The West Wing: "Four Times Ainsley Hayes Tried to Explain (And One Time She Didn't Have to)"
Title: Four Times Ainsley Hayes Tried to Explain (And One Time She Didn’t Have to)
Author: llyfrgell
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing/characters: Ainsley Hayes, minor Ainsley/OFC and Ainsley/surprise
Rating: PG for hints of sexual activity
Disclaimer: Fanfiction is a transformative use and falls under the fair use clause of the Copyright Act.
Prompt: 846. The West Wing: Ainsley Hayes. Ainsley must reconcile her sexual orientation with her choice to be an active part of the Republican party.
Summary: Ainsley has been a Republican all her life, and she doesn't entirely understand why her being a lesbian is supposed to be relevant.
Author's Notes: ~3000 words, written May/June 2008 for lgbtfest. Spoilers through season 7. For timeline purposes, I set Ainsley's birthday in 1971. I can't apologize enough for the tardiness of this fic - I've never missed a ficathon deadline before, but law school finals conspired against me.
Age 18
Smith College was a well-respected educational institution with an excellent reputation and many successful graduates. This is what Ainsley told her mother when she received her acceptance letter.
Smith College was a well-known female space where sleeping with other women might as well have been a requirement for graduation. This is what Ainsley’s student host told her at Admitted Students Day.
Ainsley already knew both of those facts, and to her, it sounded perfect. Now all she had to do was avoid letting her mother know that she knew about the latter while also convincing her fellow students that she, a lifelong Republican from North Carolina, was just as much there for the latter reason as they were. If the skeptical looks she had received from both her mother and her student host were any indication, she had her work cut out for her.
Because she had always believed in being proactive, Ainsley attended the first meeting of the College Republicans, which occurred exactly an hour before the first meeting of Spectrum. Both meetings opened with the kind of icebreaker game in which people had to share various interesting facts about themselves. Ainsley informed the College Republicans that she was a lesbian and the Spectrum members that she was a Republican. Both groups seemed to find these facts extremely interesting, though Ainsley couldn’t quite tell if it was in a good or bad way. It didn’t matter, though, because Ainsley was tired of hiding.
She wished she had hid a little more, however, when her mother made a surprise visit on her birthday, opening her dorm room door to find the social secretary of the College Democrats, also a member of Spectrum, enthusiastically attempting to, er, change Ainsley’s political leanings.
Less than 10 minutes later, clothes haphazardly reacquired and visitor hastily let out, Ainsley perched on the edge of her bed while her tearful mother paced the room.
"Mama," Ainsley finally broke the awkward silence, "I’m still the same person. I still want the same things, and this doesn’t change anything."
Ainsley’s mother stopped pacing and proceeded to stare at the floor.
"No. This changes everything. You’ll understand that someday." She raised her head and met her daughter’s eyes. "You cannot let anyone know. Not if you want to have a normal life, and especially not if you want to go into politics."
"But Mama, I just have to explain to people that this is just one part of me. The Republican party is all about individual freedoms and personal autonomy, you know that. It doesn’t matter what I do in my bedroom - " Her mother’s eyes closed tightly, and she held up a hand to stop Ainsley’s rapid words.
"Ainsley. You will ruin your career, and you will ruin your father’s and my reputation. You will not explain this to anyone." Ainsley’s mother did not look at her before leaving the room and closing the door behind her.
Ainsley remained stock-still on the edge of her bed, staring at the fire escape map on the back of her door. "Happy birthday to me," she whispered.
Age 23
Ainsley did not include a statement of diversity with her law school applications, partly because after four years at Smith, she felt more diverse for being conservative than for being gay and that was unlikely to be true at law school. And anyway, she had taken her mother’s advice, or threat, to heart. It was impossible to unring the bell of her coming out at Smith, but plenty of girls seemed to cease being lesbians as soon as they’d flipped the tassels on their graduation caps, so Ainsley followed suit. Or at least she let everyone think she did.
It’s not like she had time for dating during her first year at Harvard Law, anyway. Her time was completely consumed by studying, Federalist Society, studying, writing letters to one or two close friends from Smith who knew that Ainsley wasn’t really a Lesbian Until Graduation, studying, and the Drama Society’s half-drunken production of The Mikado.
At the after-party for The Mikado, after everyone had consumed the quantity of alcohol only manageable by overstressed, underslept law students, the boy who had played Nanki-Poo ended up dancing shirtless on top of a kitchen table to the strains of "It’s Raining Men." Ainsley watched from the couch, where she’d collapsed with a few of her friends who hadn’t been in the show.
