Coming In The Capitol City Pt 02

Note: This is the conclusion to Coming in the Capitol City. Thank you for the kind notes and thank you for reading.

One thing I'd learned over the few months I'd been flying in and out of Washington: it was useless trying to understand why anyone in D.C. did what they did. Certainly, a handful of earnest first-year legislators might have real change on their minds, but it didn't take long before the harsh reality of fealty to PACs and special interests shattered that idealism. I hated seeing it, which is why I always kept myself a few degrees removed from the sausage-making. Writing speeches allowed me to indulge my hopes for a better, more just society, even if I knew that the platitudes I crafted were unlikely to come to fruition. Hope for something better—that was the platform every single candidate ran on.

Except, I knew, for this guy. He didn't care about hope—not anyone else's hopes, anyway. The world revolved around his own ambition. True, that could be said about most of the individuals who were drawn to seek national office, but this man exhibited a ruthlessness and single-minded intensity that was unlike anything I'd ever seen. He was willing to shrug off any mantle he'd worn—the thoughtful conservative, the meditative academic, the Constitutional scholar—if it got him closer to the ultimate seat of power. It was disgusting, of course, in the way that naked ambition at the cost of integrity was disgusting. But it was also fascinating. Though his hair was mussed right now, he usually kept it impeccably styled. His suits were bespoke. His demeanor, while passionate, was respectable-sounding, even if it was absolute bullshit. And while it was obvious he knew it was bullshit, it was equally obvious that he didn't think his constituents were smart enough to know it was bullshit. Put all this on paper, slide it across the table to me, and I'd think it was opposition research on a truly execrable individual. But put it in this man and all I wanted to do was climb on top of him and fuck his brains out. There was no explaining it.

"You look like the cat who stole the cream," he said, when he noticed me watching him. "I like knowing that I put that look on your face."

I crawled across the bed to where he was sitting. "And you look like an apparatchik who lies about a stolen election."

He pulled me onto his lap. "That's a big word for a little girl." He opened the robe I had slipped on and pulled it down off my shoulders. He let his fingers play across my collarbone, tracing the outline of my clavicle, then ran his cool hands over my breasts. "I don't even know your name," he said. "Who are you?"

A ghost, I wanted to say. A being with no substance, no principle, no ideals. A terrible trident of failures if spoken aloud, if put down on a quarterly review or an exit interview, but if left unspoken and shared between only us, pure freedom. Instead, I only said, "Someone who needs to be fucked."

"That I can see. But you didn't like me very much only a little while ago."

"You don't strike me as a man who needs people to like him."

He reached up and worked the ponytail holder out of my hair, pulling the tenderest hair at the base of my neck, which sent tiny stabbing pains through my body. I bit my lip and tried not to make a sound, but he heard my little cry of pain, so when my hair fell down around my shoulders, he ran his hands through it and grabbed a handful in each hand and pulled, hard. The little bursts of pain transformed into a blunt razor's edge—on one side was pain and on the other was pleasure. The sound I made, halfway between a moan and a sharp intake of breath, was involuntary, but it excited him, I could tell. "You like that, don't you, you little slut," he whispered. I was surprised—I had been conditioned for years to treat that word with contempt. Yet, I could feel my skin flushing. The truth was, it turned me on, and he knew it. "Yes, you're a little whore, aren't you? You put on a show of righteous outrage downstairs, but you knew from the minute I spoke to you in that bar that you were going to take every inch of my cock wherever I wanted to put it, didn't you?"

I leaned into him and put my lips on his ear, and whispered, "Yes, Daddy." He gripped my ass in his hands so hard I could feel his nails in my skin. A few moments later, I had my fingers wrapped around his stiff cock. I hadn't been with another man besides my husband since we'd married—and my husband was a nice fit. Comfortable. But this man was bigger than my husband by a substantial margin. I was no size queen, but I had always been curious to know what it would feel like to be filled up completely.

I had to take it slow to start. I rubbed the head of his penis against me, and he tried to pull me down on it. I pushed him back against the quilted headboard, hard. "Be patient," I said, and lightly cupped his balls as I slowly lowered myself a little onto him. I could feel his thighs tense up under me. My wetness helped ease him into me, little by little, but at the same time his thick cock was stretching me open. Once again, I was balancing on that line between pain and pleasure. For him, though, it was all pleasure. He let his head fall back against the wall while I worked my way down his shaft.

"My god," he said. "How can you be this tight?" Finally, I sank all the way down on him, consuming his cock entirely. "Fuck," he growled. "You feel so good." He grabbed my face and pulled me in for another of his rough, animal-like kisses, but this time I wanted it, too. His hunger was mine.

