Chapter 7/Epilogue

"Do you want to get out of here?"

Dan stared at Sophie, hesitating. Moments before, Amy had been next to him, that same almond shampoo wafting in his direction, in a scene very reminiscent of their first time together. Let's get out of here, she'd said back then. With Sophie, it was a question; with Amy, a command.

With Amy, there was never really a question, and Dan never really had a choice.

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The loss of control Amy felt when she looked into Dan's eyes that first day was enough to send her reeling into an irrational madness.

She was off her game. She wasn't thinking straight. She had even flirted with him, insofar as complimenting someone's professional skill was flirting, which for Amy it was. Then he revealed how clueless he was. Good, he's just another naïve plaything, Amy thought. I couldn't fall for that. But it's good enough for the night. And in sex, she could regain her advantage. Mostly. When Dan told her he was engaged, she was oddly relieved. It put a limit on him. It made him a scumbag cheater – another reason she would definitely never fall for him.

Amy had spent so many years being disappointed and abused and betrayed and not taken seriously by men. When she was a child, the boys made fun of her for being smart. Amy tried not to raise her hand so much. In high school, despite being indeed very smart, her government teacher saw no reason to allow Amy to participate in debates if she was going to be "aggressive" about it. Amy tried not to be aggressive. Her high school boyfriend had attempted to sexually assault her – except that Amy was told that this couldn't possibly be true. They were dating, after all, and you can't assault your own girlfriend. He was just "being a guy."

In college, she had two boyfriends. One of them she had largely ignored for her studies and internships. She found him having webcam sex, on her computer, with his ex. The next one she had been utterly devoted to, deferring to his interests, attending all his plays, sometimes even pulling all-nighters on her work so that it didn't interfere with their time together. While trying to put together a montage of his performances, she found a tape of him "performing" with his co-star.

She never blamed the women. She always thought that was unfair – why should someone else be responsible for your boyfriend's relationship?

And for the first time, she didn't blame herself either. She had spent her life being so many different versions of herself for other people, and it was never enough. She was done. From then on, she refused to be vulnerable, refused to stifle her ambition or intelligence for anyone else's comfort, refused to conform to society's expectations of her as a woman, and refused to give herself fully to anyone.

She knew it wasn't necessarily rational behavior to guard herself in the extreme way that she did. But the truth is, people aren't rational and motivations don't always make sense.

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A string of conquests Dan forgot, sometimes even while he was looking at them, had followed that first brunette, and by now Dan had slept his way through half of D.C. Not to mention screwing Marlie the night before she married his brother. (He hadn't actually initiated that, but he hadn't turned it down. Because he didn't care anymore. Because he was drunk. Because he'd seen a picture of Amy in Politico that day and he was stuck in Albany and fucking Marlie was the closest thing to killing a dog that he could do and still be considered sane.)

He had worked with Congresswoman Hayes for a while, making connections wherever he could, and learning the ins and outs. He cozied up to Carol Hallowes when he heard about the job opening in her mother's office. That job had become available when the Senator's communications manager somehow ended up in the wrong car from the airport and missed an important press conference. By that time, Amy was working for Vice President Meyer and not Senator Meyer, so they had not run into each other much. He'd always been surprised that Amy had left the White House proper, but it was a higher position and she must have known about Selina's presidential aspirations.

And then one day there they were, the Meyer entourage, and he knew he had to make his move. He'd been buttering up the president's staff before that, but the Veep's office was a good enough next step, and he was ready now. Ready for ascension. Ready for Amy.

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I cannot believe you are dating your boss' daughter.

She's fun, she's sexy… she can advance my career.

That's the one… that's the one.

Many people had taken it upon themselves to tell Amy about the tour of Washington undertaken by Dan Egan and his penis. They told her because they thought she was his scorned ex, unceremoniously dumped by a low-level staffer, albeit a pretty cute one. When she found out this was the story he was telling people, she didn't deny it. She even threw in some details. Being the dumpee had actually brought her quite a bit of sympathy from female staffers, several solicitations from male staffers, and a good amount of reprieve from her family's insistence that she have a love life. Ben even told her how much he loved her new reputation as a "normal" lovesick woman, because it made it that much more effective when she tore the other employees a new asshole. And she did do that, often, because you know, she just couldn't help it – she was angry about her breakup.

Amy had strategically avoided Dan for years, and no one really questioned it. Once she started working for Selina in the Senate, she had little to do with staffers from the House, and she didn't really go out much. Or have friends. So when she saw him that day in Hallowes' office, it made her insides churn. She felt ethereal and panicked, like she was having a very realistic dream about being buried alive and trying to claw her way to the surface. But she didn't let any of that show. She was a professional. She reminded herself that she was, actually, the one who ended things.