Kevin, who had come to see the show because he knew Ainsley from Fed Soc and probably wanted to sleep with her, snickered and pointed. "Can you believe that faggot? How could he think anyone would take him seriously as a lawyer? No wonder he played a character with a name like Nanki-Poo!"
Until that moment, Ainsley had been of the opinion that she would not be able to move for the rest of the night. At Kevin’s words, however, she mustered the sobriety to sit up and face him. "Excuse me, I don’t think I heard correctly. Surely you didn’t just use an extremely offensive term to refer to our classmate and future colleague."
Kevin laughed. "Whose future colleague? I won’t be working anywhere that hires people like that."
Ainsley stood, mostly masking her wobbliness. "Well, I’ll certainly do my best not to work somewhere that hires people who will say things like that about someone who never did anything to them. Which, in case my meaning was unclear, includes you."
"My calling him a faggot doesn’t do anything to you, Ainsley, so why are you getting all worked up about it? Who cares if I call some homo what he is?"
"I care, Kevin, and you should too. But I’m beginning to figure out that if you don’t, I won’t be able to explain it to you, so I won’t waste my breath." Ainsley turned on her heel and left the party, only stumbling a little on her way out.
Age 29
Ainsley had never thought she’d be working in the White House before she turned 30. Then again, she’d never thought she’d be working in a Democratic White House at all, so it just went to show.
She loved her job. Loved it more than any other she’d had - more than research, more than working at a law firm, even more than clerking for a Supreme Court justice. She could say something to Sam and if she were convincing enough, he would take her ideas and send them to the President of the United States. When Ainsley was younger, she had dreamt of someday being the president, but she had come to agree with her mother to a certain extent at least - the Republican party would never nominate a lesbian, and she didn’t know if she could maintain either a façade of straightness or a policy of abstinence well enough to survive that kind of public scrutiny.
So she sat in the steam pipe trunk distribution venue, surrounded by Gilbert and Sullivan posters and some of the most brilliant minds in the country, and came up with ideas that the president might use. It was a great job.
On one particular afternoon, Ainsley was reading the legislative history of a bill that had just been passed through Congress - a bill defining marriage as only between a man and a woman. It was something akin to morbid curiosity that kept her staring at the things that people she supported, wrote positive articles about, even voted for had to say about her.
"Hey, do you have that thing for me yet?" Sam’s voice broke Ainsley’s concentration, and she looked up to see him standing in the doorway.
"Oh, yeah, here you go." She shuffled a few pages on her desk, stapled the ones she wanted, and half-rose from her chair to hand them to Sam. "How was Portland?"
"It rained. CJ was grouchy. The president was distracted. Oh, but we might have a plan to get more public school teachers."
"Uh-oh, that sounds like a tax raise to me." Ainsley raised an eyebrow at him.
"We still are not Republicans, Ainsley, much as you’d like to convert us. We can argue about it later, okay?" Off her nod, Sam turned to leave.
"Hey Sam?"
"Yeah?" He didn’t entirely turn to face her.
"Uh - is the President going to sign the marriage bill?" Ainsley hoped it sounded like a casual question.
Now Sam did turn around. "Oh no, you’re not going to start in on THAT, are you? I will never understand how you Republicans can be all for personal freedoms when it comes to carrying deadly weapons, but as soon as it comes to a person’s choice of whom to marry, you turn around and try to regulate it. How does legislating love, for crying out loud, qualify as small government? Seriously, Ainsley. Don’t start."
Ainsley just looked at him. "Well. Apparently I don’t need to."
Sam looked relieved. "Good. I’ll see you later, then." He started to leave.
"Sam?"
"…What?"
"Is he going to sign it?"
Sam turned from the door again, a different look on his face this time. "No. He’s going to put it away."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
She nodded. He turned to leave.
"Sam?"
"What?"
"For the record, being a Republican does not necessarily mean I automatically and wholeheartedly agree with everything everyone in the party does or says. I am not, for the record, a sheep."
Sam looked back at her again. "I know."
"Good."
"Josh spent most of yesterday arguing with Congressman Skinner about that bill. Josh still can’t get his head around Skinner being gay and a Republican." Sam was still looking at her. Ainsley studied a random paper on her desk.
