Chapter Text
1998
Josh gives her a gift approximately three minutes into their first interaction. Donna watches him lift the Bartlet for America staff badge from around his neck and hand it to her. Her heart thumps wildly in her ribcage as she takes it from him, hoping her new boss doesn’t notice the way her hands are trembling. He’s smiling at her, and the warmth in his eyes steadies her. She doesn’t miss a beat in her conversation with the donor on the other end of the line, determined to prove to Josh that he’s made the right decision.
When Donna hangs up the phone, she picks the badge up from where she’d carefully set it on the desk. She flips it over in her hands, feeling the smooth lamination between her fingers. It probably cost about fifty cents to make but she can’t help but feel it’s the most precious thing she’s ever owned.
She doesn’t take her new staff badge off for the rest of the day. It swings proudly against her sternum as she helps Josh pack up everything they’ll need for the move to Charlotte. It rests comfortingly beneath her jacket as Josh takes her to drop her car off at the Bartlets’ farm — as in Jed Bartlet, governor of New Hampshire and candidate for president of the United States, she keeps reminding herself with a thrill — for safekeeping until she needs it again.
It’s early afternoon when they board the campaign bus, which means that it’ll be early the next morning by the time they arrive in Charleston. She’d checked the map she had stowed in her glove compartment before leaving her car, quickly calculating that the trip would be around a thousand miles, not much shorter than the drive she’d just made from Madison. At least she’d have company this time.
When she asked Josh about their travel plans, he’d shrugged and explained that it was pretty standard: they’d drive through the night, check into their hotel long enough to change their clothes, and hit the ground running. It sounds exhausting given that Donna had barely slept the night before, lying in her uncomfortable motel bed and trying to soothe her frayed nerves. Still, the prospect of what they’re about to do has her buzzing with energy.
Luckily, Josh lets her sit next to him on the bus. He gives her the window seat, which seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement considering how much work takes place on the ride. She’d already met a few people before the campaign office and now she meets what she assumes are most of the rest of the campaign staff as they come to discuss various topics with Josh. He introduces her to every one of them as “Donna Moss, she drove here from Wisconsin”, a phrase she suspects will haunt her for a long time to come.
Not long after they’ve passed over the border into Connecticut, an intimidatingly tall and beautiful woman that Josh addresses as CJ comes to stand next to their seats to ask him a
question about ad buys. Donna listens carefully to their conversation, trying to absorb all the information and commit it to memory. Just as the woman is about to go back to her own seat, Josh reaches out a hand to touch her elbow.
“Hey CJ, can Donna bunk with you at the hotel?” he asks.
CJ’s nose wrinkles. “Who the hell is Donna?”
Donna leans forward in her seat, realizing CJ hadn’t been able to see her. “Hi.”
She watches CJ’s eyes widen comically for a split second before the other woman schools her face. “Next time warn a girl,” CJ groans at Josh before extending her hand to Donna so they can shake. “Nice to meet you, Donna.”
“I wouldn’t count on any warnings, he can be a little oblivious.” Donna says, leaning over Josh to return CJ’s handshake with a firm grip.
“What are you basing that on?” Josh protests. He looks flustered in a way Donna finds incredibly endearing. “You’ve known me for less than five hours.”
She shrugs. “I’m very observant.”
“Yeah, she can stay with me,” CJ says with a smirk.
Donna sleeps surprisingly well on the bus, likely due to the physical and emotional exhaustion of the past few days. She wakes up once in the middle of the night to find her head resting on Josh’s shoulder. Her cheek is comfortable pressed against the fabric of his shirt and for a moment she considers keeping it there. She thinks better of it though, carefully shifting so her head leans against the back of her seat instead. No big deal, she tells herself, it won’t happen again.
In the morning she learns that Josh had not been exaggerating when he said they’d hit the ground running in Charleston. They’re given forty-five minutes at the hotel before the bus will depart for their new campaign office. Donna doesn’t bother to take her badge off as she rushes to change her clothes.
Her first full day on the campaign passes in a blur, the staff badge around her neck the only thing that keeps her grounded. She catches herself playing with it more than once, running her fingers up and down the cheap metal chain. It reminds her of the worry stone her Nonna had given her during her first semester of college.
