“Yes,” the chief of staff answered. “There is a small gym upstairs that previous Presidents have used.”
“I’ve seen it,” David commented. “It is in no way comparable to a real gym. In fact, it’s pretty sad.”
“Buy some new equipment and make it what you want,” the chief of staff told him.
“And who’s going to pay for that?” he shot back. “I’m not. It seems to me that if you want me to use it, you need to find the money to make it into a workable gym. It’s not that now. You get me a workable gym, and I’ll consider using it. Until then, no.”
“It’s been satisfactory for the past several Presidents. And since it would be for your personal use, you would obviously have to pay for those purchases. Expenditures for personal gym equipment could in no way be of benefit to the taxpayers.”
“Gym equipment costs a small fortune, and I can’t afford that,” David protested, but was cut off by Gray.
“It’s done,” Gray said briskly. “No more gym.”
“Excuse me,” David said, getting pissed not only at the news but the way Gray was delivering it. “I pay for my monthly gym costs, so don’t tell me ‘it’s done.’ When you start paying for my workout, then you get a voice in it. And besides, I also have my karate practice sessions there.”
“We’ve inquired,” the Secret Service chief fielded this issue. “The man with whom you work would be willing to come here to the White House to work with you on an hourly basis three times a week, exactly as you have been doing.”
“No, not exactly,” David protested. “Without the class, the sparing experience would not be the same, the paired self-defense training would not be the same―”
“It’s done,” Gray said, sounding impatient.
“And who is paying for that one?” David asked angrily. “I’ll pay what I’ve been paying every month, but anything above and beyond that is coming out of someone else’s pocket.”
They argued that point for a good five minutes, neither David nor the chief of staff backing down on their points of view. Each, in fact, was becoming more entrenched as they argued.
Finally Gray simply said, “Enough. David, we’ll find a line in the White House budget to cover the added expense. But you’ll have to pay for the equipment you want upstairs.”
“The fuck I will!” David protested loudly. “If you want this, I’ll give you a list of the equipment I’ll need.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Gray complained. “I need to get back to the office. I’ve got real issues to deal with back there that I had to leave to come over here to deal with you.”
“‘Deal with me.’ Hmm,” David said. “You’re going back to the office at this hour? Aren’t you done for the day? Aren’t you going to eat dinner?” He wanted to add, “with me” to that question but managed to hold that part of the question to himself.
“I’ll be back when I finish,” Gray vaguely said as he left the residence. David knew the odds of Gray returning quickly were slim to none.
David was accurate in his estimate of how long Gray would be before he returned that evening, which was probably a good thing, given how angry David was after their conversation.
Rather than wait for him, David went ahead and ate dinner, read for an hour, and then crawled into bed. As he slipped beneath the crisp sheets, he was a bit surprised to feel a stirring in his crotch. Looking down, David smiled at the feel of his erection tenting the sheet that covered him. Kicking the bedcovers aside, he had just started to stroke his erection when Gray walked into the bedroom, looking more haggard than he had earlier.
“What are you doing?” Gray asked, which made David freeze in midstroke.
“Um, we call this masturbation,” David explained. “It’s what men who do not have other outlets do to relieve the sexual urges and needs they have. It’s been the single man’s most trusted companion for countless thousands of years.”
“Is that a none-too-subtle way of telling me that I don’t put out enough?” Gray asked, smiling tiredly his way.
“Enough?” David asked seriously. “How about never?”
“That’s not true. Just… um… there was that time….”
“See?” David said. “You can’t even remember the last time.”
“Of all the problems I’ve had to deal with today,” Gray said, “this is one I actually can fix. Give me a few minutes to unwind, and I’ll be back and help to solve your problem.”
David wanted to object to the idea of Gray having sex with him being a problem that had to be solved. He wanted to ask Gray what he was supposed to do in the meantime since he was still hard and horny and partway to his happy place. But he bit his tongue, pulled the covers back up over his body, and grabbed his book from the bedside table.
Half an hour later, when Gray hadn’t returned to the bedroom, David got up, threw on a bathrobe, and went in search of Gray. David found him seated in his chair in the living room, tie still tied around his neck, jacket still in place, and sound asleep.
Shaking Gray enough to wake him, David said, “Gray, come on. Come to bed.”
While he was able to get Gray up and moving, Gray never did wake up fully. He shed his clothes and crawled into bed, and was asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow.
“And there goes that idea,” David said softly to himself. Horny and frustrated, he turned off his light and rolled over onto his side away from Gray, feeling pissed off at the world.
The next morning, David woke Gray by snuggling up against his backside and fondling Gray’s morning wood. Gray woke up, but the first thing he did was to look at the clock on his side of the bed.
“Oh, crap, I’m going to be late if I don’t get moving.”
“Late? It’s only 6:30. How can you be late this early?”
“Got a full day ahead of me,” Gray said as he moved into the bathroom.
“So you’re going to leave me hard up for a second time in eight hours?”
“What do you mean?” Gray asked, poking his head back out of the bathroom briefly.