"Isn’t it kind of weird to be a gay Republican? I wonder how he managed to get elected." She didn’t look up.
Sam said, "Yeah," and finally left.
Age 33
Ainsley didn’t leave the White House because she got tired of her job. She left because she got tired of being the token Republican, the one who got dragged back from vacation and promoted when the administration needed good bipartisan PR. She found it ironic, somehow, that Sam had no qualms about advancing her status like that purely because she was a Republican when she couldn’t imagine he’d be comfortable with exploiting the administration’s only gay employee to boost the government’s image. She also found it ironic that she, the Republican, was the administration’s only gay employee - or at least the only one she knew.
Ainsley’s new job, working as an associate professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, was calm and quiet and out of the national spotlight. She taught first-year law students how to write legal briefs and led a seminar on legislation. It was a relief not to have brilliant people constantly objecting to her opinions - until it got boring.
She wrote an article, which got published in the Columbia Law Review, on the current state of gun control legislation, and she half-expected an irate call or email from Sam. It never came. She contributed to a constitutional law casebook, writing the section about Lawrence v. Texas and its aftermath, wondering if anyone would notice her sudden shift to a not-so-Republican topic. Six months after the casebook’s publication, she wasn’t sure anyone even noticed which part she’d written. She considered writing a tell-all book about her time in the Bartlet White House, just to get some attention, but that wasn’t her style.
Sometimes Ainsley still watched the press briefings, when she didn’t have to be in the classroom. She saw the debacle that ensued when CJ stopped being the one to handle the reporters, and she started following the news coverage of the White House staff. She even set up Google Alerts. It was something to do.
Thus, it was a direct result of her boredom that Ainsley found out about the rumors that CJ was a lesbian. The most powerful lesbian in the world, actually. Ainsley was pretty sure, from the moment she read the headline, that the article was completely making things up, and she waited for the inevitable emphatic denial from the White House. Even liberals would have trouble getting away with a gay Chief of Staff.
The denial never came. When Ainsley read the next day’s headlines, she couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across her face. CJ’s statement - or lack thereof - was exactly what she had been telling her mother all those years ago. It didn’t matter whether CJ, or anyone, was gay. It was no one’s business, because CJ could run the West Wing just as well regardless of her sexual preference.
That, of course, was not the attitude taken by the conservative bloggers Ainsley read. To them, CJ’s refusal to confirm or deny was an admission of truth, which meant that everything she had ever done in her illustrious career could be called into question as part of some gay agenda. Which, obviously, was bullshit.
So Ainsley wrote an article. It ran a couple of days later as an op-ed in the Washington Post, and Ainsley braced herself for a call from her father or from Sam, depending on who read the newspaper first that morning.
Her cell didn’t ring. Neither did her office phone. At noon, she checked the Post’s website, wondering if they’d decided not to run it.
In fact, the Post had spelled her name wrong in the byline. Both first and last. Ainsley wasn’t sure if she would have recognized it, had she not known she’d written the words on the page.
She sighed and twisted a lock of hair around her finger. At least someone had said what she needed to say, even if no one knew it was her.
Age 35
Ainsley’s new West Wing office was nowhere near the steam pipe trunk distribution venue and she was no longer working for the Bartlet administration, but she was still the most conservative person in the building and there was still a Pirates of Penzance poster on her wall.
And, apparently, Sam Seaborn still poked his head into her office without warning.
"Hi, Sam. Don’t I have some sort of guard on this door now?" She would have to have a talk with Maggie, her new secretary. The White House Counsel merited an actual secretary.
"Oh, she just told me to come on in - she said you didn’t have any meetings scheduled for your first morning." Sam looked almost contrite.
"Well, all right - but this doesn’t need to become a habit. I can still kick your ass on national television, you know." Ainsley smirked, letting him know she was kidding. Mostly.
"I have no doubt. I just came by to say that the president would like to meet with you later this morning - how’s eleven a.m.?"
The president wanted to meet with her. "Eleven will be fine." Ainsley was pretty sure anything would have been fine.
"Okay, I’ll tell Ronna." Sam ducked back out, and Ainsley was momentarily perplexed until she remembered that Ronna was the president’s secretary now.
Two hours later, at a quarter to eleven, Ainsley stood outside the Oval Office. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to walking through those double doors and across the huge expanse of carpet, but it was her job now. She was responsible for legal advice to the President of the United States.
