by J J Arias
Compelled to add a hint of credibility to the absurd scheme, she followed Mila out of the ballroom and to the library at the other end of the wing, her stoic expression in place while they strode with purpose. As soon as she crossed the threshold, George made a beeline for the bar cart. She was already pouring herself some bourbon before Mila had closed the door gently behind them.
“You know, you and your compatriot might have come up with something that couldn’t be easily verified,” she said with her back to the door.
As soon as George finished preparing her drink, Mila helped herself to it. “Yes,” she said as she sipped the bourbon not meant for her, “and I’m sure the person who perpetrated such a tasteless Halloween prank will be very sorry,” she finished, her painted black lips turned up in a wicked grin.
George set to preparing another drink without commenting on her original one having been stolen. The girl had rescued her from a rather sweaty bore. She deserved some of her twelve-year, small batch bourbon.
“I suppose I should thank you, Your Highness Queen of Egypt,” George said as she sat in one of the armchairs in front of the unlit fire, moving carefully so as to not damage the beads in her dress.
“Don’t mention it,” she replied, helping herself to the other armchair across from George. She crossed one leg over the other, causing the gauzy material of her dress to ride up and reveal her shapely calves.
George forced her eyes away from the exposed skin at once, but with the wry smile looking back at her, she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t been noticed. The silence in the room was a welcomed reprieve from the noise and activity of the ballroom. After two straight weeks of campaigning and fundraising, George’s people batteries were depleted.
Drinking her bourbon with a large chunk of ice and sitting in her favorite place without having to perform was the closest to Heaven she’d ever felt. She didn’t factor her drinking companion in the equation. After another drink, she might be persuaded to believe that when she wasn’t antagonizing her, the younger woman wasn’t terrible to be around. At least when she was quiet. She relaxed into the chair as a delightful tingle eased into her body. It even helped with the kink in her back thanks to so many nights on hotel beds.
It should have been awkward. Sitting there, glancing at each other occasionally before instantly looking away, but it wasn’t. When the ice clinked around in her glass, she started to get up, but Mila was much faster.
“Allow me,” she said, taking the tumbler from her hand.
George did. A moment later, Mila was back with refreshed glasses.
“Why did you accept the fellowship?” George’s question surprised even her. She hadn’t been planning on saying anything at all, but her eyes had drifted to those legs again.
“Because I applied for it,” Mila replied casually with one hand on her drink and the other playing with the ends of her black wig.
George chuckled. It was an honest enough answer, yet it didn’t get to the heart of her question. She was curious to know why she wanted to work for her. It didn’t appear like she had any interest in her policies or platforms, yet there she was, rescuing her from Brandon and understanding that all she wanted was quiet company.
The door creaked open, bringing in a flood of party noises before George could ask a more specific follow up question. For a person who spent most of her life talking, she suddenly felt like her conversation skills had gone rusty.
“There you are.” Josephine the Good Witch slurred only a little as she barged in. “Oh.” She stopped short when she caught sight of Mila. “I didn’t know you were here,” she added unnecessarily.
Her sparkling eyes darting between them made it clear to George what she was thinking. She shot up immediately.
“I better get back before I turn into a pumpkin,” she said, adjusting her feather headband in the mirror and stealing another glance at Mila in the reflection. The black wig was fun, but her tipsy brain acknowledged that her natural color suited her so much better.
“I’ll keep an ear out for any more important phone calls,” Mila said as she stood. Leaving her lipstick stained glass on the side table and walking out with them.
Chapter Nine
On her first full morning back at home, George was more sluggish than usual. She’d made the deadly mistake of combining champagne and liquor and the mild nausea turning her stomach was her constant reminder of the error. If she were being honest, she’d acknowledge that it was the unrelenting soreness in her back that really led her to hit the snooze button.
Pain is a state of mind, she echoed the mantra she’d heard from her parents her entire life. Scrapped knees at the playground, sadness after a fight with a friend, or a failed attempt at anything. It didn’t matter. It was all met with the same slap on the back, demand that she buck up, and remember that pain could only hurt if she let it. George had been a very resilient preschooler.
A hot shower before her workout helped release some of the tension coiled in her lower back. Some exercise would take her the rest of the way.
Downstairs, George wasn’t as surprised to hear the sound of the treadmill as she had been the first time she caught the interloper in her sanctuary.
“I’m almost done,” Mila, her sweat soaked body in nothing but running shorts and a loose muscle shirt over her sports bra, said too loudly over the music in her ears.
George raised a single hand indicating that it was alright. Judging by her coiled muscles and perspiration, it was obvious she’d been there since well before sunrise. Anyway, she didn’t feel up to making a fuss that morning, and the woman had helped her at the gala. Just for today, she wouldn’t kick her out of her gym. Just for today.
Opting for a start on the weights, George stretched her sore back on the bench and started bench presses. A few moments later, Mila slowed to a jog, then a walk before turning off the treadmill.
“Do you need a spotter for that?” she asked as she peered down at George.