“Do you remember last night? You and I were going to… have some quality time together… but you fell asleep.”
“Oh? Oh, right. Sorry about that. I was more tired than I realized. Can I have a rain check?”
“Are you going to be home tonight?” David asked before agreeing to anything. “It’s kind of important for you to be here for us to have sex.”
“As far as I know.”
“And will you be leaving the office at a reasonable hour tonight? Maybe to, I don’t know, have dinner with me? I’ve heard rumors from other married couples that they sometimes eat together. I know it’s radical, but maybe sometime we can try it.”
Gray either missed or ignored David’s sarcasm. “I don’t know until I get into the office and find out what I’ve got facing me today. I’ll be here if I can. And I’ll try to stay awake tonight. Sorry about last night.”
David stayed in bed while Gray finished in the bathroom, dressed, and left. Only then did he get up and start moving around, his mood already taking a nosedive before his day had even really started.
THAT NIGHT Gray did not make it home for dinner because he had a speaking engagement somewhere in the DC area. He, in fact, did not make it home until close to eleven. David had the butler leave the plate of cold food at Gray’s spot at the table so he could see it and maybe take the hint. He had also lit two candles and let them burn down to next to nothing as well, thinking that perhaps he might be able to send a subtle message to Gray. His message was too far below Gray’s radar to be noticed.
David was already in bed and had turned off his bedside light to go to sleep by the time Gray finally got home. When the overhead light came on, flooding the room with bright light, David roused and moved to cover his eyes. “What the fuck?” he groggily asked.
“Oh, sorry,” Gray said as he flipped the light back off. “I didn’t realize you were in bed already. I thought you’d be in the livin
g room.”
“Already? Gray, do you know what time it is? I have to work in the morning. I was sound asleep.”
“I thought I had a rain check for tonight?” Gray asked, looking and sounding like a hyperenergized man half his age who had spent his evening dancing vigorously at a club somewhere and was on some sort of stimulant or had drunk too much coffee.
“Huh?” David said flatly, neutral disbelief in his voice. “Really? I’m asleep and now you want sex?”
“I thought you wanted to,” Gray argued, a little bit more aggressively than David thought was reasonable.
David decided not to answer that question because he was afraid he would say something nasty about how could he not want to, the way Gray was sweet-talking him at the moment. Gray disappeared into the bathroom and came back a few minutes later, naked. That night, rather than climb into bed and fall asleep, Gray pulled the bedcovers off David before he climbed onto the bed and directly up on top of David.
Since he was feeling more sleepy than horny at that particular moment, and because there had been no build up, no foreplay at all to get him into the mood, it took a few minutes to get David’s dick aroused enough to do what Gray seemed determined to do. With one hand Gray braced himself while the other hand grabbed David’s erection and guided it to where it had not been in a very long time.
Since he was out of practice, it took Gray a moment or two longer than usual to accommodate David’s arousal, but accommodate him he did. When David was finally balls-deep inside Gray, neither had thoughts of anything but the other. They were both now back on shared familiar footing and knew what to do.
David’s hand rose to Gray’s chest, grabbing his nipples and gently twisting them. He let go and pulled Gray down to kiss him deeply while starting to thrust upward into Gray. The position they were in was one in which the man on top had general control, but since Gray wasn’t moving, David decided to get things started.
A telephone rang while they were kissing. Gray pulled back a bit from David and started to say, “I should….” at just the point where David really rammed his dick fully into Gray’s body, making him moan and shudder.
“Ignore it,” David ordered.
Ringing telephones were secondary.
A moment later when it rang again, they also ignored it. With their mating moving along quickly, more quickly than David would have preferred, he flipped them around so Gray was flat on his back and David was on top, Gray’s legs pushed back toward his shoulders.
When the telephone rang a third time, David was rapidly approaching orgasm and was aggressively taking Gray, pinning him to the bed and kissing him deeply as he thrust into the home stretch, his orgasm within reach.
Neither of them heard the knock at their bedroom door, but they certainly heard the voice that said, “Excuse me, Mr. President.” The Secret Service agent had opened their bedroom door and stuck his head inside.
“Get out!” Gray shouted instantly as he quickly tore his lips away from David’s.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the agent said, looking away but not leaving the room. With his back turned, he relayed what was obviously the original purpose of his poorly timed arrival. “You’re needed in the Situation Room immediately, sir.”
“Fine. I’ll be there in a minute,” Gray told him, shoving David off and jumping up out of their bed. Gray had pushed David with sufficient force to throw him completely off the bed and onto the floor.
“It’s urgent, sir.”
“I’m coming. I just need a minute.”
With the door quickly closed behind the retreating agent, David grumbled loudly. “Well, it’s a good thing one of us will be coming.” He had not moved from where he’d fallen onto the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Gray told David. “I have to go see what’s happening. I knew I should have answered the phone.”
“Go. When you come back, I’ll be the one with blue balls” was all David could say.
