“Oh! Right you are.” Felt bad. Jeff was in the middle of his accidental term as President and he took the job seriously. He’d been working with his team for weeks on his speech, meaning I should have remembered. Then again, turning thirty-five had felt very milestone-ish for me and Paris was awesome, and generally forgetting stuff like this was very par for my course.
“Not a problem, baby, and don’t feel bad. Just eat with me and be my wife.”
“That I can do!”
We snuggled back into bed and had a lovely breakfast of eggs scrambled with lox, croissants, excellent coffee with cream, and fresh fruit. We talked about Paris and how great it had been to be there. We weren’t jet-lagged because we’d used gates—A-C technology that looked like airport metal detectors but were capable of moving you across the street or across the world in one step. They could move you to other planets, too, but we didn’t use them for that a lot and, now, we might not have to use them for that ever again.
“I’m glad we were able to celebrate your birthday before the address,” Jeff said as we finished up.
“Me too. And I’m sorry I forgot. Earth’s first manned long-distance spaceship with true warp capability is a huge deal. I’m so glad it’s happened during your Presidency.”
Jeff smiled. “Me, too, baby. It’s one of the few truly good things that’s happened that didn’t have something horrible attached to it.”
“Well, I think that most of the aliens now living in our solar system would disagree with you, but I know what you mean.”
Considered telling Jeff about my weird dream, but didn’t want to spoil his mood or slip up and mention my fantasizing about Ewan and Dennis. Besides, he’d just tell me that two chocolate mousses were too many and since I knew he was wrong and I was going to eat two, minimum, any time Chef made his mousse, what was the point of fighting?
We showered together, which was one of my favorite things to do, ever, because we had great sexytimes in the shower and today was no exception. Once climaxed to the max, we got dried off, clothed, and ready.
Well, Jeff got clothed. In, literally, what he wore every day. A-Cs were, at all their cores, conformists, particularly when it came to their attire. Which was basically black and white with as few other colors as possible, “none” being considered best. The men wore black suits, white shirts, black ties, and black dress shoes, while the women wore black slim skirts, white oxfords, and black pumps, day in and day out. All Armani. The A-Cs loved Armani as much as they loved black and white. Possibly more. It was hard to be sure.
As President, Jeff could have worn other colors and designers. But—other than the concession of a colorful tie worn as infrequently as possible and only under extreme duress—he did not. No matter what, no matter where, and no matter how much I begged, he did not. None of them did, other than a handful of Attire Rebels whose idea of going out on a fashion limb was to wear jeans and tennis shoes only if facing death. Most of the A-Cs preferred to face death in Armani, presumably so they’d head to the afterlife well-dressed.
And no one complained about this, other than me.
I, however, was the Leader of the Attire Rebels. Or I had been. Before I’d become the First Lady. Jeff’s side of the Presidential Closet was filled with the Armani Fatigues—mine had color. And jeans. And band t-shirts. And Converse. Sure, I had my own Armani Fatigues, but I didn’t wear them all the time.
Well, honestly, these days, I pretty much didn’t get to wear them at all. Because I was the FLOTUS and that meant that I had to have a “color” assigned as mine because D.C. was a freak town of the highest order. My color had been decreed iced blue. And, therefore, a huge portion of my closet was now iced blue. It was a pretty color but, as with black and white, the repetition of it got me down. In fact, I was at the point where getting to wear black and white was thrilling, a real “mix it up and keep the town guessing” kind of change. That my sartorial life had been reduced to this definitely made me bitter.
Despite this or, rather, because of it, I didn’t get to get clothed. However, I was definitely the one stuck getting ready. Jeff needed zero assistance to look amazing. I was not so fortunate. And, sadly, these days, if it was a big event—and this was—my getting ready took a really long time.
I sent a text to my Prep Team, put on my underwear—which I was shockingly allowed to do all by myself—covered up with my nice Presidential Robe, and went across the hallway with Jeff to check in on our children—Jamie, who had just turned six, Charlie, who was just over two, and our ward, Lizzie, who was now sixteen. They were all up and breakfasting in the family dining room on this floor of the White House Residence and, like me, they were all in their own White House robes.
When Jamie was born, everyone had said she looked just like me, in part because when A-Cs and humans mated the A-C genetics dominated the internal but the human genes were dominant for external. And the older she got, the more Jamie looked like me. As many put it, she was kind of my little clone.
Technically, Charlie should have looked just like me, too. Only he didn’t, at least not in the way Jamie did. By now he was looking more and more like Jeff. Not that this was a bad thing, but it did make me wonder. No one else seemed concerned about it, but my kids were already different, and being even more different could be good or could be dangerous.
Hybrid children were special, and mine were no exception. In fact, mine were exceptionally exceptional. Charlie was telekinetic, which was a real parenting challenge we rarely felt up to. Jamie was empathic, like her father, but there was more going on with her. She’d moved herself thousands of miles to get to me and Jeff and then stopped a spaceship from falling on us during Operation Destruction, and she’d done it with, as far as we could tell, her mind, which sort of indicated telekinetic abilities.
But, unlike Charlie, she didn’t spend her time lifting heavier and heavier things, and we weren’t sure that she could be classified as telekinetic. No, as near as we could tell, Jamie spent her time communing with the other hybrid children, and some who weren’t hybrids, via telepathy.
And, of course, there was also ACE. ACE was a superconsciousness I’d originally channeled into Paul Gower, who was a dream reader—which was a rare A-C talent—and who was also, at that time, the A-Cs Head of Recruitment. Gower was Jeff’s cousin, though not as close a cousin as Christopher White. But these days, Gower was something else—the A-C’s Supreme Pontifex, aka their top man religiously.