"You ready?" A cheerful voice came from the desk to her left. Ainsley wondered if she looked as incongruously young to Ronna as Ronna did to her. She thought she probably did.
"Oh, as ready as I’ll ever be." Ainsley smiled, a bit nervously, and Ronna grinned back.
"This is your first day, right?" Santos had been in office for nearly a week before Ainsley had received the call from Josh, asking her to serve as White House Counsel. It took all of two days for her to abruptly quit her brand-new job at the Harriman Institute and move all of her things into the much larger and more lavish office in the West Wing.
"It’s my second first day. This one’s a little different, though - unless something untoward happens in the next five minutes, I probably won’t be meeting the president in my bathrobe this time." Ronna looked mildly bewildered. Ainsley made a 'never mind' gesture, not particularly wanting to relive the memory of her first encounter with President Bartlet.
"Ainsley? Do you have a pen name?" Ainsley hadn’t expected that question, and she looked at Ronna quizzically.
"I mean, maybe one that’s remarkably close to your real name but a couple of letters off?"
Ainsley still wasn’t sure what Ronna was talking about. "Usually only when someone spells my name wrong...oh." And the lightbulb clicked on.
"I read your article. About CJ." And Ainsley suddenly remembered that, according to Josh’s big mouth, she was also no longer the only lesbian in the administration.
"I think you’re the only person who did. Or at least the only one with the ability to switch letters around in your head."
"I thought it was great. You made some really excellent points, and it was really brave of you to - " Ronna’s phone beeped and she held up one finger to Ainsley while she picked up the receiver. Ainsley took the moment to watch Ronna, her short dark hair impossibly neat and her eyes sparkling. Ainsley felt a sudden desire to be the cause of the excitement in those eyes. Surprised at herself, she took a step back.
"Yes, sir." Replacing the receiver, Ronna nodded to Ainsley. "You can go in now."
"Thanks, Ronna," Ainsley paused, thinking for a moment. "Do you want to get a drink tonight? I hear the bartender at a place down the street makes a mean Pink Squirrel."
Ronna beamed. "I don’t even know what a Pink Squirrel is, but I’d love to."
"Great. I better go in now." Ainsley gestured towards the door and turned to walk through it. As she turned the handle, a smile flashed across her face. She was entering the Oval Office to advise the president, and she had a date.
And at least for now, Ainsley didn’t have to explain herself to anyone.
Author: llyfrgell
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing/characters: Ainsley Hayes, minor Ainsley/OFC and Ainsley/surprise
Rating: PG for hints of sexual activity
Disclaimer: Fanfiction is a transformative use and falls under the fair use clause of the Copyright Act.
Prompt: 846. The West Wing: Ainsley Hayes. Ainsley must reconcile her sexual orientation with her choice to be an active part of the Republican party.
Summary: Ainsley has been a Republican all her life, and she doesn't entirely understand why her being a lesbian is supposed to be relevant.
Author's Notes: ~3000 words, written May/June 2008 for lgbtfest. Spoilers through season 7. For timeline purposes, I set Ainsley's birthday in 1971. I can't apologize enough for the tardiness of this fic - I've never missed a ficathon deadline before, but law school finals conspired against me.
Age 18
Smith College was a well-respected educational institution with an excellent reputation and many successful graduates. This is what Ainsley told her mother when she received her acceptance letter.
Smith College was a well-known female space where sleeping with other women might as well have been a requirement for graduation. This is what Ainsley’s student host told her at Admitted Students Day.
Ainsley already knew both of those facts, and to her, it sounded perfect. Now all she had to do was avoid letting her mother know that she knew about the latter while also convincing her fellow students that she, a lifelong Republican from North Carolina, was just as much there for the latter reason as they were. If the skeptical looks she had received from both her mother and her student host were any indication, she had her work cut out for her.
Because she had always believed in being proactive, Ainsley attended the first meeting of the College Republicans, which occurred exactly an hour before the first meeting of Spectrum. Both meetings opened with the kind of icebreaker game in which people had to share various interesting facts about themselves. Ainsley informed the College Republicans that she was a lesbian and the Spectrum members that she was a Republican. Both groups seemed to find these facts extremely interesting, though Ainsley couldn’t quite tell if it was in a good or bad way. It didn’t matter, though, because Ainsley was tired of hiding.
She wished she had hid a little more, however, when her mother made a surprise visit on her birthday, opening her dorm room door to find the social secretary of the College Democrats, also a member of Spectrum, enthusiastically attempting to, er, change Ainsley’s political leanings.
