My Only Talent

In politics, stupidity is seldom a handicap.

Note: The descriptions and accounts in these stories are fictional and do not portray any actual people or events

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Both girls stared at me, then spoke simultaneously. "Why?"

My heartbeat sounded loudly again. I looked them both in the eye for a moment. There was no way to avoid discussing this now. "Because Nora is pregnant."

Their faces froze, their Suzie Signals halted, and my heart stopped.

Nora's face turned grey -- almost the same color as her platinum hair, but without the luster. Lara's was white -- all the blood had drained out. Then an almost identical and very skeptical look crossed both their faces -- the kind of look I had often seen before somebody shouted "Bullshit!" at me.

Finally, Lara said "How can you even think that? She's protected, and besides she hasn't been with anyone else since you've been gone, so it's been at least six weeks since..." She paused and looked briefly at Lara for confirmation. "So, unless it just happened, then..." Her eyes got even bigger.

Nora asked, "Robbie, how can you possibly know that? Can you, I mean is it possible that you can..."

I nodded solemnly. "It's a boy."

"Jesus!"

I couldn't resist. "No, just our son."

Several emotions played across Lara's face. "This changes everything!" No shit.

Nora was lost in thought. Then she hinted at a smile. "We have some planning to do, then. We must be adaptable!"

I could almost see the wheels spinning in Nora's head. She held her mouth funny for a minute, then said, "I assume that you also want Lara to be..."

"Yes!" I completed her thought. "But it doesn't have to be right away. We can move things around and be ... adaptable."

Nora stood up, hands on hips, now officially running the meeting. "We have a little time to plan, and start things moving. First, we need to talk to your mother about how her pregnancy went. Any idiosyncrasies, problems, cravings, anything else that might be tied to your 'talent'."

I supposed that this would not be a good time to talk to them about my idiot cousin Mikey, the Klingon speaker, lest she think stupidity runs in the family.

She paced back and forth, eyes flashing, ticking things off on her fingers. "Second, we need to go over your early childhood. Milestones, growth curve, how early did you talk, walk, everything!"

My mother had told me about this, interminably. Talk very early, walk late, puberty very late.

But Lara was on to her next item. It went on for quite a while. I think her final point reached number 19. Lara was not only following; she was taking notes. I tried to remember my action items, most of which could not be addressed until I returned from England and was back in school for the fall semester.

Then, Lara got a funny look on her face, as if she was staring off into the far distance. "I guess Suzanne was right, after all, wasn't she, Nora?"

My heart stopped again at the mention of Suzanne, and a sort of chill passed through me. Nora tilted her head, and then looked at me. "Suzanne said you were going to want children, and she knew she did not."

Damn, these girls really did talk about everything. Even if it was true, it didn't really help. Well, maybe a little.

Luckily, they were determined to distract me in other ways.

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We had a very tearful goodbye. Mostly mine. I found that leaving Nora alone with my boy in her belly struck fear deep in my heart that something awful would happen and I would not be there to help. Lara, however, seemed to adopt the persona of momma bear protecting her cub, and I would be back in Austin just before Lara had to leave for Pennsylvania, and Nora for Massachusetts.

Another PERT chart appeared in my head -- a nine-month plan. One of my action items was to find a work assignment for the spring semester that would place me near the Harvard B school. I made a note to self to contact all my faculty advisors and all the potential employers that I had previously interviewed with to find a possible situation. Still dangling was what happened after that.

I barely made it onto the plane at DFW. I didn't sleep, despite the long flight. Might have had nightmares, anyway. No sign of Elizabeth Ashcroft Knowles on the flight. Not sure I could have handled it if she had been there, wonderful as she was. My mind raced with a thousand scenarios, none of which were satisfactorily resolved in my thoughts. Life is an adventure, right?

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Summer was waiting for me when I arrived at Terminal 3 at Heathrow. Seeing her snapped me out of one world and into another. Back in the USA, there were responsibilities, duties, schedules, and soon to be children. In jolly old England, there was a very hot and muscular woman blazing with desire. She circled her arms around my hips, grabbed my buttocks and planted a kiss on me that made all the airport onlookers embarrassed. It made me horny. I realized my face was red, despite most of my circulatory resources suddenly moving just below my belt.

