The President's Wife - Kathy Myme Page 0,3

her temples. “It appears that Keating, uh, accidentally discarded her name from the internship program. She’s meant to start today and I don’t have a place for her.” She shakes her head, making a face. “My apologies. I don’t mean to trouble you with this, sir.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble.” Mr Andrews smiles widely, all self-assured charm and relaxation. Confidence comes off him in waves so strongly that I’m sure I could bottle it if I tried. “Internship problems, huh? You know, I could probably solve that for you.”

I blink. “You could?”

He looks me in the eyes, amused. “How would you like to be my intern over in the West Wing?”

The West Wing. He’s offering me the chance to work in the West Wing. The place where all the action happens. Where the decisions of state are made. Where the President of the United States spends most of his time. God, this can’t be real.

But I haven’t come this far to back out now.

“I accept,” I blurt out as quickly as possible. “Thank you! Thank you so much, sir.”

“It won’t be easy,” he warns. “I’ll work you hard, Miss…”

“Waters. Veronica Waters.”

“Miss Veronica Waters,” he finishes. He says my name slowly and sweetly like I’m some sort of exotic novelty. “But if you choose to work with me, I’ll be damned if you don’t get to taste greatness.”

When he reaches out his hand, I grab it eagerly. I walked into this place today expecting to intern for some boss-who-has-a-boss-who-has-a-boss that is important. It’s not even 8:30AM yet and I’m about to step inside rooms where history is made.

I accept the deal.

David

I haven’t had sex in four hundred and eighty-nine days.

From the very start of my campaign for the presidency, my life has been planned down to the very second. And not one of those seconds has been allocated for fucking.

In part, it’s a media thing. Starting the campaign as a single man means any dates I went on which caught the media’s attention would be all over the latest gossip sites. And ‘interviews with the President’s lover’, or whatever trash they’d use for the headline, would not play well to my image.

That’s the price of becoming president. Four hundred, and eighty-nine fucking days without sex.

“Mr President, your eleven am is here.”

I look up, brought back from my daydreams to the real world. My five-minute coffee break is over, and now I have to get my head back in the game.

“Send them in,” I reply, leaning forward onto my desk.

My desk. The President’s desk. The actual Resolute desk in the Oval Office. It doesn’t feel entirely real yet, even though I’ve been here for months.

As my next meeting enters the room, I can’t help but wonder how many women have been bent over this desk and fucked. It would have to be a few... and a fair few more than the public would guess. In the days back when everyone didn’t carry a camera connected to the internet on them at all times, you could get away with anything if you were the president.

“Mr President, we’re going to have to be quick I’m afraid.” Miss Robertson is one of Mr Andrew’s people from the press office. “The press is expecting you in half an hour. Now, we’ve prepared a number of points for you, if y-”

I cut her off. “No, I have my own notes.” I am the President of the United States, not some illiterate fool who can’t prepare for a simple press conference. It bothers me sometimes, how much the White House staff try to do every aspect of my job for me.

I’ve been elected on my own merits and through my own hard work. I am perfectly capable of writing my own talking points.

Miss Robertson is giving me quite the glare.

“As I’ve told the Press Office before, I prefer to write my own points,” I say, the glare not fading.

She looks at me in silence a moment longer. I sigh. She is just doing her job. I don’t really need to get into this again right now.

“Okay, let’s compare notes then.” Compromise is key, which after having said a million times on the campaign trail, I still half-believe.

“Well,” Miss Robertson says. “We’ve reviewed the leaks in full and while they are damaging, I think we can mitigate that by…”

I take the sheet with the notes from her hand and tune out. Someone, unmentionably likely from my inner circle of staff, has leaked some costing documents from an infrastructure project I