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She can’t breathe.
“You haven’t had a drink since you were 22?”
She asks it even though she’s already heard, and she’s already asked it once, and she wonders if the Vice President knows why she clarifies again. If he remembers.
“That’s right,” Hoynes says. Like that doesn’t change everything.
CJ makes a stupid joke about Ulysses S. Grant and Hoynes has the nerve to laugh.
She can’t breathe. She can’t think. It feels like someone’s tightening a rope around her chest.
No one bats an eye when she politely excuses herself.
Her heart is racing as she walks through the halls to the outside of the building — trying not to rush, trying to look casual, like she’s not moments away from making a scene in the White House.
She flings the doors open, ignores the presence of a secret service agent who asks if she’s okay, and when he doesn’t follow her into the Rose Garden she thanks God. An ugly sob forces her face into a pained contortion before she’s even made it far enough into the garden that they might not hear her inside.
CJ still can’t really breathe.
With shaking legs she finds the singular bench that’s near the grass, lightheaded and desperate for air, feeling the night’s cold too little too late to get back and grab her coat. She tells herself she barely feels it.
Alone in the garden with a hand clutched to her own chest and her eyes shut so tightly she’s giving herself a headache, it’s impossible — it’s just simply impossible — not to feel all of it at once with a devastating, terrifying intensity.
She coughs, burning her throat as she cries, spitting out a disgusting bit oh phlegm she’d rather never have felt; she tries, she desperately tries, to get herself back together, to take a deep breath and wipe her eyes and get back inside like nothing happened.
Like John Hoynes’ twenty-two years of sobriety don’t mean a thing to her.
She couldn’t get up if she actually tried to.
Leo finds her outside in the Rose Garden where she hoped she’d be left alone.
Of course it’s Leo. She doesn’t want to see him — doesn’t want him to see her, either, but knows better than to be surprised that it would be Leo.
He finds her, and when he sees that she’s crying — that she’s struggling to catch her breath — he sits down next to her with a worried, fatherly look and a hand on her shoulder that she almost throws off but leans into instead.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and she says nothing. She shakes her head and cries and tries to stop feeling Hoynes’ hand between her thighs in an elevator she never should’ve ended up in.
God, how stupid could she be?
“CJ,” Leo tries, trying to get her to look at him. “CJ, talk to me,” he says. He sounds so concerned she might’ve started crying even if she hadn’t yet.
She shakes her head again. She can’t. She feels Leo try to pull away — no doubt wondering if his presence is even wanted. His hand on her is so distinctly different from John Hoynes’ that she only sobs more dramatically when she feels him let go of her.
“Okay,” Leo says softly, placing his arm around her shoulders this time. “I’m here. I’m here.”
It’s humiliating, she thinks, to cry like this and feel so utterly incapable of regaining control of herself even in front of her boss. It’d be far more humiliating if he knew why.
It’s like she can smell his cologne without remembering what it smelled like. CJ has no idea what it was — just that there was too much of it in the air and that it clung to her skin even after the first of many showers.
She’s shaking uncontrollably, her hands heavy and unfeeling in her lap, useless if she were to try to move her arms. CJ’s chest feels like it’s about to implode in on itself — like she needs to be cut open just to relieve the pressure building up.
“Focus on me.” Leo’s voice sounds distant, like he has to shout just for her to hear it, but he takes her tingling hands in his own and squeezes them tightly. “CJ,” he says, then repeats her name a few times, loud and calm and consistent. “CJ, eyes on me.”
She tries to take a deep breath when he tells her to — she’s more successful the second time. “You’re okay,” Leo tells her, his hands clasped around hers still. “It’s a panic attack, just breathe. You’re going to be okay.”
It reminds her of what Amy told her when she got back to their hotel room after it’d happened. It feels like hell right now, but you’re gonna be okay. Most of us have been there.
CJ had insisted it wasn’t like that. Had insisted that she couldn’t call it that. That it wasn’t like what other women suffered.
She’d been drunk, she must have repeated that a million times — out loud to Amy and in her head for eight years since. Really drunk, but that’s okay. He’d been drunk, too.
He hasn’t had a drink since he was 22.
She can’t believe she didn’t realize.
“What happened, CJ?” Leo asks her, one hand holding her own numb one and one arm still around her shoulders. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t tell you,” she whispers, her voice cracking through another sob as Leo strokes her hair and she doubles over, feeling like she’s about to throw up all over their shoes. She cries, can’t stop crying, clutching her chest like that’ll get her air.
“You can tell me anything,” Leo tries to assure her, but she laughs through her fogged up panic and shakes her head desperately.
She can’t do that to the President. She can’t do that to Leo.
Not when they’ve all just decided to put Hoynes on the ticket a second time. Not when they need Hoynes on that ticket.