She had every intention of saying no thank you, I’ve always worked out alone and have never had a problem. But the words died in her throat as smooth muscular thighs came closer to her face. George, who’d made her entire career on words, forgot how to speak.
How pathetic. By the time her brain processed what was happening it was too late. The younger woman had taken her silence as a stubborn person’s acceptance of assistance. She stepped closer, tiny shorts only inches from her face.
George clenched her jaw and focused on a point in the ceiling as she started the presses. On the third one, Mila spoke. “I’m pretty sure you can do at least ten more pounds. You don’t have enough resistance.”
Ego kept George from explaining that she did more reps at lower weights to keep her arms strong but lean. One year she’d gotten too bulky and it had not played well in any of the polls or focus groups. Apparently, it alienated women and intimidated men. No one wanted Governor GI Jane.
To hell with it, she thought before giving Mila a nod. Ignoring the pain in her back, George finished the set and stood without wincing.
“I’ve been thinking,” Mila started as she gathered her things while George picked up a dumbbell for her triceps. “How did you end up with a first and middle name like Georgia Washington?”
“It could’ve been worse,” she replied, a vein bulging in her forehead as she tried to keep the correct form while she spoke. “It was almost America the Beautiful.”
Mila nearly choked on her water as she laughed. The sight of her hard, angular face breaking out into laughter sent George’s heart into her stomach. It was a lovely sound and an even more gorgeous sight. Something about it felt sacred, like a rarely blooming flower.
“You’re kidding,” she said when she finally managed to swallow. “No parent would be that cruel,” she added, her skin flushed and her laughter putting a previously unseen dimple on full display.
George didn’t reply. She was suddenly too aware of the stuffiness of the small room. Of the tightness of her clot
hes and the wholesale impropriety of joking around with the half-naked staff member her husband had been rumored to be involved with when she was still an exotic dancer.
Mila stopped laughing. Her face returned to its formerly stoic state. “See you in the office,” she said before turning and leaving George alone in the gym.
Shit, she thought bitterly, although she wasn’t sure why. She pushed down the discomfort that had taken over her hungover body. It isn’t worth spending too much time thinking about, she told herself. No point in dissecting the supreme unease and anxiety making her skin hot and her stomach turn.
George worked out so hard and so long that Josephine had to retrieve her in time to shower and make her first meeting of the day. Today would be packed with local organizations whose endorsements she needed. The day would be long and arduous. She didn’t have any real estate in her brain to spare.
* * *
The day had been more grueling than George had expected, which was saying something because she’d budgeted for misery. Apart from the drain of being on for so long, she’d also had to stand and deliver speeches longer than she’d anticipated. It would have been bad enough on its own, but doing it in very high heels was absolute torture.
Resting in bed did nothing to aid her back. She needed relief if she’d have any chance of falling asleep.
Slipping on her old college t-shirt, with its GOODE lettering all but faded, and some gray sweatpants, George crept downstairs. At nearly midnight, there wasn’t a single person up and roaming around.
When she reached the gym, she spotted the purpose of her trip. Her inversion therapy table. Pulling it out from its spot in the corner, she moved it to the middle of the room where it wouldn’t knock into anything else. That was an expensive lesson she didn’t need to learn twice.
Once strapped into the machine, she set her timer and pulled the little level to flip it over, allowing gravity to stretch her neck and back. Within minutes, the strain eased from her lower back and she could take deep cleansing breaths. As the blood rushed to her head, her body loosened and her eyes closed. She’d sleep there if she didn’t have to limit her inversion to half an hour.
“Who’s got you head over heels?” a woman’s smooth, low voice asked.
George’s eyes sprung open, disoriented by the accidental nap she’d taken. The woman who’d almost worked her way out of the blonde irritant category was back and just as intrusive in her upside-down state.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” George snapped, wanting to flip herself up from the vulnerable, restrained position but refusing to give her the satisfaction of disturbing her.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Mila shot back with what might have been a wink, but without her contacts in at that angle she couldn’t be sure.
“Weren’t you just in here this morning?” George asked, her words sharp and evidencing her annoyance despite her best efforts at concealment.
Mila climbed on the stationary bike without replying right away. She took her time clipping in and setting out her towel and water bottle before providing a response. As she did so, George glanced at the timer. Another fifteen minutes before she could leave without the appearance of being run out of her own space.
“Since I’ve stopped dancing, I’ve been falling out of shape,” she responded, her legs pumping as she lifted her short hair.
George didn’t comment aloud but wondered if her very athletic body was out of shape what the hell she looked like in shape. The image of a female hulk popped into her head, assuring her that there was too much blood rushing to her fatigued brain.
“Does that help?” Mila asked in the face of George’s cold silence. “I’ve tried all kinds of therapy for my sciatica, but nothing has made a difference.”
George wondered if that was a health hazard of her prior employment. The image of Mila in her underwear on a stage flashed in her mind and she coughed to physically dislodge it.
