Work Text:
Grab your cigarettes,
And follow me out of the living room.
And I'll get drunk enough to tell you how I feel
About the men you loved,
And how they all seemed to get the best of you
Because If I don't say these things, you know,
Someone will.
The thing is that he’s not that drunk. He’s not as drunk as he usually needs to be to show up at Donna’s; he’s not drunk enough to yell at her roommate’s cats.
(Not that he needs to be drunk to yell at them; they’re no fonder of him than he is of them. And, for that matter, not that he even yells so much as firmly commands them to go away. Donna only says “yells” because she likes exaggerating, so whose problem is that, anyway?)
Anyway, he doesn’t know quite when it was that he decided to give the cabdriver Donna’s address rather than his own. It might have been a momentary decision, when the cab had pulled up in front of him at the curb, and the words had come out before he knew what he was saying. Or, it might have been when he got to the bar in the first place, when he’d felt like having more drinks than Donna, the self-proclaimed defender of his “sensitive system”, would have allowed him, had she been there.
He wasn’t that drunk, but arriving at the bar felt like a lifetime ago, when he had been completely unsure what the night held.
(Not that he was sure now; the closer they got to Donna’s, the less sure he was.)
Because, if he was being honest with himself, he probably decided to go to Donna’s much earlier than that, sometime around lunchtime, when Donna had told him that she had to run back to her apartment to feed her roommate’s cats.
(Because Donna’ roommate, apparently, was not in town.)
But it might have been before that.
(Maybe that had just solidified everything.)
It might have been this morning, when her tone had been measured and cool, and he’d realized that she was still upset with him over the night before.
(She had every right to be upset, that was the thing. He was upset, and he was the one who had caused the damn thing.)
She hadn’t seemed that upset, when she left; she’d just given him a sad sort of smile when he’d told her she should buy the dress for herself, and told him that she’d call him in the morning.
(Which, technically, she hadn’t done, but that was just because he had called her—had called her in to work, that is—even though it was a Saturday.)
He’d called her in, and she’d seemed normal enough on the phone, but by the time she’d gotten to work, she’d been somewhat sullen, quieter than usual. He doesn’t remember at which point, exactly, he’d realized that she was upset over something bigger than the fact that she was at work on a Saturday.
(It was probably the fact that she didn’t usually get upset about coming in on a Saturday; in fact, Saturdays were usually his favorite days in the office with her. They’d order food in and spend more time than usual sitting around and chatting, or just being together in some way, and sometimes he’d pretend that she wasn’t there because he told her to be, that she’d just wanted to spend Saturday with him, that they were somewhere else entirely. It was usually easier to do this after they left the office, when they’d usually head to The Hawk and Dove and have a few drinks and feel like, for just a little while, they were normal people, not boss and assistant, not White House employees, just Josh and Donna. But Donna hadn’t gone to The Hawk and Dove after work tonight, not this time. She’d said she was tired, and maybe she was, but he got the sense that something was just off with her, like it had been all day.)
It's just that he’s only now realizing that maybe the fact that her roommate was out of town was part of the point, like maybe that had to do with the red dress thing, and maybe that was just another thing he’d ruined for her last night.
(He hated himself for how he had to make himself be upset about that. Of course, he was mad at himself for hurting Donna—he never wanted to hurt her, not ever. But he doesn’t hate the fact that she came back to work instead of going back to her roommate-less apartment with whatever gomer she’d been with.)
He’s knocking on the door, and it’s only as he’s doing so that he realizes he’s probably being too loud, because maybe he’s a little drunker than he thought, and then Donna is opening the door.
“Why do you always direct your cabs from The Hawk and Dove to my place?”
He frowns. “How do you know I was at The Hawk and Dove?”
“You invited me, earlier. And, not that there needs to be an ‘and’, but and, it’s the middle of the night, and you’re at my apartment. Where else would you be coming from?”
“Look, would you just let me in? It’s cold out here.”
“You’re in the hallway of a building, Josh, it’s plenty warm.”
He does his best begging face, and she sighs.
“Josh, I’m not in the mood. Actually, for that matter, Flopsy, Button, and I are all not in the mood for you to come in here and yell at them.”
“Flopsy and Button?”
“Josh…”
“I mean it, Flopsy and Button? No wonder you always just refer to them as “my roommate’s cats”, what kind of grown woman calls her cats Flopsy and Button? Those cats would have been beaten up on the playground in two minutes flat!”
“On the playground?”
“By the cat bullies,” he says, dismissively. “Flopsy and Button?”