I'm not sure how long it took us to get the parking area where she had left her van, but I was on cloud nine the whole time. Summer was mine for the next few weeks, ready, willing and able. I was going to cut loose, just before I had to cut her loose, and I was going to make sure neither of us ever forgot our fleeting English Summertime together.

The ride back to Summer's house seemed to take a long time -- I was anxious to arrive. Mallory greeted me with a reproachful glare, then finally presented her ears for a rub. That was all the attention she got for a while, as Summer and I lurched toward the big four poster bed like a big four-legged spider. I didn't know where to start, but I supposed the order did not matter, as I wanted it all.

Summer's hands flew over me like a hyperactive child. I loved it.

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Lara had always enjoyed her counseling sessions with Dr. Asa Weltschmerz, M.D., PhD, but now she had a whole new level of pressing issues to discuss with him. Asa was the only one she could trust to completely keep her confidences, plus he could answer some of the medical questions that were running through her head.

Asa seemed surprised that Robbie had revealed so much to her and Nora and was incredibly curious about the baby. He explained the need for keeping certain medical information private, and offered intensive and personal exams for Nora, along with an OB he could trust, and explained he would need to talk to Robbie too about how to keep things close to the vest. He told her most of what was "special" about Robbie's talent apparently did not show up until a child was approaching adolescence, and that they would all be learning as they went along.

After Lara left, Asa was thankful for two things. First, that he had been there to discover and learn about Robbie's talent. Second, that Suzanne had never learned more about it.

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When the second Monday in July finally rolled around, I was back in the Eurotunnel office and ready for our first meeting with the dildoes of Downing Street, as Oliver Hastings Harrison so aptly dubbed them. I had thought they would have a chauffeur and a Rolls befitting their self-perceived exalted status, but they took the train from London and still arrived in Folkestone with noses in the air and loaded for bear. They filed into the room defiantly. I picked out the mousiest looking guy and introduced myself.

"I'm Robbie Roberts! You must be Digby. Pleased to meet you!"

Digby was actually the guy behind him, but my purpose was still served. OHH took control, using his admiral's command voice to herd everyone into their seats. Digby looked very uncomfortable. I liked it.

Drummond McFadden smiled shyly and let the dog collar he had crafted for me show out from under his notebook. Bloody bastard!

OHH continued -- laying out the agenda. It was just as I had pronounced over that contentious conference call -- shared goals and agreed to measures to establish that those goals had been met. Digby sat through it all, and at one point literally sat on his hands.

On cue, two of the underlings began an obvious and well-rehearsed back and forth presentation about why we should return to their original, infeasible and budget busting plan. They looked very surprised when Digby cut them off and threw them under the bus, saying there were other forces at play and that the more moderate and workable plan that OHH had proposed would be the best choice. I could see Tessa and whoever she was working with had made quite an impression on someone, even beyond my talk with Richard Paul at topless night. Drummond gave a very amazed and impressed look and put the dog collar away. OHH smiled contentedly.

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Jay and Millie Kincaid began their honeymoon in Iowa with little fanfare, but soon noticed they were being followed. The first contingent was local yokel newscasters, usually on their first job out of J school, looking for anything of moderate local interest. Millie was extremely photogenic, and Jay looked better than most of the locals involved in car crashes or armed robberies, so they got a lot of mentions on the evening news. Even the most cursory research led to stories about the fancy wedding in Texas, and that made the story stand out a bit. They popped up so often on local station's newscasts that the regional reporters for the national channels noticed them and began to use their smiling faces waving to the folks when they arrived in a new town as "B roll" video for stories about the upcoming election cycle.

Minor market radio stations began asking them for interviews to fill otherwise dead air, and their audiences liked them, and called in to talk about them. TV stations followed suit, and soon they were being covered with amazing regularity.