“I hurt some disks in a car accident when I was first campaigning,” she blurted. Smooth, she thought before deciding she shouldn’t care what an inconsequential person thought of her in the middle of the night in her own home.
“No aspirin for you, huh?” Mila asked, only a little out of breath as the color started to rise in her face from exertion.
“Numbing is for the weak,” she replied, only partially joking. “If it can’t cure it then what’s the point.”
Mila chuckled in the husky way she’d done the night in the library during the gala. It sent an unwanted spike of energy tearing through George’s abdomen.
“Here, here,” she said in vehement agreement as she toweled off her face. “Pain meds are bullshit. Why would anyone want to make their body more susceptible to pain if not absolutely necessary? Why bury it only to make it worse in the end?”
George couldn’t find anything to disagree about. As a child, her parents had always preached that life was about facing things head on. Pain had a purpose. It could teach and strengthen. She hadn’t expected a millennial to have the same mindset as baby booming immigrants whose life motto was about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
The beeping from the table’s timer ruptured the silence. Mila rose from the bike just as George started turning herself upright slowly to avoid the rush of blood from her head.
“I have a lot of experience getting hurt,” she said as she neared.
George swallowed hard. She hated being stretched out and tied down. It was a power dynamic she couldn’t abide, but if she stood up too quickly, she’d pass out, and that was even less desirable.
“There’s a lot of physicality in entertaining,” she continued in a husky voice. George met her gaze automatically as soon as her soft perfume filled the air around her. “We get plenty of injuries. Especially those of us who specialize in pole dancing,” she said only inches away from George as she helped push her up another twenty degrees so she was nearly upright.
Mila’s eyes were so piercing she could almost feel the weight of them on her skin. She hadn’t concealed her methodical full body scan of George as she laid like a rat in a trap. She moistened her full lips with the tip of her tongue and turned George’s mouth into the Sahara.
“I’ve learned a lot of good ways to work out the kinks,” she said in warm, hushed tones that sent a flurry of inappropriate thoughts rushing in.
Mila held her in her gaze for another minute until reaching out, her fingertips grazing George’s forearm and setting her system ablaze. Bright blue eyes darted between her mouth and her eyes. In her mind, George was drowning in her lips. Lost in her strong, skillful hands. Rapt in the heat of her body.
Mila’s husky voice broke her fever dream. “Let me help you with that,” she said, pulling on the Velcro strap tethering her to the table by her ankles and waist. Before George’s brain could formulate words of protest, Mila dropped to her knees in front of her.
Jesus, she cursed. If she was lightheaded before, the sight of the beautiful woman crouched in front of her was enough to induce a stroke. As Mila unfastened the ankle straps, George wasn’t sure her legs would be sturdy enough to hold her up. She gripped the side of the table as Mila stood slowly. Unnecessarily slowly, as if making a show of snaking up her body without actually touching her.
“Ready?” she whispered, her hands finding the strap around her waist as she stepped in closer. “I’m good at pain relief.”
George’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the sides of the table like a vice. The exchange had robbed her of her voice and her senses. Part of her wondered if she’d fallen asleep and this was a strange dream, but the throbbing between her thighs clued her in to the reality.
She’s playing you, her inner voice screamed as if having ripped duct tape off its mouth. This is what she’s trained to do, use her allure to trick sex-starved dopes like you.
George swallowed again to return moisture and movement to her mouth. When Mila pulled the strap, effectively releasing her, she closed the gap between them. She
couldn’t remember the last time she’d experienced the warmth of someone’s breath on her cheek or stared at such perfectly formed lips. It had easily been a decade since she last kissed any lips. She yearned for the sensation.
Don’t be so pathetic, she chided herself to the effect of a vat of ice water being dumped on her from above.
“Thanks,” George said in deep voice like she’d just come out of hibernation. “But I’ll be fine.” She stepped off the table and turned toward the door, even though she’d lost all feeling below the knee. Numb legs carried her away. She didn’t dare look back.
Chapter Ten
Mila and the governor had worked out a delicate dance of avoidance while in the mansion. It didn’t matter that it was one-sided when that side had total control over both their schedules. Sometimes they crossed paths in the gym while Mila was leaving and the governor was coming in, but the exchange was brief and stiff.
At work, they interacted well enough, as much as Governor Fernandez did with any of the other fellows, but that wasn’t saying very much. It was clear they were supposed to be neither seen nor heard.
Flotsam and Jetsam had jumped headfirst into a new public works initiative, which called for a great deal of research into sewers. A fitting task. Tim had convinced the rest of them to help with something for the Department of Citrus, which Mila had been positive wasn’t a real thing. She was wrong.
After a few weeks of monotony, Mila was ready to shatter the routine. Blankenship’s lackey was still circling and trying to get a picture of her doing something untoward with the governor’s husband, who she hadn’t seen more than once.
In a fit of desperation, she knocked on Tim’s door. The three of them staying at the mansion had an unspoken agreement not to invade each other’s space. An agreement Tim and Jetsam had apparently changed their minds about.