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None of it makes sense. A vigil of candles outside the White House gates and a photo of twins in tiny hats and the wrong man sitting behind Bartlet’s desk. What’s down was up and what’s in was out and, heaven help them, what’s red was blue, and nothing makes sense.
Nothing, he thinks, except for him and Donna.
Which is really very on brand for the two of them. They’ve always operated on a different plane from the world around them, vibrated at a different frequency from the bullpen, the bullshit.
It’s like this:
Once, their first year in office, the whole senior staff bought Rosetta Stone before the Asia trip. It started, as most of their ill-fated ideas did, with a competition between CJ and Toby. Something about who could most convincingly ‘integrate with the locals’. It ended, as most of their ill-fated ideas did, with CJ, adored, trading kisses on cheeks with the sushi chef of the most-Michelin starred restaurant in Japan and Toby, miserable, mumbling something about feminine wiles and unfair advantages into his cup of sake.
Josh had tried gamely to learn with the rest of them: arigato and onegai shimasu and so on and so forth, but when Leo’d broken the news less than 48 hours before wheels up on Air Force One that Donna wouldn’t be coming (and honestly, Josh, no one else was throwing a hissy fit over bringing their support staff, they’re trying to do a thing here, run a country, would you please?) the whole thing had lost its shine for him, somehow. If he couldn’t watch Donna’s cheeks stain themselves cherry while he paraded around town in the world’s tightest kimono, what was the point?
When he’d told her as much, her midnight silhouette leaning in his office doorway, she’d clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth, by which she’d meant: so you’re giving up?
And he’d plopped his chin in his cupped palm, eyes equal parts sheepish and proud, and grinned up at her from his desk, by which he’d meant: why learn another language, when I already speak you and me?
They’ll never admit to it, but they’ve become proficient in the art of it. She’ll give him the face she calls her regular face (it isn’t), which means: listen to what I’m saying to you, Josh. And he’ll tell her she doesn’t need to bother Stanley Keyworth with a call (she does), which means: please don’t go anywhere, Donna. And they’ll trade admonishments with birds and their beaks outside his window (it did stop, for the record, after they asked it nicely) and neither will give a damn about Joe Quincy’s opinion on the matter. About anyone’s opinion, really. Except for CJ’s. And the press. And everyone in the world.
Because the sick truth of it is, they do best like this: his hand, firm against her low back as he leads her to her apartment, away from the flowers and the teddy bears guarding watch over the shrine of Zoey. Her hands, shaking as she pours them a midnight cup of tea in her kitchen.
He raises his eyebrows at her then. “If I’d have known invoking the 25th was all it took for you to bring me caffeine, I’d have given all 100 senators a turn in the Oval,” which means: I know everything has changed, but please don’t tell me you and I are changing too.
And she rolls her eyes and points to the box, emblazoned for reasons passing his understanding with tiny puffs of cartoon sheep. “Sleepy Time Tea,” she smirks, which means: The rest of the world can go lopsided, but we never will.
So he murmurs, which means: thank you and she nods, which means: of course and they do this thing where they pretend everything is normal, that the world is right side up, that there’s nothing strange about being in your assistant’s apartment in the middle of the night or that drinking tea with melatonin means they’ll get a healthy 8 hours.
It’s all make-believe. They know neither of them will sleep tonight.
They’ll wind up in her bed, sure. But they won’t sleep, which means: it doesn’t count. And she’ll burrow her chin into his chest, which means: Promise me it’s gonna be okay, Josh. And he’ll press his mouth to the crown of her head (lips closed, never open, the exact scientific difference between comfort and a kiss) which means: I promise, Donna. Because if there’s one thing they know how to navigate, it’s a crisis.
Shots ring out, and she’s next to him. Heroes fall from grace, and he’s next to her. Prodigal daughters go missing and entire administrations are upended and in the dark of her room their hearts thump a matching beat, because this is what makes sense.
The FBI returns the faxes to his office immediately after Zoey is found safe, which strikes Josh as the least important part of their job, but they’re the ones with top secret security clearances and artillery rifles, so what the hell does he know.
It’s worth it, anyway, to watch Donna’s mouth turn irritable and pouty when he fans the faxes out in front of her.
“Well-wishes from the LemonLyman ladies and Zoey, all returned safely to the White House on the same day.”
“That’s the order you’re gonna list those achievements in?” She snatches the pages from his grasp.
He grabs them back, “Tsk tsk, Donnatella. Mail fraud is a federal crime."
“So’s using this stuff as late night inspiration, you sicko.”
He laughs out loud at that, not bothering to hide his delight at the effect this has on her.
“Federal offense, huh? It’s not child porn. Hey, maybe you’re the sicko.”
She clears her throat then, reading aloud from one of the handwritten scans in her breathiest impression of Marilyn Monroe: “Dearest Joshua, I can’t imagine how difficult this time must be for you. How lonely and afraid you must feel. Please know, should you ever need comfort, I’d be happy to provide my services. Just say the word, if there’s anything at all you need to de-stress. Love, your biggest fan…”
And his breath hitches despite himself when she really breathes out the last word “… Stacy.”
“You like that, huh? Is that what turns you on?” she mocks, and he feels electricity in his fingertips.
“What? Stacy sounds like a perfectly respectable gal.” He takes a sip from his Bartlet for America mug and relishes the way her nostrils flare. “Don’t you think?”
“There’s more.” She fixes her gaze back on the paper, reading aloud again, her tone deadpan: “P.S. I have no gag reflex.”
He chokes on his coffee, spluttering so hard she has to pat him on the back more than a few times before his breathing returns to normal.