“Josh, the only cat bully here—no, wait, anywhere, cats don’t even have playgrounds—is you, and I can’t believe you’re only learning their names now, seeing as this is hardly the first time you’ve showed up drunk in the middle of the night to yell at them!”
“You’re the one who’s kept their ridiculous names secret!”
“Josh!” she says, and it’s different, she’s not laughing. In fact, she looks like she might be just this side of teary. “I’m really not in the mood for you to come in here yelling, okay? Not tonight.”
Josh blinks, pausing for a minute. “I’m not here to yell at your roommate’s cats,” he says quietly.
Donna looks at him expectantly, and it was only then that it began to dawn on him that instead of spending the cab ride wondering when he’d made the decision to go to Donna’s, perhaps he should have spent some time deciding what, exactly, he planned to say when he actually got there.
“I’m not,” he repeats. “I promise, I’m not.”
She sighs, and then she’s stepping back from the door and letting him in, and he’s following her in somewhat cautiously, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her and also what on earth he’s supposed to say to her, how to articulate what he’s doing here.
He steps inside and immediately the cats slink away from him, and he doesn’t even have time to wonder if Donna notices, because she comments sullenly, “I told you they weren’t in the mood.”
“I’m not here to yell at them,” he repeats. “I’m not!”
She looks at him expectantly again, and he tries desperately to scrape some words together in his head. It won’t be worthy of Sam or Toby, but he has to make this up to Donna somehow, has to apologize for last night somehow, for tearing her down because of his own jealousy.
“Today was Saturday,” he says, and he checks his watch as he says it, because suddenly, he’s not sure whether or not it’s still Saturday.
“I know,” she says, “known to normal people as a non-work day.”
“Saturday is my favorite work day,” he argues, and maybe this can be it, this can be how he tells her.
“You couldn’t pick a normal work day to be your favorite day?” Donna interjects.
“Hush,” he says, “I’m trying to say something here.”
Donna raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.
“Saturday is my favorite workday,” he says, “because when you come in on Saturday, that’s when we have the most fun, isn’t it? I know it’s always because there’s something going on, but on Saturdays we always get to have lunch or go to The Hawk and Dove or just…” He pauses, looking at the ground, suddenly unsure of what he was going to say. “I don’t know,” he finishes weakly.
“It feels like the old days,” Donna says softly. “On the campaign. When work got all blended in with the other stuff. Is that what you mean?”
He nods. “I miss the old days. And Donna, I—I mean, about last night, I said some things to you, and I shouldn’t have said them. I didn’t mean them, I was just--.”
‘Jealous’ is the word—it’s the only word, the only one that’s true, the only one that makes sense, and also the only one that he can’t possibly say to Donna, because what if she didn’t understand?
“It’s just,” he says, finally, instead, “these other guys—the guys you go out with, or the one you went out with last night—I didn’t mean what I said about you. It’s not you, it’s them. You give them the best of you, and they don’t--I can’t—I mean, the guy last night, he didn’t deserve the dress, even if you were going to just steal it.”
“It’s not stealing, it’s borrowing.”
“It’s borrowing from a store, which is—,” he pauses. “You know what, never mind. It’s not important. I’m just—what I’m trying to say here, Donna, is--.”
“You’re sorry,” she says quietly, and he nods.
She shrugs. “I know,” she says. “You tried to tell me last night. I mean, it was in a very you way, but I understood.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
“Then why were you upset this morning?”
She sighs, and then she looks away from him, like she’s trying to decide whether to tell the truth or not.
“Because you were right,” she says, at last. “You shouldn’t have said what you said—it was none of your business—but you were right, and I wanted you to be wrong so badly. I wanted it to be…not what it was. I wanted him to be…,” she pauses again, and then she looks at him, for just a second, something unreadable in her eyes, and then she looks away, so fast that he wonders if he imagined what she said, if he imagined the way that she looked at him just now. “Not him,” she finishes, finally. “I wanted him to be not him.”
But then she turns away, effectively breaking the moment, and heads towards her phone. “I’m going to order a pizza,” she says. “I know you haven’t eaten, and your sensitive system is going to wreak havoc on my apartment if I don’t get some food in you.”
He frowns in confusion. “How do you know I haven’t eaten?”
She smiles at him, the usual fondness and warmth that’s been missing from her face all day appearing at last.
“I always know,” she says. “You’re very transparent.”
“I’m not!”
“You are,” she says. “And it's very sweet. Which is why I accepted your apology last night.”
She smiles at him again, softer this time, and then she reaches for the phone. “We’re getting veggie pizza, by the way.”
“No, Donna, come on. I was nice to the cats!”
“The cats ran away from you before you could bully them. We’re getting veggie.”