They were in front of other people, and she kept her cool, but she was intrigued. So she tested him – Do you like working for Hallowes?... He calls that the Leviathan. But any trace of the old Dan – the Dan she had wanted to hate for being everything she never wanted to be again – had disappeared. In his place was someone gunning for Mike's job and grabbing coffee pods away from unassuming Gary. Someone who was a lot like her when they'd first met.

When he told Selina the two things she had done wrong in New Hampshire, she was so taken aback, the only thing she could think to do was call him a shit. And he was a shit! He was a shit trying to get back into her life and fuck it all up and do it better than her! When he revealed he had leaked the Hallowes' story about Rapey Reeves, she was genuinely shocked. He had smirked at her – "What?" Like a challenge. Like a "fuck you." All she had was a weak shot about foreplay.

She was off her game again.

Then Selina hired him and Amy had said anything she could to try to get him out of the office. But Selina wants what Selina wants.

And that's the one, she thought during Selina's fundraiser. That was the Dan she'd told him to be. That was the Dan she had helped to create.

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Amy hadn't created him. She hadn't broken him either. She'd brought him back to life.

The real Dan was a depraved son of a bitch. And this Dan was not going to get on all fours and rush to Amy's bed because she crooked her finger at him once. He was going to make her beg for him, ache for him, wait for him. The way he had done.

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Their time together under Selina was a weird concoction of familiarity, competition, sexual tension, and stubborn restraint. It was undeniable that their chemistry benefited them both, professionally speaking, but any time either of them showed a hint of personal affection or weakness toward the other, it had to be destroyed. It was a cat and mouse game, and Dan and Amy could play for years, except she was never quite sure which one she was.

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He had toyed with her a couple of times since they started working together, but the denouement was that day after they spoke on CNN. Why not kill two birds with one stone? he'd thought. Try to get the access he needed, and see if she took his bait. She didn't beg him the way he wanted, but he knew he had her nearly where he wanted her. The thought of Amy getting all worked up while he withheld himself from her got him off for days.

There was one time, one almost slip-up, in the parking lot during his relaunch party. Her unrestrained anger was turning him on like a primal Pavlovian trigger, and Dan was pretty sure he would have slammed her up against a concrete pillar and started devouring every inch of her if the police had not intervened.

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Ben had figured it out the other day. Or at least, that was when he finally told her he knew. She asked why he thought that she was the one who dumped Dan.

"The Dan that exists now is a complete shitstain. He'd watch his own mother go to jail if it meant he came out smelling like slightly more pleasant shit. But when he testified about the data breach, he defended you. When you left, he got you a job. And you told me he tried to get you to quit with him before Hughes resigned. They tell you you gotta kiss a lot of babies in this business to get ahead, but Dan would just as soon nail the babies together to make a ladder if it meant he got to the top before everyone else. So tell me, why does he keep offering you the ladder?"

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He knew sometimes he was giving away too much. Like when he'd gone to the hospital with her, or helped her with Jonah, or needed her to be near him at PKM. It was all work, though, he rationalized. They worked well together, and his career came first.

Except Ed wasn't work.

He knew it wasn't serious. He knew she didn't love Ed, or even hate him. Ed was just her fake smile or the stock photo of someone's grandma on her desk – a half-assed badge of normalcy that she needed to display so people would shut the fuck up. But even knowing all of that, it still made him insane to think about that nine-foot cretin touching her. It made him even more insane to think that he was just Ed to her back then.

And even if it was for work, he hates that he came to Nevada because she called. But he loves that she's waiting for him. So he goes with Sophie.

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"The way he feels about you is the only constant from the Dan I met eight years ago. I met him back when he was still wet behind the ears from his mom instead of Danny Chung's jizz, remember?" Amy nodded reluctantly, but remained silent. "Maybe it was this fucking town that changed him, I don't know. I mean, when I first got here, I was saying really stupid shit too, like… 'please' and 'thank you'."

Amy smiled wryly and Ben continued.

"But it's more likely that what happened was you. You think everyone who wants to hug you is just trying to get around there to stick a knife in your back, so as soon as they come within arms' length, you get your own knife and slash their throat, thinking you showed them. You think you protected yourself and that you did yourself a favor, because even if this one didn't have a knife, you just know that the next one will. But in the meantime, you're just leaving bodies and becoming more and more like the things you hate."

.

.

So now she's sitting in this hotel room in Nevada, waiting. Because they're the only ones here, and because she's drunk, and because watching Dan dominate the recount room is like her sick personal aphrodisiac, and because he had his shirt cuffs rolled up, holding a whiskey in his strong, dark-haired hands just like that first time, and because she's so tired of not having him, and because maybe Ben's right, and maybe this time there won't be a knife.

Fin.