In the Weeds

by M. L. Buchman

  Rex hadn’t liked the idea of traveling with the President. It had looked like the whole plan was going to go awry on that point alone until Dilya trotted out of the tunnel that connected the White House East Wing basement to the Treasury Building garage. She’d had Zackie and a day pack, and without even hinting that she hadn’t been invited on the trip to Ottawa, she strode up to Rex. She’d given him a good head rub, taken the leash from the President’s hand, and done exactly as Colby had taught her—leave no doubt about who was in control.

  “C’mon, Rex. Time to go.” She’d climbed into the Beast limousine and, after one bewildered glance back at Colby, Rex had followed her in and lain down on the floor. Zackie was ecstatic—even by Sheltie standards—to have her big buddy Rex along for the ride.

  The President had merely shrugged at Dilya’s abrupt appearance, shaken Colby’s hand, and said, “Good luck, Mr. President.” That was fifteen minutes ago.

  Now, it was just him and Ivy coming down the front lawn. The press had been told that there’d be no statement or time for questions on the South Lawn. The fourteen reporters lucky enough to get a seat on Air Force One were following the fake Motorcade. Everyone else had left an hour ago—taking vans out to Anacostia to board a greenside MV-22. Air Force One would reach Ottawa in under an hour, the slower Osprey needed almost two.

  So there were only a few stringers left at the White House. None had bothered to come out for a photo of the Marine and the imposter walking down the lawn. Even if they didn’t know that’s what was going on.

  He saluted the Marine standing at attention by the helo’s door. Not McShea—he’d gone ahead with the other helos shifted up to Ottawa for transportation to the meeting. The Marine saluted back, then did a sharp doubletake.

  “Carry on, Sergeant. It’s all with good reason.”

  The Marine glanced at Ivy. No, he looked at Ivy like she was a side of meat he wanted to take home. The man was too damn handsome for his own good and knew it.

  “Stow it, Sergeant Mathieson,” Ivy said in a tone that implied things Colby didn’t want to be thinking about Ivy and other men.

  “If you say so, ma’am.” He actually gave her a leer. If he really was President, Colby knew who his next appointment to Nome, Alaska, would be.

  Colby clambered aboard, forgetting about the hat. He almost knocked it off, revealing his hair, which he wore much shorter than the President. He made a point of avoiding the President’s chair until Ivy grabbed his arm and shoved him into it. She sat in the armchair directly across from his.

  When the Marine sergeant boarded after folding away the stairs, he offered a glare that could scorch Colby’s image irreparably into the fabric of the seat. Apparently all Marine crew chiefs were very protective of the President’s seat. With this asshole, he was fine ignoring the man.

  “It’s for security, Sergeant. The President is traveling by another route.” Ivy’s reassurances did little to assuage the man.

  “At least I have you here to protect me,” Colby told her once the crew chief turned to other duties.

  “Tell me why I should bother,” Ivy made a point of yawning as if bored, but it carried longer than fit the joke. They’d slept through the afternoon and evening, but somewhat less during the night after they eaten most of a large pizza.

  “Because you already can’t live without me,” he teased.

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “Well, could be,” he had to admit as they finally lifted off the South Lawn.

  Ivy twitched and collapsed deeper in the seat opposite him.

  “Ivy,” he signaled for her to lean in close, as close as the seatbelts allowed.

  She watched him the way cats watched Rex—with a great sense of caution and some alarm. Rex hadn’t even sniffed at one since a long ago feline had tried to quarter and section his nose with a swipe of claws.

  And that was when Colby knew. Dad had always said that Mom had simply taken his heart and run away with it after their first date. He didn’t know if a swim in the Potomac, a space launch in Florida, and tackling a major security problem was the kind of thing Dad had meant. But Colby understood what he’d meant.

  After his parents, the number of people on the planet he cared about as much as he cared about Ivy Hanson totaled precisely zero. Her first homecoming was his first memory. He remembered her dogging his and Reggie’s footsteps, but he also remembered an awful lot of good moments.