They can’t risk losing re-election because she thought a guy was drunk eight years ago. She doesn’t want them to. Leo wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye again if he actually had to make that call.
“I can’t,” she tells him, high-pitched and shaking. Leo has both his arms wrapped around her as she sobs, as she’s wondering what would happen if she passed out right now. She feels on the verge of a heart attack.
“I really really can’t,” CJ insists, even when part of her wants to. When part of her is desperate to look him in the eye and say what happened, even if she ruins everything. Part of her wonders if she’d get the recognition she craves — if she’d get the understanding, the justification for being this ridiculously upset.
Part of her wonders if Leo wouldn’t roll his eyes and tell her it’s not that big of a deal. She swallows down bile at the thought of Leo telling her to just get over it. “Please believe me when I say that,” she whispers. “Please, I’m not exaggerating.”
“Okay,” he says softly, like it’s the last thing he wants to say to her. Leo doesn’t let go. She hangs onto the thought that it feels vastly different from Hoynes. “Okay,” he repeats. “Don’t worry about explaining right now.”
Her head is in his shoulder, as she leans over horribly uncomfortably; CJ coughs again, trying desperately to squeeze her thighs together to stop the feeling of John Hoynes’ fingers there without making it obvious that that is what she’s doing. She’s shifting too much, moving too much, but Leo makes no comment.
With one of her hands in his, he tells her again to breathe — to keep breathing, slowly, in and out, until he can finally tell that she’s managing to follow his advice. CJ squeezes his hand until he flinches, and she doesn’t understand the sigh of relief he brings out at that until she realizes she can actually feel her fingers again.
“You’re okay,” Leo repeats, as her breathing becomes less ragged, her vision less blurred. “You’re okay, don’t worry about explaining. Just breathe.”
The calmer she manages to get, the stronger the shame creeps in. She doesn’t ever want to look at him again.
CJ closes her eyes again, genuinely trying to focus on her breathing, focus on the scent of Hoynes’ cologne that’s fading with each breath she takes, focus on the way the cold air in the Rose Garden is nothing like the crowded hotel’s event room.
When her shoulders sag a little, Leo calmly lifts her head from his shoulder and offers her the handkerchief from his pocket. Her heart is still racing, but the heart attack feels like it’s been kept at bay for now. She even manages to take the hand kerchief, even if her fingers tremble.
“What was that about?” he asks anyway, his voice too loud for the headache now forming behind her eyes.
She shakes her head, slow and defeated this time. She takes a long, shuddering breath; she dries her cheeks with his handkerchief.
“You really can’t say?”
“Please trust me on that,” she tells him, lightly touching the skin beneath her eyes. She blinks a few times. She breathes slowly, one hand against her chest just to make sure. “It’s not—” CJ hesitates. Not important, she wants to say; not your problem; not your business; not worth it. “It’s nothing.”
“It can’t possibly be nothing.”
She hates that he’s starting to sound frustrated. She can’t blame him; but she hates him anyway.
“I’m asking you to believe that it is,” she states, calmer than before. She tries to fix her hair blindly. She’s feeling the cold now.
Leo looks at her like he’d rather believe anything else, but she stares right back this time and she appreciates that he gives in. There’s a beat of silence before he nods, patting her shoulder like that’s really the end of it. “Go home,” he tells her. “I’ll call my driver, he’ll take you. I don’t care if you drove here.”
She’s already not telling him what happened. She does him the favor of not arguing his offer.
When he stands, she does too, and she stays standing still for a moment longer than he does when her legs feel more wobbly than she’d anticipated. He waits for her by the edge of the garden. “You’re gonna be okay?” Leo asks.
She nods. “Thank you,” she says, as if she’s only saying it to the question. She doesn’t elaborate.
He calls Margaret to pick up CJ’s bag and coat and arrange the driver, and he stays with her when she awkwardly checks her face in the reflection of a window. The Vice President is nowhere to be seen, and she shivers at the thought of facing him right now. She wonders if Leo would be able to tell if that happened.
Margaret pauses for a moment when she sees her, eyes narrowing in concern before she promptly hands the coat and bag and disappears back into the west wing. CJ chuckles, and Leo laughs harder than appropriate.
When the car is finally there, CJ’s put her coat on and wrapped it tightly around herself. She’s checked herself in a compact mirror and wishes she hadn’t. She feels Leo’s hand on her back when she walks outside.
“Leo, I—” she starts, turning around before she’s opened the car door. “Tomorrow, can we just pretend this—”
“This never happened,” he assures her. “Saw nothing, know nothing. Any other day.”
It’s the final weight lifted off her chest she needed.
She thanks him again when she sits down in the backseat, managing to politely greet the driver who’s name she doesn’t even know. She shuts her eyes, leaning back against the seat with a tired sigh.
Leo closes the door for her, but not before she can hear him say “take care of yourself, kid.”
She manages a smile at that, but makes no promises.