“I rest my case,” she says, rolling her eyes and refocusing on her computer.
He makes a big show of ripping the faxes in half (“Happy now, Principal Moss?”) and throwing them in the wastebasket before sauntering back into his office, their charged banter enough to power him through 8 more hours of poring over the new sentencing guidelines.
That night, alone in his bed, he dreams about her for the first time in a long time and when he wakes up the next morning, he does his damndest not to focus on them, the stories his subconscious spun in the night. It wasn't like he'd conjured the image of them together on purpose. She’d put on that… that voice, that performance, reading that fax. Surely she knew what she was doing. Still, as the coffee maker gurgles to life, he feels the familiar claw of shame creeping up his neck. He steadies himself; he’s been here before. He’ll do what he always does: give himself 30 seconds – and no more – to remember it.
In the dream, her questions were always different:
“You like that, baby?” “Is that what turns you on?” “Do you want this, Josh?” “Do you want me?”
In the dream, his answer was always the same:
“Yes, yes. God, Donna. Yes.”
It isn’t the NASA administrator he finds attractive, he almost tells her.
Yeah, and it’s not the cappuccino man she has a crush on, she wants to reply.
He feels helpless.
He's never been like this, not with her. Distant. Carefully, purposefully. His confident swagger turned cocky. And he wonders if she knows it’s his defense mechanism: the arrogance, a China trip dangled in front of him as if it wouldn’t be stripped away like a punishment, a puff piece giving him leverage in the Post as if he wouldn’t gamble away every last advantage he had 12 hours later, withholding a missile launcher from a Senator like a petulant toddler. The edges of him are sharper than before and he’s terrified she’ll flatten herself against him, because only iron sharpens iron and he knows if he goes dull, eventually she will too. And he’ll never forgive himself if he lets that happen. So instead, he’s cold to her. Ignores her jokes about smocks and crisp $1 dollar bills, asks her to set up meetings with Amy even though he knows, he knows it hurts her.
This version of him is angry, all the time. Everyone knows he’s radioactive right now and damn them all, because he’ll smoke like the remains of Chernobyl for the rest of this political cycle if he wants to, let the carcinogenic waste of what’s left of his political career waft across the Hill, for all he cares. Maybe he wants to infect them all with the self-doubt poisoning his veins, with this terrifying realization, in his mid-40s, that maybe he’s not cut out for the one thing he thought himself born to do after all.
She stops by the office again after his surprise party, her eyes searching his from across a mahogany desk that’s born witness to all of it, all that they are, the two of them, and Josh doesn’t know where to begin. A prodigy from North Korea had only wanted the freedom to play his piano without fear of death and Donna’s aunt and uncle had turned out to be perfectly nice people despite hailing from the party Carrick the Coward had fled to, and minutes after he’d learned this news, she’d thrown him a surprise party. He can see the desperation in her eyes and maybe even a flash of anger too and, still, he’s terrified to let her in. Because he’s radioactive and she knows it better than anyone and he’d rather die than take her down with him.
But she’d made the same basic point as the President a few days ago about the economy and today she’d pleaded with him to go fix things with Amy when all he’s ever done is lie prone between her and her dates like human roadkill and when she takes a few steps toward him, now, leans down and blows out a still-lit candle on his piece of forgotten birthday cake, he prays she’ll understand what he means when he asks, “Have you ever heard of ‘han’?”
She hesitates. Like a deer caught in headlights, he thinks, or a Deputy Chief of Staff caught in a bluff by the senior Senator from Idaho.
“Han,” she parses slowly. “…as in: Solo?”
He laughs then, because he knows what it looks like when Amy and her scarlet toenails feign ignorance about leaving dead fish in his office and because this, Donna, her confusion anything but feigned and toes he’s never seen painted anything but a soft, unassuming pink, is something different altogether.
“No, Obi Wan," he huffs out a laugh. "It’s Korean. It’s…” he trails off, trying to remember what CJ’d said to him, how she’d described it. “There’s no literal English translation, but I dunno,” he scratches his head and there’s that douse of insecurity again, the feeling of sweat prickling at his scalp foreign to him until a few days ago. “It’s a state of mind, a sadness.”
He feels her eyes on him, so he closes his, reciting the rest from memory, head pointing toward the ceiling, “A sadness so deep no tears will come.”
*******************
She feels pathetic.
She’s never been like this before, not with him. Jealous. Transparently, humiliatingly. The old her wouldn’t have said a thing about his office walk of shame this morning. Would’ve just glided her hips a little quicker as she walked past him into his office to give him his schedule or licked his cake frosting a little slower off her fingers in the mural room or made a joke about birthday suits right there in the bullpen just to watch him blush, to make sure his dimples still cratered deep and flirtatious and like they were made to match her own, and that would’ve been that. She’d have regained her footing in the only place she felt safe; at the center of his universe - or at least his morning - again. Or maybe she’d have retied his new tie for him, all lugubrious bats of slate gray eyelids as she drew the noose tight around his neck like she didn’t know what she was doing, like the heat of his stare didn’t sear pleasure direct to her veins.
Instead, this version of her – the one she barely recognizes, the one she can’t seem to stop herself from being – this version of her can’t resist a jab about his walk of shame, his two-day suit, his three-year sort-of girlfriend.
This version of her is angry, all the time. About fireworks over the south lawn, the way his eyes avoid hers even as he hands her a glass of champagne, drawn instead to a woman down the aisle, fathoms beneath him.
