theirlawyer | (no subject)

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Ainsley pinches at the bridge of her nose, trying to fight off the will to sleep. It's been so busy in the White House ever since the President had started to call meetings with a good deal of the legal staff, which meant they weren't available for the day-to-day and Ainsley's workload had dramatically increased. It meant that it was pushing ten at night and she's genuinely unsure if she should leave.

What she wants now, more than anything, is just a night off. The trouble is, if she's here, then she's tied to her phone and that means it's not really relaxing. What she needs is that hotel. Whatever strange logic governed it meant that no time had passed since she and Sam had accidentally wandered into it and right now, she loves the idea of a weekend away when all she does is sleep and relax and rest.

There are two problems in this.

The first being that she can't find a door that opens there and the second being that she doesn't want to go alone. She begins the long walk up from the Steampipe Trunk Distribution Venue towards Sam's office, not surprised to still find him at work. She raps her knuckles lightly on the glass separating his office from the bullpen and pokes her head in the door.

"Do you ever wonder what our lives would be like if we had normal 9 to 5 jobs?" she wonders, in place of an actual greeting. "I don't know what I'd do with myself, honestly."

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"Let's go full out. Steak, wine, a nice dessert? I'm sure someone in the hotel kitchen can whip that up for us."

If not, Sam can make it happen. If anyone deserves it, it's Ainsley, whom he feels is overworked and under-appreciated.

It sounds suspiciously perfect and Ainsley very much wants to have that kind of dinner, even though that kind of dinner also sounds like she's not wearing nice enough clothes to be eating. "Sam, the way to my heart is definitely through all those things. I could never deny any of them," she assures him, giving him an encouraging smile so he knows that he's playing right into the things she enjoys.

And she wonders if this is the kind of nice, romantic dinner that is shared between platonic friends or whether she ought to be reading into it.

"See? I do learn," Sam says, holding doors open for her all the way to the hotel restaurant. When they arrive, he pulls out a chair for her before settling in his own.

"We'll just order everything that looks good and mix and match. Sound like a plan?"

Ainsley follows, already beginning to feel the tension erasing itself with every additional step. "I don't think I've ever seen you eat more than picking at the occasional light platter," she admits, already thrilled that today might change her luck. "What's it like when Sam Seaborn indulges?" she wonders, her eyes widening at the thought.

"It usually ends with antacids and a birthday card to write but hopefully we'll have a better ending tonight," Sam teases. "I'm fond of shellfish. I suspect it has to do with growing up on the coast. Somehow, a big plate of oysters just makes me think of home. Charming, right?"

"Well, don't worry. If you eat too much, I'll rub your stomach until it feels better," Ainsley promises with a sly grin, thinking of oysters and steak and pie and bread and whatever else he's willing to get for her. "Now, Sam, you have to stop talking about food if you aren't going to give it to me."

"I'm working on it," he promises. Sam tries not to think about just how appealing it would be for Ainsley to rub any part of him. It's probably a bad idea to get involved and yet...

"Ainsley? May I ask you a personal question?"

"Of course," Ainsley replies warmly, feeling in a better mood for her proximity to food. She's probably willing to answer a dozen personal questions, but it's best not to let Sam know that. Best to leave him wanting more, so to speak.

"If I were to say this wasn't a work related dinner or a dinner between coworkers or a dinner between friends, would you still want to go?"

It's simply testing the waters a little. There's no safer place to do that than here in the Nexus where nobody else from DC is around.

Ainsley had to take a minute to parse through Sam's words. It's almost like she takes each of his scenarios and dissects it before moving on to the next. If it's not a work dinner, if it's not coworkers, and it's not friends, then that leaves one very hopeful possibility that Ainsley takes a moment to wonder whether he's actually offering what she thinks he is. "Sam," she gets out, searching his face for anything betraying that this might be a joke.

"You'd better not be putting me on just for a prank," she warns, feeling her heart constrict with nerves, slightly.

"I would never prank anyone about something like this but much less you, Ainsley," Sam says, utterly sincere. "I would never hurt you like that. I just wanted to test the waters and see if you were interested before...putting myself out there."

"I am," Ainsley says, maybe trampling a little on his last few words, but there's a rush of desperation to make sure Sam understands that she's not disinterested and that she genuinely wants to have dinner with him (not as coworkers, not as friends, but something more). "I mean," she clears her throat, trying to calm her enthusiasm. "I would very much be interested in sitting down to a meal with you, in such a fashion."

