,” Delphine says in a flat American accent, and she laughs and Cosima throws an elbow.
Delphine’s pulling her and kissing her, blonde curls on a pink bedspread, long lashes and long legs and green eyes, elegant hands pinning her wrists to the mattress. It’s like everything she’s ever loved about Delphine in a moment, in a laugh, in the way she shivers, in the confident roll of her spine, in happy, unfettered sex in the well-furnished eye of a storm.
Today, Delphine goes back to Paris. Today, Cosima goes back to the campaign trail. They have to figure out how to do this for real now, how to love each other in plain sight.
Cosima thinks they’re up for it. Delphine agrees.