Having his entire length inside me was unlike anything I'd ever felt before. I moved slowly to start, long, deep strokes, my hands gripping the edge of the headboard behind him. I looked down at him as I moved. "You like that, Daddy?" His breaths were ragged and irregular as he watched his cock moving in and out of me. "That's a good girl. Fuck me nice and slow." He licked his thumb and began rubbing my clitoris, which was swollen and achingly sensitive. Too sensitive. I guided his thumb to the side and moved it for him, up and down, up and down. "Yes, just like that," I said. Now all the disparate parts of the pleasure I was feeling started to come together—the way he filled me so completely combined with the sweetness of his rhythmic stroking of my clitoris—creating a sensation that I could barely process. I was hardly aware of the sounds I was making until he reached up and pulled my face close to his again and whispered, "I love the way your voice sounds." He hesitated for a moment, and then said, "Say my name as you fuck me." I did, and it intensified everything—the pleasure, the weirdness, the edginess of what we were doing.

I reached behind me and put my hands on his thighs so I could lean back and steepen the angle. I could feel his knees open up as his hips rose to meet my body. "Oh my god, just like that—don't stop." He kept stroking me with one hand as I fucked him, and with the other he pushed me back even farther. I had never experienced this particular kind of sexual pleasure before. It was a variation on the way he ate my pussy while fingering me, but multiplied many times. I could feel my orgasm, still in the distance, building, like a string of lights, illuminating one bulb at a time, on and on—transient but also inevitable. If only he didn't stop. He laughed. "I could watch you fucking me for days." Hearing his deep voice speak these words, when up until this night I'd only heard him droning on about constitutional process and stolen elections, brought me closer to the edge. "It's so good, just like that," I groaned. "Don't stop."

He laughed again. "I'm not going to stop. I want you to come all over my cock." And I was going to—for the first time in my life, I was going to be brought to climax not by a man's tongue, or by my own hand after pleasant-enough but orgasm-free sex, but with a thick cock deep in my pussy. I could feel myself starting to toe the edge, and as I looked at him, at his overly proud features, his slightly crooked mouth, his hard blue eyes, everything I hated about him fell away until only desire was left. He had brought me to this place where I knew I would step out of my mind—almost out of my body—for a few ecstatic moments and, temporarily, at least, I adored him for it.

"Tell me how good it feels," I whispered. "I just need to know how good I'm making you feel." Suddenly, and with a violence that startled me, he grabbed me and flipped me onto my back, pinned one of my arms above my head, and with his other hand, pulled my right thigh up against his hip, and roughly put himself back into me. I could hear the sound of my wet pussy now with every one of his thrusts. It was so hot, a testament to how much he turned me on and how good he was fucking me. He loomed over me, his dark blond hair falling across his eyes. "You want to know how good this makes me feel, huh? Your little pussy is about to make me come harder than I've ever come in my life." He reached down between us to find my clit again. "And you're going to come with me." But I was already almost there. My legs started to stiffen as the inevitability of my orgasm reached the point of no return. I made sounds I barely heard, so loud was my heart beating in my ears, but he responded to them by thrusting into me harder and faster, grunting.

"So good," were the only words I could speak as I bore down on him, my whole body tightening on his penis, sucking him in, my grip on him so tight that he could barely pull out enough to thrust back in. My orgasm was set in motion now, unstoppable, spinning forward relentlessly, deliciously. "I'm coming," I cried. "Fuck, I'm coming." My body seemed suspended in space—everything stopped for a moment as waves of unspeakable pleasure, big as the world, moved from the center of my body through my chest, my legs, my arms. I heard an animalistic, almost guttural sound and realized it was coming from me. My pussy pulsed rhythmically from my orgasm and it felt as if it wanted to pull his entire being into my body. He could feel the spasms. "Oh my god—what are you doing to me?"

"Give it to me," I murmured, still awash in the warmth of my orgasm. "Come in me."

He leaned down and put his mouth on my neck. "Tell me your name," he said, his voice rough-edged now, breathless. "I want to say your name when I come." I could've given him a pseudonym, the name of the anonymous ghost who'd walked into this room an hour earlier, but I didn't, because I wanted to hear my name in his mouth as he climaxed. So it was as much for him as it was for me when I told him my real name."Holy shit," he said, "that is so—fucking—good." Now there was shock on his face—the insouciance, the glibness was gone as he realized that, for once, he was completely out of control. "Fuck, I'm going to come in your little pussy right now. Right fucking now."