"Good, now that we've gotten the hard part over with, let's have dinner? I'm sure you're starved by now." Sam is more nervous now that it seems that Ainsley is actually interested and for someone who makes a living writing speeches and crafting policy, he's awfully tongue-tied in his personal life.

He leads her over to a table and pulls out her chair. It's the little things that make a dinner into a date and he wants it clear that this is a date.

Ainsley has a dozen questions that she wants to ask, but doesn't know if this is the appropriate time to register them. After all, it's not like she wants to ruin this first dinner amongst more-than-friends with too many questions, but she still can't help her curiosity. "Sorry, before we order..." It turns out she can't wait.

"What sort of arrangement are you looking for? Is this just one dinner? Or would you like something more?"

"Well, I would like to get through dinner without flubbing it. Other than that, it's up to you, isn't it? To decide whether or not you want to keep going out with me?"

Sam really hopes that she does. It'll take a lot of the pressure off.

Ainsley should take the gesture and run with it. Dinner, with the possibility of becoming more. She thinks she can handle that, even if she eyes Sam with a bit of trepidation because she thinks it's a lot of what she wants presented to her on a silver platter. "You know I like dinner a lot," she says, which she knows he knows. "Who's to say I won't want to have multiple dinners, if you don't flub it?"

"Well, that doesn't help with the pressure," Sam says. He thinks he can get through this without ruining it and he hopes that his tendency to crumple when it really matters with a woman won't occur tonight. He cares more about Ainsley than he has anyone in a long time.

"You women have it easy, you know. You hold all of it in the palm of your hand. We have to do our best to impress you and make you want to go out with us again but you? You just have to show up, more or less, and we're going to want to go out with you whenever you want."

"I find that ridiculous," Ainsley scoffs. "You really think that by showing up, I can get whatever I want? Despite the expectation that I have to look good, my hair should be impeccable, I should be wearing makeup because god forbid a man thinks I look tired, and more than that, I need to fit the social norms to impress a man? And it's expected," she retorts, arching her brow upwards.

On the outside, it might seem like she's getting charged up and fiery, but this is Ainsley's wheelhouse and she does love arguing with Sam.

"You could show up in your bathrobe with no makeup and I would still want to go out with you," Sam argues back. Maybe she's right about it being expected of women and there's a lot less expected of a man but in the specific case of Ainsley, it doesn't matter. She always impresses him.

"You just have to show up."

"I believe we have a history of me showing up in just my bathrobe," Ainsley says, though the flush in her cheeks says that it's far from her proudest moment and were it not for the fact that she's still somewhat keen to keep Sam's reaction to the debacle in her mind, she might be blotting it out of her memory completely. "And the Bossa Nova," she admits, sipping at her water through the straw.

"See? That actually made me like you more," Sam says, grinning at her with the smugness that comes when he wins an argument.

"So in the case of Ainsley Hayes, White House counsel, you can just show up and I'm going to want to go out with you every day of the week."

Ainsley flushes pink in her cheeks, having not expected to find herself a relationship while working at the White House, though she can't deny that the moment she'd met Sam on that program, she'd felt something. She'd convinced herself it was just the determination to crush him on national television, but maybe it'd been more than that. "You're lucky, too, that you're as gorgeous as you are," she says as casually as she can.

"Because I can definitely get on board with seeing that face more than once a week outside of work."

"Oh? How many times a week, you think?" Ainsley being interested in him is a pleasant surprise and it's a little more shocking than Sam wants to admit to himself. He enjoys her company - she's a vibrant, brilliant, beautiful woman - but he doesn't agree with her politically and he thought that might put a damper on their personal lives. He's glad to see it apparently does not.

"Because I could go for several nights a week. You might have to negotiate me down."

"And how did you know that negotiating with you is one of the things I enjoy most in the world?" There's a sticky sweet sort of drawl in her voice that she usually only hauls out right before she entraps the prey and does her damage. "Seriously, though," she goes on, dropping away a lot of the pretense. "I'd like to do this regularly, if we could. If it goes well," she amends. "I'd like to do this, then."

"Then we should do this," Sam agrees. He lowers his voice a little, trying to pitch it as warm and intimate so she doesn't miss his meaning.

"I would like to try to do this here in the hotel at first. I like the idea of a place where we can spend time together without having to explain it to other people. Eventually, I want to take you out in DC too but I just...I don't want the press latching onto it or the other staffers making it into something it isn't. I want a chance to get to know you without a lot of external pressure."