More than that, the badge feels like a talisman, a symbol that she belongs. Josh already has a new badge by noon, so she knows this one is hers. She also knows that he and most of the other people wearing this same badge are all much smarter and more educated than she is, but her heart flutters with the knowledge that he had decided to give her one anyway. With this badge around her neck, no one will question that she should be here.
That night, as she and CJ chatter companionably while they get ready for bed, Donna carefully sets her badge on her nightstand. It sits among her hotel room key and the daily planner she’d bought herself at a convenience store somewhere in Pennsylvania, a collection of relics for her new life. She reaches out to touch it one more time before she rolls over to go to sleep, excited to put it on again tomorrow.
2000
The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is quiet. Josh knows it’s partially because Congress is in recess, but he also suspects that Donna is running a fair amount of interference to keep his workload as light as possible. She hasn’t been treating him with kid gloves, but it’s not lost on him all the ways she’s working to take care of him right now.
Like how she’s come over to his apartment every night since Christmas Eve. Leo has enacted a semi-strict policy that Josh leave the office at a reasonable hour, at least for now, but he hasn’t seemed to account for the fact that Josh doesn’t have much of a life outside of work. If it weren’t for Donna, he’d probably spend the night watching CNN on his couch, alternating between getting riled up by what’s on the screen and getting lost in his own head.
With her, though, the nights have been almost fun. They eat takeout and watch bad movies and play card games. Every night before she leaves — if she doesn’t end up falling asleep on his couch — she insists on gently cleaning his stitches, even though they both know he’s capable of doing it himself.
Josh is dreading tonight because Donna isn’t coming over. Her roommate is hosting some Christmas party that Donna had agreed to help with weeks ago, before any of this had happened. She’d told Josh that she didn’t have to go, that she could tell her roommate she had to work late and come over to his apartment instead, but he’d insisted that she should go. He wants her to have a life that doesn’t revolve around him, or at least he tells himself that he does.
Just before the end of the day Donna comes into his office, immediately placing a nondescript brown paper shopping bag on his desk.
“What is this?” he asks.
She drops down into the chair across from his desk. “When someone gives you a gift, it’s customary that you open and discover what it is for yourself.”
“You really don’t have to get me a Christmas present,” he says even as he pulls the bag toward him
She shifts in her seat. “It’s not a Christmas present, it’s…it’s just a thing that I think you can use.”
He sticks his uninjured hand into the bag and pulls out a box. Turning it over, he finds that the box bears the image of a small electronic device that seems to consist of a speaker and a number of buttons. Nothing about the unassuming image calls any previous knowledge or context clues to his mind. He looks up at her, stumped.
“It’s a sound machine,” Donna explains.
“Like for babies?” he asks, though he means it genuinely.
She rolls her eyes, smiling. “Adults can use them too. I thought it might help you sleep. Quiet your mind a little bit.”
He’d admitted to her how much trouble he’s had falling asleep for the past month — probably longer if he’s being honest with himself. While he’s always been a ruminator, the events of the past few weeks have made it even more difficult to calm his racing mind as he lies in bed trying to sleep. Even when he’s not in bed his apartment is too quiet, leaving too much space for his mind to run amuck. To make matters worse, he can’t even listen to music to help fill the silence.
His chest clenches as he thinks about Donna listening to him, really listening, and somehow finding time to slip away to a store and pick out something that she thought could help him.
Donna doesn’t seem put off by his silence, a phenomenon that’s become more and more common recently. “If you don’t like it that’s okay but I figured it was worth a shot, right?”
“Right,” he agrees, feeling something that feels shockingly like hope.
“I also brought you this.” She hands him a file on the Patient's Bill of Rights. That’s much less of a gift, but he takes it from her anyway.
When Josh gets home that night he makes a simple dinner of spaghetti using the groceries he and Donna had picked up together on the day after Christmas, the first meal he’s cooked in recent memory. After he eats at his kitchen table, he washes the few dishes he’d dirtied. His mind works all the while, amplified in the quiet of his kitchen. He’s thinking about the legislative agenda for the upcoming session of Congress, or at least he’s trying to, his thoughts coming faster and faster the longer he’s left alone with them.
He spends the rest of the evening puttering around his apartment. There’s not much that needs to be done, Donna having helped him with so much of that, but he manages to find a few odd jobs if only to have something to do with his shaking hands.