  She was a voracious reader. With her Marine Corps mom often overseas and her father running a restaurant and a household, Colby was the one she came to when she didn’t understand a story. He’d been the one stuck trying to explain the cruelty of twelve-year-old boys to her.

  If she’d been a remarkable kid, she was an astonishing woman. A woman he hadn’t known he was waiting for.

  It was as if the focus shifted as they lifted up and over the National Mall. Maybe it was sitting in the President’s chair, but he could see more clearly now. He’d climbed up out of the weeds and, looking back, could see that he and Ivy had a common path that went back a long way. And it was so easy to imagine what that path looked like going forward as well—without the duckweed.

  Ivy finally leaned closer as the helicopter’s rotors, finally up to speed, lifted them off the South Lawn. The seat belts let them lean just close enough to whisper despite the pounding rotors.

  “What?” Her caution ran even deeper than his.

  “Could be that I can’t live without you. Maybe. Maybe not. But I do know one thing.” Did she remember all of the good times as well as all the teasing?

  “What’s that, Thompson?”

  “I have no idea how I lived without you this long.” Not what he’d been intending to say. He’d started out to say something about how he couldn’t live without the awesome sex. But it had shifted, morphed by the President’s chair, into some strange, impossible truth.

  “Get a grip, Thompson.” Ivy’s expression definitely agreed about the strange and impossible.

  For the first time in his life, it felt as if he actually had one. “I’ve got a grip. Trying to live up to your standards, you’ve already made me a better man than I ever set out to be, Ivy. And while I do love your body, it’s nothing compared to how I feel about you.”

  “Whoa!” Her eyes went as saucer wide as the day she’d asked him where babies came from and hadn’t let him escape answering. He could still feel the heat in his cheeks from that long-ago conversation. Or maybe it was the heat from what he’d just said.

  “Whoa!” Colby said himself and flopped back in the President’s chair. “I didn’t just say what I think I just said. Did I?”

  “Not unless I heard what I didn’t just hear. Or didn’t hear what I just heard. Or…” She took a slow, deep breath before asking softly. “Did you just say you…loved me?” She mouthed the last two words silently as if even the sound of them had been scared away.

  “Uh,” Colby looked around the helo, but he couldn’t even pet Rex as a distraction because Rex was in the Beast with the real President.

  Love was a word for moms and dads. It was a word for a man’s best friend—at least of the four-footed kind, not for Reggie. But was it a word for someone he’d known his whole life? And for her whole life?

  He didn’t think so. Yet maybe it was.

  “Colby?” He could hear the strain in her voice.

  He tried to look away. He really wanted to watch the approach to Andrews Air Force Base. He wanted to look down on Air Force One from the sky.

  But he couldn’t look away from her, from Ivy.

  There was the right question. Was love a word for describing Ivy Hanson?

  “Yes.”

  “Colby, what did you just say?”

  “Yes.” He’d just said yes.

  “What are you saying yes to, that I just said your name?”

  “Yes,” he teased her, which wasn’t at all what he’d meant.

  She scowled at him as the wheels settled on
the pavement close beside the shining bulk of Air Force One. They taxied forward, entering the massive hangar that could hold all four of the big executive jets: the identical pair of 747s used for Air Force One, and the pair of 757s used for Air Force Two duties for the Vice President or when the First Lady traveled alone. The shadows seemed to bring them even closer.

  Sergeant Mathieson lowered the forward door and descended to stand at his station as the engines wound down to silence. The helo pilots were busy with their logbooks. He and Ivy were alone for just a moment.

  “And yes, I said what I said.”

  “Which was?” How typical of Ivy to not let him off the hook.

  “Yes, I can’t think of a better word to describe how I feel about you.” He tugged on the President’s cowboy hat and clambered out of the Chair of Truth before something else slipped out, like how easy it was to imagine spending the rest of his life with her.