“I won’t eat it!”
“Yes, you will,” she says.
He sighs, and they’re silent for a moment before he opens his mouth again. “Donna, I—I really am sorry.”
He expects her to have a smart remark back, to act like he’s only saying so to get a real pizza, but he means it. He needed to say it, not to have Donna say it for him. He needed her to know that he was out of line, that his comments were born of jealousy, that she didn’t deserve anything that he said, that she really is too good for the men she goes out with, for all of them.
But she doesn’t tease him, she just reads him as she always does, and the genuine smile is back as she begins to dial. “I know,” she says.
If that look in your eyes, as I slowly go through the evidence,
Gives any insight into the void you can't get filled
Then your heart it's bigger than any I've come up against.
And if nobody has loved you enough, I know now,
Someone will.
“Hey,” he says, and they’re sitting on a bench now, and somewhere, a block from here, Cliff Calley is running his hands all over the piece of Donna’s heart that he’s been granted access to—that he stole access to, more like, since it’s not as though Donna would have ordinarily given it to him.
Or maybe she would have. Maybe she would have. Josh doesn’t know, because he doesn’t get to have Donna like that, not the way that Cliff did. But he doesn’t let the jealousy gnaw at him, not now.
Not now, because right now Donna is hurting, Donna is broken, right there next to him, and earlier, he just made everything a lot worse.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay,” he says. “It’s going to be fine.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know,” she says. “You don’t know what’s in that diary.” She says it so softly that it’s almost like she’s not saying it to him at all, just saying it for herself maybe, letting the words hang in the air like their frozen breath.
“I don’t need to,” he says quietly. “If it’s not relevant to the case, Donna, then I don’t need to.”
“It’s not,” she says. “I meant that, I promise that it’s not, Josh. But I—I mean, he’s looking at it, he’s reading my thoughts, he’s going to know that I--.”
She looks at him, stopping herself suddenly, as though she’s shocked by what she was about to say to him, and her eyes are wide, terrified and sad.
Josh, for his part, wants nothing more than to know what she was going to say, wants to know what Calley is now finding out, because this is Donna, and he wants to know everything about Donna, wants to know what she thinks about, what she’s filled those pages with. He can picture her chicken scratch handwriting on the pages, and the very thought of it almost makes him smile, because it’s Donna, and that makes this moment all the worse.
No one deserves this less than Donna, Donna who has the biggest heart of anyone he knows, who is probably, even now, protecting someone by letting Calley see what’s in her diary.
And then all at once, he understands.
He knows exactly what’s in that diary, he knows exactly who Donna’s protecting.
Because he suddenly remembers why that diary had looked familiar to him before, when he’d held it in his hands, after they’d ripped out the pages that involved Cliff. He’d seen it sticking out of Donna’s overnight bag, over on her side of the bed, the bed that she’d shared with him when he was recovering from Rosslyn, the bed that she’d shared with him again on Christmas Eve only just over a year ago, the bed that she’d held him in when he’d told her what Stanley had said.
All of that must be in the diary, which means this—all of this, Donna’s agony—is his fault.
“Oh, Donna,” he says, and he’s reaching for her, wanting to hold her, touch her cheek, apologize to her for what he’s put her through.
Because Donna is sacrificing everything for him right now, Donna has traded away her dignity for his, and he can’t articulate what that means to him, what she means to him.
Donna, who was never going to tell him what she was doing. She was simply going to protect him, shield him from scrutiny, or pain, or heartache, or all of it, as she always did.
But before he can say anything, before he can find the words to tell her that she’s saving him, that she always does, that she means more to him than he knows how to say, Cliff is striding towards them, and the moment is broken.
It’s only later, when he’s driving her home, and he gets out of the car to open her door, pull her out of the passenger seat, and into a tight hug—it’s only then, when he feels her finally relax against him, that he says the most inadequate, miniscule words he’s ever said, words that don’t even begin to scratch the surface.
“Thank you,” he says, and she seems to understand this, because she holds him just a little tighter before letting go.
She doesn’t say anything until she’s up the steps, and he’s leaning back against his car, watching her, making sure she gets inside safely.
But then she’s turning around, and because she’s Donna, she understands without him saying so how guilty he feels. “It’s not you,” she says. “It’s not your fault. There are things in there that are…,” she pauses, seeming to look for the words. “It’s all me,” she says, finally. “It’s always all me.”
Then, before he can respond, she’s giving him a sad smile—a smile that seems to carry as much weight as her words—and she’s slipping inside.
And Josh is left alone, in the cold, feeling like his heart has slipped right out of his chest and shattered on the frozen sidewalk under his feet.