Less than 10 minutes later, clothes haphazardly reacquired and visitor hastily let out, Ainsley perched on the edge of her bed while her tearful mother paced the room.
"Mama," Ainsley finally broke the awkward silence, "I’m still the same person. I still want the same things, and this doesn’t change anything."
Ainsley’s mother stopped pacing and proceeded to stare at the floor.
"No. This changes everything. You’ll understand that someday." She raised her head and met her daughter’s eyes. "You cannot let anyone know. Not if you want to have a normal life, and especially not if you want to go into politics."
"But Mama, I just have to explain to people that this is just one part of me. The Republican party is all about individual freedoms and personal autonomy, you know that. It doesn’t matter what I do in my bedroom - " Her mother’s eyes closed tightly, and she held up a hand to stop Ainsley’s rapid words.
"Ainsley. You will ruin your career, and you will ruin your father’s and my reputation. You will not explain this to anyone." Ainsley’s mother did not look at her before leaving the room and closing the door behind her.
Ainsley remained stock-still on the edge of her bed, staring at the fire escape map on the back of her door. "Happy birthday to me," she whispered.
Age 23
Ainsley did not include a statement of diversity with her law school applications, partly because after four years at Smith, she felt more diverse for being conservative than for being gay and that was unlikely to be true at law school. And anyway, she had taken her mother’s advice, or threat, to heart. It was impossible to unring the bell of her coming out at Smith, but plenty of girls seemed to cease being lesbians as soon as they’d flipped the tassels on their graduation caps, so Ainsley followed suit. Or at least she let everyone think she did.
It’s not like she had time for dating during her first year at Harvard Law, anyway. Her time was completely consumed by studying, Federalist Society, studying, writing letters to one or two close friends from Smith who knew that Ainsley wasn’t really a Lesbian Until Graduation, studying, and the Drama Society’s half-drunken production of The Mikado.
At the after-party for The Mikado, after everyone had consumed the quantity of alcohol only manageable by overstressed, underslept law students, the boy who had played Nanki-Poo ended up dancing shirtless on top of a kitchen table to the strains of "It’s Raining Men." Ainsley watched from the couch, where she’d collapsed with a few of her friends who hadn’t been in the show.
Kevin, who had come to see the show because he knew Ainsley from Fed Soc and probably wanted to sleep with her, snickered and pointed. "Can you believe that faggot? How could he think anyone would take him seriously as a lawyer? No wonder he played a character with a name like Nanki-Poo!"
Until that moment, Ainsley had been of the opinion that she would not be able to move for the rest of the night. At Kevin’s words, however, she mustered the sobriety to sit up and face him. "Excuse me, I don’t think I heard correctly. Surely you didn’t just use an extremely offensive term to refer to our classmate and future colleague."
Kevin laughed. "Whose future colleague? I won’t be working anywhere that hires people like that."
Ainsley stood, mostly masking her wobbliness. "Well, I’ll certainly do my best not to work somewhere that hires people who will say things like that about someone who never did anything to them. Which, in case my meaning was unclear, includes you."
"My calling him a faggot doesn’t do anything to you, Ainsley, so why are you getting all worked up about it? Who cares if I call some homo what he is?"
"I care, Kevin, and you should too. But I’m beginning to figure out that if you don’t, I won’t be able to explain it to you, so I won’t waste my breath." Ainsley turned on her heel and left the party, only stumbling a little on her way out.
Age 29
Ainsley had never thought she’d be working in the White House before she turned 30. Then again, she’d never thought she’d be working in a Democratic White House at all, so it just went to show.
She loved her job. Loved it more than any other she’d had - more than research, more than working at a law firm, even more than clerking for a Supreme Court justice. She could say something to Sam and if she were convincing enough, he would take her ideas and send them to the President of the United States. When Ainsley was younger, she had dreamt of someday being the president, but she had come to agree with her mother to a certain extent at least - the Republican party would never nominate a lesbian, and she didn’t know if she could maintain either a façade of straightness or a policy of abstinence well enough to survive that kind of public scrutiny.
So she sat in the steam pipe trunk distribution venue, surrounded by Gilbert and Sullivan posters and some of the most brilliant minds in the country, and came up with ideas that the president might use. It was a great job.