She figures maybe she owes Amy an apology. For savoring the pause she once took between “Are you in love with Josh?” (by which she’d meant will he always, if given the choice, choose you over me?)
and her response: “I’m his assistant” (by which she’d meant how can you not see that time and again, and then again once more, he already has?).
For taking such smug satisfaction in the knowledge that Amy was jealous of her. For feeling so certain that it would never be the other way around.
Amy gives a quote to the Washington Post about Josh and a dead fish and it gets Josh’s attention, so Donna orders a birthday cake in the shape of a dead fish at Georgetown Sweets that morning, even though she knows he’ll hate it. Maybe because she knows he’ll hate it, if she’s being honest. So desperate for a piece of him she can’t see that the more of him she grabs for, the less there is to hold onto. He’s a mountain she used to free solo with her eyes closed, the footholds she’d once memorized turned to landslides of gravel. She’s slipping. She’s slipping and it’s not a possibility that she’ll fall, it’s a guarantee. And still she’s too proud to strap into a harness.
She finds him later, hours after CJ has blessed her mini fridge so many times she thinks the little GE mini model may actually get to heaven someday. He's bent over in his office chair, head in his hands, globs of wax dripping onto his slice of untouched cake from a candle, still somehow flickering. It’s the only light in the room, so she’s surprised he doesn’t lift his head when she blows it out with a whoosh.
But then he’s telling her about ‘han’, his words jarring a memory loose in her. “A sadness so deep no tears will come,” his voice is gritty and it’s déjà vu, left over from CJ’s lecture in the mural room ("if he’d come to me I’d tell him myself, except men are funny like that; he’d never come to me”).
“Wait, I know this one. CJ told me…”
His head snaps up at her words, jarred back to reality. “Oh, okay.” He doesn’t seem annoyed. Just defeated. He digs the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, sniffs himself awake and shakes loose the cobwebs in his head, then reaches for some stray files, for his backpack. “I don’t know what made me think of that now anyway. Too much sugar…” he trails off.
“Josh,” she murmurs, pulling manilla from his hand. “Here, let me.”
“You don’t have to…” he starts.
“Yes I do,” she finishes.
He doesn’t argue after that. Just slumps back into his chair, and she can feel his eyes on her as she packs away his files.
“Might should pack up the whole desk, just in case,” he tries, with the closest thing to a laugh he can muster. “Dunno if my security pass will be working tomorrow.”
She winces. The angry, bitter version of her would snap at him right now. Tell him to grow up. Put an end to this pity party, because his actual party needs him. His country needs him. His president needs him. Hell, she needs him.
But the tips of his ears burn crimson and suddenly, all she can see is a little boy on his 8th birthday, his first spent as an only child, staring at an unwished-upon candle burning to ash in front of him with eyes not unlike the ones that gaze up at her now, gutted with the guilt of a transgression that looks, on paper, to be his fault, but is, in actuality, nothing of the sort.
And so she walks behind his desk, grasping his hand in hers and pulling him up to face her, sliding the strap of his Jansport over his shoulder. She keeps his hand in hers and they walk, the two of them, out of the office.
The hallway is dark.
“You left something out,” she says, as she shuts the door behind them, “about ‘han’.”
She can feel his gaze on her fingers as they turn the lock closed in the dark, years of muscle memory in action. He stops short and she can almost see the gears in his brain turning.
“A sadness so deep no tears will come…” he tries again, trailing off, a miniscule shake of his head telling her he doesn’t remember any further.
“And yet,” she whispers, “still there’s hope.”
The call from Ryan had woken her up at 1am. And, still half asleep, she’d realized she never thought the heir to the Pierce dynasty capable of sounding so panicked when he’d pleaded for her help, something about Josh and too many gin martinis and hurling expletives at the Capitol Building. She hadn’t stopped to grab a coat or for lights – red, green, or otherwise – until she’d gotten to his door, her stomach turning alongside the sound of her key in his lock, terrified of what she might find inside, remembering the hum of Christmas music in an ER waiting room and duct tape over a jagged window’s edge.
She finds him in his bed, breathing, thank God. Snoring, even. And she feels her shoulders melt with relief, even when she spots a tumbler of scotch on the bedside table because yes, it’s worrisome, especially for him, but it’s not a bullet wound in his chest and it’s not stitches in his palm. And he’s had a hell of a week.
She thinks for a moment, then stands. Wipes the creases from her pajama pants and turns to slip back out the door. Until she hears him stir.
“Donna?”
He blinks his eyes open, groggy, still nearly asleep, she thinks. “What’re you doing here?”
“Nothing, Josh. Go back to sleep,” she whispers, holding her breath for a moment until he seems to process her words, nestling his head back into his pillow.
She stays still, though, feet rooted to the floor. Needing to see something. To make sure he falls back to sleep, maybe, or to make sure he doesn’t dream, probably. In the darkness, she can just make out the cadence of his breath as it slows.
“You sent the kid,” he mumbles, “to the restaurant.” His voice is like molasses, and she can tell now that it’s far thicker with alcohol than with sleep.
“I made a game day call,” she shrugs. It’s a tight rope walk, holding together what’s left of his ego these days. “You’re still the 3rd most powerful man in the country, Josh. Losing Carrick didn’t change that. Wilcox has always been an ass, you know that. No one else would’ve been so stupid as to stand you up—”
He holds his hand out in the darkness, to her. She takes a tentative step toward him, reaching for it. Instead, he wraps it around her waist, pulling her down on the bed next to him, her seated curve perpendicular to the horizontal splay of him, all biceps and Brooks Brothers and bedding.
“Thank you,” he murmurs.