It’s just after nine p.m. when he runs out of chores to do. Josh hasn’t gone to sleep this early since elementary school, so he takes the sound machine out of his bag in an attempt to find some of the calm Donna thought it might bring him. After fishing a pair of batteries out of his junk drawer and popping them in the device he switches it on, finger hovering over the various buttons. There are several sound options: rumbling thunder, crashing waves, babbling brook, white noise.
He presses the thunder button first, immediately regretting it when the sound of crashing thunder startles him, setting his teeth on edge. He fumbles to change the sound. Crashing waves and babbling brook don’t bother him, but they don’t do much for him either. He switches over to white noise, feeling a little skeptical.
This track sounds exactly as he’d imagined it would, a soft hum of noise that’s reminiscent of an airplane cabin. There’s no instantaneous effect, but then again he shouldn’t have expected there to be. He twists the volume dial forward a quarter of a turn and carries the sound machine with him into the living room.
Josh settles onto the couch with the book on theoretical physics Donna had given him for his birthday. He’s not sure he’ll be able to focus on it, but he quickly finds that the white noise fills some of the space in his mind, creating a soft buffer between him and his more catastrophic thoughts. His hands shake a little less each time he turns the page. As he reads, he makes a mental list of all the odd facts he’s going to bug Donna with when he gets to work tomorrow. He lets himself get lost in the pages, the constant hum of white noise a friendly companion, and he can almost imagine she’s there with him.
2005
Donna’s leg hurts.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it, no silver lining she can find. Well, maybe there is, but she’s honestly not in the mood for that today. It’s Monday morning, her first day at work since having her brace removed the previous Friday afternoon. She’s coming in a little later than usual today, her roommate dropping her off at the White House after a very early, and very painful, session of physical therapy first thing this morning.
Now, as she hobbles past security, she wishes she had just stayed home today. That’s not a feeling she’s used to, usually eager to come into work. However, it is one that’s becoming disturbingly familiar.
Donna considers herself a fairly happy person; she’s not usually prone to bad moods. But ever since she’s come back from Germany she feels like a pressure cooker, steam building and building until it’s ready to burst at any moment. Today she feels dangerously close to boiling over. Sure, she’s grateful that her leg is free, that she’s no longer weighed down by the bulky hardware or plagued by an unscratchable itch, but she’s also crabby and tired and her leg fucking hurts.
And yet, when she passes by Margaret’s desk and the other woman asks her how she’s doing, Donna responds “Good!” with as much cheerfulness as she can muster. It’s much easier than giving an honest answer.
When she finally makes it to her own desk, she finds a small brown paper bag sitting on it. She drops into her chair, desperate to get off her leg, before reaching for the bag.
Donna peers inside the bag, then sticks her hand in to pull out a large muffin. She can instantly tell it’s not one from the mess because it’s not wrapped in plastic, and it smells far too fresh. No, this is a banana nut muffin from her favorite bakery near her apartment, the one she always treats herself to when she’s having a bad day. That takes much of the mystery out of the gift; the only person who would know about that is Josh.
Josh is nowhere to be found though, currently in a meeting with CJ. He must’ve stopped by the bakery before work to pick this up for her. She breaks off a piece of the muffin and pops it into her mouth, that thought and the familiar taste making her feel marginally better than she did five minutes ago.
Donna works for a while until Josh gets out of his meeting, appearing next to her desk.
“Hey, how are you?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” she lies. “Thanks for the muffin.”
“Oh, no problem. I figured you could use a little pick me up after physical therapy this morning,” he says. “I got you something else, though. Wait right here.”
Josh speed walks to his office, quickly coming back with a brand new heating pad, still sealed in the box. She tries to hide her frown; he should know by that she’s the owner of several heating pads
“It’s for the office,” he quickly explains, as if he’s read her mind. “I know how it is, when you go back to work and your body’s trying to keep up, so I thought…I thought maybe this could help.”
Donna’s stomach flip flops. She thinks of all the times she’d insisted on tucking a heating pad behind Josh’s back while he’d worked at his desk, unable to focus on her own tasks when she’d known he was in pain, and wonders if that’s what this is. While Josh has been there for her in many ways since her accident, they’ve never discussed their shared experiences in the way she wishes they could and even the subtle acknowledgement of them through this gift is more than a little unexpected.
“That’s…I…thank you,” she stammers.
Josh seems to notice her bemusement, gently asking, “Do you want me to plug it in now?”
Donna doesn’t trust herself to speak, just presses her lips together and nods. She watches him take the heating pad from its box before crouching down to look for an outlet. He quickly spots the one beside her desk, plugging the heating pad in and turning it to its highest setting.