"Say it—say my name."

He looked down at me. Our eyes locked, I saw, just fleetingly, beyond the artifice into his depthless elemental need. "Say it." He spoke my name, and as soon as it was on his lips, I realized I was going to come again. He froze for a moment, suspended in a paralyzing moment of expectation, that same look of shock on his face. Then, with his mouth near my ear, he let loose with a primal, wordless cry that filled me up in a completely different way than his throbbing cock had, and the knowledge that it was me, my body, that was giving him this exquisite pleasure, summoned the orgasm from deep inside me. It appeared so fast I hardly understood what was happening. This one dwarfed the one I'd just experienced, like a galaxy to a single hot burning star. I was no longer in this beautiful bed with its now-wrinkled white sheets, no longer in this well-appointed hotel room, no longer in the arms of this man I didn't know at all but now understood on a primeval, even primordial, level. I was nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Slowly, the world came back into focus. His body relaxed onto mine, his chest rising and falling as he caught his breath. As I fully re-entered reality, I was surprised to find he was gently brushing damp strands of my hair off my forehead. Everything about his face had softened, from the firm set of his jaw to the subtle lines across his broad forehead. But it was his eyes that were most changed. They looked human. I could see emotion in them.

"Are you okay?" I asked him. He nodded but said nothing. "What are you thinking right now?"

He continued stroking my hair. "Just that that was the first time in a long time that I felt like a real person."

"Because I said your name."

"People say my name all the time—in my offices, in the media, at home. But they're not really addressing me. They're addressing the person they want me to be—and yes, before you say it, also the person I've made myself into. My devil's bargain. I know that. But when you said it, when you said it the way you did, when I was as deep in you as a man can be in a woman, it felt like you were talking to me. I thought that person was dead—so many reinventions, so many layers of deceit. You didn't think I know that about myself?"

I thought about the images I'd seen of him on television, sitting completely alone in the Senate chambers, all the seats around him empty, no one, not even his staffers, willing to go near him. At the time, his public isolation after his acts of treachery was one of the only things that had given me hope that some things were still beyond the pale in our democracy. But now I saw that image very differently. "You don't have to do what you do."

"You'll never understand. Everything I've done in my life—everything—has been in service to gaining the presidency. From the schools I attended and the offices I ran for to the faith I pretend to hold dear and even the woman I married, who despises me. There is no turning back now. No absolution but total victory. That's my only path forward." He rolled off me. "Anyway, whatever that was that we had, that's already fading away." He sat on the edge of the bed, his back curved, his head in his hands. I pulled the sheet around me and crawled over to where he was sitting. I smoothed down his hair, but he pushed my hand away. "Don't be nice to me." He looked over at me. "We can never do this again."

"I know."

"I've come too far. There's no turning back."

I shook my head. "That's just not true."

"You progressives love redemption. You love to see people on their knees. Not in my corner of the world. In my corner of the world, an apology is an admission of defeat. And if I'm defeated now, then what was it all for? I'll have nothing. I'll be nothing."

I loathed what he was saying and I loathed the gamble he was making, but I no longer loathed him. I knew his name and he knew mine. We were no longer ghosts.

Epilogue

The text came around midnight, six months later. I was in a town car, on my way to the airport for another late-night flight to D.C.. The snow-crusted landscape on either side of the highway sparkled under the rising moon and the billboards flashed by one after the other, hawking car dealerships, real estate services, and 2% milk. The text notification—like a faraway church bell tolling—told me the text came from the encrypted text app my boss used, so I reluctantly dug out my phone and opened it. It was not from one of my contacts—there was no name attached to the number—but I knew who it was from because I'd received messages from the number every six weeks or so. I opened it.

Do you still think about it?

The car drifted into the airport-only lane and rounded the gentle curve leading into the terminal. I looked at the text, each word bringing back an image from that night. He'd been right, of course. Memories in D.C. were short. His misdeeds had been forgiven or forgotten, explained away, and he'd come out of it stronger. A 2024 favorite, even. The gamble had gone his way, making what had seemed inexplicable doubling-down just six months earlier look like political genius. My heart sank every time I saw his name in the news and I was overcome by dread at the thought that he might actually become president. Politically, he was so dangerous. He wouldn't, after all, be the "nothing" he so feared, but I couldn't help thinking that he'd be something much, much worse.

We hadn't seen each other since that night, and we never would. But every so often, I would get this text. The same words every time, always the same question. Did I still think about that night?

As the car entered the Departures area, I typed back the same word I always did, which was the truth: Yes.