“It’s no big deal,” she whispers back.
He blinks up at her, pupils blown-wide with a hazy mix of pain and whiskey and… something else. “It is a big deal. You saved me from embarrassing myself in front of half of the District.”
“I think the U.S. Capitol might disagree,” she parries back, keeping her tone light, as if he hops out of taxis to scream at buildings every Wednesday, like clockwork.
“Ryan told you,” he guesses, and it’s more of a sigh than a question.
“He meant well.” She lets her hand stroke his back for emphasis. “He didn’t know what to do and…well, he knew…”
“He knew that you would,” he finishes for her.
There’s nothing to say to that, really. So she just nods, and he buries his head into the safety of her stomach. She holds her breath. The hum of his air conditioner throbs. 30 seconds tick by, maybe 45.
“Donna?” His words are a vibration against her core. So open and simple she can almost convince herself she’s imagining them. “You’re the only one who really knows me.”
Unbidden, heat ricochets down her spine. It tingles, this want of him. Like nerves deadened from surgery sparking back to life. She thinks of the way he used to flinch when she’d rub steroid cream across the scars on his chest, the way she’d been almost giddy with relief when she realized the lack of numbness meant his body was healing. She looks down at him now, and it may as well be a hot September smelling of smoke and gunpowder all over again with the way she goes lightheaded at his words, ones so vulnerable she almost can’t let herself believe they’ve left his lips, ones that might just be enough to sustain her through the end of this administration. Through the end of time, if that’s the way it has to be.
It’s all she wants: to know him. It’s everything she can’t have: to be the only one who does.
When his breathing evens out and she knows he’s gone back to sleep, she extracts herself from his grasp and pads to the bathroom, bringing back a glass of water and some Advil for his bedside table. As she slips out the door, locking it behind her, she wonders which she’s more terrified of: that he’ll remember this in the morning, or that he won’t.
Tomorrow, she’ll give him more Advil and a warning about eating bland foods, and she’ll notice his body isn’t vibrating the way hers is, his neck doesn’t flush like her own. And she’ll know for certain then: his confession, her at his apartment – he doesn’t remember any of it. And maybe it’ll be for the best. Because tomorrow, she’ll lay out her ‘what a shame’ files in front of him: foreign adoption policies, hybrid energy partnerships, funding special education for kids with disabilities, 21st century teacher corps and she’ll look into his eyes and see something familiar shining behind them, and suddenly she’ll find herself thinking of her hair in a headband, of a supreme court nomination that was supposed to sail and of ceilings falling down around them. Because in his eyes she’ll see, for the first time in weeks: cautious optimism.
And as they sort through the files together, deciding which issue to tackle first, she’ll wonder if she’ll ever be brave enough to tell him: her biggest what a shame is what will never be between the two of them.
He’s waiting for her at the first shutdown party with a beer and an apology. Leo told him what she’d done, the way she’d spent the entirety of the budget negotiations fighting for his plan. He…he’d thought— when she’d referenced the hand Angela Blake had been dealt, it felt like… like even she’d lost faith in him too…
She cuts him off, the smile threatening to spill free across her face proof positive that she’s forgiven him already. Doesn’t he know by now, it’d take an asteroid plummeting to earth for her to lose faith in him?
(Neither knows how prescient her prediction will become)
(But that won’t be for another year or so)
So, for now:
It’s 2pm on a Wednesday and she’s forgiven him and they’re playing shutdown-sanctioned hooky, so they get day drunk off whatever’s on tap and he teaches her how to play pool, despite the fact that she knows full-well he has no clue what he’s doing. And she lets him, despite the fact that he knows full-well she grew up playing with her brothers. Semantics like that pale in comparison to the tickle of his words in her ear, to the angle of her body under his as he leans over, correcting her grip on the pool stick.
A few pitchers and five hours later, most of the bar cleared out to the next hotspot, he watches with hooded lids as she tugs playfully at the brim of his baseball cap. Is this supposed to be his disguise? It’ll take more than a Nationals cap to blend in with the junior staffers in this bar, Joshua.
Is she calling him old, Moss? She shrieks and squirms to get away from him, then, because he’s got his fingers between her ribs, tickling her until she begs for mercy. Huh? Huh?
Not old she manages through desperate laughter. Distinguished.
That seems to satisfy him, because he puts her down. Which seems to satisfy her, because she grins up at him with her biggest smile.
And neither would dare say as much out loud, but they both find themselves wishing, wildly, for the briefest of moments, that the government would come grinding to a halt forever, that business would never resume as usual again, that her, drunk and swaying into him, and him, in a ball cap and buying her another round of beer just to watch her drink it, in a bar playing hooky could be all they’d ever have to be.
They used to play these games on the campaign trail. On bus rides between Concord and Sioux Falls, rousing rounds of Fuck/Marry/Kill or Charades or Spoons or – when Toby’d bang his head against the laminated glass and stand, declaring he’d rather hand the election to the Other Guy than sit through another game of MASH – poker. That is, if the road wasn’t too bumpy to shuffle.
One night, everyone else asleep, the aisles dark as they’d rolled over the cactused Southwest, he’d felt the point of her elbow as she’d slid into the seat next to him.
She was bored, she’d declared. And, powerless to resist this woman, even so early on, even back then, he’d sighed, closed his briefing book, and pulled both their tray tables down.
It was a trick she’d practiced on the back of her customer’s receipts at the diner. It looks easy, she’d explained with the gravitas of a graduate student giving a dissertation, if you’re doing it right, but it’s actually incredibly difficult. She’d ripped a sheet of paper from his briefing book then, and plucked a pen out of his dress shirt pocket, brushing off his high pitched protests. She needed two pens, okay, one to write with her right hand and the other with her left.