“Where do you want it?” he asks when he stands back up.
“I can do that myself.” She moves to grab the heating pad from him.
Josh pulls it back, out of reach. “I know you can, but I’m offering to do it for you.”
If she were a stronger woman she might keep arguing with him, but today she’s tired.
“Here,” she says, motioning to her right hip.
Josh crouches down next to her and carefully slips the heating pad in between her hip and the chair. He repositions it slightly so it’ll stay snugly in place. The heating pad isn’t warm yet, but his hands are when they brush against her pant leg.
He stays kneeling next to her leg, looking up at her. “That good?”
“Yeah,” she breathes. “That’s perfect.”
Josh smiles, looking half smug and half genuinely pleased. He stands up and pats her on the shoulder. “You’ll let me know if you need anything else?”
“Yup,” Donna replies, lying again.
He goes back to his office, and she turns her attention to her computer, or tries to at least. Her mind keeps coming back to the muffin and the heating pad, to the pen he’d given her on her first day back at work, all the things he’s trying to tell her without telling her. And maybe neither of them knows what to say, but they’ve always known how to communicate without words. She can almost pretend it’s enough.
Donna quickly pushes that thought out of her mind, knowing she’ll have to deal with it sooner or later but making a conscious decision not to think about it now. For now she just relaxes back into her desk chair and lets herself be warmed.
2007
With their whirlwind trip to Hawaii quickly followed by Thanksgiving and Christmas, not to mention the ordeal of staffing an administration, they don’t get a chance to unpack the rest of Donna’s things until after the new year. After a slow start to their last free Sunday before the inauguration, Donna announces that they should tackle the rest of her boxes today if they want them unpacked anytime in the next one hundred days. She assigns him the role of putting away the last of her baking utensils, which he accepts with a playful salute.
Unpacking Donna’s things is a process that Josh finds surprisingly enjoyable. Every item of hers that finds a spot in the apartment makes it feel like more than just a place he sleeps at night. When she’d practically lived here when he was recovering from the shooting, he’d grown used to her shampoo in his shower and her yogurt in his fridge. Now it’s blankets over the back of the couch and pottery mugs in the cabinet and their books cohabitating on the bookshelf. There’s something deeply satisfying about being able to look around the apartment and see tangible evidence that this is her home now too.
When Josh finishes in the kitchen he comes back to the living room, where he finds Donna sitting on the floor with an open box in front of her.
”What do you got going in here?” he asks.
Donna startles, quickly clutching the item she’s holding to her chest and covering it with both hands so he can’t tell what it is. “It’s nothing,” she snaps.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to…” He takes a step back in an attempt to give her some space.
“No, I’m sorry,” Donna says, visibly deflating. “It’s just…embarrassing.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he assures her.
“It’s probably not as big of a deal as I’m making it.” She pats the floor next to her, an invitation to sit which he takes. ”It’s a CD.”
“Okay?”
“That I burned for you.”
His eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Why is that embarrassing? I told you I loved that CD you burned for me.”
And he had. Shortly after he’d written the president a memo on Molly Morello, she’d given him a mixed CD, claiming she had made it in the interest of improving his taste in music.
“I’m trying to broaden your horizons,” she’d said, holding the CD out to him.
He’d snorted. “I think my horizons are broad enough.”
“When was the last time you voluntarily listened to something released after 1985?”
Josh hadn’t had an answer to that, or at least not one he cared to share, so he took the CD from her and slipped it into his bag. That night he’d listened to it on his drive home, and although most of the songs were outside his preferred genres, he found himself putting it in the stereo in his living room when he got home and pressing play again. He’d listened to it countless times over the next few months, purposely not thinking about why he spent so much time listening to music he didn’t even like that much.
While he didn’t explicitly tell Donna how much he’d appreciated the CD at the time, she had to have known he listened to it after catching him singing along to a Dixie Chicks song under his breath once when they were in the car together. It wasn’t until two months ago, after she’d moved in and found the CD still in his collection, visibly touched that he’d kept it all that time, that he’d admitted to her how much he loved it.
“I know,” Donna says now. “I made you that one after I made this one.”
“After?” he asks, confused.
“I made this one first but I couldn’t give it to you. I…see for yourself.”