Because he doesn’t know exactly what she means.
But he knows she was protecting him. He know it was all her, in the sense that it was her giant heart, her care, her affection, that kept him safe.
But the rest of it is all him, it has to be. Because Donna was there tonight, protecting her boss, her boss who has fallen so deeply into impropriety that he could never dig himself out of what Cliff knows. He knows he can never make it up to her.
He’s fallen, and that’s not all her, it’s all him.
So I hope my voice can stay as clear as I need it to
But that my words take on the nature of a drill
To be set against the frozen sea inside of you
Because if I don't tell you I'm falling in love, then
Someone will.
“Why would I think that you were?” Donna asks.
Josh just looks at her, because maybe this is the moment, maybe this has to be the moment, right here, when he finally says it, finally admits that the way his stomach tied up in knots from the moment that Donna told him she met Jack actually means something, just like it had actually meant something when she’d told him she’d been with Cliff Calley—not only once, but twice.
Just like it had meant something the night that she’d appeared in the bullpen in that red dress with no back.
Just like it meant something every time she’d mentioned going on a date, every time she left in the evening to squeeze in a drink with some guy, while he left for his empty apartment.
Just like how it meant something when he was with Amy, when he’d been seeing Amy, and dating Amy, and unable to think about anything other than Donna, and who Donna was with, and wondering if Donna was at home, wondering about him.
(She wasn’t, probably, because even when he was with Amy, it wasn’t as though Donna had stopped going out with other people. It hadn’t seemed to make her feel sick the way it made him feel sick.)
Sometimes he thought about what Joey Lucas had said, years ago now, “It’s because she likes you, and she knows that it’s beginning to show, and so she has to cover herself with misdirection.”
Even then, he’d felt his heart leap in his chest, had to do everything he could not so smile, not to let his affection for her flood his face, the way it had flooded soothingly through his body, replacing the ache that he otherwise always carried there.
“Believe me when I tell you that’s not true,” he’d said, and he’d meant it, because he hadn’t dared to hope that it was true, that there was any possibility that it could be anything more than a fantasy, because look at Donna, Donna with her soft blonde hair and her giant blue eyes, and the love and care that radiated from her. Donna with her sunshine smile, and her laughter that sounded like a chorus of bells, and the way that she could light up a room merely by walking into it.
But now here he was and Donna—that same Donna, radiant as ever under the soft glow of the Christmas lights, in her festive sweater—was asking him a question, asking him to bare his soul to her, maybe, to tell her what he’d meant just now, but also what he’d meant for years before that, what he’d meant by “those are good stories, those would make me like you”, or by notes in books about alpine skiing, or by all those stolen glances and excuses to throw his arm around her shoulders, or touch the small of her back.
Donna was asking about all of those things, and he didn’t know what to tell her.
He didn’t know what to tell her, because on some level, he suspected that she already knew.
And on some level, he had to ask her the same sort of question—a question that encompassed what Joey Lucas had said, or that asked what she meant by, “if you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for red lights”, or that asked her why she’d taken care of him, why she’d moved in with him and sacrificed so much of herself after Rosslyn, why she’d spent Christmas two years ago with him, cancelling her trip to her own family, why she looked at him the way she did, sometimes, when she was tying his bowtie, helping him to get ready for an event.
He wanted to ask her all of those things, because they couldn’t keep going on like this. They couldn’t keep playing this game of chicken, could they? One of them had to say something, at some point, one way or another, or else they would end up stuck in an endless cycle of “you go first, and then I’ll respond”.
And maybe Donna was asking him—here, now—to break that cycle.
Or maybe she wasn’t.
And that was the thing—that would always be the thing, that would always be the hang up—what if she wasn’t? What if Donna saw him as merely her boss, her boss with the receding hairline, who was older than her and different than her in so many ways. (No one would ever say that he lit up a room when he walked into it, after all. No one had thought that of him since Joanie used to dote on him, and that was far too long ago to mean anything now.)
What if it would just embarrass him, to tell Donna how deeply jealous he was, how badly he wanted her to stay here, to stay here and have Christmas with him, not to go away with Jack after all?
He didn’t think he could handle that—didn’t think he could handle the look of pity on Donna’s face when she realized that he had feelings for her. What if she thought he was pathetic for it, the same way that Leo had seemed to, earlier, when he’d asked about his holiday plans and he’d instead given him an answer about what Donna was doing, since she was never far from his mind.
He wondered about that, too. Leo wasn’t one to meddle or worry about the affairs of his staff. Leo would merely roll his eyes at Josh over the whole thing.