And he’d watched, transfixed despite himself by the slope of her cursive as she’d written, with both hands at the same time: Donna with her left hand, Moss with her right.
He’d snatched the pens from her then and tried himself. The ‘J’ and the ‘L’ went okay, but by the time he’d gotten to ‘s’ and ‘m’, the whole operation had fallen apart. Not that he’d minded, her laughter vibrating under the crook of his shoulder all the victory he’d needed that night anyway.
Whatever, he’d challenged her. She’d had years to practice writing Donna Moss. It was too easy. Try both of their names. She’d smirked at him then, ripping another paper from his binder--
(He’d learned already not to bother trying to stop her. She’d walked into his office and talked him into giving her a job and she’d picked up the phone and talked Republican businessmen into writing checks for Bartlet for America and she’d left him once and come back once and there was nothing he could do to stop any of it. Not that he’d wanted to anyway)
--and her hands had moved, both in simultaneous motion, over the paper.
But when he’d looked down to watch, goosebumps rose on his forearms.
In her scrawl, plain as the fields they rolled past, it had said: Donna Lyman.
He’d sat stock still for a moment. The headlights of a car on the interstate had flashed through the bus cabin, then disappeared.
She’d looked up at him, triumphant, until she’d seen the look on his face. And he’d watched her realize – too late – that what he’d meant was: try writing her first name and his first name. Not her first name and his last. Both of them stared back down at the offending words: Donna Lyman. And as if their names tied together in matrimony had connected their bodies too, he could almost feel the flush creeping up her neck under her campaign badge (the one she hadn’t taken off, except to shower, for the two weeks since she’d been back). And, before he could stop her, she’d crumpled the paper in her fist.
Hey! He’d grabbed for it, coaxed it out of her fingers. What did she have against… he’d flipped the page over, scanning it… against the Iowa Corn Growers Association Luncheon?
She’d laughed then, still embarrassed, he could tell, but also relieved. They didn’t have to make this a thing. He wouldn’t make it a thing. And she was grateful.
****************
Josh thinks himself a pretty normal guy. Sure, there was the PTSD. From the fire, then his dad's embolism, then the shooting. But he worked for the president. They wouldn’t let you work for the president if you weren’t a normal guy.
He does one weird thing.
But it isn’t so weird if you understand one, critical detail: When Joanie had died, she hadn’t just died, was the thing. Everything of her – soccer trophies and math certificates and scrapbooks from her 8th grade trip to D.C. – all of it had burned with her.
So, Josh saves everything. Not physically, because that was the whole problem to begin with. Digitally. Birthday cards from his mother, his acceptance to Yale Law Review, a letter Sam had written him from Prague – all meticulously scanned, catalogued, and filed on his laptop (and a backup hard drive, just in case). It doesn’t feel weird, per se. Some people are sentimental. So what if he’s 40 and a man who claims to be too busy to get himself coffee? It took, what, a few minutes to save a copy of a card from Mallory congratulating him on finally seeing the light and leaving Hoynes? It took, what, a lifetime to think of Joanie’s diary turned to ash, and not feel a blaze of hollow spread through his limbs.
“Take my laptop," he instructs, thinking on his feet in the hurried aftermath of the failed budget negotiations. "Start a tally of programs affected by the shutdown and email it to me as you go. Don’t read anything in the file marked private.”
She stares at him, both of them catching up to his words, their implications. A record-scratch, in real time.
“Don’t take my laptop,” he amends. And the moment, like so many odd moments between them, meant to be ignored, passes.
He thinks about it later that night, when he pours himself a drink and looks out from his patio at the lights on the Hill. Wonders if she thinks he’s got some hidden stash of bad 80s porn, maybe his own diary incriminating the administration, to match hers. Wonders what she’d think if she knew that, in a folder marked private – amidst scanned birthday cards and law review notes and letters from summer camp – she’d find her own handwriting, on the ripped reverse of a meeting agenda for the Iowa Corn Growers Association Luncheon, the slope of her ‘D’ matching the curve of his ‘L’:
Donna Lyman.
It didn’t wind up being a gift certificate from Tower Records or a circled blender in a catalogue and it definitely didn’t wind up being socks, but when Colin starts to undress her, she finds herself almost wishing it had been.
She pulls back like she’s been stung, hands flying to her head to snatch at the strip of pink and peach cloth slung around her hair before he can pull it off himself.
Because Colin’s fingers--
(the ones that’ve captured images of brutal conflict on five continents with a simple click, the ones she caught herself eyeing as they signaled the bartender for another round ((and she’d realized then, bitterly, when she’d surprised herself by the ease with which she’d convinced herself that orange juice was just as good as a rusty nail, that it was because she’d had some practice pretending things aren’t what they are)), fingers that’ll make her come a few minutes from now, slick with confidence and callouses, fingers that have seen a hard day’s work, fingers that wouldn’t look so out of place in an Indiana soybean field which is to say: fingers entirely unlike Josh’s)
--those fingers can touch whatever of her he likes.
Except for her pashmina.
(the one Josh saw at Thanksgiving, the one he bought three weeks in advance)
(even though she was the one in charge of shopping)
She tries to make her movements casual, but she feels his eyes on her like question marks as she folds the shawl gingerly across the back of her hotel chair, wool on polyester. “It was a Christmas gift,” she shrugs, by way of explanation, as if that makes any sense at all. As if the reverence with which she runs her fingers through the fabric and the half-hearted clarification she attempts (“from my boss”) wouldn’t strike anyone as utterly incongruous.