She extends the CD case out to him and he takes it, smiling in what he hopes is a reassuring way as he does. “I’m sure it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
He looks at the tracklist she’s handwritten and placed in the front of the case. She’d titled it “To Josh” which wouldn’t be conspicuous except for the fact that the other CD she’d given him hadn’t had a title at all. His eyes scan down the list of songs. There’s many that he doesn’t recognize, not by name at least. As he continues down the list he realizes the few songs he does know — “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell, a cover of Stevie Nicks’ “Songbird” — seem to share a common theme. He looks back over some of the unfamiliar titles — “You’re Still the One”, “Desire”, “Truly, Madly, Deeply” — and starts to make some connections.
“These are all love songs,” he says, though it comes out sounding like a question. When he looks back up at Donna, she’s blushing.
“I was trying to choose songs that made me think of you but when I listened back to it I realized…well I’m not sure I fully realized what was going on but I knew I couldn’t give it to you, so I made you another and gave that to you instead.”
That’s when it clicks for him. Donna had made him this CD, selecting every song with him in mind, not initially realizing that it laid all her cards on the table. He thinks back to when she’d given him what he now knows was the replacement CD, how he’d still been with Amy at the time.
“You said this was the first one you made me?” he clarifies.
She nods.
“You gave me the other one in the spring, before the election. So you made this one…?”
Her face flushes an even deeper pink. “About a week before that.”
The knowledge that she’d felt all this for him five years ago makes him almost giddy, even though they’ve both admitted that they felt it even earlier than that. “I love you, you know that?”
“I could stand to hear it again.” She scoots closer to him, her arm coming around his back.
“I love you,” he repeats, not giving her a chance to say it back before turning his head so their lips meet for a soft, unhurried kiss. Her fingers cradling the back of his neck are just as good as any verbal declaration of love.
When they break apart Josh moves to hand the CD to her but she stops him, pressing it back into his hand.
“No, you should have it.” She smiles. “I want you to have it. After all, I made it for you.”
“Can we listen to it now?”
“It’s your CD,” she says with a shrug. “You can do whatever you want with it.”
Josh stands to feed the CD into the stereo. He pulls Donna up from the floor and into his arms as the first few chords of the song play. They begin to gently shift from foot to foot, almost a dance. She buries her face in the crook of his neck and he can feel her body relax into his embrace. They don’t talk, which leaves space for him to listen to the lyrics.
“Come away with me and we’ll kiss on a mountain top, come away with me and I’ll never stop loving you.”
“This is the first song you picked and it took you until the end of the CD to realize it was too romantic?” Josh asks.
She chuckles. “You know how it was back then.”
He knows exactly what she means; they had spent so many years in such a heady state of denial that it was easy to bust through boundaries and still be able to convince themselves that they hadn’t overstepped at all.
“I’m looking forward to not doing that anymore,” she says, not needing to hear his confirmation that he understands to know that he does.
Josh smiles even though she can’t see his face, tightening his grip on her as they sway to the music. “Me too.”
2017
Donna feels like a kid on the night before the first day of school. Though in this case, school is the United States House of Representatives, and she’s the newly-elected representative for Wisconsin’s second district. Tomorrow is the big day: the opening day of the new session. She’ll spend the morning moving into her new office before the House convenes at noon, at which point she’ll take her oath of office. By this time tomorrow she will officially be Congresswoman Moss.
Josh had taken her and the girls out to dinner to celebrate and they’d spent the rest of the night playing several spirited, bordering on heated, rounds of Uno. Now that the girls are in bed and Josh is doing some lesson planning for the new semester, the anxiety is starting to set in.
It’s not so much that she’s worried about the work. Yes, it’s a change, but in some ways she feels her entire career has led up to this. After years of assisting and advising she finally gets to do the damn thing.
What she is nervous about are the changes her new position will bring for her family. Donna hadn't made the decision to run for the House lightly. There had been months of back and forth, her listing all of her reservations about running for office and Josh countering with all the reasons she should do it. In the end it had been his support, along with the girls’ excitement, that had helped her find the courage to run. But now all the things they’ve discussed — her increased hours, the trips to and from Madison — are about to become a reality and she hopes she hasn’t made a decision about her career at the expense of her family.
Donna finishes the last step of her nightly skincare routine, taking one last, long at herself before shutting off the bathroom light. When she comes into the bedroom, she finds Josh sitting on the bed, already in his pajamas, with a cardboard box beside him. She raises an eyebrow.