  “Typical, Colby,” she muttered to herself as she descended the stairs behind him. “Can’t even say the word.”

  He decided against pointing out that she hadn’t said “the word” either.

  Ivy was in a bad reentry burn. Her heat shield—the shield that kept men away from meaning too much to her—was badly cracked and burning away. Would it last long enough for her to survive whatever this newest game of Colby’s was?

  The Motorcade raced into the hangar and stopped on the back side of the helicopter, out of everyone’s view. When the President emerged, Colby handed over hat and sunglasses, then shrugged off his jacket and flipped it over his shoulder. Taking up Rex’s leash, Colby now looked much more like himself.

  He had looked important, even daunting in the President’s seat on Marine One. And so sure of himself. So…impressive. As impressive as the President in his own way. When had that happened?

  Never avoid the question! One of Drill Sergeant McKinnon’s Laws. If you’re asking it, there’s a reason. Be damn sure you figure out the answer…preferably before it kills you. And this one definitely possessed lethal qualities—like death and destruction to her sanity.

  “Okay,” she muttered to herself as she followed Colby and the President out of the hangar. “Do I love Colby Thompson?”

  “Duh!” Dilya said from close beside her. “Dumb question.”

  “Why is it dumb?” Even with Zackie in tow, the girl had a serious stealth mode.

  “He isn’t just amazing. He’s amazingly amazing.”

  Ivy couldn’t believe that the kid was quoting Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at her about being in love.

  “It isn’t possible that I love him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s like a big brother to me. Maybe even more than my own brother.”

  “But you had sex with him. You told me that.”

  The President headed for Air Force One’s forward stairs—the entry for the President, special guests, and senior staff—to greet the press and then climb aboard. Colby led them toward the rear stairs that had lowered from the center of the tail section for everyone else to use.

  “I did.” Not that she was comfortable discussing her sex life with a teenager—though she didn’t seem to have much choice at the moment.

  “Was it good sex?”

  Ivy eyed Dilya, but the teen didn’t blink. Not hiding behind any facade at the moment, Dilya was daunting as well.

  “It was amazing sex,” Ivy did her Marine Corps best to answer honestly.

  Dilya sighed happily. “I knew it. I just knew it. That doesn’t sound like you’re thinking of him as a brother very much.”

  She wasn’t at all, was she. Meaning that had been a lame excuse.

  Never use an excuse. They just hide the answers.

  She wished McKinnon could have been a little less helpful. Then maybe she could have avoided all of this.

  But she hadn’t.

  Maybe if she’d gone to space as Colby suggested. Or left for space right now…

  But she didn’t want to avoid Colby. Didn’t want to miss out on all they could have shared.

  Did she love the boy who had let her weep out her first-ever fifteen-year-old heartbreak on his shoulder? Did she love the man who kept trying to convince her that it was never too late to pursue her real dream of space? Did she love the man who saw past the uniform? Colby saw her. He was incapable of seeing her any other way because he knew her too well.

  “You know what true love is?” Dilya asked without a hint of teenage innocence.

  “Uh… Why don’t you tell me? Then I’ll see if I agree.”

  “First Lady Anne Darlington-Thomas told me it was two things. First, you can’t imagine not living your life beside someone. She said that test worked for both men and women. But she said women were lucky, because they had an even better measure.”

  “What’s that?” Ivy climbed the stairs into the back of Air Force One. Thankfully Rex had pulled Colby up well ahead.

  “Can you imagine giving birth to any man’s child other than his?”

  Ivy didn’t need to think about it for a second. Not an instant. She’d give anything to be able to hold Colby’s child in her arms. Dilya was right; it was the gut punch question when the answer couldn’t be denied. But could she stand to live with him for all the years to come? That was a much harder question.

  Ivy sat beside Colby in the Secret Service section at the tail of the airplane. Dilya used her First Dog privileges to head forward as if she hadn’t just dropped a ticking time bomb in Ivy’s psyche.