But Leo wasn’t the first to notice. Joey Lucas had thought she’d seen something, years ago, and she wasn’t the first to notice, either. CJ had told him, time and time again, that he had to be careful, that he had to be more mindful of how he looked at Donna and spoke to Donna, that he had to keep a better eye on himself. Even Amy had asked it, once—“are you dating your assistant?”
He’d denied it, he’d always denied it, but there was something there, and he knew it. There had always been something there, since that day in New Hampshire when she’d wandered into his office and hired herself.
But he can’t do it, he can’t do that to her, not when she has a whole Christmas—a whole future, maybe—planned out with Jack, and even though the thought of it makes him feel like his heart is leaking out of his chest (a feeling he’s not actually unfamiliar with), he can’t do this to her. He can’t ruin this for her. He can’t. She deserves more than that.
And so his words—not the words he wanted to say, not the words he meant, not the words that have been written on his heart since the second he placed his badge in her hand in New Hampshire in 1998—echo in his head when Leo approaches him later—Leo, who sizes him up in an instant, who sees what everyone has already seen, which is that Josh is recklessly, hopelessly, and ever unfortunately in love with Donna Moss.
“I don’t know,” he said to Donna, in answer to her question, not letting his voice shake, not even for a moment. “It was just something I said.”
Someone will, and maybe someday you'll be listening.
But I could be just as you need me up until.
The kind of guy you say you're looking for,
Sounds like the kind of guy I want to be
But if you just want someone to hold you tonight, well then
Someone will.
It’s been a long night, but not in the way that nights are usually long for them. Tonight’s been a night full of laughter and light and Donna’s eyes shining at him, from across the room or from inches away from him, like she’d been, earlier, when she’d sat on his lap in the car on the way to their first ball.
It’s been a night that’s been charged with…something, from the moment that he’d thrown the first snowball at Donna’s window, and then she’d appeared there, in the street, without a coat, her cheeks already flushed from the cold, and she’d been so beautiful, so radiant, that he couldn’t help but stare at her, stammer out how amazing she looks.
And she does look amazing. He likes her hair like that--all soft golden curls that fall gently to her shoulders. He liked her in his coat, too, wrapped around her shoulders, much too big for her. He liked the way it looked, her in his coat. There was belonging there, almost. It wasn’t the first time she’d worn his coat—of course it wasn’t, it was warmer than hers, so she was constantly stealing it—but he liked seeing her in it, like it belonged to both of them rather than just him, like she’d pulled it out of the closet in his entry way—their entryway, in this version in his head, not just his—and slipped it on, simple as that.
It was easy to think that way, now that it was the end of the night, and he had found himself, once again, in a cab with Donna, her head against his shoulder.
There was no reason for her to be this close to him, no reason for her to sit in the middle seat next to him, not when the seat beside her was empty, but here she was, and he felt a surge of affection for her, suddenly, that was so powerful that he wondered how she couldn’t feel it in the air surrounding them.
She’s been quiet, in the cab, leaning up against him, but never saying anything, and he wonders if she’s fallen asleep. He can’t shift his head to check without disturbing her, though, and he worries that if he moves, she might move away too, like when his childhood dog had fallen asleep with his head in Josh’s lap, and Josh would just sit there, quietly, for what felt like hours, just to make sure his companion wouldn’t wander away.
When they reach Donna’s apartment, he nudges her, and it’s only then that he realizes that she’s awake, that maybe she was awake the whole time, and there’s a look of sadness in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before.
“Hey,” he says, as she sits up, and he takes her hand to help her out of the cab, “are you okay?”
She nods, and gives him a little smile, but it’s not her smile, not the one she’s given him all night, not the one that lights up her entire face.
“Let me walk you up?” he asks, and she nods again, letting him put his arm around her, his coat still draped over her shoulders.
He pays the cabbie—“I’ll get another one in a minute,” he tells Donna, who seems to accept this—and then guides her up the steps, waits with her as she lets herself into the building, and then follows her upstairs to her apartment, which is still all lit up as she’d left it earlier.
When they get into her apartment, he helps her out of her—his—coat, and when he looks at her, her eyes are shining again, but in a different way than before. This time, there are tears shining in them, and his mouth falls open.
“Hey,” he says softly, “hey, Donna, what’s going on?”
He guides her to the couch, and sits down beside her, cautiously taking her hand in his again.
She shakes her head, and a few tears spill out. “I’m sorry,” she says, “this is stupid, I don’t know why I’m crying.”
“It’s not stupid,” he says gently. “What’s going on?”