On one particular afternoon, Ainsley was reading the legislative history of a bill that had just been passed through Congress - a bill defining marriage as only between a man and a woman. It was something akin to morbid curiosity that kept her staring at the things that people she supported, wrote positive articles about, even voted for had to say about her.
"Hey, do you have that thing for me yet?" Sam’s voice broke Ainsley’s concentration, and she looked up to see him standing in the doorway.
"Oh, yeah, here you go." She shuffled a few pages on her desk, stapled the ones she wanted, and half-rose from her chair to hand them to Sam. "How was Portland?"
"It rained. CJ was grouchy. The president was distracted. Oh, but we might have a plan to get more public school teachers."
"Uh-oh, that sounds like a tax raise to me." Ainsley raised an eyebrow at him.
"We still are not Republicans, Ainsley, much as you’d like to convert us. We can argue about it later, okay?" Off her nod, Sam turned to leave.
"Hey Sam?"
"Yeah?" He didn’t entirely turn to face her.
"Uh - is the President going to sign the marriage bill?" Ainsley hoped it sounded like a casual question.
Now Sam did turn around. "Oh no, you’re not going to start in on THAT, are you? I will never understand how you Republicans can be all for personal freedoms when it comes to carrying deadly weapons, but as soon as it comes to a person’s choice of whom to marry, you turn around and try to regulate it. How does legislating love, for crying out loud, qualify as small government? Seriously, Ainsley. Don’t start."
Ainsley just looked at him. "Well. Apparently I don’t need to."
Sam looked relieved. "Good. I’ll see you later, then." He started to leave.
"Sam?"
"…What?"
"Is he going to sign it?"
Sam turned from the door again, a different look on his face this time. "No. He’s going to put it away."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
She nodded. He turned to leave.
"Sam?"
"What?"
"For the record, being a Republican does not necessarily mean I automatically and wholeheartedly agree with everything everyone in the party does or says. I am not, for the record, a sheep."
Sam looked back at her again. "I know."
"Good."
"Josh spent most of yesterday arguing with Congressman Skinner about that bill. Josh still can’t get his head around Skinner being gay and a Republican." Sam was still looking at her. Ainsley studied a random paper on her desk.
"Isn’t it kind of weird to be a gay Republican? I wonder how he managed to get elected." She didn’t look up.
Sam said, "Yeah," and finally left.
Age 33
Ainsley didn’t leave the White House because she got tired of her job. She left because she got tired of being the token Republican, the one who got dragged back from vacation and promoted when the administration needed good bipartisan PR. She found it ironic, somehow, that Sam had no qualms about advancing her status like that purely because she was a Republican when she couldn’t imagine he’d be comfortable with exploiting the administration’s only gay employee to boost the government’s image. She also found it ironic that she, the Republican, was the administration’s only gay employee - or at least the only one she knew.
Ainsley’s new job, working as an associate professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, was calm and quiet and out of the national spotlight. She taught first-year law students how to write legal briefs and led a seminar on legislation. It was a relief not to have brilliant people constantly objecting to her opinions - until it got boring.
She wrote an article, which got published in the Columbia Law Review, on the current state of gun control legislation, and she half-expected an irate call or email from Sam. It never came. She contributed to a constitutional law casebook, writing the section about Lawrence v. Texas and its aftermath, wondering if anyone would notice her sudden shift to a not-so-Republican topic. Six months after the casebook’s publication, she wasn’t sure anyone even noticed which part she’d written. She considered writing a tell-all book about her time in the Bartlet White House, just to get some attention, but that wasn’t her style.
Sometimes Ainsley still watched the press briefings, when she didn’t have to be in the classroom. She saw the debacle that ensued when CJ stopped being the one to handle the reporters, and she started following the news coverage of the White House staff. She even set up Google Alerts. It was something to do.
Thus, it was a direct result of her boredom that Ainsley found out about the rumors that CJ was a lesbian. The most powerful lesbian in the world, actually. Ainsley was pretty sure, from the moment she read the headline, that the article was completely making things up, and she waited for the inevitable emphatic denial from the White House. Even liberals would have trouble getting away with a gay Chief of Staff.
The denial never came. When Ainsley read the next day’s headlines, she couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across her face. CJ’s statement - or lack thereof - was exactly what she had been telling her mother all those years ago. It didn’t matter whether CJ, or anyone, was gay. It was no one’s business, because CJ could run the West Wing just as well regardless of her sexual preference.