  Colby didn’t even seem to notice as he slid his fingers through hers and took hold of her hand. It was so natural.

  She was so screwed.

  15

  One hour to Ottawa. One hour in which not a single word had passed between them. Colby was cool with that.

  Ivy had asked for no more impossible confessions—thank God. Nor had she offered any of her own. But it was clear what she was thinking by the way she fell so quietly asleep on his shoulder, never breaking their handhold.

  He could do this all day, every day.

  And apparently he was comfortable with it—as the impact of landing startled him awake with his cheek resting on her hair.

  Their fingers were still slipped together.

  And Harvey Lieber was glaring down at them.

  “You two think this is going to work.” He made it a demand rather than a question.

  Colby looked at Ivy. Was it going to work? He didn’t know. But he knew he’d be an idiot if he didn’t try.

  Except why was Lieber asking about his relationship with…

  Oh. He wasn’t. He was asking about the HMX-1 helicopters.

  “Nothing is ever a hundred percent certain,” Ivy stated as if she was quoting someone.

  Harvey harrumphed.

  Colby could feel his pain. From Ottawa’s Macdonald-Cartier International Airport to Harrington Lake—the Canadian PM’s retreat—was forty kilometers through the very heart of Ottawa city past a million people along unfamiliar roads and bridges. Or an eight-minute flight on an HMX-1 aircraft out over sparse suburbs. Less exposure in time. Far more hazardous if attacked.

  “Okay, here’s how we’re going to play it.” And he began to explain. Colby could only groan.

  Air Force One parked at the south end of Runway 32, well away from any of the passenger or cargo handling areas.

  Two large hangars faced the area where Air Force One, several helicopters, and the backup Presidential Motorcade had all been parked. Between the hangars, a barracks building that would have housed the pilots and mechanics had been appropriated as an operations center. A lone, bright orange helicopter was parked off to the side by a building with a medical transport sign.

  “It’s an old QRA,” a Canadian security agent informed her before continuing his patrol.

  “A what?” Colby—again clothed as the President—whispered his question in her ear as they crossed to one of the HMX White Hawks that had been moved up the previous night. The President, wear
ing a Secret Service vest and leading Rex, along with Dilya and Zackie, headed toward one of the backup helos.

  “Quick Reaction Area. It was where they staged emergency alert fighters at the peak of the Cold War in case of a Russian attack. They could be airborne over the capital in less than three minutes. Those square blocks we spotted out behind the hangars, those were probably missile silos, which I’d guess were nuclear armed back in the day.”

  The airport itself was strangely quiet, as there would be no takeoffs or landings while the American President was on-site.

  “Let’s get a move on, ‘Mr. President’.”

  “Lead the way, Major Hanson,” Colby said with all the graciousness of the President himself. Banter with Colby had always been fun—he was just as quick to hand it out as she was. Something she’d found far too rarely.

  The two of them climbed aboard one of the White Hawks. This time it was again Sergeant McShea waiting for them—the crew chief they’d gone swimming with in the Potomac four days ago.

  Four days? Four days! Ivy was clearly losing her mind and it was all Colby’s fault.

  “Um, Colby?” McShea asked.

  “Salute when addressing the President, Marine!” Colby snapped it out but backed it up with a big smile. Because of the last-minute change, she hadn’t thought to warn the Marine crew. Her area of responsibility.

  Tish was loading up in the Motorcade and had probably kept her Motorcade people in the loop just fine.

  McShea saluted automatically, probably Colby’s intent. Then he’d offered a slight, but very amused smile. “Welcome aboard HMX-1, sir!”

  “Carry on, Sergeant!” Then Colby banged his hat and head hard against the White Hawk’s low entry. It took everything she had not to laugh in his face as he collapsed into the President’s chair.

  “Ow!” Colby reached up to remove his hat.

  “Don’t! The press corps are watching. Look at me.” Ivy clambered over to the bench seat that would force Colby to look away from the open door. His face wasn’t that good a match for the President’s.