"Told you so!" bragged Little Lionel "Choo Choo" Soso, a political consultant who specialized in GOP candidates and Hispanic voters. He had been hired by Cactus Jake Warner and was following in the footsteps of his much more famous consultant father, to shepherd Jay's early exposure. He had a plan, and it was working. He wanted to make Jay Kincaid one of the youngest candidates ever considered for VP, and he was all in on making it happen.

Somebody else had a plan too. Ashley Armstrong was a recent graduate of USC, majoring in film and journalism. She was one of the poorest kids in her class, and she had to hustle to get into the school and hustle to stay in. They called it the University of Spoiled Children, and Ashley had experienced it firsthand, always being a second-class citizen and outsider. Despite her very camera-friendly looks and smooth announcer voice, she did not have any family pull, so as her classmates got choice internships at Hollywood studios or major network newsrooms, Ashley ended up taking a first job as the second banana evening newscaster at the lowest rated local TV station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

But Ashley was determined to be more than a newsreader. She wanted to be a featured investigative reporter, finding the stories that would make a big splash and get her noticed for a better job. She had worked out her own branding scheme and developed a series of background tunes and Chiron tags featuring "Ashley Armstrong Asks" -- hopefully highly embarrassing questions to very important people. She knew that nothing got ratings like exposing nasty sex or sanctimonious hypocrisy and she was hoping that Jay Kincaid and his hot wife would provide both. She was determined to keep after them until the truth was exposed.

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Alexander Walton's first few weeks in the West Wing were a blur. He almost wished he was Dwight the Dweeb Boy again, when he was last completely comfortable in his own skin. Ambassador Pliskin, now National Security Advisor Pliskin, threw everything at him, hoping perhaps to burn him out. Somedays he felt like he did during his first few weeks at MIT, an overwhelmed kid, sandblasted by the fast flow of data, granular with detail, and unable to tell which datum was trivial and what was key information.

"That's the job, kid!" Pliskin seemed to love being in the heat of things, and he thrived while Alexander struggled. "It's a fuck load better than being on the outside, not knowing what is going on and wondering how bad the previous bunch of Bozos was screwing it all up! It's never boring. Boring is what scares me."

Alexander was never bored. He was either working as hard and as fast as he could, or he was catching a few hours of sleep. Even his dreams were mostly alternate scenarios from work playing out in his mind. He got to his coat closet sized office at 6 AM, ran ragged all day prepping for and attending meetings, and rarely left before 10 PM. He used to envy the people "in the know" that got the PDB; now he contributed to it and was anxious about the follow up questions POTUS or cabinet members would ask, which usually generated a lot of work for Alexander to research, synthesize and summarize the available data. He wasn't shy about walking around and asking people to explain things to him, meeting a lot of them who did not know him and did not believe he had clearance to hear their answers. But the Ambassador always endorsed his requests, and nobody ever froze him out twice.

Carmencita was proud of his new job, even though she wasn't supposed to talk about it, and very pleased with his new salary, but she was getting tired of spending so much time at home without him. She threw herself into her job, and her reputation for spectacular rehab success continued to grow within the agency. They were cautious about discussing their workdays with each other. Dwight was cleared for hearing about the activity of most of the people she worked on, but compartmentation was the order of the day. She was not cleared for what he worked on.

She became a compulsive exerciser, trying out all the new stuff from her rehab journals as her exercise routines while watching Netflix or network TV each night. She was in great shape, and when Alexander got home, usually during the 10 PM newscast, he worshipped her body properly. That kept her sane, and happy. Barely.

He was walking into Pliskin's office to drop off some of the one-page issue summaries with wide margins for annotation that Pliskin and POTUS both favored, when a familiar voice caused him to pause outside the open door. The Ambassador waved him in.

"Come in Alexander. I believe you know my daughter Suzanne?"

Suzanne smiled warmly, in an almost predatory way, and crooned, "Hello, Dwi..."

Her father interrupted. "Ixnay on the Ightdway, there Suz! I suppose I should formally introduce you to Alexander Walton, my new deputy."