That, of course, was not the attitude taken by the conservative bloggers Ainsley read. To them, CJ’s refusal to confirm or deny was an admission of truth, which meant that everything she had ever done in her illustrious career could be called into question as part of some gay agenda. Which, obviously, was bullshit.
So Ainsley wrote an article. It ran a couple of days later as an op-ed in the Washington Post, and Ainsley braced herself for a call from her father or from Sam, depending on who read the newspaper first that morning.
Her cell didn’t ring. Neither did her office phone. At noon, she checked the Post’s website, wondering if they’d decided not to run it.
In fact, the Post had spelled her name wrong in the byline. Both first and last. Ainsley wasn’t sure if she would have recognized it, had she not known she’d written the words on the page.
She sighed and twisted a lock of hair around her finger. At least someone had said what she needed to say, even if no one knew it was her.
Age 35
Ainsley’s new West Wing office was nowhere near the steam pipe trunk distribution venue and she was no longer working for the Bartlet administration, but she was still the most conservative person in the building and there was still a Pirates of Penzance poster on her wall.
And, apparently, Sam Seaborn still poked his head into her office without warning.
"Hi, Sam. Don’t I have some sort of guard on this door now?" She would have to have a talk with Maggie, her new secretary. The White House Counsel merited an actual secretary.
"Oh, she just told me to come on in - she said you didn’t have any meetings scheduled for your first morning." Sam looked almost contrite.
"Well, all right - but this doesn’t need to become a habit. I can still kick your ass on national television, you know." Ainsley smirked, letting him know she was kidding. Mostly.
"I have no doubt. I just came by to say that the president would like to meet with you later this morning - how’s eleven a.m.?"
The president wanted to meet with her. "Eleven will be fine." Ainsley was pretty sure anything would have been fine.
"Okay, I’ll tell Ronna." Sam ducked back out, and Ainsley was momentarily perplexed until she remembered that Ronna was the president’s secretary now.
Two hours later, at a quarter to eleven, Ainsley stood outside the Oval Office. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to walking through those double doors and across the huge expanse of carpet, but it was her job now. She was responsible for legal advice to the President of the United States.
"You ready?" A cheerful voice came from the desk to her left. Ainsley wondered if she looked as incongruously young to Ronna as Ronna did to her. She thought she probably did.
"Oh, as ready as I’ll ever be." Ainsley smiled, a bit nervously, and Ronna grinned back.
"This is your first day, right?" Santos had been in office for nearly a week before Ainsley had received the call from Josh, asking her to serve as White House Counsel. It took all of two days for her to abruptly quit her brand-new job at the Harriman Institute and move all of her things into the much larger and more lavish office in the West Wing.
"It’s my second first day. This one’s a little different, though - unless something untoward happens in the next five minutes, I probably won’t be meeting the president in my bathrobe this time." Ronna looked mildly bewildered. Ainsley made a 'never mind' gesture, not particularly wanting to relive the memory of her first encounter with President Bartlet.
"Ainsley? Do you have a pen name?" Ainsley hadn’t expected that question, and she looked at Ronna quizzically.
"I mean, maybe one that’s remarkably close to your real name but a couple of letters off?"
Ainsley still wasn’t sure what Ronna was talking about. "Usually only when someone spells my name wrong...oh." And the lightbulb clicked on.
"I read your article. About CJ." And Ainsley suddenly remembered that, according to Josh’s big mouth, she was also no longer the only lesbian in the administration.
"I think you’re the only person who did. Or at least the only one with the ability to switch letters around in your head."
"I thought it was great. You made some really excellent points, and it was really brave of you to - " Ronna’s phone beeped and she held up one finger to Ainsley while she picked up the receiver. Ainsley took the moment to watch Ronna, her short dark hair impossibly neat and her eyes sparkling. Ainsley felt a sudden desire to be the cause of the excitement in those eyes. Surprised at herself, she took a step back.
"Yes, sir." Replacing the receiver, Ronna nodded to Ainsley. "You can go in now."
"Thanks, Ronna," Ainsley paused, thinking for a moment. "Do you want to get a drink tonight? I hear the bartender at a place down the street makes a mean Pink Squirrel."
Ronna beamed. "I don’t even know what a Pink Squirrel is, but I’d love to."
"Great. I better go in now." Ainsley gestured towards the door and turned to walk through it. As she turned the handle, a smile flashed across her face. She was entering the Oval Office to advise the president, and she had a date.
And at least for now, Ainsley didn’t have to explain herself to anyone.