Since he had no idea how long Gray would be away, he went ahead and finished himself off. After cleaning up, he threw on a bathrobe and went out into the living room to stretch out on the couch and read a book he’d been working on. An hour later, there was still no sign of Gray, so he gave up and went to bed. He had no idea when Gray made it to bed. They did not get a chance to return to their abortive attempt at sex that night, nor in any of the following days that week.
Chapter 10—Not Tonight
GRAY’S SCHEDULE remained full of events in the weeks that followed. He did occasionally spend an evening at home. Experience, though, had taught David to not believe Gray would be home until he was actually in the residence.
David’s overall feelings were decidedly down during those weeks. He hated their life in the White House. Before, he’d always felt so centered, so balanced, so happy with life. He’d always tried to be a very calm, patient man. Consequently, being so off made everything feel wrong.
Gray clearly absolutely loved being President. The job let him be the political animal he was so good at being. It was almost as if he and David were having an inverse reaction to the White House.
AS THEY sat in the living room one night a few days later, something mindless on the television, Gray tried to initiate a conversation.
“How are things going at work?” he asked.
“Fine,” David said, not looking up.
“Any exceptional students this semester?”
“A couple,” David said.
No matter what he asked, David’s answers were all one or two words, and the tone was flat.
Gray got up from the chair in which he sat and moved over to the sofa to sit beside David. “I know how unhappy you are,” he said.
“I’m fine,” David said without giving it a thought.
“David. You say you’re fine, but you don’t seem fine to me. What’s wrong? You’ve always been infectiously upbeat and happy about life. You’re not like that anymore. It seems like you’re perpetually in a bad mood these days.”
“How would you know? You’re never here.”
“I’m here now.”
“Right, the first time in how many weeks? I can’t remember the last time we did something as simple as have a meal together. And I won’t even bother to mention the weekends we haven’t spent together.”
“I’ve been busy,” Gray said.
“You need to eat, and it would be nice if once in a while you took a day off for your own well-being. Yes, I’m unhappy. I’m more than unhappy—I’m miserable, mostly because I haven’t seen you in forever, and when I do, all I see is you working a ridiculous number of hours that no man can sustain. You need to take a break, slow down a little. We moved in here, and it seems like this place ate you alive. It’s like they took my best friend and left me all alone in a foreign land where I don’t speak the language. For all intents and purposes, I’ve been alone these last several months, and I don’t like it. I’m lonely—and a bit scared.”
“How’d you like to go out to dinner some night soon?” Gray asked.
David immediately sat up and locked his gaze on Gray. “Out? You and me?”
“Yes, us. You and me. Out. Food. Dinner. Restaurant. Like we used to do.”
“You can do that?” David asked. “You want to do that? We could do that? How can you do that?”
“I’d rather spend time with you than I would with anyone else in the entire world,” Gray reassured him with a gentle kiss.
“Next week is our tenth anniversary,” David said, having hesitated to bring up the issue earlier for fear he’d only be disappointed again.
“Let’s go out to dinner that night,” Gray said.
After much consultation with schedulers, they made plans to go out to dinner together a week later on the evening of their anniversary. Before moving to the White House, David had had a favorite restaurant, a place he’d introduced to Gray many years earlier. They both loved the food, loved the care with which they were tended while they were there, and loved the atmosphere.
They were on a first-name basis with everyone at the restaurant.
Since it was a favorite, Gray suggested they go there for dinner. Once the decision was made, plans behind the scenes swung into action. Secret Service agents descended on the place to assess it from a security point of view. Background checks were run on the owner and all of the staff. Escape routes were plotted. And a thousand other similar details all happened behind the scene.
On the appointed night and at the agreed-upon hour, they both dressed to go out, and were happily walking hand in hand toward the door to get into the limo for the drive to the restaurant. David was upbeat and happy, finally smiling again.
Just as the door was held open for them to exit the building, an agent spoke to Gray. “Sir, the chief of staff requests that you join him in the Situation Room immediately.”
“What’s wrong?” Gray asked.
“All I have is the message that you’re needed in the Situation Room immediately, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” Gray told David with a quick kiss. “I’ve got to go see what’s happening.”
“Of course,” David agreed. “Go. I’ll wait here for you.”
“I’ll be back as quick as I can, babe.”
FOR FIFTEEN minutes, David sat on a sofa by the door waiting, basically twiddling his thumbs since he didn’t have his iPad with him.
“Any idea what the crisis is?” David asked the agent who stood nearby.
“No, sir.”
“So we have no way to evaluate how long he might be?”
“No, sir.”
Tired of sitting, David stood and started to slowly pace. He made one slow circuit of the room before reversing course and walking the other way. After forty-five minutes of pacing, David was ready to admit the obvious—they weren’t going to dinner that night.
When they were an hour past their scheduled departure time, David made a decision that was painful to him. “I think it’s clear we’re not going anywhere tonight,” David told his lead agent. “Could you please notify everyone necessary that it looks like we can’t make it tonight after all. I’ll call the restaurant.”
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