For the first time since she met him, his rakish confidence slips just the slightest bit. “That’s… real cashmere. Expensive, isn’t it?”
And then, when she still won’t meet his eyes: “A discounted roll of film… was the last gift my editor gave me, I think. Is this an American custom or something?”
She walks back to him then, mouth pressed taut. Winds her arms around his waist, leans up toward him and whispers into his ear, like she’s scared someone will overhear: “Or something.”
Pushes down any thoughts of Josh, then pushes Colin down with her, flush against the bed.
A few days later, when he meets this infamous boss – all wrinkled dress shirt and paper thin bravado, both their chests puffed as they argue over Israel versus Palestine and flight times from Germany to Gaza versus DC – Colin will think of a folded pink and peach pashmina, of the click of Donna's nails on her laptop when she’d thought he’d been asleep, of the way she would only hold his gaze in the photos he took, like she craved the barrier of his lens, like she was used to needing the plausible deniability of a filter.
He’ll watch the two of them from his spot in the corner of the room: Donna groggy in crisply laundered hospital sheets and her boss drawn like a magnet to her side; the practiced, instinctive way their eyes scan the room for press or peers or presidents, maybe, before they dare to land on each other’s and Colin will think of yellowing letters in the post from a girl he took for granted, of puritanical workplace ethics, of rose bouquets and the poke of his index finger against Donna's big toe and suddenly, he’ll feel indescribably sad. Not for himself, so much, as for the two of them.
And none of it will seem incongruous to him anymore.
“So… Freddie Briggs.”
“What about him?”
“Nothin'.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“…But c'mon.”
“Here we go.”
“Freddie?! What's that-- short for 'Frederica'?"
"That would be long for 'Fred'."
"Hate to break it to you, Donna, but he sounds like a loser.”
“Actually, he was a senior.”
“Seniors can’t be losers?”
“Not to a sophomore.”
“So he was a statutory rapist.”
“He was on the football team!”
“Oh, right. Because athletes can’t be predators.”
“Josh.”
“Donna.”
“Do you have a point?”
“I'm just saying…sixteen? It can’t have been good, can it?”
“Why couldn’t it have been good?”
“It was your first time.”
“Who says first times have to be horrible?”
“Literally everyone.”
“So you’re saying yours was terrible too.”
“I don’t think mine lasted long enough to warrant a rating.”
“Who was it with?”
“Sally… Something?”
“Joshua.”
“Donnatella.”
“Tell me you remember her last name.”
“Okay, I remember her last name.”
“How romantic.”
“It wasn’t! That’s my whole point.”
“I don’t think that’s quite the brag you think it is.”
“So you’re telling me your time with Freddie was romantic?”
“I don’t know. We were friends first, you know? I knew I was safe with him. It felt like… like getting to know someone I already loved in a whole new way.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“I’ve never done that. Gone there, I mean. With a friend.”
“What about—”
“She was dating my law school roommate, Donna. I’d hardly classify me and Amy as friends.”
“You probably dodged a bullet there.”
“With Amy?
“With steering clear of the risk. Of ruining a friendship. With Freddie, after we... It got weird. Sex changes things, y’know?”
“Yeah.”
“Josh?”
“Mm?”
“Do you think we would’ve been friends, in high school?”
“Well considering I would’ve been old enough to be your teacher… Actually, that’s kinda hot— OUCH. Jesus, what was that for?”
“I’m saying, in a parallel universe where we were the same age, in the same town, in the same math class at the same time… do you think we would’ve been friends?”
“Yeah, Donna. I do.”
It takes Donna almost a full year to work up the courage to visit. His family was from Colorado, but they’d lost a son in Iraq and decided to bury their last son left near his brother. On the drive, her radio proudly declares it to be the warmest December Sunday in Arlington, Virginia since 1967. Funny, her fingers feel frozen around the steering wheel.
The gravestone is simple. Granite marble atop an emerald mound of St. Augustine. She bends down to trace the engraving with her fingertips:
Donovan Morrissey
1980 – 2004
Beloved Son, Brother, Friend
She refuses to cry.
She’d made the decision to come here between bites of French toast this morning. Maybe it was the way the dawn light bathed her Adams Morgan loft in soft forgiveness, or the fact that she’d had other errands to run in Virginia later that day.
More likely, though she won’t admit it to herself, it’s because tomorrow is the first day since she’s lived in D.C. that she’ll walk into the OEOB, instead of the West Wing. There’s gonna be a temp here tomorrow she’d told him, and still he didn’t get it. Maybe he never will.
She straightens, realizing: in her haste to leave, she’d forgotten to buy flowers. She looks around for a vendor or a garden or— and that’s when she spots it, exactly an arm’s length away from the gravestone. A young cherry blossom tree.
Standing, she steps the few paces toward it. And her breath catches. They’re just buds, not flowers, but that’s not it. It's the plaque at the base of its trunk (a trunk that’s more of a stick, really, still in its infant stage, held up by elastic twists, tied around a plastic spine).
She bends down to read it:
Planted in memory of Donovan Morrissey
(in honor of Donna Moss, who never stopped fighting for him)
She runs her fingers along this engraving too, the one she knows only one person could have organized, without fanfare, not unlike a memo about Molly Morello or an inscription in a book about Alpine Skiing. And she thinks of Josh's face the night of Donovan’s death in the limo on the way to the State of The Union, when he'd whispered in her ear that he thought she was brave.
And only then does she allow herself to cry.