No one else called her "Suz" and lived to tell about it. But her father had always called her that. She felt sympathy for Dwight, er, ah, Alexander. Her father burned through deputies and assistants the way a carpenter's nail gun went through nails. But she knew this one was tougher and smarter than most, and very memorable.

Dwight was frozen in thought, suddenly transported back to that Austin hospital room where he was trussed up after his injury and at Suzanne's tender mercy. He had a big involuntary erection and a small confused smile on his face.

The Ambassador filled the silence. "Suzanne has a new position as an assistant professor at GWU, and she is also going to be doing some consulting work for the administration on developing economies in the third world."

Alexander's instincts for self-preservation finally kicked in. "Perhaps you should meet my wife, Carmencita, in the near future?"

Suzanne's smile faded. "Perhaps."

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The trip to Torquay was designed to treat my recent Summer Mawn withdrawal symptoms, sort of a self-indulgent prelude to properly training her to reach her sexual potential and carry on without me after I returned to Austin. I had a plan for that, a rather good one I thought, but it was overcome by events quite quickly. What started as a dalliance in Devon became a very unexpected and wild experience for Summer, jump starting her final training in ways I could not have devised.

Our choices for places to stay on the "British Riviera" were limited somewhat by our finances and the desire to bring Mallory along with us. I had never been to the French Riviera, but I had been to the "Redneck Riviera" in Alabama and Mississippi, and the "Texas Riviera" in Port Aransas and Port Isabel, and the dog friendly choices were about the same. We booked ahead and I even got a discount when I supplied my father's frequent flyer number. It's a big data global village now. Summer swapped shifts with other firefighters and I prevailed upon OHH to give me a few extra days off, so we were clear for a Thursday through Thursday vacay.

Instead of tents or sleeping in the van at what I would call a campground for campers and Summer called a caravan park, we had booked a room in an old but still serviceable hotel well past its prime, and several blocks from the water. It didn't quite achieve its former Victorian splendor but was at least affordable and clean.

Once we had stored our stuff in the room, and Mallory had sniffed and approved the area and settled in her double-locked crate for a while, we headed for an early dinner in the dining room, which had a reputation much loftier than the hotel alone. The restaurant was full of locals in addition to tourists like us. The food was surprisingly good, and Summer, a very discerning culinary customer indeed, announced we should come back, in addition to trying some of the other places she had researched.

We went up to our room, took Mallory out for a walk, then returned and shed our clothes. Although Summer and I had been going at it several times each evening since I got back from Texas, my thirst for her juices had returned, and for desert I feasted between her thunder thighs and listened happily to the sweet Suzie music she played as I did so. After her second and surprisingly short refractory period, I turned her over and did her doggie style while her doggie watched. I slammed into her with abandon, and as she got into the rhythm, a stray image popped up on her Suzie carrier. Drummond McFadden, in the romanticized flesh! Shirtless, with hair a foot long and atop a big black horse, no less.

Well, truth is truth, I suppose, my ego notwithstanding. Where is Asa Weltschmerz when you need him? My only available psychoanalyst was always the persona of my mother that I carried with me, and I could hear her now. What is the worst thing that could happen? I would lose Summer to Drummond? I was going to lose her anyway, and Drummond was a good guy, and I know he liked her, too. Perhaps I'll have to modify my plan for Summer a bit.

But if I wasn't careful, I might lose my erection. I looked down on Summer's wonderous backside, and thankfully John Henry the pile drivin' man soon joined in, steeling me to my task. Perhaps it was a little burst of testosterone that prompted my next thought.

"Summer, you slut, before I leave for Texas, you are going to have to show me you can take on two men at once, you know."

Her heavy breathing stopped, she grunted, and came, hard. The Suzie signal image of Drummond dismounted the horse and walked purposefully towards her mouth. Then she took in a giant, gasping breath. I was on a roll.

"Not just in your mouth, either!" I pulled out of her pussy and dramatically entered her perfect pucker. So tight and so right! She began keening, and I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, hard. She came again, just as I finished off too. What a woman.

It took us both a good five minutes to stop the heavy breathing. Summer spoke first, of course.