“I just—it’s just hitting me, what you said earlier,” she says. “About what the President will think, and I took the blame for Jack and he didn’t—I mean, I thought he liked me, I thought he liked me more than that, and he just let me--.” She trails off, and she’s crying in earnest now, and he doesn’t think, he just pulls her towards him, pulls her head into his chest, wrapping one arm around her back while he strokes her hair with his other hand.
“Donna, he’s a jackass,” he says, and it’s not enough—doesn’t say nearly enough about the way he’s seething with anger at Jack, Jack who was with Donna and didn’t see what he had, Jack who left her broken and hurting like this, Jack who didn’t see how smart and beautiful and wonderful she is, who didn’t care about her or her career, who just left her to pick up the pieces, like she was nothing.
“I should know better,” she says, and it’s muffled because her face is still in his chest. “After—I mean, after what happened with—well, back in Wisconsin—I never thought something like this…not with Jack.”
“Donna, this is not your fault,” he tells her, and he’s still stroking her hair, trying to hold her tighter to him, trying to make sure she understands. “He didn’t deserve you, he didn’t see how amazing you are, and you deserve so much better than him. No one gets to hurt you like that, Donna, no one does.”
She keeps crying, and he holds her tighter, whispering soft words to her that don’t mean anything, and he doesn’t know how long he holds her for, he just keeps holding on, trying to make her world right again, just the way that she always rights his.
He presses a kiss to her hair, and she hiccups, her head still buried against him. He smiles, because it’s so endearing, and because Donna is still letting him hold her, for once. He hates that she’s hurting—he feels shattered by it, just like she does—but she’s letting him be here, holding him.
After a long moment of quiet, when her tears finally subside, she pulls back. “Oh no,” she says, “I’m getting makeup all over your shirt, it’s going to be ruined.”
“It’s fine,” he says, and it is, it really is. “We’ll send it to the dry cleaners, it’s fine.”
“I’ll send it to the dry cleaners,” she corrects, and that’s fair, because Josh doesn’t even know what dry cleaner he uses, only Donna does. “And no, I won’t, the dry cleaners won’t be able to get that out!”
“Donna,” he says, and when she doesn’t look at him, her eyes roaming guiltily over the stains on his shirt, he pushes her chin gently up until her eyes meet his. “Do you think I care about the shirt right now?”
She smiles, just a little, and he stands up, untying his bowtie as he does. “Come on,” he says, “I know you have hot chocolate mix somewhere around here, I’ll make some of that, we’ll watch a movie or something.”
Donna sighs. “I can’t,” she says, and his face falls, until he looks up at her and sees her smiling at him again.
“I can’t let you make the hot chocolate,” she continues, standing up with him. “You put way too much mix in there, it gets all powdery.”
“It’s not sweet enough with one packet!”
“Do you know how much sugar is in one packet, Joshua? The dehydrated marshmallows alone--.”
He cuts her off by pulling her towards him again, crushing her to him in a tight hug. He feels her surprise, but she hugs him back, and they stand there, in the middle of her living room, for a moment. “It’s going to be okay,” he says. “And I’m here, I’m—I’m not going to let anyone believe, for one second, that you’re to blame for any of this, okay? You’re not taking the fall for this.”
She nods against his chest, and then she leans up, pressing a kiss to his cheek, before she’s grabbing him by the hand and pulling him towards the kitchen.
“You can have one and a half packets, not two,” she says.
It's the nights like this in the quieter parts of Los Angeles
When you think you see the outline of the beast, up in the hills.
Well you might be sitting beside the only person you could face it with
But if you don't want me after tonight,
Someone will.
They were in LA, again.
The last time they’d been in LA—together, at the same time—things were so different.
(They were different, both of them, not just the circumstances.)
The last time they’d been in LA, he’d been hung up on Joey Lucas—or something like that—but it had been Donna who he’d followed around the party, even taking her by the hand at one point as he’d pulled her away from her conversation.
He’d always needed Donna, on occasions like that. There was just something about them.
(Or something about Donna, more likely.)
And now they’re at another party, on another night, in Los Angeles, and his eyes are following her around just like they were that night, so many years ago, but it’s different this time. It’s different because she’s the only person he can fathom sitting beside, and he can’t walk up to her and take her hand and lead her away from her conversation like he could before.
He can’t take her hand, because she isn’t his anymore—not that she ever really was, not in the way he’d wanted her to be—and because they’re here for differing reasons, for opposing campaigns, and instead of working the room like he needs to be, he’s stuck here, watching her, a cocktail of pain and pride in her thrumming through his body.
Amy’s here, tonight, and he has half a mind to go after her again. It had worked before, somehow, using her as a shield to keep himself from thinking about Donna.