He goes stargazing with a brunette, so she goes for drinks with a Republican. Cosmically, she thinks, it balances out.
He’s got blonde hair where it’s supposed to be brown and he’s sincere where he’s supposed to be sarcastic, his smile smooth where it’s supposed to dimple and he doesn’t make a single joke about Wisconsin cheese or Catholic schoolgirls or Freddie or Freeride or February. He orders the steak medium rare and she has the iceberg wedge with extra bleu cheese and she feels perfectly pleasant, which is to say she feels absolutely nothing at all.
And she doesn’t know if it’s habit or masochism, then, that prompts her to ask him what he thinks of space. But it does the trick, because when he shrugs, says NASA’s overfunded and space is underwhelming and the whole thing’s overrated, frankly, she finally feels something, deep in her gut. Not quite a sting, more than an ache. A little stronger than petty, weaker than revenge.
So she knocks back her third old fashioned and flashes him her first real smile and decides, rather than asks, we should get out of here.
Later, when they’re sweaty and sated between her sheets and he’s kissing her shoulder, that was amazing, Donna, you are amazing, and a gust of wind through cobalt curtains reveals a sliver of silver moon, only then does she allow herself to think again of the stars.
He catches himself sometimes, lost in the domesticity of it all. The touch of her hand reaching for his to sign a forgotten document. The shape of her full name in his mouth, like it’s meant only for him to use. This morning, weaving through a throng of protestors on the phone with her, only to realize she’d long-since hung up on him. It’s not beleaguered, their intimacy; it’s lived in. It’s his favorite turtleneck on her; fitted and worn and smelling impossibly like home.
“You don’t want it?” she asks as he hands her his blueberry muffin and he shakes his head.
It’s not that he could get used to this, it’s that he is used to it. To moments like these, in the midst of a morning routine unique to maybe six people in the world that they share, when he allows himself to imagine a life with her. Allows himself to consider that maybe they’ve overblown the fear of this whole thing in the name of ethics and good old fashioned Democratic self-masochism and fear of CJ physically combusting from her podium. Allows himself to think, maybe, just maybe, the White House wouldn’t spiral into scandal if he said ‘fuck it’ and pulled his willful, willowy assistant into a closet and pressed his lips to hers, felt her gasp against his mouth and then relax her own to make room for his tongue, watched her pull away with an unbelieving, wry shake of her head and a cheeky retort. Took you long enough, you idiot.
Allows himself to hope that the two of them could build more bridges in this building together than they’d burn.
He doesn’t snap out of it until a few minutes later, in Leo’s office for Senior Staff. Before he’ll meet Evelyn Baker Lang and her mind and her shoes. When there’s still a long line of potential nominees to cull, instead of a short one to finagle.
It’s when he asks Leo: “Why isn’t Haskins on the list?”
And it’s when the Chief of Staff responds, simply: “Having an affair with his clerk.”
That’s when he comes crashing back to reality.
That’s when he thinks of an assistant who molded herself into a Donna-shaped obstacle between Josh and an intern over an Ebay-ed chest of moose meet, of a girlfriend who fell on her own boyfriend’s sword to save his military career. “This guy’s got an important career ahead of him,” she’d pleaded with him that night as he’d watched granules of powdered snow land in her curls and realized with sudden, blinding clarity that she would always put herself last. For the ones she loved. For the ones she didn’t. For him, regardless of where he fell on that spectrum.
Haskins will be taken out of consideration for the Supreme Court for the crime of having an affair with his clerk. He won’t be taken off the federal bench, nor will he ever know he was in the running for the highest court in the first place. No, it’s the clerk’s career who’ll stall out, mired so deep in the quicksand of the DC rumor mill she’ll be lucky if she can get a job as a paralegal once the story’s broken. He thinks of the college dropout who appeared in his office like a mirage, ready to find herself and start over, promising not to let it affect her typing and he remembers the way his bones ached with the surety that this woman would conquer the world one day. But Haskins had an affair with his clerk and Donna won’t conquer anything but the lunch rush at a diner in Madison if he ever allows his fantasies to become reality.
His next sip of coffee goes down like the serrated edge of a knife. He turns back to Leo. “How about Evelyn Baker Lang?”
She finds herself wondering, sometimes, if they’d fuck the way they fight.
Wonders if it’d be like when she takes a vow of silence against him: his hand cupped around her mouth as she comes, not because he doesn’t want to hear her but because maybe, even in a universe where there are no lines they aren't allowed to cross, they’d never outgrow the fear of being caught.
Wonders if it’d be like a lecture about carpel tunnel, his face incredulous watching her take charge: knees bracketing his hips, impervious, imperial above him.
Wonders if it’d be anything like today, the two of them skulking around the bullpen, spitting insults through glass cubicle partitions: passionate, heated, their eyes never leaving each other’s even as they rip each other to shreds. She imagines they could do without Ryan the translator, though Josh does always perform best with an audience.
In reality, their sex life will land somewhere in the blissful in-between. His mouth bruising bites into her neck one minute, whispering promises to the birthmark under her collarbone the next. Her nails scraping crescent moons between the muscled blades of his shoulders, then going elegant and flat, memorizing the shape of his face by feel alone. Saturday afternoon delight in their new apartment, skipping brunch at that new chicken and waffles spot down the street to christen the guest bedroom instead. Donna swiping his ringing cell phone from the bedside table, holding his gaze as she widens her eyes and puts on that sexy, naïve voice she knows drives him even crazier now than it did in 1998 when she answers: “Josh Lyman’s office, how may I help you?” Sam on the other end, with an eye-roll they can feel through the phone. Her voice, breathless from under a mountain of linen sheets as she translates his request: “Mr. Seaborn wants to know if you plan on getting out of bed anytime soon to work on the language for the appropriations bill, Mr. Lyman?” Josh’s eyes the same sparkle, his voice the same dare as that day in the bullpen when he groans into a silky patch of skin between her ribs: “Tell him a pack of wild bison on stilts couldn’t drag me out of bed with you today, Miss Mozzarella.”