“The girls and I put some stuff together for your new office,” he explains, motioning for her to join him on the bed.
She does, attempting to peer into the box as she sits down next to him. “Oh?”
“See for yourself,” he says as he pulls the box onto his lap.
At the top of the box are a number of drawings the girls have done. She rifles through them, smiling as she identifies which of her daughters each piece of art belongs to. There’s one by Olivia, easily distinguished by the attention to detail their six-year-old had paid to drawing her own curly hair, that portrays the five of them with as many members of their extended family she could fit on the page. She’s carefully labeled each person, so Donna can see that she hasn’t just included blood relatives: CJ, Sam, and Toby’s respective families, the Santoses, and the majority of the Barlets are all present. Donna runs her finger over her own likeness, smiling.
Next is a large card made from purple construction paper, bearing the message “Good luck, mommy!” in Josh’s handwriting. The girls have gone all out in decorating it; she’ll have to be careful in handling it or she’ll be cleaning glitter out of her office for the rest of her term. They’ve all signed it, Nora’s hurried scrawl, Olivia’s newly-learned cursive, and Bianca’s careful block letters.
Beneath all the paper are several framed photos. The first is a candid of Josh and Donna on their wedding day as they sat together at the head table, him smirking as her head is thrown back in laughter. There’s one of all three girls on their last trip to California, dressed for the beach in matching pink bathing suits and rhinestone sunglasses. Another is one that Zoey had insisted on taking of the Moss-Lymans when they were in Manchester three Memorial Days ago, the five of them squeezed together on the Bartlets’ porch swing.
At the bottom of the box are both of her framed Georgetown diplomas, one for her bachelor’s in political science and one for her master’s in political communication. They’ve been in frames for years, usually residing in her and Josh’s shared home office, but he must’ve just taken them down today.
“You weren’t lesson planning just now, were you?” Donna asks.
He smirks. “When have you ever known me to prepare for a semester this far in advance?”
“I thought you were going for a ‘new year, new you’ kinda thing.” She carefully places everything back into the box, setting it on the floor before angling her body toward his. “Josh this is…thank you”
“I have one more thing,” he tells her.
Josh leans back to open the drawer of his nightstand. He pulls out a round object wrapped in several layers of newspaper. Donna takes it from him, surprised at the weight of it. She peels the paper back to reveal one of the blown glass spheres that Jed kept on his desk in the Oval Office. The collection has since moved to his study in Manchester, lined up on a high shelf to keep them out of reach of the gaggle of children that frequent the farm, but she would recognize them anywhere. This one is blue and green, the colors swirling together beneath the translucent glass.
She looks to Josh, who’s watching her with warm eyes. “He gave this to me last time we were in Manchester and asked me to give it to you before your first day. He also gave me a long spiel about how he always thought they brought him stability and clarity when he was in office and that he hopes they’ll do the same for you, but I’ll spare you the details on that one.”
Donna thinks back to the last time they made the drive up to New Hampshire, realizing it was early the previous fall. “But that was before the election.”
“I guess he has just as much faith in you as I do,” he says.
If Donna wasn’t holding a very breakable object she would fling her arms around Josh’s neck and tackle him back on the bed.
Her face must say as much because Josh laughs, taking the glass ball from her hands to set it gently in the box before pulling her half into his lap. She presses her face into his neck, breathing in the scent of their laundry detergent.
“Nervous?” he asks, running a hand up and down her back.
“Excited,” she says. “And nervous.”
“Anything you wanna talk about?”
“It’s nothing we haven’t gone over a dozen times already.” She pulls back to look at him, her arms still around his neck. “I just wish I could be sure I made the right decision.”
“You did.” He sounds completely certain. “Or at least as right of a decision as any of us can ever make. I won’t pretend it won’t be hard sometimes or that we won’t all have to make sacrifices, but we’re gonna tackle this the same way we do everything else— together.”
“I love you so much,” she responds, because really, what else can she say to that?
“I love you too.” Josh’s fingers are playing with the hem of her shirt, brushing the soft skin of her stomach. “Now, there is another part to your gift, if you want it, but this one’s a little more experiential.”
It’s not hard to guess what he means. “I might be interested,” she says, grinning at him with her lip caught between her teeth.
Then his hand is sliding up her shirt, his mouth warm and familiar on hers, and any nervousness is quickly forgotten.