(Well, it had never totally worked, not the way that he needed it to. It was never quite enough.)
But he can’t pull his eyes off of Donna, and it’s that that feels so very much like that night in LA, all those years ago.
Josh has never liked LA. There’s something about it—maybe it’s his loyalty to New York, having grown up in Connecticut—but there’s something eerie about the way that LA sprawls out, girded by a ridge of distant hills, vast and dark and unending.
There’s something about LA that always felt like if the world was going to end and the apocalypse was going to happen, it would start with LA, just to take out the bleakest place on earth first.
That feeling has never been new to him, but it’s worse without Donna. Or maybe it’s just worse because Donna is here, and she’s so close that he can’t tear his eyes off of her, but she’s not sitting beside him, not like she was last time.
And that’s the thing that he misses most of all about her, he thinks. It’s the way that nothing is ever that scary when Donna’s next to him. Nothing ever feels impossible.
It’s not that he never messed up, with her or in front of her—he must have done so a thousand times. But every mistake, every misstep, no matter how huge—nothing had ever felt insurmountable when she was right there with him, walking through the halls, offering him gentle smiles that made him feel like there were butterflies in his stomach, like some kind of junior high kid.
Donna had always just appeared by his side, with the right folder or the right idea, or the way to get in contact with someone which had previously seemed impossible. She knew the right words to say to get CJ or Toby or Sam or even Leo off his back, and she knew what to say when he felt like he’d messed up beyond repair, when he’d thought his job was truly in jeopardy.
She always knew what to say, or what to do, even if it was standing guard outside his door while he stood with his back against the wall in his office to stop the panic attacks from closing in on him. Sometimes she stood there with him, even, shoulder to shoulder, doing what she was best at, which was helping him figure out how to breathe again when it seemed like the world was spinning so fast that his breath had been snatched from his lungs.
Donna made the world stand still when he desperately needed it to. She’d been with him for every event, every crowd after Rosslyn, when having too many people in one room used to make him feel like he was going to collapse.
She’d silenced Christmas music for him, helped him through the months of hearing sirens, seen what was going through his mind before he had. She’d been the one who had gotten him help, the one who had taken him to the hospital and then held his hand as he got it stitched up.
She’d done all of that, and she’d made all of it seem okay. Nothing felt like it was really, truly going to break him, not when she’d been right there.
But now he was watching her, across the room, and he felt like he was about to lose his mind again, and even though she was in the same room, he missed her so much that he couldn’t breathe. He missed her so much that if he hadn’t been sitting here in a chair, watching her, he feels like he would have collapsed.
And so when Amy appears, sliding into a chair beside him, when Amy looks at him like she used to—a look which is easy to define, which tells him exactly what Amy is after and it isn’t him, not really, not that it ever really was—he looks back.
He looks back, because he can’t look at Donna anymore, can’t feel like he’s sitting there, at his table, quietly bleeding out, while the only person he’s ever felt like he can face the world with makes her rounds, letting other men buy her drinks, and not noticing—or maybe ignoring, he’s not sure which is worse—his eyes on her.
And later, when he’s in his hotel room and Amy is there, he realizes the foolishness of the whole affair, because it’s not enough to have someone, it’s not enough to make him stop seeing Donna, every time he closes his eyes. It’s not enough to make him stop aching, day in and day out, to go back to that very first night in Los Angeles, to grab Donna’s hand and never let go of it, never waste his time on Joey or Amy or anyone else, to hell with his job and their position, and everything else, because no matter who else he has for the rest of his life, it will never, ever be enough.
It won’t stop him, he knows, from seeking someone, anyone, someone that can make that ache not quite so heavy, not quite so painful.
It won’t stop him from trying desperately to convince himself that one day, maybe, it will work. One day, it won’t hurt so much to breathe without her. One day, he won’t have to look at her across the room and feel like his future is slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass, because his future is letting someone else put a hand on her shoulder, letting someone else buy her a drink at the bar.
And so he keeps throwing himself into the party, into the job, into exhaustion, so at least the little sleep he manages will be dreamless.
It doesn’t and it won’t stop him from slipping into Amy’s arms, from giving in to someone who knows as well as he does that it’s all meaningless.
It isn’t enough, but it’s all he has, now.
I have to believe that
Someone will.
It was terribly unfair, the way he hadn’t really understood it until Donna had left.
He’d spent so much time running from her, running from the way that he felt for her, trying everything to hide it, everything to keep it in check.
He’d done everything he could to keep her close to him, while keeping her from understanding why.
It was the fact that he couldn’t live without her, that he couldn’t fathom spending one single second in the west wing without her beside him, and he didn’t understand that until it was too late.