Her surprised giggle wafting out the open window down the Georgetown row as she clicks the call dead and he flips her back onto the mattress and latches his lips to her earlobe. Ding ding ding, everyone to their corners for round two.
(But it’ll be a few years before she learns any of that.)
Her cell buzzes later that night. Her blue dress is crumpled on the floor and the moonlight hangs through her window and she’s tucked in sheets she hasn’t had time to wash in a week and she knows, before even looking at the screen, that it’s him.
U get home okay?
Her thumb hovers over the buttons until, with a twitch, she flips the phone shut and rolls back over in bed.
A few moments later, another buzz. This time, the text is longer.
Donna, I’m not messing around. It was a stressful night for everyone. Just let me know you got home safe, please.
She stares down at his words. Starts to type, until – there it is:
The NSC killed my Panama joke tonight and I know Kate Harper told me why while we were crashed in my office. And she told me about some scary shit, some national security level shit that should have me terrified right now. But I swear to God, Donna, I can’t remember a word she said because the only thing I’m terrified about right now is you.
She types back then: Got home fine, going to bed and watches as a bubble of ellipses pops up, then disappears. Twice, then three times. Until it goes blank. Whatever he was going to say, he thought better of.
He’d handed her a rod and reel to give to CJ tonight. She didn’t know he owned a rod and reel. She didn’t know he fished.
She flips her phone shut for good, rolls over, and cries herself to sleep.
Because he does this, this thing where he casts her away, then reels her back in, only to let the slack back out again just as fast. Because she doesn’t know if it’s on purpose, if he means it, or if he can’t help it, the same way she can’t help but catch on his own lure. And because CJ was right; it’s never been the White House, it’s always been him.
“They’re still in your office.”
“I know.”
“What are they doing?”
“Waiting by the sea.”
Every spring semester, the week before finals, he would take a trip to the ocean. Drive the whole way on 495 South with the windows down in his Cutlass from Cambridge to Cape Cod just to feel the wind rip through his scalp, just for the afternoon, just to lie on the beach and feel the sand slipping between his fingers. Or maybe to feel his fingers slip through the sand. He could never be sure which.
Just to remind himself that control was a construct, that fighting against it was futile, that a B+ wasn’t a housefire and that no matter how much of a failure his professors or his parents might discover him to be, he’d wake up in the morning and still be alive. Or maybe he wouldn’t, but he couldn’t control any of that. Tan granules in his palm, on the other hand. The weight of them as they dissolved through his fingers, the speed at which they flowed back into the earth – of that domain, he was a master.
“What’s this?”
“Your diplomatic passport.”
She’s slipping through his fingers now, and he’s letting her. Because no matter how much pressure he’d applied, blood had still poured from his bullet wound like syrup and no matter how many puddles he and Charlie waded through, Zoey had still gone from a champagne toast in an arboretum to tied up in the back of a van and no matter how many April bouquets of flowers he gives her or how difficult an Angel maintenance assignment he entrusts her with or how carefully he holds her gaze over a Starbucks cup when she asks what he meant, when he said it wasn’t what it looked like… no matter how hard he tries to stop her: Donna will still leave him someday.
He knows this like he knows the sleek stack of her spine; by feel, without looking.
“You got me a seat on the --?”
“No, I even had to give mine to McKenna. I’m going on the press plane.”
She will leave him someday.
“Oh, well. You tried”
“You’re going on a CODEL to the middle east with Fitzwallace and Andy. No presidential hand holding. You’re gonna see what’s going on, brief me and Toby about it.”
She will leave him someday.
“What I did wrong wasn’t breaking my word, it was making a promise I couldn’t keep in the first place.”
She will leave him someday.
But if she’s going to slip through his fingers, it’ll be at the pace he sets, at a velocity he can control. Because cellos don’t sound like sirens when he’s the one plucking the strings.
A cat covered tin of dry cookies from her mother and a cell phone call from a shutdown party and still, still the two of them cling to these lies they tell themselves for fear of drowning in the truth. He pretends to be the kind of guy who does his best thinking in the shower and she pretends she’s nothing like Wilt Chamberlain and they pretend it’s coincidence: the way they make decisions and the world changes. Convince themselves that tectonic plates shift in spite of the way their brains click together to complete a puzzle, not because of it.
He puts the first woman chief justice on the Court and she saves social security from slipping through the cracks and they don’t know it yet, but someday soon, together, they’ll drag a congressman all the way from Houston to the highest office in the land, then do it all over again eight years later with a female senator from California, just for the symmetry of the thing.
And when their oldest asks him between bites of pizza, all blonde curls and blue eyes, “Daddy, if Senator Marks becomes the first woman President, does that mean she’ll be the most powerful lady in the world?” he’ll wink over their daughter’s head at her taller, spitting image of a mother and reply, “Second to your mom, maybe.”
Three kids and five grandchildren and as many decades later and they keep waiting to prove her parents and their cats right. But she idolizes him even on days when she can’t stand the sight of him and he knows she’s smarter than he’ll ever be even on days when he’d rather die than admit it and no matter how many years pass, they never do wind up outgrowing compromise.