It was no accident that he’d left almost immediately after she had, because he couldn’t stay there, couldn’t sit in his office knowing that her departure was final, that she would never brighten his doorway again, would never sit on his desk and steal french fries from his takeout box. He couldn’t walk past her desk and see someone else sitting there, couldn’t have someone there that he had to use the intercom to communicate with.
Moreover, he couldn’t breathe without her—his breath caught, tight, in his chest, and it felt almost like it had all those years ago when he’d been recovering. He felt like he was reliving the experience of watching the explosion in Gaza on TV all over again, because he knew that this—her leaving, her breaking his heart in half—had something to do with that, and he didn’t even blame her for leaving him when he’d never been able to keep her safe.
(And he couldn’t keep her safe now, that was part of it. Because this being apart from her meant not getting to see her every day, not getting to walk beside her, not getting to have her over at his apartment, her leg pressed to his as they sat on the couch together, watching—or not watching—something, anything, nothing that mattered as much as the being together mattered.)
He hadn’t fully realized—or maybe he had, maybe over the years he’d been realizing, in pieces and moments—that his whole world revolved around Donna.
Even when he’d been with Amy, he’d frustrated Amy when he’d wake up and immediately grope around his nightstand for his phone to call Donna. He’d sit there in his boxers and t-shirt, while Amy tried to get his attention, and he’d be on the phone with Donna.
(He should have paid more attention to that before now, he thinks.)
But everything—every moment, every step, every action, every breath—none of it was ever apart from Donna. None of it ever happened without Donna on his mind, and he hadn’t really understood that until she’d been gone, until he’d had to start to learn how to breathe without her.
He hadn’t realized that Donna wasn’t just someone, the way that he’d always pretended she was.
(He’d pretended that, he understands now, for everyone else’s sake, not for his own sake, because on some level, he must have always known—there was no one else. There was no one else but Donna. She was—is--everything, and no matter how far apart they are, he can’t separate himself from that. No matter how angry he is at her or she at him, he is still Josh, and she is still Donna, and he’s only just understood that not only is there no one else, but there never will be. It’s not enough to have someone; it’s never enough unless it’s Donna.)
But then she’s there, right there in the same hotel, and she’s across the hall from him, all at once so close and so agonizingly far away, and he almost knocks, almost knocks because he can’t take it anymore.
And then he is knocking, before he even really knows what he’s doing, just like he was all those years ago, the night after she wore that red dress to work.
He’d known he was falling even then, known it without really knowing it, without acknowledging it, without letting himself believe it was anything.
Back then, he’d believed that someone could be enough, that the jealousy he was feeling didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him wanting Donna himself, it just had to do with the fact that she was his best friend, that he didn’t want anyone to hurt her, not ever.
He hadn’t realized what it all meant, then.
But now he knows—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if he has someone else, if he has Amy or anyone else—it doesn’t matter, if that someone isn’t Donna, because that person will never be what Donna is. That person would be a filler, a cheap substitute, and that isn’t fair. It’s never been fair. It wasn’t fair to Amy—he can look back and see that now—because he’d tried to make Amy fit into the Donna-sized hole in his heart and it just hadn’t worked.
Sometimes he thinks that he and Donna are nothing more than a collection of almosts--he'd almost said something, hundreds of times, and maybe she had, too--and they'd been like ships passing in the night, never available or honest, or with the presence of mind (or physical presence, now) to be more than that.
But now Donna’s here, and now he understands that this could be it, this could be his chance, this could be the time to take it all back.
And so he’s knocking, and he’s ready. He’s ready to put this—everything—behind them, ready to make her understand once and for all that there’s no one else, that he can’t go on for one more moment without her beside him, that trying to do so is slowly killing him.
And before he knows what to say, before he knows what he’s doing, the door is swinging open, and there she is—as radiant as she had been, that night with all the balls, with the snow and her curls on her shoulders and her shining eyes. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail now, and she looks exhausted, but she’s wearing a tattered old Harvard sweatshirt that he knows used to belong to him, and he thinks he’s never seen anything more beautiful or hopeful in all his life.
“Josh?” She asks, and he thinks he hears a hope in her voice to match the hope that rose in his heart at the sight of her in his old sweatshirt.
“Hi,” he says.
It’s not everything, but it’s a beginning. And as she smiles softly, just a little, and steps aside to let him into her room—a room that smells like Donna, that feels warm and safe just like she always did—his world begins to feel like it just might right itself again.
It’s not just someone. Someone was never enough.
It was Donna, it always has been.
And so it was, and so it is, and so it will be.